The Last Christmas Cowboy Page 9

Determinedly not seeing that Elliott so clearly had a crush on her, and redirecting it all toward Iris.

  She didn’t want to see any of this. Didn’t want to know any of it. Him forcing it on her was...

  She was denying it all for a reason, and hell if he knew what it was. He wasn’t the person to try and figure it out, either. He was his own whole mess.

  He gritted his teeth, making sure everything in the forge was well handled before pushing the door open and greeting the cold air like an old friend.

  “Well,” came an all-too-familiar voice from behind him, “you look...angry.”

  He turned and saw Sammy standing there, her pregnant belly round, her eyes far too knowing. It was easy to see, even in the darkness.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We are doing Christmas decorating. So I came to see if you were committed to your yearly avoidance. And to see how you were because I know you hate this time of year.”

  “Just working.”

  “Okay. You seem pissed.”

  “Christmas,” he growled. “And I’m roped into this whole parade thing and I’d rather not deal with it. You know that.”

  “Right.” Sammy let out a slow breath. “And it has nothing to do with why Rose came running into the house looking like the hounds of hell were on her heels. And why she had soot on her face.”

  He gritted his teeth and looked square at his friend. “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “Just a suspicion. One that’s been growing for a while.”

  “I haven’t touched her,” he said, the lie tasting like grit on his tongue. “I mean, not like you’re implying.”

  “But there’s something there.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Sammy. She’s a kid.”

  “I don’t think you mean that, Logan. Because while all of us sometimes fall into treating her like the baby around here, you never do.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean that you think you’re not right for her. And that my husband would kick your ass.”

  “That,” he confirmed.

  “I can’t keep secrets from him,” Sammy said, her voice soft, a little regretful. Because he knew if Sammy would keep a secret for anyone, it would probably be him. But never from Ryder.

  “There’s not a secret to tell,” he said. “I swear that.”

  A look of understanding dawned on her face. “That’s why you were sitting out on the porch that night. When I left Ryder’s bedroom.”

  “I told you, I was thinking about everything I shouldn’t do.” He took a sharp breath, the air cutting his lungs. “And I know what the hell I can’t do. Don’t worry.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked up at the stars, like she was trying to choose the right words. “Good,” she said finally. “I love you, Logan. I really do. Like a brother. And I want you to be happy. I want Rose to be happy.”

  “You don’t think I’ll make her happy.” He shook his head. “Neither do I. If I did...”

  “It’s different for us. It’s different for us because we’re not really part of them.”

  “I know that. I mean, you are now.” She looked away. “Don’t. I mean, don’t feel bad about that. I’m not insulting you, or trying to be mean. Look, I’m not the kind of guy who falls in love. I’m around her a lot. I feel some things. But I’m man enough to know what it is. And I’m man enough not to act on lust. She and I had a little fight. It got a bit out of hand. But hell, you know Rose, she can take care of herself.” He tried to laugh. “She threw a soda can at me.”

  “I do know she can take care of herself.”

  “You don’t need to come out here and play mama bear.”

  She sighed heavily. “The problem is I feel like a mama bear to both of you.”

  “You don’t have to. And I know what I am. I know what I can do, and what I shouldn’t do.”

  Sammy was silent for a long moment. “Yeah, I knew all those things about myself, too. And now here I am.”

  He couldn’t tell if Sammy was arguing for or against. And he had a feeling she didn’t know, either. Because they’d gone over all this when she and Ryder’s relationship had changed from friendship to more. The drawbacks. The risks. And in the end for her it had worked. So he could see why she felt torn now. Afraid him and Rose crossing a line would destroy all they’d built, also afraid she was telling him to turn away from love.

  But that was all fine and good for her and Ryder.

  Not him.

  He was different. He was scarred.

  Broken.

  Rose wouldn’t heal that. He’d just break her, too.

  “Not everything ends the way it did for you two,” he said.

  “It could for you. If you wanted it to.”

  “With someone who’s not Rose, though, right?”

  “She’s so young, and it isn’t that I don’t think you’re great.”

  “You can’t say anything to me that I haven’t said to myself,” he said. “Did you think I wanted to wake up one day attracted to Ryder’s sister? I didn’t. I agree with every reason you have that it’s not going to happen with her.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen with someone.”

  “You’re confusing a few things. The fact that I think she’s hot doesn’t mean I want anything else. That’s the issue.”

  She looked at him skeptically.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t psychoanalyze me. I don’t need your hippie-dippy feelings bullshit.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But Logan, there is someone out there for you. I know it.”

  He knew that she believed it. She believed that because she was able to heal from the wounds of her past, because Ryder had been able to heal from the wounds in his, that it meant they all could. Him, too.

  But she didn’t know. Not really. She didn’t understand.

  He had the kind of guilt that dogged a man like a demon straight out of hell. The kind of stuff that you didn’t want to bother a partner with. The kind of stuff you didn’t heal from.

  He didn’t want to see Ryder and Sammy slaves to the pain that they’d gone through. And he knew that Sammy thought it was the same with him.

  The same kind of pain.

  It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

  His mom had been the most important person in his life. She’d chosen to have him, to raise him. To make him the center of her world, and he’d made her the center of his right back. All he’d ever wanted was to protect her.

  He didn’t give a damn about his biological father. And he’d ignored his existence. The existence of his half brothers. Half sister. No matter what changed. No matter how close they got. He refused to acknowledge the connection because of the pain the man had caused his mom.

  And Logan...

  All he’d wanted was to give back to her.

  He’d saved and saved for the best Christmas present he could think of.

  The memory made his stomach turn sour.

  No. There was no place for moving on. Not for him.

  “Thanks for checking in. I’m just going to go back up to the cabin.”

  “All right,” she said. “You can’t avoid Christmas forever.”

  “I damn well can.”

  “No,” Sammy said gravely. “You can’t. I’m fruitful, and round with the life that I’m creating, which has made me gloriously filled with nesting instincts. I want nothing more than to bedeck every hall with a bow of holly. And you will not escape, Logan Heath.”

  “Watch me,” he said, turning away from her.

  But even in the middle of all his irritation, in the middle of this insanity with Rose, he felt remarkably grateful for Sammy.

  She was the one person who came close to knowing how he felt about anything
.

  And yeah, she was perilously close to some home truths that lived inside of him, and perilously close to a man who would cheerfully snap him in half if he found out the kinds of things he thought about his sister, but still, all things considered it was good that he’d talked to Sammy.

  It put it in perspective.

  Because even Sammy thought he was bad for Rose.

  Sammy was a romantic. She was an optimist. And she certainly saw better in him than he did.

  If she couldn’t even see a way for the two of them to have something, then the possibility didn’t exist.

  It wasn’t just a road to nowhere. It wasn’t a road at all.

  And hell, he busted on through some brush tonight. Forged a path where there shouldn’t have been one, forced to recognize something that he shouldn’t have. But it didn’t matter.

  He would get it together. And he would deal with himself.

  It was going to have to start with not caring quite so damn much about the whole situation with Elliott and Iris and Rose.

  It was a mistake she was going to have to make.

  And he didn’t need to be there when she fell. Didn’t need to be the one to pick her up.

  In fact, he desperately needed to not be that man. She didn’t want him to be. That should be enough. It had to be.

  * * *

  ROSE WAS STILL feeling peevish the next day. She was up early the next morning, as was her routine, but Iris was up much earlier than usual, and that irritated Rose, who wanted to sit in silence and marinate in her feelings.

  “Elliott heard about your performance at the town meeting,” Iris said prosaically.

  “And how do you know that?” Rose asked, suddenly much more interested in the interaction.

  “He texted me,” Iris said.

  Iris looked a little bit pleased and that made Rose feel good. Though that it was about her and her moral failings, as they all seemed to see it, didn’t make her feel good.

  “Well, I’m a little bit sorry that it’s town gossip. But that’s it.”

  “Rose, I thought you’d at least feel a little bad about it.”

  “No,” Rose said, stubborn. “I am not the one who should feel bad.”

  “She’s sad, Rose. You can’t find any pity for her?”

  Badly done, Rose.

  And that was when inconvenient memories of the night before crashed into her brain, along with the vision of very angry blue eyes.

  What would Iris think if she knew about that?

  That he had backed her up against the wall. That he had...touched her.

  He touched your face. With his thumb. You’re the one that has turned his thumb into some kind of symbolic object.

  She cleared her throat. “Anyway. I just want coffee. Not a lecture.”

  “You’re unrepentant,” Iris said.

  “Well, so is she. About everything.” She thought back to Logan’s words. To what he had said about her being less fortunate in some ways than Rose was. Was that true?

  With some of her anger mown down, it was easier to see his words more clearly. That annoyed her. Because she was...well, she was annoyed at him and she didn’t want to see his point.

  She’d been able to admit that he was...well, that he was right about some things last night. But that feeling hadn’t come with any real clarity or introspection. But here it was.

  She tended to think that no one was a whole lot less fortunate than the group of them. They had lost their parents, after all.

  But she was loved. For the first time she wondered if anybody actually loved Barbara.

  “What?” Iris asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that... Now I’m thinking that Logan might be right.” His name tasted funny on her tongue. What had been familiar only yesterday now seemed foreign.

  “Well,” Iris said, “that’s something.”

  “Why are you so worried about it?”

  She huffed. “Well, as a singular object of pity in a small town, maybe I feel badly for her.”

  “You are not Barbara.”

  “Sure.”

  “And anyway, Elliott is crazy about you.”

  Iris’s lips twitched slightly. “I’m not sure that I would go so far as to interpret a few texts as crazy about me.”

  “You need to have more confidence in yourself,” Rose said.

  But her mind was halfway occupied on all the things Logan had said to her last night. It made her wonder if she had slightly too much confidence in herself.

  “I don’t know what I should have,” Iris said. “I’ve never... This is the closest I’ve ever come to dating someone, okay?” Her sister’s cheeks were pink. “And it doesn’t feel how I thought it would and I’m trying to process it all so...so. Anyway, eat your breakfast.”

  Rose obliged, because she was starving. She would have normally felt a little bit more satisfied over Iris’s admission that she felt something for Elliott, but she was consumed by unease over her present situation.

  That made her feel guilty.

  This was all supposed to be about Iris and somehow things were spinning and twisting inside of her and making her...

  She pushed her thoughts away and she collected a couple of old mugs and took the old blue-and-white metal kettle out of the pantry, pouring coffee from the carafe into it. Then she went to the living room, took her coat and hat off the peg by the door, stepped into her boots and slipped outside. It was freezing.

  Early in the morning, the sun had yet to rise, and the chill in the air spoke of frost and impending snow. She supposed given that they were into December now that was normal, but the first bite of freeze in winter always took her a little bit off guard.

  Changing seasons brought with them a wave of nostalgia, and she fought to keep her mind in the present as she raised her shoulders up to her ears and trudged toward the barn.

  But mornings like this lived strong in memory. Weather did, for Rose. That experience of her boot hitting the porch, and the first taste of a new season’s air on her tongue could peel back the years, one by one. And this morning was no different.

  She could remember a few years ago when she had come out on a morning like this and had gone to the barn, helping Logan with a cow in distress.

  A few years before that, when she had just decided that working on the ranch was going to be her vocation, and she had struck out, bright-eyed and eager, completely inured to the cold, her excitement providing a layer of warmth.

  The time she’d been fifteen, and she’d come out early before school to chatter at Logan while he mucked out stalls, and he’d flung a shovelful of dry shavings at her, and she’d retaliated. Which had sent her off to school with debris in her hair, but it had been so funny she hadn’t cared.

  She stopped, and she knew it wasn’t the cold air that had suddenly taken her breath away.

  She remembered walking down those steps, holding two metal camping mugs in her small hand. Her mom beside her with a kettle full of stove-top coffee.

  “It’s cold out this morning.” Rose could remember clearly looking up at her mom, seeing her smile. Her dark hair had been loose, blowing in the early-morning breeze. “They’re going to need their coffee.”

  “Good thing we’re here to bring it to them.”

  Her fingers tightened around the kettle and mugs she was carrying now.

  She had so few memories like that. And she tried not to let them surface. Because when they did the grief sliced so sharp and hard she couldn’t breathe.

  The barn door slid open, the sound loud and grating in the silence of the winter dawn. And there was Logan, standing backlit by the light inside, a warm glow around his muscular frame.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, blinking hard.

  Except out here there were m
emories that she didn’t want, and in there was him. Neither one seemed particularly safe right at the moment.

  “This time of year,” he said, his voice rough.

  She nodded, unwilling to say anything or show emotion that might make him...do something.

  She didn’t know what he might do. Yesterday he had transformed himself into a particularly scary stranger. Certainly not the guy who had laughed and flung shavings at her when she had been fifteen.

  And she didn’t know which Logan she was going to get this morning.

  Then he smiled. “Good. Let’s go. We have to move the cows from one side of the ranch to the other. We gotta get them up from the creek down to the lower pasture.”

  “It’s freezing,” she muttered.

  “I know. But when you signed on for this life of glamour that is being a rancher, you signed on for this.”

  “A life of glamour,” she repeated.

  He jerked his head back toward the barn, and she trudged toward him. It was the weirdest thing. When she moved past him she could feel the hair on her arms standing on end beneath the sleeves of her coat. Could feel a prickling in the back of her neck.

  She hadn’t even been that close to him. He hadn’t touched her.

  It was just a strange awareness that settled itself over her like another layer.

  She didn’t feel quite as cold anymore.

  “Got your horse ready for you.”

  He went into the stall and led her horse, Raisin, out to her, all tacked up. She frowned. “Thank you.”

  That was surprising. But then, maybe he had gotten out of bed a lot earlier than her.

  “I have coffee,” she said.

  “Well, I can stop for a quick cup but then we need to get a move on. We’re going to be battling daylight today. Sundown is at five.”

  “Sunup hasn’t even happened yet,” she said.

  She poured some coffee into a cup and handed it to him. He smiled.

  And she felt again like she was back in the barn nearly twenty years ago, helping her mom bring coffee to her dad and uncle.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, his blue gaze far too sharp.

  She lifted a shoulder and offered him nothing. She wasn’t the one who’d made it weird. He owed her an explanation. She didn’t owe him anything.