Her First Christmas Cowboy by Maisey Yates
CHAPTER THREE
TALAWANTEDTOCRY. She didn’t know this man. Didn’t know his name, didn’t know if anything he’d said about his life was true. But watching him do this—for himself, to spare her from the task was—it was too much.
She dropped back to her knees beside him. “Let me.”
“No,” he said, his voice strained now.
She knew it hurt. She knew it hurt terribly or he wouldn’t be pale like he was.
You don’t know him. You should call the police on him no matter what he says.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
For no reason at all, she trusted him.
Do you just trust him because your mom wouldn’t?
Well, it was a valid question.
But whatever. This was her life and she was making the choice to trust him. To help him. And if things went south, she had a shotgun in her closet. Sawyer Garrett, the head of Garrett’s Watch, had insisted she have a weapon and some training before she had settled into the house.
Bears, he’d said.
He had no idea.
She swallowed hard, feeling her earlier indulgence beginning to rebel against the entire situation. Honestly, it was disgusting. And she might have first aid training, but that did not mean that she was actually fortified against cleaning out a gunshot wound. And watching a man stitch himself up.
“I feel like I should do something for you,” she said. “Even if it’s just putting a cold compress on your head.”
He raised a dark eyebrow. “Not sure that would help.”
“Can I...get you anything?”
“Whiskey?” He grimaced.
“How about tea?”
He frowned. “Tea?”
“Yes. I was drinking chamomile.”
For all the good that had done her. She was not feeling particularly calm now.
“Chamomile,” he said. “Chamomile. That’s what you smell like. That’s why it was familiar.”
“I smell like something?”
“Yeah. Well, chamomile is one of the things. And soap.”
“Oh.”
For his part, he smelled like gunpowder and sweat. Rain. She was surprised she didn’t mind it.
“I don’t have whiskey. I am sorry. I know that helps dull the pain and all that.”
“That’s all right.”
“I don’t drink,” she said.
“I see.”
She might not have whiskey, but she could talk. And keep him talking.
“One of those evil things that my mother warned me against. And honestly, I might not agree with everything she taught me, but when I set out on my own, there was so much to do, so much to consider. It didn’t seem like a great idea to dull my senses. Not ever, really. So... On that score, I stayed pretty much the same. I do like sugar though.”
“Right.”
“I do have lemon bars. Would you like a lemon bar?”
“I don’t think I could eat.”
“No. I can see that.”
He continued to stitch himself up, his movements maddeningly slow, his hand steady.
She had no idea how he was keeping his hand so steady.
“I’ll get you some blankets.”
She turned away and went down the hall, grabbing a folded flannel blanket out of the closet. By the time she came back, he was done. His head was resting against the back of the couch, his eyes closed, and he was breathing hard.
Obviously, it had been a lot more difficult than he had wanted to let on.
“Real talk, what’s going to happen if your brother finds you?”
“He won’t,” he said, his tone hard. “I lost him. I hid my car in the woods. I was trying to get to... It’s a place he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t matter. But the point is, there’s nothing connecting me to any of this. Even if he found my car, he would have no idea which way that I went.”
“But if he did...”
“I’m armed,” he said. “And I won’t let him get to you.”
Her heart jumped in her chest. “Okay.”
“You have a lock on your bedroom door?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Lock it.”
And she didn’t know if he meant to keep his brother out, or to keep him out. But it didn’t much matter. She disappeared into her room and locked the door, turning off the lights and getting into bed. Breathing hard, she pulled the covers up over her head.
And she asked herself how in the world a quiet night grading papers and watching murder mysteries had ended with a big, dangerous, wounded man on her couch.
Nothing so exciting had ever happened to Tala. She was beginning to think that excitement was overrated.
She tossed and turned the entire night and was grateful that the following morning was a Saturday and she didn’t have to worry about school. When she got up, she half expected to find the man gone. Half expected to find that he had been a hallucination, some product of her fevered imagination brought about by watching too much sensationalized television.
She should read more. But then, she would just read sensationalized novels. She didn’t see the point of anything that wasn’t slightly sensational. She had spent her life relegated to mundane texts, with no TV and no movies. So now she liked everything to be full of action and sex. And if her life still wasn’t full of those things, it didn’t much matter. She could think about them anyway.
She got dressed, putting on a pair of jeans—something that was forbidden when she was growing up—and a sweatshirt. Then she crept out of her bedroom, down the hall. He was on the couch. On his back. And for one moment, she was terrified. Terrified that he had died in the night, and now she had a dead outlaw on her hands. She crossed the room quickly and sent up a prayer of thanks when she saw his chest rising and falling. He was alive. He was alive. It was okay.
She went into the kitchen and opened up the fridge, taking out a dozen eggs, and some bacon. Then she started the coffee and began to cook.
A few minutes later, she heard him stirring.
“You’re cooking?”
“Yeah. I thought you might be hungry. Especially since you weren’t able to eat anything last night. How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
He tried to move. “Like shit.”
“Sorry,” she said.
She didn’t know why she was sorry. She didn’t know why she cared.
With the pale morning light streaming through the window, he didn’t look any less dangerous than he had in the dead of night. And he was... He was beautiful. Shockingly so. The stubble on his face was nearly black, his jaw square.
His nose was blade straight, his lips sensuously curved. He was absolutely the beautiful villain from any number of British TV dramas, and she couldn’t help but stare. He had a scar on his face, noticeable because it ran through his beard and created a white line where there ought to be whiskers. He had another one on his lip, the only thing marring the perfection of his mouth.
Those things prevented him from being simply beautiful. They made him look roguish. Dangerous.
“Do you like eggs and bacon?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “What if I told you I was a vegetarian?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“Do you like coffee?”
“I love coffee.”
“Should be a minute. Can you get up?”
He shifted. “Shouldn’t,” he said. “The stitches are pulling a little bit. Weird, because you would think that doing it from that angle would’ve produced a completely professional result.”
“Well, I could’ve done it for you.”
“Sweetheart, you looked like you wanted to keel over and die while I was doing that. I don’t think you could’ve done it.”
“I’m not a shrinking violet,” she said, frowning. “I had to defy my family to get where I am, and you might look around and not see much, but this is a life that I fought hard for. I had to learn to shoot and learn to do complicated first aid in order to take this job, because everybody on Four Corners Ranch needs to know how to contribute during an emergency.”
“Was that a threat?”
“Only if it needs to be.”
“Doesn’t need to be. I promise. You saved me. If I’d been left outside in that storm... God knows.”
“Well, I’ve never saved anyone before.”
“I hate to be an imposition, Miss...”
“Tala. Tala Nelson.”
“Tala,” he said. “I like that name.”
“Thank you,” she said, feeling warm for some reason. “And you are?”
“Clayton. Clayton Everett.”
“What is it that I’m going to do with you, Clayton Everett?”
“If you wouldn’t mind, it’d be nice if I could stay for a couple days. I’ve got money. I can pay.”
Clearly a man who didn’t know how to just... Take a favor.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You don’t have to pay to stay with me.”
“There’s nothing in life that’s free, and I don’t take handouts. You know, unless I’m bleeding out on the ground. Then I’ll take a handout. But I aim to pay it back.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s the right thing to do. And I don’t know why, Clayton,” she said, his name feeling strange on her lips, “but I trust you. You’re not going to hurt me.”
“No.”
“And I’m not going to get you into trouble or put you in any danger. You can stay here. But you have to stay out of sight. I can’t have anybody at Four Corners knowing that you’re here.”
“What’s Four Corners?”
“It’s the ranch that we are on. Well, it’s four ranches, actually. But they operate as one. Garrett’s Watch, Sullivan’s Point, McCloud’s Landing and King’s Crest. We are on Sullivan’s Point. Staying in one of the houses on that piece of land. I’m the teacher.”
“The ranch has a teacher?”
“There are hundreds of employees, and we are out in the middle of nowhere. There’s a one-room schoolhouse, and I teach at it. And they really cannot know that the teacher is housing a potential fugitive, okay?”
“Got it.”
“So you can stay, but you can’t cause me any trouble.”
“I’m just going to lie low until I’m 100 percent. And then I gotta disappear. I gotta go where my brother can’t find me, where the law can’t find me. I have to go underground.”
“Won’t anybody else be looking for you?”
“My mom and dad are long dead. I used to ride in the rodeo, but I just retired this past season.”
“You’re a rodeo cowboy?”
“Yeah. One of these days, I’ll start a ranch of my own. But I’ll wait.”
“It seems unfair that your brother was able to mess your life up like this.”
“That’s family, right? Always happy to come in and fuck everything up.”
“I’m not sure my family has ever done anything quite so interesting. But I can understand feeling like they did their best to make things difficult.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll do my best not to make your life any more difficult.”
“Appreciated.”
The coffee finished brewing and she brought him a cup, and when she handed it to him, their fingers brushed and her stomach somersaulted. This was the first time in her life she’d ever been alone with a man. Like this. Alone alone. With no one else around and... No strings or ties or anything that would prevent them from...
He’s a stranger. He was shot. You’re insane.
It was just that she’d never tackled the man thing.
Her mother had made her naturally distrustful of them, and she had given her a lot of strange feelings about sex in her body. Once she had gotten into college, doing well enough to stay on, all of her financial aid had become the most important thing. She had started at a community college, taking entrance exams to get in, because she hadn’t graduated from high school and she didn’t have any test scores.
She had felt like she was on trial the entire time. And then she had managed to do well enough to transfer to another school, but the only thing that mattered was school. And paying for her life. She’d worked full-time and gone to classes. A social life hadn’t even been a thing. Much less dating. She had roommates, and they had been friendly, but even that hadn’t been... Fun, like friendship or anything like that. She had to be too serious. And then right out of school she had landed this job at Four Corners. And it wasn’t conventional. Not the kind of teaching job she had expected, but she had her own classroom, and the pay was great. Especially given that it came with housing. It gave her so much more than she had expected. So much freedom.
And now she was beginning to think about the things that she was missing. Only now that she was secure.
And he was here. And he was so... So handsome. So compelling and dangerous and...
Exactly not the kind of thing a twenty-four-year-old virgin is probably going to be able to handle?
Fine. Maybe.It wasn’t like she wanted to... She’d never even kissed. To jump right from that to... Sex with a stranger. Well that was a little bit crazy. But then he didn’t feel like a stranger. She felt an affinity for him based on what they had shared. About their lives. About their families.
She had watched him sew himself back together. She had cleaned his wound. She had undressed him.
“I have to grade papers.”
“No problem.”
And somehow, for the rest of the day, they managed to work around each other. She graded papers. Drank tea. He slept on the couch. At some point, she got her tablet and watched TV, sitting at the kitchen table. He slept some more.
She made soup for dinner, and she brought it to him on the couch.
She gave him pain pills when he needed them.
It felt strange, and it felt companionable.
And it was a relief when no bad guys came and knocked the door down. Because yeah, she felt a little bit of paranoia. It was impossible not to.
On Sunday morning, she realized that she had to get some supplies.
“We’re going to need some more first aid things, and some food. I’m going to go into town and get it. Stay put. And don’t hurt yourself.”
“I’m neither a child nor a dog,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt myself.”
“Yeah right. I see you getting restless. I would put a cone of shame on you if I thought it would help.”
She decided to go to the nearest store. A little all-in-one market with a weird collection of things specifically tailored to the area. Pyrite Falls was hardly a town. More of a row of buildings. To do serious shopping, you had to go farther afield. But she just needed some vegetables and meat, and the great thing about the little store was that it stocked local fruits and veggies. As far as meat went, she made a quick stop at Garrett’s Watch for that. She also stopped by the community garden at the Sullivans’ for some fruit.
So much of this place was self-contained. It made things easy.
When she got home and opened the door, Clayton was gone.
