Page 30 of Rocky Mountain Cowboy Christmas
“What?” he called back, his voice a little growly.
Blinking as reality returned with a rush of cold air, Camille shifted back a step, needing some distance from Steve to get her thoughts working again. Even as she tried to tell herself that she’d imagined that moment, that he’d been about to ask her a normal, not-at-all-sexy question, she couldn’t keep the butterflies from tumbling around in her belly.Stop, she told them firmly. She should know better than to think that he’d be interested in her, and she needed to knock it off before she ended up embarrassed and hurt.
Despite the internal lecture, she still wanted to throw a pinecone at Nate’s head. Why did he have to shout right when Steve was getting to the interesting part? Now she was going to die of curiosity if she didn’t find out what he’d been about to tell her. She liked Nate well enough, but right now she wished he’d fall in a hole.
“You’re up!” Nate gestured toward a family clustered together by the edge of the lot. Even at a shout, Nate’s words sounded testy, and Camille felt a rush of annoyance. Couldn’t he have helped the family? Even as she thought it, she knew she was being unreasonable. This was why she shouldn’t indulge in daydreams about unobtainable firefighting ranchers. It stole all of her good sense.
Steve gave Nate a wave of acknowledgment before turning back to Camille.
“Duty calls,” he said with a slight, rueful grimace. His gaze lingered on her face for a charged second before he sighed and turned Harry around, being careful the horse’s oversized rump didn’t knock into her. As he started leading the gelding away, Steve glanced over his shoulder at her. “We’ll talk soon.”
With that completely unsatisfying ending to their conversation, he jogged back toward the family waiting in the lot. Realizing that she was staring after him like a lovestruck idiot, Camille forced her feet to move. She followed more slowly, watching as he greeted the parents and their three kids, tying Harry’s lead rope to the hitching post. As he put on the horse’s harness, he explained each step to the customers, letting the kids touch each piece with curious hands. When the smallest child toddled too close to one of Harry’s oversized hooves, Steve swept him up with the ease of long practice before handing him off to the boy’s dad.
Camille loved how he worked around the horse and the kids, calm and easy, but with a careful firmness that showed he wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. Although she wished they’d been able to finish their conversation, she enjoyed being able to stare at Steve to her heart’s content without him noticing. He stroked Harry’s thick, fuzzy neck absently as he listened to one of the kids, and she was transfixed by the movement of his hand, so firm yet gentle. As stupid as it was, she couldn’t keep her mind from dwelling on how that hand would feel against her skin.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he looked straight at her, the corners of his mouth tucked in as if he were holding back a smile. Heat rushed to her cheeks, and she knew she had to be bright red. If he hadn’t guessed the direction of her thoughts before, her vivid blush had to be giving her away now.
Completely flustered, she lifted her hand in an awkward wave. His smile stretched more widely, and Camille lost what little ability she had to act normally. It was time to retreat. Turning away from the tempting man in front of her, she hurried the rest of the way to her car, not allowing her gaze to stray in his direction. Once she got into the old Buick, she closed her eyes and shook her head at herself. Why couldn’t she have even a smidgen of game? Why had she given Steve that goofy wave?
Carefully backing out, she ran through their brief encounter in her mind. What had he been about to say before Nate interrupted? From the way he’d prefaced the question, it had felt as if it was going to be important. She huffed out a breath. Between thinking about this, her spying neighbor, the creepy night noises, and the industrious mice who shared her home, she’d never be able to sleep that night.
Chapter 7
The night was unusually still, which made him uneasy. Every squeak of snow beneath his boots, every heavy breath—even the low thud of his heartbeat—seemed too loud. With every second that ticked by, he expected Camille to pop her head outside or Mrs. Lin to look out the window or—even worse—emergency sirens to head in his direction, letting him know that someone had spotted him skulking around. Despite his fears, the night remained silent…too silent.
He waited in the trees for over an hour longer than usual. Common sense told him to go home, to come back when the wind was noisily whipping the snow around, hiding any sounds or movements he made. He couldn’t do it, though. He couldn’t leave, not when there was a chance that something might happen. If he missed it, all those nights of waiting and watching would’ve been for nothing.
Carefully, quietly, he slipped across the road toward Camille’s house.
* * *
It was still dark when Steve woke. Years of predawn rising had trained his body not to need an alarm, although they had destroyed any chance he might have of sleeping in, now that his kids were old enough to allow that. Pushing back the covers, he shivered as the air chilled his sleep-warmed skin. His parents had very generously remodeled the old ranch house when Steve had first spoken with them about moving his family back to Borne, but the place was still over a hundred years old. No matter what kind of new flooring or paint it received, the house was going to be drafty.
As he made the bed in the dim moonlight, the undented pillow on the right side caught his notice. It’d been over eight years since he’d last shared his bed, and he still hadn’t gotten out of the habit of staying to his side while he slept. For some reason, that untouched pillow sent a wave of loneliness through him, worse than anything he’d felt in years. He’d never needed someone by his side more. After Karen had died, he’d been devastated by grief and secretly terrified. She’d been such a good mother, and he hadn’t known how their family was going to survive without her. Somehow, they’d managed, and he’d become accustomed to being a single parent. Although he’d never call it easy, he’d always felt like he was doing a good job rearing his children on his own.
Now that the kids were getting older, things weren’t so simple. All four were incredibly smart and amazing and so good it made his heart squeeze just thinking about them. But parenting was more complicated now, especially with Micah and Zoe. They were both so brilliant and at the same time so sensitive, and he knew that the wrong words from him could easily crush them. It was hard to find the right thing to say, though. He’d always thought of himself as a pretty straightforward, uncomplicated guy, and things that wouldn’t have fazed him as a child sent Micah—and sometimes Zoe—into an emotional tailspin. He’d never felt so out of his depth.
He tried. Even when conversations were awkward and painfully uncomfortable, he still attempted to push through, but sometimes trying wasn’t enough. If he said the wrong thing, they’d shut down and go silent, and he’d know he’d screwed up, but not be sure how to fix things. They weren’t like a piece of equipment that came with replacement parts and an instruction manual.
Sometimes he felt like he needed a translator to communicate with his two middle children. Karen would’ve been that. She’d felt things just as deeply as Zoe and Micah did, so she would’ve helped Steve understand the best way to parent them…maybe. He realized that he was having a hard time imagining what Karen would’ve been like if she’d lived, or how she would’ve parented their kids as preteens and teenagers. They’d all changed so much over the past years, and she would’ve, too, he was sure. It hit him suddenly that he’d been without Karen longer than they’d been together, and at some point, the crushing grief had softened to a lingering ache, a hollow spot in his chest where she used to be.
Shaking himself out of his thoughts, he gave the quilt covering his bed a sharp tug to straighten it and then turned away. He dressed in the mostly dark room, putting off the moment that his eyes had to become accustomed to the harsh artificial light.
When he’d finished getting ready, he walked quietly down the hallway, glancing in the girls’ room to see them both sound asleep. He tapped lightly on the boys’ door.
“I’m up,” Will said in a semi-alert mumble, making Steve smile a little as he quietly descended the stairs. He scribbled a note on the whiteboard on the fridge, letting the other three know where he and Will would be, and filled a water bottle at the sink. As he drank, his gaze settled on the chair where Camille had sat the day before, and his smile threatened to return. He liked having her there at his family’s table. Ever since he’d seen her in the scrapyard, Camille had fascinated him. She fit with his children, like a puzzle piece snapping into place so effortlessly that he was a little envious. He wondered if she thought he was bland and dull in comparison to their vividly inventive minds that were so like hers, and he wished that Nate hadn’t interrupted the previous day before Steve could finish talking to her.
“Ready?” Will asked quietly as he entered the kitchen, pulling Steve out of his thoughts.
“Drink some water first,” he said, filling another bottle and handing it to Will before topping off his own. They pulled on their boots and coats in silence, donning their hats before adding their headlamps. Will unhooked their snowshoes from the wall and handed Steve’s to him, although they waited to strap them on until they reached the foot of the porch stairs. This had been their routine since before they’d moved away from Simpson, and their movements came automatically for both of them.
“Long route or short today?” Steve asked.
“Long.” Will reached toward the star-speckled sky, stretching. “I sat in the store too much this weekend.”
They turned right, heading for the north edge of the property, picking up a slow jog to get their muscles warmed up and to accustom their brains to the different motion required to run in snowshoes. Snow-blanketed pastures stretched to their left, while the tidy rows of evergreens created lines of dark shadows to their right. The entire ranch seemed to be sleeping. Even the wind was quiet, leaving just the brush of their clothing and the soft thuds of their snowshoes to break the early-morning silence. “Want to switch to tree duty next weekend, get a break from the store?” Now that they were out of the house and wouldn’t wake the sleepers, Steve spoke at a normal volume. There weren’t many bears out at this time of year, but there was no harm in making enough noise to scare off any wildlife.
“Sure.” Will’s jacket rustled as he shrugged. “I don’t mind the store, though, and Uncle Nate hates getting stuck in there. He’d rather be outside with the horses.”
