A Christmas Blessing (8 page)

“Maybe I was imagining what it would be like when this was no longer just a house, but a home, filled with warmth and laughter and happiness. Or didn’t you ever stop to think that I might have dreams?”

“So why don’t you do something to turn it into a home?” she taunted before she could stop herself.

The look he shot her was unreadable, but there was something in the coiled intensity of his body language that sent a thrill shimmering straight through her.

“Perhaps I have,” he said, his challenging gaze never leaving hers.

Then, while Jessie’s breath was still lodged in her throat, he pressed a kiss to the baby’s cheek, handed her back to her mother and sauntered from the room with the confidence of a man who’d just emerged triumphant from a showdown at the OK Corral.

That was the last she saw of him until after the supper she’d been forced to eat alone. She’d spent most of the evening the same way, alone in the kitchen, pondering what Luke had said—and what he hadn’t. With the radio tuned to Christmas carols, her mood was a mix of nostalgia and wistfulness and confusion.

She hadn’t especially wanted to spend the holidays with Erik’s family, hadn’t been much in the mood for celebrating at all in fact, but now that Christmas was only two days away, she couldn’t help thinking of the way it had been the year before. She wondered if she would ever recapture those feelings.

The whole family and dozens of friends had been crowded around a gigantic tree, its branches loaded with perfectly matched gold ornaments and tiny white lights, chosen by a decorator. Mary had played carols on the baby grand piano, while the rest of them sang along, their voices more exuberant than on key.

Jessie remembered thinking of all the quiet Christmases as she’d been growing up, all the times she’d longed for a boisterous houseful of people. With her hand tucked in Erik’s, she’d been so certain that for the first time she finally understood the joy of the season. Her heart had been filled to overflowing. In agreeing to go to White Pines this year, perhaps she’d been hoping to reclaim that feeling for herself and eventually for her baby.

It seemed unlikely, though, that it would have been the same. Erik had stolen her right to be there from her, wiped it away in an instant of carelessness that she’d never really doubted for a moment was as much his fault as Luke’s. Sometimes, when it was dark and she was scared, she blamed Luke, because it hurt too much to blame her husband.

Everything Luke had said earlier was true. Erik had hated working on the ranch, whether his father’s or his brother’s. He’d had other dreams, but his father had been too strong and Erik too weak to fight. He’d preferred working for Luke, who tolerated his flaws more readily than his father did. He’d accepted his fate by rushing through chores, by doing things haphazardly, probably in a subconscious bid to screw up so badly that his father or Luke would finally fire him.

Well, he’d screwed up royally, all right, but he’d died in the process, costing both of them the future they’d envisioned, costing Angela a father and her the extended family she’d grown to love. Sometimes Jessie was so filled with rage and bitterness over Erik’s unthinking selfishness that she was convinced she hated him, that she’d never loved him at all.

At other times, like now, she regretted to her very core all the lost Christmases, all the lost moments in the middle of the night when they would have shared their hopes and dreams, all the children they’d planned on having.

“Jessie?” Luke said, interrupting her sad thoughts as he stood in the kitchen doorway, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. “Are you okay?”

“Just thinking about last year and how much things have changed,” she admitted.

Luke’s eyes filled with dismay. “I’m sorry. I know facing a Christmas without Erik is the last thing you expected,” he said, regarding her worriedly. “Why don’t you come on in the living room? I’ve started a fire in there.”

Without argument Jessie stood and followed him. She was frankly surprised by the unexpected invitation, but she had no desire to spend the rest of the evening alone with her thoughts, even if being with Luke stirred feelings in her that she didn’t fully understand.

When Luke stood by the fireplace, Jessie crossed over to stand beside him. He looked so sad, so filled with guilt, an agonizing of guilt that had begun some seven months ago for both of them. Instinctively she reached for him, placing her hand on his arm. The muscle was rigid.

She tried to make things right. “I don’t blame you for the way things are, Luke. I wanted to. I wanted to lash out at someone and you were the easiest target. You were there. You could have stopped him.” She sighed. “The truth is, though, that Erik was always trying to prove himself, taking chances. You couldn’t have kept him off that tractor if you’d tried.”

He shrugged off her touch. “Maybe not, but I blame myself just the same. Look what I’ve cost you.”

Jessie wanted to explain that it wasn’t Erik she missed so much as the feeling of family that had surrounded them all that night as they sang carols. To say that aloud, though, would be a betrayal of her husband, an admission that their life together hadn’t been perfect. She owed Erik better than that. He had given her the one thing she’d never had—the feeling of belonging to a family with history and roots.

“Regrets are wasted, Lucas. We should be concentrating on the here and now. It’s almost Christmas, the season of hope and renewal,” she said.

She glanced around the living room, which looked as it would at any other time of the year—expensive and sterile. It desperately needed a woman’s touch. Even more desperately, it needed to be filled with love.

“You’d never even know it was the holidays in here,” she chided him. “There’s not so much as a single card on display. I’ll bet you haven’t even opened them.”

“Haven’t even been out to the mailbox in days,” he admitted.

She lifted her gaze to his. “How can you bear it?” Before he could answer, she shook her head. “Never mind. That was what the cabinet full of liquor was all about, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said angrily. “It was about forgetting for a few blessed days, forgetting Christmas, forgetting Erik, forgetting the guilt that has eaten away at me every single day since my brother died right in front of my eyes.”

Jessie flinched under the barrage of heated words. “Sounds like you’ve been indulging in more than whiskey. You sound like a man who’s been wallowing in self-pity.”

“Self-loathing,” Luke said.

“Has it made you feel better?” she chided before she could stop herself. She’d been there, done that. It hadn’t helped. “Has anything been served by you sitting around here being miserable?”

He didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He just stared at her, his expression vaguely startled by her outburst.

“Don’t you think I feel guilty sometimes, too?” she demanded. “Don’t you think I want to curl up in a ball and bemoan the fact that I lost a husband after only two years of marriage? Well, I do.”

She was on a roll now, releasing months of pent-up anger and frustration. She scowled at him. “But I for one do not intend to ruin the rest of my life indulging in a lot of wasted emotions. I cried for Erik. I grieved for him. But a part of him lives on in Angela. I think that’s something worth celebrating. Maybe you’re content to spend the holidays all shut up in this bleak atmosphere, but I’m not.”

Oblivious to his startled expression, oblivious to everything except the sudden determination to take charge of her life again, starting here and now, she declared, “The minute I get up tomorrow morning, I am going to make this damned house festive, if I have to make decorations from popcorn and scraps of paper.”

She shot him a challenging look. She had had it with his veiled innuendoes and sour mood. “As for you, you can do what you damned well please.”

Chapter Six

S
itting right where he was, staring after Jessie long after she’d gone, Luke realized he hadn’t given a thought to Christmas beyond being grateful that he wouldn’t be spending it with his family, enduring their arguments and silences, their grief. Consuela had dutifully purchased his gifts to everyone, wrapped them and sent them over to White Pines. He’d merely paid the bills.

Now, though, he would have had to be denser than stone to miss Jessie’s declaration that the atmosphere around his house was awfully bleak for the season. That parting shot before she’d gone off to her room had been a challenge if ever he’d heard one. Just thinking about it was likely to keep him up half the night, wondering how he could give them both a holiday they would never forget. There was no question in his mind that with Jessie and Angela in the house, it would be wrong, if not impossible, to ignore the holiday—the baby’s first.

A week ago he hadn’t expected to feel much like celebrating, but for the past forty-eight hours his mood had been lighter than it had been in months. Part of that was due to Angela’s untimely, but triumphant, arrival. She was truly a Christmas blessing. A far greater measure of his happiness was due, though, to this stolen time with Jessie and his sense that she truly didn’t blame him for Erik’s accident.

He finally admitted at some point in the middle of the night that instead of getting her out of his system, he was allowing her to become more firmly entrenched in his heart. He could readily see now that his initial attraction to Jessie had been pure chemistry, tinged with the magical allure of the forbidden. In some ways, his conscience insisted, she was even more out of reach to him now.

But he knew in his gut that the attraction went beyond her being unavailable to him. Traits he’d only suspected before were clear to him now. He was coming to know her strengths and her weaknesses in a whole new way and nothing he’d discovered disappointed him.

In addition to being beautiful and warmhearted, she was also quick-tempered. In addition to being strong and brave, she was also willful and stubborn. She had a quick wit and a ready laugh, but she could also be a bit of a nag when she believed in her cause. In his view the positives outweighed the negatives. The contrariness only made her more interesting.

Those discoveries solidified his long-held belief that she and Erik had been mismatched from the start. As much as he had adored his younger brother, he’d also recognized that Erik was weak, too weak to stand up to their father, too weak to provide much of a challenge to a woman like Jessie.

He’d wondered more than once what had drawn them together in the first place. Observing them in years past with a sort of detached fascination, he had had no problem guessing why Erik had chosen a woman with Jessie’s strengths. Less clear was why she had fallen in love with his brother. The past couple of days had given him some insight into that.

He was beginning to realize that far from being the gold digger she had appeared to some distrusting family members at first glance, Jessie had simply craved being part of a family with history and roots. On the surface, anyway, his family was storybook caliber with its strong men, boisterous affection, deep-rooted ties to the Texas land and abiding sense of loyalty. Erik had been her passport to all of that.

He couldn’t help wondering, though, why she had chosen to move across the state after Erik’s death, when she could have stayed at White Pines, claimed her rightful place in the family she’d obviously grown to love, and been doted on.

As he understood it, his parents had begged her to stay, especially after they’d learned she was pregnant. Even though it had meant giving up something desperately important to her, Jessie had insisted on going.

Whatever her reasons, he admired her for standing up to them. He also knew she hadn’t taken a dime when she’d left. It was yet more testament to her character, proof that she had married Erik for love, not for money.

Lingering in the barn, Luke was leaning against a stall door, still contemplating Jessie, when Chester butted him from behind. The old goat was obviously tired of being ignored. Luke turned on him with mock indignation.

“Hey, what was that all about? Goats who get pushy don’t get treats.”

Chester didn’t get the message. He nudged Luke’s coat pocket trying to get at the sections of apple he knew were there. Luke dug them out and fed them to him.

“So, what do you think, Chester? What can I do to make this holiday special?”

Since the goat didn’t seem to have any sage advice, Luke headed back toward the house. He was almost there when inspiration struck. He might not be able to deliver a load of gifts or even an album of Christmas carols, but he could certainly come up with a tree.

He detoured to the woodpile for an ax, then headed into the stand of pine trees on the ridge behind the house. He’d planted most of them up there himself, full-grown pines that had cost a fortune. He supposed he’d done it just because his parents had no similar trees, despite the name of their home. The gesture had been some sort of perverse link to his past.

He surveyed the cluster of trees critically, dismissing several as too scrawny, a few more as misshapen, though they’d all seemed perfect to him when he’d chosen them from the nursery. Finally his gaze landed on a tree that was tall and full and fragrant.

He worked up a sweat and an appetite chopping it down, then dragging it through the snow all the way back to the house. Propped up against the back porch railing, the tree seemed ever-so-slightly larger than it had on the ridge. He eyed it uneasily and decided he might have been just a little optimistic about fitting it into the house. Still, there was no denying that it was impressive. It made a statement, one he hoped that Jessie couldn’t mistake.

After stomping the snow off his boots and dusting it from his clothes, he snuck inside to make sure that Jessie was still in bed. During the night as he’d been sitting awake in the living room staring into the fire, he’d heard her pacing the floor with the baby. Hopefully, she was catching up on lost sleep this morning.

He tiptoed down the hall as silently as a man his size could manage, then edged the bedroom door open a crack. Down for the count, he decided, after watching the soft rise and fall of her chest for several seconds more than was entirely necessary.