A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [46]
“Can’t think what else it could have been,” Clay answered, as serious in tone and expression as a man bearing witness in a court of law, under oath. “A sleigh pulled by eight reindeer is a fairly distinctive sight.”
“Thunderation,” Edrina exclaimed softly, while Harriet favored her older sister with a smug I-told-you-so look.
Dara Rose glared up at her bridegroom. “Mr. McKettrick,” she began, but he cut her off before she could go on.
“Call me Clay,” he said mildly. “I’m your husband now, remember?”
Dara Rose got to her feet. “Clay, then,” she said dangerously. “I will have you know—”
Again he interrupted, setting Harriet on her feet and saying, “You two go on and change your clothes. Get your bonnets and your coats, too.”
Edrina and Harriet rushed to obey.
Dara Rose stood there in her sorry-luck wedding dress, trembling with frustration. “How dare you get their hopes up like that?” she whispered furiously, flushed and near tears again. “How dare you encourage them to believe in things that aren’t even real?”
“Whoa,” Clay said, cupping her chin gently in one hand. “Are you saying that St. Nicholas isn’t real?”
“Of course that’s what I’m saying,” Dara Rose retorted, under her breath but with plenty of bluster. “He isn’t.”
Clay gave a long, low whistle of surprise, though his too-blue eyes danced with delighted mischief. “I got here just in time,” he said.
Dara Rose was brought up short. “What?” she managed, with more effort than a single word should have required.
Clay shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe another human being could be so deluded as Dara Rose clearly was. “They’re only going to be little girls once,” he said, “and for a very short time. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, you might have ruined one of the best things about being a kid—believing.”
Dara Rose’s mouth fell open. Clay closed it for her by levering up on her chin with that work-roughened and yet extraordinarily gentle hand of his.
“Now,” he went on decisively, “Edrina and Harriet and I are going out to find a Christmas tree. You can either come with us, Mrs. McKettrick, or you can stay right here with the chickens. Which is it going to be?”
Dara Rose wasn’t about to send her children out into the countryside in a mule-drawn buckboard with a stranger, but neither did she have the heart to insist that they forget the whole crazy plan.
“Edrina and Harriet are my children,” she said, hearing the girls laugh and scuffle in the small bedroom as they went about exchanging their wedding garb for warmer things, “and I will not have them misled.”
“Fair enough,” Clay said, letting his eyes drop. “Shouldn’t you get out of that fancy dress before we head out?”
THE MUD WAS DEEP, but the mules that came with the hired buckboard were strong and sure-footed. Once Clay had arranged the transaction, changed his clothes and collected Chester from the jailhouse, they made the short journey to the ranch with no trouble at all—in fact, it seemed to Clay that those mules knew how to avoid the worst of the muck and plant their hooves on solid ground.
He pulled back on the brake lever and simultaneously reined in the mules right where the kit-house would go up, come spring.
He jumped down, smiling as Edrina and Harriet piled eagerly out of the back of the buckboard, Chester leaping after them and barking fit to split a man’s eardrums, and went around to reach up a hand to Dara Rose.
She hadn’t said two words to him since they’d left town, and her color was high, but she let Clay lift her down.
Gasped when he made sure their bodies collided in the process.
He laughed, though she’d roused an ache inside him.
She blushed and straightened her bonnet with both hands, which made her bosom rise in that tantalizing way he so enjoyed.
“You gave your word,” she whispered, narrow-eyed.
“And I’ll keep it,” Clay assured her. This was what he got for putting his mouth in motion before his head was in gear, he figured. A wife to contradict everything he said and no wedding night to make up for the inevitable difficulties of an intimate alliance.
If Sawyer