A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [65]
“Eat fast!” Edrina urged Clay, as he sat down at the table. “We’ve been waiting forever to decorate the Christmas tree!”
“Forever,” Harriet testified.
“For that,” he said, “I do apologize.” Clay looked down at the simple but plentiful meal Dara Rose had prepared—boiled potatoes, the last of the preserved venison and green beans she had grown in her own garden the summer before and subsequently put up in jars for the winter. He favored her with a slight, appreciative smile, and then spoke again to the children, who were fairly electrified with energy. “Settle down now,” he said quietly. “We’ll get to that tree, I promise.”
They subsided, dragged themselves melodramatically out of the kitchen, portraying despondency, Chester tagging along, his ears perked up in anticipation of some new and wonderful game the three of them might play.
Clay ate at his own pace, the way he did everything, and seemed to savor the food Dara Rose had put aside for him, with no real conviction that he’d be around to eat it.
Once he’d finished, Dara Rose offered coffee, but Clay shook his head, said, “No thank you,” and started for the front room. When Dara Rose lingered to clear the table, Clay shook his head a second time and beckoned politely for her to follow.
Edrina and Harriet had been busy, Dara Rose discovered. They’d taken every single ornament out of the boxes and laid them in neat rows on the settee.
Later, out in the woodshed behind the house, working by lantern light and supervised by two very lively little girls and an eager dog—Dara Rose spent the time fussing over her chickens—Clay cobbled together a stand to support the small tree and they all went back inside.
To Dara Rose, the thing looked more like a shrub than a tree, but both Edrina’s and Harriet’s eyes glowed with awe as one decoration after another was reverently added to this bough or that one. The homemade ornaments held their own against the store-bought ones, in Dara Rose’s opinion, and she had to admit that, when finished, the effect was very nearly magical—especially when the porcelain angel with the wire halo and the feather wings seemed to hover over the whole of it, offering a blessing.
“Thunderation,” Edrina breathed, reflected light from the colorful blown-glass ornaments shining on her face.
“It’s bee-you-tee-ful,” Harriet pronounced.
Even Chester, sitting between the children and gazing at the shining display, seemed spellbound.
“It’s enough to make a person believe in St. Nicholas,” Clay said quietly, for Dara Rose alone to hear. “Isn’t it?”
“No,” she said promptly, but without her usual conviction.
Only days ago, Dara Rose reflected dizzily, she’d been alone in the world, with two children to support, winter coming on and the threat of eviction hanging over her head. She might well have lost Edrina and Harriet forever, the way things were going.
But then Clay McKettrick had arrived by train, with his handsome horse, and pinned on the marshal’s badge, and turned her entire life upside down.
The man had even managed to turn a scrub pine into a more-than-respectable Christmas tree.
It was hard, under such circumstances, not to believe in magic.
Christmas Eve
THE CLOCK ON THE FRONT room wall chimed ten times, and the lantern light wavered as Clay came out of the bedroom, shaking his head.
“Not yet,” he said to Dara Rose, who was waiting to fill the pair of small stockings she’d allowed the girls to hang from the knobs on the side table. She’d sent him in to see if Edrina and Harriet were really asleep, or just pretending. “Those two are playing possum, for sure.”
Dara Rose had an orange to drop into the toe of each stocking, thanks to the box from Clay’s people up north, along with a bright copper penny and the new mittens