A True Cowboy Christmas by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

12

Gray couldn’t bring himself to drop Abby’s hand.

They said their goodbyes and left Martha and the rest of the town to their celebrating. Gray was well aware that the real reason he was prepared to leave the ranch in hands other than his own for the first time in about a decade—not to mention, his daughter with her uncles—had a lot more to do with the bed he knew waited for them upstairs than any particular recognition of his newly married state.

He was a man, after all.

Though it occurred to him when he and Abby stepped into the gold-plated old elevator in the lobby and left the crowd behind them that he’d had some doubts on that score over the years. He hadn’t meant to become a monk, but he had. He hadn’t meant to bury himself on his land before it was his time, but he’d done that too.

He’d married Abby because he wanted a wife. A good wife, a mother for his daughter, and a decent marriage that they could roll on into the future. A marriage for the right reasons that would let future Everetts become stewards of the land, not prisoners of it.

But tonight wasn’t about that, he admitted to himself as the elevator slowly rose.

Tonight was about Abby.

It was about the way she looked at him with all that wonder and heat in her gleaming eyes that made him so hard he felt like a fifteen-year-old all over again.

The elevator chugged its way from one floor to the next as if it was taking the time to tour through its own long history as it went. Gray felt the weight of what they’d done in the courthouse, and what they were about to do, thank God, sitting on them both a little too heavily. Abby stopped looking at him once the elevator cleared the second floor. She was staring down at the floor as if she’d never seen her feet before and was unduly fascinated by them.

“I had the hands pick up your boxes,” he told her.

She jolted as if she hadn’t been expecting the sound of his voice. He could admit that had come out on the abrupt side, but it was better than the thick silence that pressed at him.

When she looked at him again, her cheeks were rosy. “Thank you.”

“I want to make moving in as seamless as possible.”

She nodded, though he noticed she wasn’t quite meeting his gaze. She was looking slightly to one side. “I appreciate that.”

If he’d been calmer, he might not have been able to feel his pulse in his sex the way he did then. Insistent. Demanding.

He was half afraid she could hear it too.

The other half wanted her to.

“Your mother didn’t cause any trouble today,” he heard himself say, because apparently this woman was the only thing on earth that could turn him chatty. “I was waiting for her to—”

“Can we not talk about my mother?” Abby asked softly. “Please?”

Gray studied her for a moment. There was color on her cheeks, yes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.