Christmas in Painted Pony Creek by Linda Lael Miller

Author:Linda Lael Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-07-18T17:40:50+00:00

7

For the next few days, Jesse sheltered Tessa and Isabel from all possible harm, and though the necessity of it chafed her considerable pride, Tessa cooperated. She knew it couldn’t last.

Mostly, it was business as usual. She worked her shifts at Bailey’s, and Isabel attended kindergarten and day care under the watchful supervision of her teacher and the childcare workers.

After work, Jesse slept at Tessa’s some nights, tossing and turning on that awful couch. Other times, Tessa and Isabel stayed in the cottage on the ranch, in the spacious spare room just down the hall from Jesse’s bedroom.

Tessa was getting too comfortable, too complacent, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help indulging in the semi-fantasy of having a real home and a partner.

On the ranch, the three of them passed whole evenings playing board games and watching old movies on the big flat-screen in Jesse’s living room. After Isabel went to sleep, they talked. Jesse told Tessa what it was like to grow up on a working ranch. Tessa told him about her mother, the various foster homes she’d lived in. Of course, her life hadn’t all been dreary and dysfunctional. Most of the foster parents were kind enough. And about the Staffords, the couple who had taken her in, loved her like their own and then died in an accident.

She’d had friends, even before she went to live with the Staffords, and she’d gotten good grades. In high school, she’d been a cheerleader and a member of the National Honor Society, landing several small but much-needed scholarships, and her foster parents had seen to it that she got therapy.

Jesse simply listened. He never asked for more than she was willing to tell, and he didn’t make judgments.

Best of all, much to Tessa’s relief, he didn’t seem to feel sorry for her.

Instead, he admired her for her strength and courage.

Tessa wasn’t sure she agreed with that assessment; she’d been scared for much of her life, even when things were going well.

There was always that need to stay ahead of the curve, lest some disaster overtake her without warning. Which, of course, disasters usually did, and at the most unexpected times.

What she hadn’t told Jesse was that she’d started getting counseling at the community clinic—preliminary diagnosis, low self-esteem, among other things—or that she was on birth control now.

The time they’d spent together since she’d asked Jesse to come over that first evening had been innocent—on the surface.

They were careful, because of Isabel, not to touch and definitely not to kiss.

Still, the atmosphere crackled between them, and when they occasionally bumped into each other, both of them flinched and said Sorry.

It was, Tessa was beginning to think, ridiculous.

Jesse was a man, and she was a woman, and though they hadn’t said so, they wanted each other.

Damn, but Tessa yearned to be alone with Jesse, just the two of them, and find out how deep their attraction ran.

She had the day of the Thanksgiving dance off. That morning, she washed her hair and slathered herself with body lotion.

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