Christmas Cowboy: Will of Steel / Winter Roses

Five

“Well, what do you know?” He laughed. “We’re both closet map fanatics.”

“And we love ancient history.”

“And we love shooting targets from the front porch.”

She glowered up at him.

He sighed. “I’ll try to reform.”

“You might miss and shoot Sammy,” she replied.

“I’m a dead shot.”

“Anybody can miss once,” she pointed out.

“I guess so.”

They’d stopped on the dance floor while the band got ready to start the next number. When they did, he whirled her around and they started all over again. Jillian thought she’d never enjoyed anything in her life so much.

Ted walked her to the front door, smiling. “It was a nice first date.”

“Yes, it was,” she agreed, smiling back. “I’ve never had so much fun!”

He laughed. She made him feel warm inside. She was such an honest person. She wasn’t coy or flirtatious. She just said what she felt. It wasn’t a trait he was familiar with.

“What are you thinking?” she asked curiously.

“That I’m not used to people who tell the truth.”

She blinked. “Why not?”

“Almost all the people I arrest are innocent,” he ticked off. “They were set up by a friend, or it was a case of mistaken identity even when there were eyewitnesses. Oh, and, the police have it in for them and arrest them just to be mean. That’s my personal favorite,” he added facetiously.

She chuckled. “I guess they wish they were innocent.”

“I guess.”

She frowned. “There’s been some talk about that man you arrested for the bank robbery getting paroled because of a technicality. Is it true?”

His face set in hard lines. “It might be. His attorney said that the judge made an error in his instructions to the jury that prejudiced the case. I’ve seen men get off in similar situations.”

“Ted, he swore he’d kill you if he ever got out,” she said worriedly.

He pursed his lips and his dark eyes twinkled. “Frightened for me?”

“Of course I am.”

He sighed and pulled her close. “Now, that’s exactly the sort of thing that makes a man feel good about himself, when some sweet little woman worries about him.”

“I’m not little, I’m not sweet and I don’t usually worry,” she pointed out.

“It’s okay if you worry about me,” he teased. “As long as you don’t do it excessively.”

She toyed with the top button of his unbuttoned jacket. “There are lots of safer professions than being a police chief.”

He frowned. “You’re kidding, right?”

She grimaced. “Ted, Joe Brown’s wife was one of my uncle’s friends. She was married to that deputy sheriff who was shot to death a few years ago. She said that she spent their whole married lives sitting by the phone at night, almost shaking with worry every time he had to go out on a case, hoping and praying that he’d come home alive.”

His hands on her slender waist had tightened unconsciously. “Anyone who marries someone in law enforcement has to live with that possibility,” he said slowly.

She bit her lower lip. She was seeing herself sitting by the phone at night, pacing the floor. She was prone to worry anyway. She was very fond of Ted. She didn’t want him to die. But right now, she wasn’t in love. She had time to think about what she wanted to do with her life. She was sure she should give this a lot of thought before she dived headfirst into a relationship with him that might lead very quickly to marriage. She’d heard people talk about how it was when people became very physical with each other, that it was so addictive that they couldn’t bear to be apart at all. Once that happened, she wouldn’t have a chance to see things rationally.

Ted could almost see the thoughts in her mind. Slowly he released her and stepped back.

She felt the distance, and it was more than physical. He was drawing away in every sense.

She looked up at him. She drew in a long breath. “I’m not sure I’m ready, Ted.”

“Ready for what?”

That stiffness in him was disturbing, but she had to be honest. “I’m not sure I’m ready to think about marriage.”

His black eyes narrowed. “Jillian, if we don’t get married, there’s a California developer who’s going to make this place into hot real estate with tourist impact, and Sammy could end up on a platter.”

She felt those words like a body blow. Her eyes, tormented, met his. “But it’s not fair, to rush into something without having time to think about it!” she exclaimed. “The wills didn’t say we have to get married tomorrow! There’s no real time limit!”

There was, but he wasn’t going to push her. She had cold feet. She didn’t know him that well, despite the years they’d been acquainted, and she wasn’t ready for the physical side of marriage. She had hang-ups, and good reasons to have them.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “Suppose we just get to know each other and let the rest ride for a while? ”

“You mean, go on dates and stuff?”

He pursed his lips. “Yes. Dates and stuff.”

She noticed how handsome he was. In a crowd, he always stood out. He was a vivid sort of person, not like she was at all. But they did enjoy the same sorts of things and they got along, most of the time.

“I would like to see your place,” she said.

“I’ll come and get you Saturday morning,” he said quietly.

He waited for her answer with bridled impatience. She could see that. He wasn’t sure of her at all. She hated being so hesitant, but it was a rushed business. She would have to make a decision in the near future or watch Uncle John’s ranch become a resort. It didn’t bear thinking about. On the other hand, if she said yes to Ted, it would mean a relationship that she was certain she wasn’t ready for.

“Stop gnawing your lip off and say yes,” Ted told her. “We’ll work out the details as we go along.”

She sighed. “Okay, Ted,” she said after a minute.

He hadn’t realized that he’d been holding his breath. He smiled slowly. She was going to take the chance. It was a start.

“Okay.” He frowned. “You don’t have any low-cut blouses and jeans that look like you’ve been poured into them, do you? ”

“Ted!”

“Well, I was just wondering,” he said. “Because if you do, you can’t wear them over at my place. We have a dress code.”

“A dress code.” She nodded. “So your cowboys have to wear dresses.” She nodded again.

He burst out laughing. He bent and kissed her, hard, but impersonally, and walked down the steps. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

“You call that a kiss?” she yelled after him, and shocked herself with the impertinent remark that had jumped out of her so impulsively.

But he didn’t react to it the way she expected. He just threw up his hand and kept walking.

They worked side by side in his kitchen making lunch. He was preparing an omelet while she made cinnamon toast and fried bacon.

“Breakfast for lunch,” she scoffed.

“Hey, I very often have breakfast for supper, if I’ve been out on a case,” he said indignantly. “There’s no rule that says you have to have breakfast in the morning.”

“I suppose not.”

“See, you don’t know how to break rules.”

She gasped. “You’re a police chief! You shouldn’t be encouraging anybody to break rules.”

“It’s okay as long as it’s only related to food,” he replied.

She laughed, shaking her head.

“You going to turn that bacon anytime soon?” he asked, nodding toward it, “or do you really like it raw on one side and black on the other?”

“If you don’t like it that way, you could fry it yourself.”

“I do omelets,” he pointed out. “I don’t even eat bacon.”

“What?”

“Pig meat,” he muttered.

“I like bacon!”

“Good. Then you can eat it. I’ve got a nice country ham all carved up and cooked in the fridge. I’ll have that with mine.”

“Ham is pig meat, too!”

“I think of it as steak with a curly tail,” he replied.

She burst out laughing. He was so different off the job. She’d seen him walking down the sidewalk in town, somber and dignified, almost unapproachable. Here, at home, he was a changed person.

“What are you brooding about?” he wondered.

“Was I? I was just thinking how different you are at home than at work.”

“I should hope so,” he sighed, as he took the omelet up onto a platter. “I mean, think of the damage to my image if I cooked omelets for the prisoners.”

“Chief Barnes used to,” she said. “I remember Uncle John talking about what a sweet man he was. He’d take the prisoners himself to funerals when they had family members die, and in those days, when the jail was down the hall from the police department, he’d cook for them, too.”

“He was a kind man,” Ted agreed solemnly.

“To think that it was one of the prisoners who killed him,” she added quietly as she turned the bacon. “Of all the ironies.”

“The man was drunk at the time,” Ted said. “And, if you recall, he killed himself just a few weeks later while he was waiting for trial. He left a note saying he didn’t want to put the chief’s family through any more pain.”

“Everybody thought that was so odd,” she said. “But people forget that murderers are just like everybody else. They aren’t born planning to kill people.”

“That’s true. Sometimes it’s alcohol or drugs that make them do it. Other times it’s an impulse they can’t control. Although,” he added, “there are people born without a conscience. They don’t mind killing. I’ve seen them in the military. Not too many, thank goodness, but they come along occasionally.”

“Your friend who was a sniper, was he like that?”

“Not at all,” he said. “He was trained to think of it as just a skill. It was only later, when it started to kill his soul, that he realized what was happening to him. That was when he got out.”

“How in the world did he get into law enforcement, with such a background?” she wondered.

He chuckled. “Uncle Sam often doesn’t know when his left hand is doing something different than his right one,” he commented. “Government agencies have closed files.”

“Oh. I get it. But those files aren’t closed to everyone, are they?”

“They’re only accessible to people with top-secret military clearance.” He glanced at her amusedly. “Never knew a civilian, outside the executive branch, who even had one.”

“That makes sense.”

He pulled out her chair for her.

“Thank you,” she said, with surprise in her tone.

“I’m impressing you with my good manners,” he pointed out as he sat down across from her and put a napkin in his lap.

“I’m very impressed.” She tasted the omelet, closed her eyes and sighed. “And not only with your manners. Ted, this is delicious!”

He grinned. “Thanks.”

“What did you put in it?” she asked, trying to decide what combination of spices he’d used to produce such a taste.

“Trade secret.”

“You can tell me,” she coaxed. “After all, we’re almost engaged.”

“The ‘almost’ is why I’m not telling,” he retorted. “If things don’t work out, you’ll be using my secret spices in your own omelets for some other man.”

“I could promise.”

“You could, but I’m not telling.”

She sighed. “Well, it’s delicious, anyway.”

He chuckled. “The bacon’s not bad, either,” he conceded, having forgone the country ham that would need warming. He was hungry.

“Thanks.” She lifted a piece of toast and gave it a cold look. “Shame we can’t say the same for the toast. Sorry. I was busy trying not to burn the bacon, so I burned the toast instead.”

“I don’t eat toast.”

“I do, but I don’t think I will this time.” She pushed the toast aside.

After they ate, he walked her around the property. He only had a few beef steers in the pasture. He’d bought quite a few Angus cattle with his own uncle, and they were at the ranch that Jillian had shared with her uncle John. She was pensive as she strolled beside him, absently stripping a dead branch of leaves, thinking about the fate of Uncle John’s prize beef if she didn’t marry Ted sometime soon.

“Deep thoughts?” he asked, hands in the pockets of his jeans under his shepherd’s coat.

She frowned. She was wearing her buckskin jacket. One of the pieces of fringe caught on a limb and she had to stop to disentangle it. “I was thinking about that resort,” she confessed.

“Here. Let me.” He stopped and removed the branch from the fringe. “Do you know why these jackets always had fringe?”

She looked up at him, aware of his height and strength so close to her. He smelled of tobacco and coffee and fir trees. “Not really.”

He smiled. “When the old-timers needed something to tie up a sack with, they just pulled off a piece of fringe and used that. Also, the fringe collects water and drips it away from the body.”

“My goodness!”

“My grandmother was full of stories like that. Her grandfather was a fur trapper. He lived in the Canadian wilderness. He was French. He married a Blackfoot woman.”

She smiled, surprised. “But you always talk about your Cheyenne heritage.”

“That’s because my other grandmother was Cheyenne. I have interesting bloodlines.”

Her eyes sketched his high-cheekboned face, his black eyes and hair and olive complexion. “They combined to make a very handsome man.”

“Me?” he asked, surprised.

She grinned. “And not a conceited bone in your body, either, Ted.”

He smiled down at her. “Not much to be conceited about.”

“Modest, too.”

He shrugged. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “You have beautiful skin.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Thank you.”

“You get that from your mother,” he said gently. “I remember her very well. I was only a boy when she died, but she was well-known locally. She was the best cook in two counties. She was always the first to sit with anyone sick, or to take food when there was a funeral.”

“I only know about her through my uncle,” she replied. “My uncle loved her. She was his only sister, much older than he was. She and my father had me unexpectedly, late in life.”

Which, he thought, had been something of a tragedy.

“And then they both died of the flu, when I was barely crawling,” she sighed. “I never knew either of them.” She looked up. “You did at least know your parents, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “My mother died of a stroke in her early thirties,” he said. “My father was overseas, working for an oil corporation as a roughneck, when there was a bombing at the installation and he died. My grandmother took me in, and my uncle moved in to help support us.”

“Neither of us had much of a childhood,” she said. “Not that our relatives didn’t do all they could for us,” she added quickly. “They loved us. Lots of orphaned kids have it a lot worse.”

“Yes, they do,” he agreed solemnly. “That’s why we have organizations that provide for orphaned kids.”

“If I ever get rich,” she commented, “I’m going to donate to those.”

He grinned. “I already do. To a couple, at least.”

She leaned back against a tree and closed her eyes, drinking in the sights and sounds and smells of the woods. “I love winter. I know it isn’t a popular season,” she added. “It’s cold and there’s a lot of snow. But I enjoy it. I can smell the smoke from fireplaces and woodstoves. If I close my eyes, it reminds me of campfires. Uncle John used to take me camping with him when I was little, to hunt deer.”

“Which you never shot.”

She opened her eyes and made a face. “I’m not shooting Bambi.”

“Bull.”

“People shouldn’t shoot animals.”

“That attitude back in colonial times would have seen you starve to death,” he pointed out. “It’s not like those old-timers could go to a grocery store and buy meat and vegetables. They had to hunt and garden or die.”

She frowned. “I didn’t think about that.”

“In fact,” he added, “people who refused to work were turned out of the forts into the wilderness. Some stole food from the Indians and were killed for it. Others starved or froze to death. It was a hard life.”

“Why did they do it?” she wondered aloud. “Why leave their families and their homes and get on rickety old ships and go to a country they’d never even seen?”

“A lot of them did it to escape debtor’s prison,” he said. “They had debts they couldn’t pay. A few years over here working as an indentured servant and they could be free and have money to buy their own land. Or the people they worked for might give them an acre or two, if they were generous.”

“What about when the weather took their crops and they had nothing to eat? ”

“There are strings of graves over the eastern seaboard of pilgrims who starved,” he replied. “A sad end to a hopeful beginning. This is a hostile land when it’s stripped of supermarkets and shopping centers.”

A silence fell between them, during which he stared at the small rapids in the stream nearby. “That freezes over in winter,” he said. “It looks pretty.”

“I’d like to see it then.”

He turned. “I’ll bring you over here.”

She smiled. “Okay.”

His black eyes looked long and deep into hers across the distance, until she felt as if something snapped inside her. She caught her breath and forced her eyes away.

Ted didn’t say anything. He just smiled. And started walking again.

She loved it that he didn’t pressure her into a more physical relationship. It gave her a breathing space that she desperately needed.

He took her to a play in Billings the following weekend, a modern parody of an old play about two murderous old women and their assorted crazy relatives.

She laughed until her sides ached. Later, as they were driving home, she realized that it had been a long time since she’d been so amused by anything.

“I’m so glad I never had relatives like that,” she ventured.

He laughed. “Me, too. The murderous cousin with the spooky face was a real pain, wasn’t he?”

“His associate was even crazier.”

She sat back against the seat, her eyes closed, still smiling. “It was a great play. Thanks for asking me.”

“I was at a loose end,” he commented. “We have busy weekends and slow weekends. This was a very slow one, nothing my officers couldn’t handle on their own.”

That was a reminder, and not a very pleasant one, of what he did for a living. She frowned in the darkness of the cab, broken only by the blue light of the instrument panel. “Ted, haven’t you ever thought about doing something else for a living?”

“Like what?” he asked. “Teaching chemistry to high school students?”

He made a joke of it, but she didn’t laugh. “You’re not likely to be killed doing that.”