A Creed Country Christmas Read online

  His heart seemed to travel on ahead of him, drawn to the light and warmth of the house. Drawn to Juliana.

  Reaching the barn, he unsaddled his horse, rubbed the animal down with a wad of burlap and gave him a scoop of grain in the bottom of a wooden bucket. He was putting off going into the house, not because he didn’t want to, though. No, he was savoring the prospect.

  The first snowflakes began to fall, slow and fat, as he left the barn, and the sun was veiled, bringing on a premature twilight.

  Lanterns shone in the kitchen windows, and Lincoln raised the collar of his coat, ducked his head against the wind and quickened his stride.

  Gracie met him at the back door, her face as bright as any lantern, her eyes huge. “I’m learning the multiplication tables!” she fairly shouted. “And I gave a recitation about Saint Nicholas, too!”

  Lincoln smiled, bent to kiss the top of Gracie’s head, then eased her backward into the kitchen, out of the cold. The table was clear of the slates and books that had come out of Juliana’s satchel that morning after breakfast was over, and she was at the stove, stirring last night’s venison stew.

  She turned her head, favored him with a shy smile, and it struck him that she was not just womanly, but beautiful. She made that faded calico dress of hers look like the finest velvet, and he wanted to touch her fiery hair.

  Instead, he hung his hat on its peg, shrugged out of his coat and hung that, too. “School over for the day?”

  She nodded. “We accomplished a lot,” she said quietly.

  Lincoln smiled down at Gracie again. “So I hear,” he replied. “Where are the others?”

  “Theresa’s putting Daisy and Billy-Moses down for their naps,” Juliana answered, seeming pleased that he’d asked. “Joseph is with Tom—they spotted a flock of wild turkeys and they’re hoping to bring back a big one for Christmas dinner.”

  Christmas. He’d forgotten all about that, and it was coming up fast. Fortunately, he’d already bought Gracie’s dictionary, and his mother had taken care of the rest. There was a stash of peppermint sticks, books, doll clothes and other gifts hidden away on the high shelf of Cora’s wardrobe; she’d shown him the loot before she left on her trip, and admonished him not to forget to put up a tree.

  As though reading his mind, Gracie tugged at his sleeve. “Are we getting a Christmas tree?”

  Lincoln thought it was a foolish thing to cut down a living tree, minding its own business in some copse or forest, and he flat-out refused to allow any lighted candles in the branches. But he always gave in and hiked out into the woods with an ax, and nailed two chunks of wood crisscross for a stand, because it meant so much to his little girl. “Don’t we always?” he countered.

  “I thought you might change your mind this year,” Gracie said. “You said it was a very German thing to do. What’s German?”

  It was Juliana, the schoolmarm, who answered. “Germany is a country, like the United States and Canada. People from Germany are…?”

  “Germans!” Gracie cried in triumph.

  “Very good,” Juliana said, with pleasure growing in her eyes.

  “Go take a nap,” Lincoln told his daughter.

  “Papa, I never take naps,” Gracie reminded him. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Neither are Daisy and Billy-Moses,” Lincoln said. “Go.”

  Gracie turned to Juliana. “Is Theresa going to take a nap?”

  At that moment, Theresa entered the kitchen, and it was apparent, by the sparkle of collusion in her eyes, that she’d heard at least part of the exchange. She held out a hand to Gracie. “Come,” she said. “We’ll just lie down for a while and rest. We don’t have to sleep, and I’ll read you a story.”

  “I’ll read you a story,” Gracie insisted.

  Theresa smiled, nodded slightly.

  Gracie could never resist any opportunity to show off her uncanny mastery of the written word. When she was barely three years old, Beth had taught her the alphabet, and after that, she’d been able to divine the mechanics of the reading process. It was as if the child had been born knowing how to make sense of books.

  Lincoln felt a pang, thinking of Beth when he wanted so badly to be alone in that kitchen with Juliana, for whatever time Providence might allot them. It wasn’t as if he meant to touch her, or “offer for her,” the way Tom had suggested out there by the creek. She warmed him deep down, that was all. In places where the heat from the cookstove didn’t reach.

  When Gracie and Theresa were gone, though, he just stood there, mute as a stump.

  “Wash up,” Juliana told him, keeping her gaze averted. “You must be hungry.”

  He went to the sink, rolled up his sleeves, pumped some water and lathered his hands with soap. It was harsh stuff, fit to take the hide off, as his mother complained.

  Juliana fetched a bowl and spoon, dished up stew for him. The task was ordinary enough, but it made Lincoln think about the conversation with Tom again.

  He drew back his chair at the table, sat down. “Did you eat?” he asked, because he wanted Juliana to join him.

  She nodded. “Coffee?”

  “You don’t have to wait on me, Juliana,” he replied.

  “Nonsense,” she replied, bustling off, returning to the table with a steaming mug. “You’ve given us food and shelter, and I want to show my gratitude.” A twinkle sparked in her eyes. “But I draw the line at polishing your boots, Mr. Creed.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t be looking for a housekeeper’s job,” Lincoln said, and then wished he could bite off his tongue. Juliana Mitchell might have fallen on hard times, but she wasn’t cut out to be a servant, even if she had poured him coffee and heated up last night’s stew for lunch.

  She sat down, though, and that was encouraging.

  “Are you offering?” she asked, almost shyly.

  Lincoln went still, his spoon midway between the bowl and his mouth. “Would you accept if I did?”

  Juliana shifted in her chair. Folded her hands in her lap. “My brother would probably come here and drag me back to Denver by the hair if I did,” she said, and she sounded almost rueful.

  “Your brother?” Yes, fool, taunted an impatient voice in his head. You know what a brother is. You have two of them yourself, three if you count poor Dawson, lying out there in the cemetery next to your pa.

  A fetching blush played on her cheekbones. Lincoln tried to imagine her scrubbing floors, beating rugs, ironing shirts and emptying chamber pots, and found it impossible. For all that her dress had seen better days, there was something innately aristocratic about this woman, something finely honed in the way she held herself, even sitting in a chair.

  “Clay had enough trouble reconciling himself to my being a teacher,” Juliana said after a few awkward moments during which she swallowed a lot. “So far he’s left me alone, but he’d have a fit if I took to keeping house. Unless I was married—”

  Her voice fell away, and the blush intensified. Now, Lincoln suspected, she was the one wanting to bite off her tongue.

  “What if you were a governess?” he ventured, lowering the spoon back to his bowl even though he felt half-starved.

  She shrugged both shoulders and looked miserable. “I suppose he’d see that as an improvement over teaching in an Indian School,” she allowed.

  Lincoln wanted to close his hand over hers and squeeze some comfort into her, but he didn’t. “You do everything your brother tells you?” he asked, surprised.

  “No,” she said, meeting his eyes at last, trying to smile. He’d intended no criticism by his question, and to his great relief, she seemed to know that. “If that were so, I’d be a wealthy widow now, living in Denver.”

  Lincoln raised one eyebrow, waited.

  She did some more blushing. “Clay wanted me to marry his business partner. I’d resigned myself to that, even though I was going to Normal School. But then my grandmother died and I’d graduated, and I realized I wanted to use what I’d learned.”

  There wa
s more she wasn’t saying, Lincoln knew that, but he didn’t push. The situation seemed too fragile for that. Slowly, to give her a chance to recover a little, he looked down at his bowl, stuck his spoon into the stew and began to eat.

  “This Clay yahoo wouldn’t like your being a governess?” he asked carefully, when some time had passed.

  She laughed softly, probably at the term yahoo applied to her no-doubt powerful brother. “Probably not.”

  “Why? Because he’d think it was beneath you?” Again, there was no scorn in the inquiry.

  “No,” Juliana said, with quiet bitterness. “He’d think it was beneath him, and he’s already despairing of my reputation. To Clay, my teaching other people’s children—especially Indian children—is tantamount to serving drinks in a saloon.”

  Again, Lincoln waited. Some process was unfolding, and it had to be let alone.

  “It’s starting to snow,” Juliana said wistfully, her gaze turned to the window again.

  “What will you do, then?” Lincoln asked. “After you leave here, I mean?”

  She sighed. Met his gaze. “I don’t know,” she confessed.

  “I guess we could get married,” Lincoln said.

  Juliana opened her mouth, closed it again.

  Lincoln felt crimson heat climbing his neck, pulsing along the underside of his jawline. “You heard Fred Willand say it in the mercantile yesterday,” he said, his voice raspy. “I’ve been advertising for a housekeeper or a governess, or both, for better than a year. Failing that, I’d settle for a wife.”

  Juliana began to laugh. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, and she put a hand to her mouth to silence herself.

  “I didn’t mean ‘settle,’ exactly—”

  “Yes, you did,” Juliana said. Her look softened. “You loved Gracie’s mother a lot, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Lincoln answered readily.

  “So much that you can’t make room in your heart for another woman,” Juliana speculated. “That’s why you’d marry a stranger, someone answering a newspaper advertisement. Because you wouldn’t have to care for that person.”

  She wasn’t accusing him of anything; he knew that by her tone and her bearing. Most likely, the words stung the way they did because they were only too true.

  “And that person wouldn’t have to care for me,” he replied.

  “But you’d expect her to—to share your bed?”

  “Sooner or later, yes,” Lincoln said. “That’s part of being a wife, isn’t it?”

  Juliana propped an elbow on the table, cupped her chin in her palm. They might have been discussing hog prices, she was so unruffled and matter-of-fact. “I suppose,” she agreed.

  Before things could go any further, Tom and Joseph banged in through the back door, their faces white-slashed with broad smiles.

  “Christmas dinner’s outside,” Tom said. Then his glance traveled between Juliana and Lincoln, and he sobered a little.

  Joseph, being so young, and buoyed by the pride of accomplishment, didn’t notice that they’d interrupted something, he and Tom. “We got two turkeys,” he announced proudly. “Tom’s already gutted them, but we have to pluck them yet, and I might have to pick some buckshot out of the one I got.”

  Juliana winced.

  Lincoln smiled. Pushed back his chair and stood, carrying his bowl and spoon to the sink.

  “Better have some stew,” he told Tom and the boy.

  “And then I’ll hear you read today’s lesson,” Juliana told Joseph.

  The boy’s face fell briefly, then he smiled again. A deal, he must have decided, was a deal. Juliana had allowed him to skip his schoolwork earlier so he could work with the men out on the range. Now she wanted her due.

  “After I pluck the turkeys?”

  “After you pluck the turkeys,” Juliana conceded with a fond sigh. “And you’re not bringing those poor dead creatures into the house to do it.”

  The command was downright wifely, and that pleased Lincoln, though he didn’t let it show. The idea had taken root in his mind, and in Juliana’s, too, and for now, that was enough.

  Joseph’s grin faltered a little. “Remember last Christmas, Miss Mitchell, when you tried to roast that turkey that farmer’s wife gave us and it smoked so much that we had to open the doors and all the windows?”

  “Thank you, Joseph,” Juliana said mildly, “for that reminder.”

  Tom smiled at that.

  Lincoln glanced at the windows, saw that the snow was coming down harder and faster. Through the flurries, he glimpsed his brother Wes riding up, leading a pack mule behind him, a huge pine tree bound to its back.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered with a low, throaty chuckle, and headed for the back door, pausing just long enough to put on his coat.

  Wes wore no hat, and snowf lakes gathered in his dark chestnut hair and fringed his eyelashes. His grin was as white as the snowy ground, and even from ten feet away, Lincoln could smell the whiskey and cigar smoke on him.

  “Ma said she’d have my hide if I didn’t make sure Gracie had a Christmas tree,” Wes said cheerfully. “So here I am.”

  Lincoln laughed and shook his head. “Did you happen to credit that there’s another blizzard coming on and it’ll be pitch-dark by the time you get back to town?”

  “I’ve got enough whiskey in me to prevent any possibility of freezing,” Wes answered. He took a cheroot from the pocket of his scruffy coat, fitted at the waist like something a dandified gambler would wear, and clamped it between his perfect teeth. “Fact is, I might need a swallow or two before I head home, just the same.”

  Dismounting, Wes went back to the mule and began untying the ropes that secured the Christmas tree to the animal. The lush, piney fragrance his motions stirred reminded Lincoln of their boyhood. They hadn’t been raised to believe in Saint Nicholas, but there had always been fresh green boughs all over the house, and modest presents waiting at their places at the breakfast table on Christmas morning.

  “Are you just going to stand there,” Wes grumped, grinning all the while, “or will you lend me a hand getting this tree into the house?”

  “It’s too wet to be in the house,” Lincoln said, sounding a mite wifely himself. “We’ll set it in the woodshed, let it dry off a little.”

  “Whatever you say, little brother,” Wes replied affably, even though he was six inches shorter than Lincoln and only two years older. “Fred Willand told me when I stopped off at the mercantile to see if you’d gotten any mail—you didn’t—that you’ve got a woman out here. That pretty teacher from the Indian School.”

  Lincoln took hold of the sizable tree. It was a wonder the weight of the thing hadn’t buckled that poor old mule’s knees—he’d have to saw a good foot off the thing to stand it up in the front room. “Fred Willand,” he said, through the boughs, “gossips like an old woman.”

  Wes laughed at that. “Hell,” he said, “if it weren’t for Fred, I wouldn’t know what you were up to half the time. It’s not as if you ever stop by the saloon or the newspaper office to flap your jaws.”

  “I don’t have much time for flapping my jaws,” Lincoln answered. In spite of nearly losing the ranch because of Wes’s well-intentioned mismanagement, he’d always loved his brother. After Dawson’s death, the old man had taken his grief out on his second son, since Micah, being the eldest, would have given as good as he got. Lincoln, taking Dawson’s place as the youngest in the family, had stayed clear of his pa and taken to following Tom Dancingstar everywhere he went.

  Wes looked up, his eyes serious now. “Ma’s gone,” he said. “I can feel the peace even from out here.”

  Their mother didn’t approve of Wes’s drinking, his poker playing and cigar smoking, or the woman he loved, and she made that clear every time she got the opportunity. So Wes stayed away from the ranch house when she was around.

  Lincoln started for the woodshed, dragging the massive tree behind him. “Go on inside and have some of Tom’s venison stew,”
he called over one shoulder. “It’s probably been a month since you’ve had a decent meal.”

  “I wouldn’t miss a chance to drag my eyeballs over a good-looking woman,” Wes responded.

  Lincoln didn’t dignify that with an answer, but it made him grin to himself just the same.

  When he came out of the woodshed, he saw that Wes had left the horse and mule standing. Lincoln led them both into the barn, out of the icy wind, unsaddled the horse, fed and watered both creatures, and rubbed them down the way he’d done with his own mount earlier.

  He’d been doing things his brother should have done for as long as he could remember, but he didn’t mind, because Wes was always the one who showed up at the most unlikely times with the most unlikely gifts.

  ALTHOUGH JULIANA PUT ON A GOOD show, she was shaken inside, and it wasn’t just because Lincoln Creed had all but proposed marriage to her at his kitchen table a little while before. She might actually say yes, if he did, and that jarred her to the quick.

  John Holden would have made a perfectly acceptable husband, despite his obnoxious daughters, but she’d refused him. Other men had tried to court her during the intervening years, too, though she’d discouraged them, as well. She’d always imagined that if she ever married, it would happen in a fit of wild, romantic passion. She’d be swept off her feet, overcome with desire.

  Lincoln stirred something in her, something almost primal—that was undeniable. But wild, romantic passion? No.

  On the other hand, she knew he was kind, generous. That he worked hard, was an attentive father and didn’t judge people by the culture they’d been born into. That he let his suspenders loop at his sides in the mornings while he shaved.

  She smiled at the image, even as Tom introduced her to Weston Creed, and Gracie ran shrieking for joy into the kitchen, hurling herself into her laughing uncle’s arms.

  He swung her around. “Brought you a Christmas tree,” he told her. “Your papa is putting it in the woodshed to dry off a little. What’s Saint Nicholas going to bring you this year?”

  Gracie paused at the question and her lower lip trembled. A troubled expression flickered across her perfect face.