Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The crowd noise echoed in Tessa’s ears even though they’d been back at the football field for ten minutes.
At the sleigh, she had trouble focusing on unbuckling the Einstein’s harness. He shoved his nose into her pocket firm enough to push her backward.
“Yes, yes, you were brilliant.” She pulled out a peppermint.
He crunched it, candy bits falling onto her boots. She kissed his velvety nose. All nine minis owned downtown Evergreen Springs. Well, unless you counted Tater Tot’s attempted detour to the kettle corn stand.
She didn’t count it. They’d made it to the finish line in one piece.
Pickles neighed.
“You were also perfect.” She moved down the line with peppermints while Cade removed the antlers from their heads.
She kept sneaking glances at him. Admiring him. Five minutes ago, those same hands cupped her. And that mouth—
“Issue with the harness?” His tone was neutral, but when she looked up, his eyes held heat.
“No. Just thinking.”
“About?”
About how you kissed me like the world was ending. About how everyone saw. About what happens now.
“How we need more peppermints.” She looked up to see Edgar Cosgrove coming toward them.
“Foster! Can’t believe those minis made it all the way without bolting. So glad I followed the math and voted for you when my gut told me to bet against.”
“Hi, Edgar.”
“I made a hundred bucks off you.” Grinning like an opossum, Ed ambled over, hands in his jacket pockets. “Thanks.”
“Glad I could prove your gut wrong,” Tessa said, focusing on Snicker’s lead rope.
“Hell, half the town lost money today. Suckers.” He laughed, shaking his head. “That kiss at the end of the parade though, worth the price of admission.”
“Admission was free,” she quipped.
“Exactly.” Edgar hooted. “Oops, I see Fiona over there. Gonna go claim my winnings.”
Tessa turned to Cade as Edgar walked away. “Everyone saw us kiss?”
“Looks like.” Cade shrugged.
“Are you okay with that?”
“Are you?”
She thought about it. The kiss under the mistletoe, his hands in her hair. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes?”
His mouth quirked. “That’s definitive.”
“Tessa!” Eliza rushed toward them. “There’s my champion!”
Wyatt ambled behind her.
Eliza gave Tessa a fierce hug. “You did it! No disasters, no runaways, no—” She pulled back, eyes sparkling. “And that kiss. Girl, Mrs. Yancy needed her heart medication.”
“Eliza,” Wyatt murmured. “Let her breathe.”
“Right. Sorry. I’m just—” Eliza clapped her hands. “My best friend conquered the Christmas parade! Rent-a-Reindeer is not just a spur of the moment concept. It’s a real business now.”
“The minis were on their best behavior,” Wyatt said.
“Cade trained them.” Tessa smiled at him.
“You drove them,” Cade said. “Through the crowd, the golden retriever, that kid with the jingle bells. That was you.”
Tessa shook her head. “I couldn’t have done it without Cade.”
Cade’s eyes found hers, held it. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t asked for my help. You deserve all the glory.”
Her heart melted. That was Cade. Plain words, blunt truth, sliding under her defenses with no warning.
“Hey guys.” Fiona appeared.
“Hey, Fi.” Tessa smiled. “Where’s Jamie?”
“My folks took him home after the parade. He loved the Santa’s sleigh and your reindeers.” Fiona took a hundred dollar bill from her purse and passed it to Eliza. “Your winnings.”
Eliza clutched the money. “Woohoo! The next girls night out is on me.”
Fiona turned back to Tessa. “I’m sorry I bet against you.”
Tessa shrugged. “It’s okay, I get it.
“No, I was a crappy friend.”
“Nah, you were right to be skeptical. I do have a problem sticking with things.”
“Not anymore,” Cade said.
“I wouldn’t have bet on me either. Not with my track record.”
“But you did it,” Fiona said. “You finished.”
“She did more than finish,” Cade said. “She excelled.”
Everyone looked at him. He didn’t seem to notice, just kept watching Tessa with that intensity that made her forget other people existed.
“We should go,” Wyatt said.
“But—” Eliza resisted.
“I want to get some apple cider.” Wyatt tugged her away.
Fiona trailed after them. The parking lot was emptying fast, families heading home. The high school marching band finished their victory lap.
“So,” Tessa said to Cade.
“So.”
“You kissed me.”
“You kissed me back.”
“Under the mistletoe. In front of everyone.” She twisted the lead rope. “After I specifically said we didn’t have to.”
He stepped closer. “You also said yes when I asked if you wanted to.”
“That was intense.”
“Yes.”
“People will talk.”
“They already were.”
True. The townsfolk had been watching them since he showed up three days ago. Three days. That’s all it had been, though it felt longer.
“I saw Wyatt give you the Christmas card back.”
His expression shifted from teasing to cautious. “Yes.”
They stood there, the weight of that hanging between them. He might disappear. He might not. Neither of them had any control over it.
“This is complicated,” she said.
“Everything about us is complicated.”
“You’re from 1878.”
“So you keep reminding me.”
“Because it’s insane.” She looked at him. “Three days ago you didn’t exist in my life, and now...”
“Now?”
“Now my horses like you better than they do me.”
His mouth twitched. “That’s what’s bothering you?”
“Among other things.”
Einstein chose that moment to try eating her scarf.
“Stop helping.” She tugged her scarf away from him.
Cade scratched Einstein’s neck. “We should get them home.”
Home.
He said it naturally, like he belonged there.
“Yeah,” she said, unsure what else to say.
They worked in silence, putting the sleigh back on the trailer and then loading the minis. But the kiss hung between them, unresolved. The whole town had seen it. There’d be questions. Expectations.
And neither of them had any answers.
“Cade?” she said as he latched the trailer gate.
“Yeah?”
“What happens tomorrow?” The universe had sent him to help her get the minis ready for the parade and he’d done that.
He held her gaze. “I have no idea.”
* * *
The truck rumbled like a restless bull, every vibration running up through the seat into Cade’s spine.
He braced his hands against his thighs, fighting the urge to grab hold of something. He didn’t trust this machine. Horses, he knew. Horses, he trusted. This noisy contraption was another thing entirely.
Tessa drove, eyes forward, grip light on the wheel. She handled the parade the same way, smiling, waving, making the hard parts look effortless. She carried joy the way some men carried weapons, ready to draw it and disarm whoever stood close.
He loved that about her.
Tessa gave a soft laugh. “Four people believed in me. And really Ed doesn’t count since he just bet on me because his odds of winning were better if I succeeded. That’s it. Everyone else put their money on my failure.” She paused. “Guess I can’t blame them. I am a flake.”
Cade frowned. “A what?”
A flake.” She lifted one shoulder. “Someone who never sticks with things. Who’s always looking for the next fun event and not finishing what she starts.”
Cade’s chest constricted. He’d grown up under that kind of restlessness, his father forever chasing schemes, bottles, cards, anything that glittered. Always going after the next thing. Always leaving them hungry. Hearing Tessa call herself the same turned his stomach.
“You’re not that.” He snapped his teeth together.
“Sometimes I am. You’ve seen it. I get an idea, I run with it, then I get distracted and—” She broke off with a laugh that wasn’t much of one. “That’s flaking.”
“No. That’s not what it is. A flake is a man who leaves ten mouths to feed while he chases silver in a hole in the ground.
A man who trades supper for whiskey. A man who throws down the last of his wages on cards because he swears the next hand will save him.
” He stared out at the pale fields sliding past. “That’s a flake. That was my father.”
“Whoa. I’m sorry, Cade. That must have been so hard. I can’t even imagine raising ten kids. I can barely keep my horses in line.”
Cade looked straight ahead, the snowy fields sliding. The way she said it, so matter-of-fact, settled hard in his gut.
His father used to laugh off responsibility the same way, calling it bad luck, or saying he wasn’t cut out for farm work, before running after the next idea. Hearing Tessa put herself in that light set every muscle on edge.
He shifted, studied her profile. She rarely kept quiet. If she wasn’t talking, it was because he’d cut her deep. “Tessa?”
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“I’m like him, aren’t I? Your scatterbrained dad.”
“No. Don’t you say that. You’re not him.”
“But my flakiness is a red flag, huh? It’s okay to admit it.”
“You might be spontaneous and adventuresome, but you have something he didn’t have.”
Her brow furrowed. “What’s that?”
“Follow-through when it counts. And the guts to ask for help.” That’s how I ended up here, isn’t it?”
“Dude, I was desperate.”
“Doesn’t matter. You asked. My father never did. He just ran off when things got hard and left the rest of us to pick up the pieces.”
“Tell me more about him. How he affected you. That is, if you want to.”
“My old man chased schemes the way some men chase whiskey,” he said. “Silver strikes. Oil wells. Land claims. Every flimflam man that came through town he bought into it. And came home empty.”
Tessa turned off the main highway and onto one land road leading to the ranch.
Cade exhaled “I was the oldest. When Pa lit out, it fell to me to feed the rest. Nine hungry mouths, besides my own and my mother wore out. I hauled water, mucked stalls, broke colts, anything that bought in money. Some nights all we had to eat bacon renderings over stale bread.”
The memory pressed in. His siblings lined up at the table, looking to him like he could fix what a grown man had broken. The weight of it settled on him again, as if the years never passed. Hungry eyes staring at him across the table. His chest ached with the memory.
The road unspooled white ahead, pines braced under snow. Cade swallowed. “Pa loved cards best. Poker. Said it was skill, not luck. Said the next hand would change everything. I watched him lose the boots off his feet. Watched Ma cry into her apron when he stumbled home drunk and broke.”
The sound of those muffled sobs filled him again. His strong mother bent small by a man’s foolishness. He swore never to be that man.
Tessa’s hands shifted on the wheel. He saw the flex, the urge to reach for him. She didn’t, and he was glad. If she touched him now, he might crack.
“I swore I’d never sit at a poker table and risk supper on cards,” Cade said. He exhaled long. “But sometimes poker was the only way to do right by someone else.”
Her brow creased, faint in the dash glow, the look she wore when puzzling through hard problems. “What do you mean?”
“I had friends. Cowboys too proud to take charity, even with hungry kids at home. You can’t hand a man a coin and expect him to keep his pride. But if he wins it in a game, it’s his.”
“That’s right. Eliza told me Wyatt said you were really bad at cards.”
“I lost on purpose,” he said. “I could read the hands well enough. But I wager foolish, because that was the only way to help. Let them walk out with money they could call their own.”
“Your father’s irresponsibility turned you into an adult long before your time.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.” She put a hand on his knee.
Her pity sledge-hammered him and in a twinkling, he was twelve again. Wanting desperately to be a kid but having no choice but to step up and take care of his family.
“It was unfair.”
“That’s just the way things are. I ain’t looking for sympathy. Just explaining.”
“Where are you siblings now?” she asked. “I mean where are they in 1878.”
“Scattered to the winds.” He stared at his hands, thinking of how his family had fractured.
“After Pa ran off and Ma passed there was nothing holding us together. I took up horse wrangling to make money to send back home. My sisters all got married as soon as they could. I’m ten years older than the youngest, twin boys.
Hiram and Harry. They turned to preaching. Both of them circuit riders.”
“How old are you?” Tessa gave a wry laugh. “I never asked.”
“Thirty-one come January.”
“We should throw you a birthday party,” she said in that exuberant way of hers. “If you’re still here of course.”
And there it was.
The precariousness of his situation. He might be the kind of man you could count on, but in the face of Jeb Ortega’s card, he could disappear just as easily as his old man.
Cade couldn’t make Tessa any promises because he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.