Chapter 13
I stay up way too late, trying and failing to do pull-ups and having far too much fun hanging out with Guy. The following morning, I wake up from a dream where Guy is wearing a Santa hat and not a stitch else, watching me with those blue eyes of his as he fixes loose screws in Santa’s sleigh.
Nope. That’s not disrespectful at all.
I think he knows something is up, because I keep blushing when he looks at me over breakfast, and I know a smug male expression when I see one. Emma decides to hang out with me instead of her dad, so she rides with me on the tractor as I bring a fresh round bale of hay to the cattle pen. Barley wanders along after us, snuffling at the snow and looking stoically disappointed we aren’t spending the morning in front of the fire.
“Why do the moo cows get these and the horsies don’t?” Emma points at the big round bales, which are huge compared to the small square ones we keep in the horse barn.
“Because cows have tougher tummies than horses do. They can eat and eat, and it won’t bother them. But if a horse eats too much hay or grain, they can get really bad tummy aches, which make them sick, and sometimes die.”
“Kind of like me.”
Her statement is so calm, so nonchalant, I sit there gaping. Unsure of what to say, I ease down the hay bale in the middle of the cattle herd. “Is that what it starts to feel like?” I finally ask her. “A tummy ache?”
Emma likes to wriggle, so I keep a snug arm around her as I turn the tractor and head back toward the gate. Sure enough, she wiggles around to put the toy reindeer in her hand in my curly hair. “Sometimes I throw up, but I try not to. Daddy doesn’t like it when I throw up.”
“No?”
“It makes him cry.” Then she leans her head against my shoulder as she plays, ignoring the wintery world around us as she chooses to snuggle instead.
I can’t get the image of a hurting, terrified Guy out of my head, trying to hide his tears from his sick daughter while she’s trying to hide her nausea from him. I want to throw myself over both of them, but even a human shield can’t protect them from the land mine going off in their lives. When we reach the gate, I set the tractor’s emergency brake and wrap both of my arms around her, hugging her closer.
“Emma?” I say quietly. “Did you know that of all the things in the world, your daddy loves you the absolute most?” She smiles at me and nods as if, yeah, of course she knows. “Sometimes we cry because we love people so much. But he’s always going to want to know about your tummy aches, okay?”
“Do you throw up?” Emma asks me as if we’re having the most normal of conversations right now.
“Sometimes. When I don’t feel good or if I’m too anxious about something.”
“You should tell Daddy. He’s nice to me when I’m sick. He’ll be nice to you too.”
I mean…I can’t argue with her logic. Instead, I hug her until Emma starts to wiggle again, looking longingly at Barley. I can’t blame her. At four, I’d rather have spent my time with a furry snout than a regular boring human too.
I double-check the gate is locked behind us, then we putter along back to the garage. When I park next to the metal siding, my normal spot when I know I’ll be taking it back out again later, I see the sliding door is open. The telltale noises of a person working come from inside the garage, even though the last time I saw Guy this morning, he’d been up to his elbows in chopping wood for the wood-burning stove.
He’s working on my dad’s truck.
I stop in my tracks, trying to stuff the rapidly rising emotions down so I don’t become a sloppy mess. It’s just a truck. It’s just a man leaning under the hood, replacing a corroded battery with a brand-new one. The dusty old radio on my dad’s workbench is turned on, with ’90s country playing in the background to the sounds of plastic scraping against metal.
“The battery in this is always a tight fit.” I come up behind Guy, leaning a hip against the quarter panel. “Dad would cuss up a storm taking them out and putting new ones in.”
“Then he and I have something in common,” Guy says in a wry tone. “It’s a good thing Em was with you.”
He glances over his shoulder, checking on his daughter. Emma’s playing just outside the door, with Barley flopped over on his back, all four reddish-gray paws sticking straight up in the air like he’s a puppy again.
“Do you think it’s just the battery?” I ask, peering into the engine block.
“Nope, but it needed one anyway, and I wanted to grab some other parts when I dropped off the cake. Everyone said to tell you thank you.”
“You deliver the cake and I get the kudos?” When Guy winks at me, the memory of dream Guy in his Santa hat fixing things springs back up. I clear my throat, then laugh softly at myself. “You’re sweet to work on this. You know you don’t have to, right? You can take a day off.”
“Says the woman whose been working since dawn.” He doesn’t say it unkindly. In fact, Guy sneaks an arm around my waist, giving me a little hug before refocusing on the truck. “Besides, this is fun.”
I love that he’s in a good mood, but I shift closer, lowering my voice. “Umm, I think you should probably know something Emma told me this morning. I guess she tries not to let you know when she’s been throwing up.”
His hands pause midtask, just for a moment, as he processes this. “Did she say if she has recently?”
“She didn’t.” I shake my head. “It’s a bad sign, right?”
Guy takes a moment to answer. “Yeah. It’s a symptom of the dialysis not working as well.” He fiddles with the connections on the battery despite having finished installing it, his expression going bleak. Then he musters up a small smile. “I’m glad she has you to tell things to. Emma hasn’t had a lot of women in her life who weren’t doctors, nurses, or aides. My sister, Hayden, is great with her, but we only get to video chat once a week. It’s not the same as having someone sitting next to you.”
“Can I ask about her mom?”
The question has been on my mind from the very start, but he’s never mentioned Emma’s mother, and I wasn’t sure it was okay to ask. Guy fiddles with the connections again, and I think he’s not going to answer. Then he sighs.
“Her mom is a tough subject.”
“That’s fine. I don’t mean to push.”
“No, it’s okay.” Guy glances at Emma again, where she’s moved on to tying pieces of baling twine like ribbons into Barley’s tail. “Her mom’s name is Becca. Some friends introduced us during my junior year of college. I was studying architecture, and she was an art major. We clicked right from the start. We had fun for a few months, but it wasn’t anything too serious. Then she realized she was pregnant.”
Some pauses are trying to know what to say, and some pauses simply come from being lost in memories. Maybe for Guy, it’s both.
“I didn’t pressure her one way or the other,” he says quietly. “It was Becca’s choice, and I knew she wasn’t sure she wanted a baby. When she decided to keep Emma, I tried to do the right thing. I went to all the doctor appointments, and I took a semester off to work construction and get some money. I even proposed, although I was covered in sawdust and eating pizza at the time.”
“Not the most romantic proposal?” I tease him lightly, earning a quick smile.
“No, but Becca was cool. Totally the type to appreciate pizza and a ring.” His smile fades. “She said no, which I expected, because we weren’t really together. More like friends who were having a baby. The delivery was rough, which I keep coming back to when I think about it all. Did I miss something? Did the doctors miss something? With either of them?” His voice drops even quieter. “Becca had never dealt with mental health issues before, and when postpartum hit her hard…” Guy’s expression tightens. “I think back, and I try to figure out if I wasn’t helping enough or if I wasn’t understanding enough. If there’s more I could have done. She wasn’t bonding with Emma, and she was exhausted and scared and always crying. She used to tell me she just needed to sleep. I had a boss who understood things were tough, so he let me take Emma to work with me. I used to keep the truck running so she’d have air-conditioning, and I’d measure and cut boards next to the truck all day, so I’d be right there.”
Guy stops, and I realize he’s having a hard time continuing. When I take his hand, pressing my thumb next to his scuffed, engine-greasy knuckles, he squeezes tightly.
“I took Emma to all her doctor appointments. I didn’t miss any, and I’ve double-checked a thousand times. Em was born with a congenital kidney defect, but no one knew it. The doctors say sometimes young children with CKD lose up to eighty percent of kidney function before they start to show symptoms…”
The self-recrimination is all over his face, and when I wrap my arms around his waist, he rests his chin on top of my head for a moment. Then he moves away, looking embarrassed.
“Sorry. The last thing you need is me leaning on you with this.”
“Marriage of purpose, remember?” I remind Guy. “You get to lean on me all you want.”
The looks he gives me sometimes make me bite my lower lip, wondering how much of this is actually in my head. Maybe he just looks particularly good in engine grease.
“Anyway, when we found out about Emma, Becca took it really hard. When no one in our families was a donor match, she spiraled. Her meds hadn’t been working, and she needed more support than she was getting. She went to stay with her sister back east. I would have gone with her, but when she said she needed some space to try to process everything, I realized what was coming.”
I close my eyes, my heart breaking for the younger version of the man in front of me, with a sick infant and nowhere to turn.
“How’s Becca now?”
“She’s doing better. She finished school, has a decent job, and met a nice person. She doesn’t want to see Emma, even though we’ve talked about it a couple times. She says she can’t get close to her while knowing…”
Knowing Emma’s illness is terminal if she doesn’t get a kidney.
“You’ve spent the last four years doing this alone,” I say softly. “It must be scary.”
“Yeah, but as time goes on, I’m learning how to mask it better. I sometimes wonder how I got so lucky, because so many people have helped us when we needed it most. Some more than others.” Guy glances at me, and when our eyes meet, he gives me a sweet smile that matches his daughter’s smile. “God’s been good, and I’ve learned to appreciate when someone doesn’t close a door in my face.”
His ability to find something positive in this overwhelms me, and it’s all I can do not to hug him again. “So, you’re fixing my dad’s work truck?”
“I’m trying to fix your work truck. Fair warning, I might not be successful. Try the engine for me?”
I slip into the driver’s seat and scoot it forward so I can reach the pedals. The dashboard lights up, and the engine clicks a few times, but nothing. Guy makes a tsk ing noise but doesn’t seem too bothered by it.
“Did Emma tell you anything else I should know?”
“Oh yes. Emma also said I should tell you when I get nervous about things. Not exactly in those words, but you know, when I have a stomachache too.”
“Do as I say, not as I do?”
“Something like that.”
“She’s not wrong. You’re my wife, Sienna. I took my vows seriously. When I said I have your back, I meant it. Can you try to rev the engine while I do something?”
I do as asked, and this time, the engine turns over. It isn’t a healthy engine purr, but it’s at least running. Then it promptly sputters and dies again. A word slips from his mouth, and I snicker.
“Yeah, my dad used to say the same thing all the time.” It’s easier to talk when there’s an upright hood and an engine block between us, and my mouth unglues from what’s been on my mind. “Hey, our kiss last night…” I drift off, uncertain how to verbalize what I want to say.
“Gave you a stomachache?” I can hear the humor in his voice as he comes around the side of the hood. Guy braces an arm on the roof of the truck, gazing down at me.
“Not exactly,” I hedge, looking away. “But not not exactly.”
He tips his head to catch my gaze. “I guess the question is, was the kiss for them or was it for you?”
“I might need to plead the Fifth on this one.”
He barks out a laugh and then holds the door open wider for me to climb out. “We can’t be forced to testify against each other. Your secrets are safe with me.”
“Well, in that case, I maybe… maybe …did it for me.”
“What did you do, Sen-na?” Emma calls over from the garage door.
“Yes, Sen-na, what did you do?” Guy teases as he gets into the truck and then promptly cracks his knee on the steering wheel. When another small curse escapes his mouth, it makes me giggle.
“Oops, sorry.”
“Nope, it’s all good.” Guy slides the seat backward, shooting me a quick grin despite what must be a painful bump on the kneecap. “Just part of getting used to being with a very short woman.”
“I’m not short,” I protest.
“You’re not very tall either.” And when he winks at me, it occurs to me never once did it seem strange to have Guy in here, working with my dad’s tools, in Dad’s garage, making this his home too.
I think I like it.
***
When I go down that night before bed, Guy has transformed into a sexy Christmas Claus.
Not a sexy Santa Claus, because Santa never looked this good, not even in Santa’s better days. But here he is, in bright-red flannel pants with Christmas toys all over them, which I know for a fact match the ones Emma’s wearing to bed right now. The Maple family apparently takes their holiday pajamas more seriously than my “Christmas Eve and done” routine.
I’m far from a sexy Mrs. Claus right now. Per Emma’s request, I’m rocking some neon-green Grinch joggers I had to dig out of storage, and she’s given me a pair of felt reindeer antlers that have seen better days. One droops into my face, which might be why Guy keeps trying to hide a grin when our eyes meet.
Guy’s still wearing the Santa hat she put on his head before her bedtime story, but he’s ditched the boxy, shapeless matching flannel button-up shirt. Instead he’s reclining in a seat at the kitchen island in a white T-shirt that shows his muscles to distressing detail and is a little snugger after getting three solid meals in for a few days.
He has to know he looks good. I swear the man is doing this on purpose.
There’s a mug of milk and a brownie waiting for me on the seat next to his. I recognize this brownie. The special, Christmastime only, three-inch-thick, peppermint-dusted triple-chunk brownie from the bakery in town across the street from LK’s. A slab of chocolatey holiday joy stuffed full of enough sugar to keep a girl running for a month.
“Is this for me?” I ask hopefully, sidling up to the counter, no longer focused on the sexy Claus. Because nothing is sexier than this brownie.
The little wink he gives me is cute. “What, this brownie?”
“That’s my favorite brownie,” I say, sneaking a little closer and sitting down in the stool catty-corner to his.
“Funny, that’s what Jess told me last night when I was picking their brain for things you might like.”
“Jess sold me out, straight up, huh?” I sigh lustily when he nudges the brownie my way. “Thank you, although I feel guilty eating treats after Emma goes to bed.”
“Jess also told me you love puppies and snowmobiling,” Guy admits. “This was the easiest to fit on the counter, but I could go to the rescue shelter…”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time.” Suddenly I realize this man would one hundred percent go to the rescue shelter for a Christmas puppy if I wanted to go. A rush of warmth for him floods through me, and I find myself grinning as I lift the brownie up and take an appreciative sniff. “Ooh, these get better every year.”
“I forgot to tell you I grabbed the mail on my way in today,” Guy says as I make doe eyes at my snack. “Do we normally get a newspaper?”
“Nope, I read the news online, like a normal human.”
When he hands me an actual newspaper, there’s a bright-green sticky note attached in Jess’s handwriting.
“I thought you might want to keep this,” I read aloud, then I groan when I see the front page. “‘Christmas comes early for the Naples-Maple family.’ Oh nooooo.”
“Did we make the paper?” Guy seems surprised.
“We are the paper today. In a town this size, a rabbit hopping across the road makes the news. You and I getting randomly married is on the front page.” I show him the picture under the paper’s title page, then continue to read aloud. “Longtime resident of Caney Falls, Idaho, Sienna Naples wed Montana native Guy Maple in a private ceremony. The couple celebrated their whirlwind romance—” I pause and give Guy a look, which he responds to with that charming grin of his. “—whirlwind romance at LK’s Bar and Grill. Sienna Maple (née Naples) and Guy Maple, along with daughter, Emma Maple, are the current caretakers of Naples Ranch, a thousand-acre private wilderness and gem of the Salmon River Valley.” I hide my face in my hands, leaning on the island. “Jess! Why ?”
Guy peers over my shoulder at the paper. “What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that Micah is going to freak out. I never changed my last name to Micah’s, which was a sore point for him. Like…a really sore point.”
Guy thinks about it for a moment, and then his hands rest down on my shoulders, squeezing lightly. “You didn’t change your name for me either,” he reminds me. “You did it for Emma.”
“Yes, but Micah isn’t going to know. I swear I can hear him popping a gasket from across town.” I get up and start wiping down the counter, despite it being clean. Guy settles into the seat I vacated, watching me for a few minutes, then he casually takes a little bit of the napkin beneath my brownie, tears it off, and wads it up. Then he sets it in the middle of the island, right where I’ve wiped down three times in the last thirty seconds.
“You looked like you needed something to clean,” Guy tells me, those glacier-blue eyes sparkling mischievously. Then he starts to eat my peppermint-dusted, three-inch-thick, triple-chocolate-chunk holiday brownie.
He’s eating my brownie.
“Oh, you brat,” I breathe.
It’s been a long time since I chased someone, but some things are worth it. Guy’s faster than me, and he’s overly confident, thinking I won’t dare follow him out into the cold of the front porch. Not only will I dare, but I also grab for the freshly fallen snow on the railing, pack it up into a ball, and smoosh the sucker right into his face.
Hmm. Maybe this was a wrong move. Yep, definitely a wrong move, because I’m in my pajamas in the snow, and sexy Christmas Claus is chasing me now.
I squeal when I get a handful of snow down the back of my shirt, then dissolve into laughter as he picks me up in his arms, spinning me until I’m dizzy. Guy trips, and we both end up in the snow, although at least it’s the soft, fluffy kind on the yard, not the hard, icy, packed-down stuff on the driveway. I’m sprawled across his lap, our limbs tangled, and I’m not sure the brownie made it.
“Brownie down?” I ask as his eyes gaze down at me in the bright wintery moonlight.
“There’s a second one in the fridge,” Guy tells me smugly. “I know better than to not get a backup brownie.”
Oh, he’s a smart man. A shivery, cold man, but a smart one.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing some sort of ridiculously sexy workout routine right now? Instead of getting frostbite on your entire back?” I ask, because Guy might be sitting in the snow, but plenty of it is still falling on us.
“I had to do something more important first.” His voice gets softer and at the same time huskier. “Hey, Sienna? I’m glad everyone knows. When we walked into the restaurant last night, I have never been prouder. I like being married to you.”
I close my eyes, then I exhale softly. “I like it too.”
Guy’s face dips down, his breath condensing in the cold air. “You said you had a stomachache after the kiss,” he whispers. “I didn’t have a stomachache.”
“Maybe a stomachache isn’t exactly the right wording,” I whisper back. “More like a gut punch. The good kind.”
Guy doesn’t make fun of my description. Instead, he murmurs, “Yeah, me too.”
His fingers curl through my hair, asking a silent question. Maybe, if a snowflake hadn’t chosen this moment to land on the end of his nose, I would have been able to resist. Instead, I laugh at the way his nose wrinkles and find myself pressing my mouth to his smiling lips.
And when my fake-but-not-fake husband kisses me in the snowy moonlight, it’s even better than peppermint and chocolate.