Chapter 12
Gabe did his regular chores the following morning, and for the first time since winter had struck hard and vicious, he was glad for the icy bite. The relentless, stinging discomfort of it all. It felt right. So did swinging the little pickax and breaking the ice of the water tanks.
He’d decided to shovel out around the tanks too. It wasn’t expressly necessary, but he needed the hard kind of physical labor involved in chipping away at inches of trodden snow and ice.
When Jack appeared sometime around lunch looking happy as a damn clam, Gabe realized the morning of hard labor hadn’t done a whole lot to work him out of his mood.
He parked the UTV in the stables and glared at Jack’s approaching form.
“Where’ve you been?”
Jack frowned and stepped into the stables with him. “Doctor’s appointment. I told you that yesterday. Rose and I found out the sex of the baby this morning.”
A bunch of words he didn’t want to think too deeply on. “Oh. Right. Well, I chopped the ice, fed all these guys. Probably going to need to hay the north pasture, then I might take on the roof patching here.”
When Jack didn’t say anything, Gabe glanced over at him.
“Not curious about the baby?” Jack said in a what the hell tone that had Gabe wincing.
“Ah, right, yeah. Baby. So, what’s it going to be?”
Jack dug something out of his coat pocket. One of those black-and-white ultrasound things people were supposed to ooh and aah over. Mom had shoved three in his face, and Gabe hadn’t known what to do back then when he’d been a lonely, isolated teen. He really didn’t know what to do about them now.
“A girl,” Jack said, foisting the picture at him. “We’re having a girl.”
Gabe took the proffered picture, though it looked mostly like blobs with a little arrow at something that was supposed to be proof of a girl.
A little baby girl. Jack and Rose’s baby girl. Blob or not, those words certainly made it all so real. Too real. Time marching on. People moving on. Building things and lives, and here he was doing what exactly?
Hiding from all that. What else was there to do? Face it? How did you face that kind of promise? That kind of possibility?
He handed Jack the picture and grinned. “Let me be the first to suggest the name Gabriella.” He went to grab the pitchfork he’d need to loosen up the hay.
Gabe nearly dropped the pitchfork as he whirled to face Jack, because Jack was not joking. That voice was all serious, and Jack just wasn’t that good of an actor.
“Gabriella Alexandra Armstrong has a nice enough ring. Rose can’t name her after any of her sisters because it’d only be confusing or someone would get jealous, so she said. She suggested this.”
Gabe swallowed. His chest felt tight as panic settled in, heavy and solid. “You can’t…”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Can’t what?”
“You can’t name your kid after me, man.” He tried to laugh. Tried to do anything other than breathe a little too hard.
“Why not? Way I see it, you’re half the reason I’m alive and here and maybe even with Rose. So. You get the first name. Alex’ll be the godfather and the middle name.”
“Jack…”
But Jack just stood there as if it was a done deal. There’d be some little girl out there in the world named after him.
“I really didn’t know how you’d react, but I have to say, this wasn’t what I expected.”
“Never had a kid named after me.”
“Here’s a tip, act excited or interested or something not like I’ve lobbed a grenade at you.”
It felt a little bit like that grenade. The moment of impact. The heat, the burn, the panic. The way time slowed down, sped up, slowed back down. But Jack was standing there through it all, looking calm and patient. But not in that old soldier way that might have given Gabe some ounce of comfort.
He looked like a man. Like any man. Bundled up against the cold, ultrasound picture in his hand, a handful of years ahead of him to build a family and a life that had nothing to do with uniforms, grenades or old SEAL brothers.
Except that ultrasound picture was unbelievably going to carry some version of Gabe’s name, as if he was a part of it all—that future and that family.
“Thank you,” he managed to croak out.
“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it because of you. But you’re welcome.”
They both stood there, and Gabe wasn’t sure how long that moment of silence stretched. He wasn’t sure how to be normal after that, and he didn’t have any asshole comments or distancing jokes. All he had was this too-much feeling.
“If I told you something,” Gabe began, having no clue why he was doing this, but the words tumbled out, “could you promise not to tell anyone? Including the nosy ass mother of your child?”
Jack considered. “I guess it would depend on the secret and if it would affect her in any way.”
“It’s got nothing to do with anyone. Except me. And…well, Monica.”
“Okay, I won’t tell anyone,” Jack said quickly. Too quickly.
Gabe frowned. “You changed your mind awfully fast.”
“Rose would be far angrier with me if I didn’t find out the secret than if I kept it from her.”
Sounded about right. Gabe grabbed the pitchfork, hit it against the ground a few times. “Kissed her.”
“That so?” Jack rubbed his chin. “That all you did?”
“Yeah.”
“And you wanted to tell me because?”
Hell if he knew. Or if he knew anything he was doing. It had just been sitting there, and he’d needed to say it out loud for some unknown reason he wished he could poke to death with his pitchfork.
“Didn’t end well,” he muttered.
“Why not?”
“She started talking about shrink shit, and I wasn’t too keen on it, and I let her know.”
“You got a real hang-up about that shrink shit.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So maybe you should tell her why,” Jack said as if that was some reasonable answer.
Tell Monica why he thought shrinks were full of it? Gabe snorted. “No.” He already knew what she’d say. She’d have to defend her precious profession. She’d throw every damn excuse at him, and he didn’t want to hear it.
“Why not? You’re not a liar, Gabe. I don’t know why you couldn’t just tell her the truth,” Jack said so reasonably. But Jack didn’t know the truth. No one did, and no one needed to.
“Because it’s none of her business.”
“So you don’t like her. You’re just attracted to her?”
He thumped the pitchfork against the ground again, but it did nothing to ease this band of discomfort. “I didn’t say that.”
“Well, if you like her on top of sharing a kiss or more, I don’t see why explaining to her why you hate therapists isn’t her business. Sounds like a lot of her business.”
“Rose knows everything you ever went through?” Gabe demanded.
“Maybe not everything, but anything that’s come up. I don’t lie to her. I don’t keep things from her, though I’ll honor my promise not to tell her you kissed Monica. Luckily, we aren’t in high school.”
Gabe flipped him off, but he couldn’t let it all go like he knew he should. “Why do you tell her everything?”
“Because that’s how you build a life.”
Gabe turned, ready to load up the pitchfork and head out to do some more hard work in the bitter cold. “I’m not building shit.”
“But you’re telling me about a kiss,” Jack pointed out, still so equitable and reasonable.
“And it was a mistake. As was that kiss. A bunch of mistakes I won’t be repeating.”
“If you say so.”
He did. He definitely said so. Because the alternative was facing up to the fact Jack was probably right. The only way past this was explaining to Monica why he couldn’t trust her job or people like her.
No way in hell.
* * *
“Well, here we are.” Monica smiled nervously at the man in the passenger seat. She’d picked up her parents at the Bozeman airport this morning, and they’d be staying the night to see Revival and meet her colleagues. Then they’d head back to Denver with Colin in tow, and she would stay behind until the twenty-third, when she’d head to Denver and spend the night and have a family Christmas before heading back to Montana with Colin on Christmas Eve.
She’d parked in the Revival lot, which gave quite an impressive view of the house, the stables, the barn.
Her father looked stoic as ever.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Mom said enthusiastically from where she sat with Colin in the back. “I can see why you’d want to move here.”
Dad grunted.
She’d been nervous all day, from the morning airport pickup, to this. Alex and Becca had had their week of staycation honeymoon solitude, so Monica had been scarce. So scarce she hadn’t talked to anyone since the wedding night.
Well, she’d had a phone conversation with Becca and Rose. But none of the men, and maybe there’d been a purposeful avoiding when it came to Gabe. Which meant she was going to introduce him to her parents after their hostile parting.
The only way out was through though. She pushed out of the truck and her family followed. “Since it’s afternoon, everyone is going to be out and about. We could always go to the cabin first and settle in a bit and do this lat—”
“Show us around,” Dad said.
Ordered more like. But Monica smiled and tramped through the snow, leading them toward the stables. “The house is something of a home base. Becca and Alex live there.”
“The newlyweds, right?” Mom asked.
“Yes. Then Gabe lives in the bunkhouse there, and that’s where the new men will stay. We’ve got two coming in January, and we’ll slowly determine how many we can keep on at one time from there. Luckily, with a ranch this size, there’s plenty of work to go around.”
“Hard work is good,” Dad said.
Monica warmed a bit at that. Her father could be hard, and that was probably as close to a compliment as she was going to get. But it was a compliment coming from him.
“You hear that, Colin?” Dad asked, motioning Colin to hurry up and come walk by his side.
“Yeah, Gramps. Hard work.”
He ruffled Colin’s hair and that warmed Monica, too. He was still not a particularly effusive man, but he’d softened a lot. He never would have ruffled her hair growing up. She liked seeing him be more demonstrative with her son.
Mom linked an arm with her as they made it to the stables. “It’s a postcard,” Mom said happily. “I didn’t think it could be that much different than Denver, but…well, it’s beautiful.”
Monica squeezed her mom’s arm. “I know. Just wait till tonight. We’ve got so many Christmas lights the whole places blazes. It makes my heart happy.”
They stepped into the stables, and Becca had the horses out.
“Oh, hi!” Becca smiled warmly. “You made it. Roads weren’t too bad?”
“Not too.” Monica made the appropriate introductions, then they talked a bit about the therapeutic horsemanship. It was fun to watch her father’s skepticism melt in the face of Becca’s exuberance and knowledge.
“How many horses do you have?”
“We’ve got six right now,” Becca said, nodding to the stables. “The goal will always be to be able to have enough horses for all the men if its financially feasible. We do a lot of work with tractors and utility task vehicles now, with winter in full swing.”
“Quite the operation. Quite,” Dad said, nodding thoughtfully.
It was possibly one of the biggest compliments Monica had ever heard him give, and she might have ridden that giddy pride all the way into tomorrow—except Gabe stepped into the stables.
“Hey, Bec. I—” He stopped abruptly when he saw there was more than just Becca in the stables. “Oh.”
Monica cleared her throat. “Mom. Dad. This is Gabe Cortez. Gabe, these are my parents. Martin and Lorraine.” Monica tried to smile, tried not to look nervous or still mad at him or any of the confusing things she felt.
You’ve kissed that man. His tongue has been in your mouth and his hands on your ass.
Yeah, she really wished she could ignore all that, but she felt like it was imprinted on her forehead. A bright-red, shining beacon of embarrassment.
But Gabe was smooth and charming as ever, shaking both her mother’s and father’s hands with one of those easygoing smiles that hid everything. Everything.
But he didn’t make eye contact with Monica herself, so she’d consider that some sign he wasn’t as easy as he appeared.
“Nice to meet you both. Hope you’re enjoying your tour of Revival.”
“Quite a place,” Dad offered, giving Gabe a very obvious once-over.
“Gabe was a Navy SEAL,” Colin said excitedly, aiming his comment at her father.
Dad huffed a little at that.
“Got hurt and everything,” Colin said, practically jumping from foot to foot. “All these big scars on his arm and leg. Huge scars.”
Gabe’s mouth quirked. “You’re really selling it, kid.”
“Middle East?” Dad demanded.
Gabe nodded. “Afghanistan.”
Dad nodded.
Silence descended.
Monica glanced at her mother helplessly. Mom rolled her eyes and muttered, “Men.”
“I’d love to see the cows,” Mom offered brightly. “Can we do that?”
“Gabe can take you out in the bigger UTV,” Becca offered cheerfully. “You were going out there anyway, weren’t you?”
Monica almost, almost laughed at the deer-in-headlights look on Gabe’s face before he smoothed it out.
“Sure. Yeah, just have to walk over to the barn.” He gestured in the direction of the barn.
Colin immediately scampered outside. “I’ll show you the way guys!” Then he took off for the barn, Mom and Dad walking after him arm in arm.
Gabe followed, then Monica had no choice but to walk toward the barn side by side with him.
“Didn’t know your parents were coming,” he offered conversationally.
“Why would you?” When his expression didn’t change, when nothing about him changed or reacted, she sighed. “They’re taking Colin back with them tomorrow.”
“Should be fun for him.”
“Yup.”
“And you’ll get all that alone time you’re looking so forward to.”
She wanted to scowl at him. Instead, she smiled sweetly. “I’m sure the time will just fly by. I’ve planned so many activities.” Like baking to within an inch of her life, then eating as much as she could until she felt sick.
“That’s good. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You sound like my father.”
“The marine,” Gabe said with an edge of scoff to his voice, reminding her what he’d once said about marines.
“I dare you to say it to his face,” she said quietly.
That rare true grin split his face. None of the blank charm meant to put her off. Just true enjoyment, and she hated herself for wishing she could see that more. Make him do it more. She wanted to be the reason and the cause, and oh, she was pathetic.
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Coward.”
“There’s a difference between a coward and a man who knows when to tactfully retreat.”
“So which are you being with me?” she asked, unable to stop herself. She nearly held her breath over the answer. But he walked, mulling it over, until she had to blow out the breath.
“Hell if I know,” he muttered.