Chapter Ten
Life could take the strangest turns sometimes.
If someone had told her a week ago that she would be standing in The Christmas Ranch barn on a Saturday afternoon kissing Flynn Delaney, she would have advised them to see somebody about their delusions.
Here they were, though, with her hands tangled in his hair and his arms wrapped around her and his mouth doing intoxicating things to her.
She wanted the moment to go on forever, this sultry, honeyed magic.
Nothing in her limited experience compared to this. She’d had a couple of boyfriends in college, nothing serious and nothing that had lasted more than a month or two—and absolutely nothing that prepared her for the sheer sensual assault of kissing Flynn.
She made a little sound in her throat and he deepened the kiss, his tongue sliding along hers as his arms tightened around her. Sensation rippled through her, and she could only be grateful when he pushed her against the nearest cabinet, his mouth hot and demanding.
She couldn’t seem to think about anything other than kissing him, touching him, finding some way to be closer to him. She wrapped her arms more tightly around his neck, wanting this moment to go on forever.
They kissed for a long time there with the scents of sawdust and hay swirling around them. Even as she lost herself in the kiss, some tiny corner of her brain was trying to catalog every emotion and sensation, storing it up so she could relive it after he was gone. The taste of him, of coffee and mint and sexy male, the silky softness of his hair, the delicious rasp of his whiskers against her skin, his big, warm hands slipping beneath the back of her T-shirt to slide against her bare skin...
“Celeste? Are you in here?”
She heard her brother-in-law’s voice and felt as if he had just thrown her into the snow. Rafe and Hope must have returned earlier than they’d planned.
She froze and scrambled away from Flynn, yanking her T-shirt back down and trying frantically to catch her breath.
He was having the same trouble, she realized, as he quickly stepped behind one of the power tools to hide the evidence of his arousal.
Had she done that to him? She couldn’t quite believe it.
“Celeste?” she heard again.
“In...” The words caught in her throat and she had to clear them away before she spoke again. “In here.”
An instant later Rafe walked into the work space. He stopped and gazed between the two of them and she saw his mouth tighten, a sudden watchful glint in his eyes.
Rafe was a tough man, extremely protective of each Nichols sister—probably because he had once saved all their lives. His sharp gaze took in the scene and she doubted he could miss her heightened color, her swollen lips, their heavy breathing.
She was sure of it when he aimed a hard, narrow-eyed look at Flynn.
She could feel herself flush more and then told herself she was being ridiculous, feeling like a teenager caught necking on the front porch by her older brother. She was a grown woman, twenty-eight years old, and she could kiss half the men in town if she wanted.
She’d just never wanted to before.
“Hope said you might need some help building a few things for the set.”
“Flynn has been helping me.”
“So I see,” Rafe drawled.
“Thanks for letting me use your shop,” Flynn said. “I tried to be careful with the tools, but your nail gun got away from me.” He held up the hand she had bandaged.
“It’s got a fast trigger. Sorry about that. Anything I can do to help you wrap things up so you can get out of here?”
“Another pair of hands never hurts,” Flynn answered.
Celeste finally felt as if her brain cells were beginning to function again.
“I’m about done painting. I...think I’ll just clean my brushes and leave you to it. I should probably head up to the house to help Aunt Mary with the cookie decorating.”
She couldn’t meet either of their gazes as she walked past the men, feeling like an idiot.
“Nice shirt,” Rafe murmured in a low voice as she passed him.
Baffled, she glanced down and then could have died from mortification. It was the Sleep with a Librarian shirt that Hope and Faith had given her one Christmas as a joke. She never wore it, of course—it wasn’t her style at all—but she’d thrown it on that morning under her sweater, knowing she was going to be painting the scenery later and it would be perfect for the job.
She gathered her brushes quickly and headed for the sink in the small bathroom of the barn.
While she cleaned the brushes, she glanced into the mirror and saw it was worse than she had thought. Her hair had come half out of the messy bun, her lips were definitely swollen and her cheeks were rosier than St. Nicholas’s in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
Oh, she wanted to die. Rafe knew she had just been making out with Flynn, which meant he would definitely tell Hope. Her sisters would never let her hear the end of it.
That was the least of her problems, she realized.
Now that she had kissed the man and knew how amazing it was, how would she ever be able to endure not being able to do it again?
* * *
What just happened here?
Even after Celeste left to clean her brushes, Flynn could feel his heart hammering, his pulse racing.
Get a grip, he told himself. It was just a kiss. But for reasons he didn’t completely understand, it somehow struck him as being so much more.
He couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that something momentous had occurred in that kiss, something terrifying and mysterious and tender.
Why had he kissed her?
The whole time they’d shared the work space, he had been telling himself all the reasons why he needed to stay away from her. At the first opportunity and excuse, he had ignored all his common sense and swooped right in.
What shy, awkward bookworm alive could have resisted that, when the cutest boy she’d ever met in real life was so sweet to her?
She’d once had a crush on him. He didn’t know why that made him feel so tender toward the quiet girl she had been.
That kiss had rocked him to the core and left him feeling off balance, as if he’d just slipped on the sawdust and landed hard on his ass. For a moment, he closed his eyes, remembering those lush curves against him, her enthusiastic response, the soft, sexy little sounds she made.
“What are you doing here?” For one horrible moment he thought Rafe was calling him out for kissing Celeste, until he realized the other man was gazing down at the set piece he was building.
Focus, he told himself. Get the job done, as he’d promised.
“She wants some kind of wings on the side of the stage for the children to wait behind until it’s their turn to go on,” he explained. He went into detail about his plan and listened while Rafe made a few excellent suggestions to improve the design.
“This shouldn’t take us long to finish up,” the other man said. “In fact, I probably could handle it on my own, if you want to get out of here.”
That sounded a little more strongly worded than just a suggestion. “I’m good,” he answered, a little defiantly. “I like to finish what I start.”
He was aware as they went to work of her cleaning up her brushes, closing up the paint cans, putting her sweater back on to hide that unexpectedly enticing T-shirt.
He was also aware that she hadn’t looked at him once since she’d jerked out of his arms when her brother-in-law had come in.
Was she regretting that they had kissed? He couldn’t tell. She should regret it, since they both had to know it was a mistake, but somehow it still bothered him that she might.
Did he owe her some kind of apology for kissing her out of the blue like that? Something else he didn’t know.
He had been faithful to his vows, as misguided as they had been, and his relationships since then had been with women who wanted the same thing he did: uncomplicated, no-strings affairs.
Celeste was very different from those women—sweet and kind and warm—which might explain why that kiss and her enthusiastic response had left him so discombobulated.
A few minutes later she finished at the sink and set the brushes to dry.
“I guess that’s it,” she said, still not looking at Flynn. “The brushes are all clean and ready for Hope when she has time to come down and finish. I’m just going to head up to the house to check on the cookie decorating. Thanks again for doing this, you guys.”
She gave a vague, general sort of smile, then hurried out of the barn.
He and Rafe worked in silence for a few more moments, a heavy, thick tension in the air.
The other man was the first to speak.
“Do you know what happened to Celeste and her sisters when they were kids?”
Rafe’s tone was casual, but the hard edge hadn’t left his expression since he had walked into the work space earlier.
“In Colombia? Yeah. She told me. I can’t imagine what they must have gone through.”
Rafe’s hard expression didn’t lighten. “None of them talks about it very much. Frankly, I’m surprised she told you at all.”
He didn’t know why she had, but he was touched that she would confide that very significant part of her life to him.
He also didn’t know why Rafe would bring it up now. It didn’t seem the sort of topic to casually mention in general conversation. Something told him Rafe wasn’t a man who did things without purpose.
“She was the youngest,” the man went on. “Barely older than Louisa, only about twelve. Just a little kid, really.”
His chest ached, trying to imagine that sweet vulnerability forced into such a traumatic situation. It was the same ache he had whenever he thought about Olivia watching her mother’s murder.
“They went through hell while they were prisoners,” Rafe went on. “The leader of the rebels was a psycho idiot bastard. He didn’t give them enough to eat that entire month they were there, they were squished into squalid quarters, they were provided no medical care or decent protections from the elements, they underwent psychological torture. It’s a wonder they made it through.”
His hand tightened on the board he held, and he wanted to swing it at something, hard. He didn’t need to hear about this. It only seemed to heighten these strange, tender feelings in his chest.
“It affected all of them in various ways,” Rafe went on. “But I think it was hardest on Celeste. She was so young and so very softhearted, from what Hope tells me. She’s always been a dreamer, her head filled with stories and music. The conditions they were forced into must have been particularly harsh on an innocent young girl who couldn’t really comprehend what was happening to her family.”
The ache in his chest expanded. He hated that she had gone through it and wished, more than anything, that he could make it right for her.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Rafe gave him a steady look, as if weighing how to respond. He could see in his eyes that her brother-in-law knew exactly what they had been doing just before he walked in. Flynn fought the urge to tell the man to back off, that it was none of Rafe’s damn business.
“I was there,” Rafe finally said. “Did she tell you that?”
Flynn stared. “Where?”
“In Colombia. I was part of the SEAL team that rescued the Nichols family. It was my very first mission. A guy doesn’t forget something like that.”
Rafe was big and tough enough that somehow Flynn wasn’t surprised he’d been a SEAL. He supposed the only remarkable thing about the situation was that the man seemed content now to live in a small town in Idaho, running a holiday attraction.
“So you saw their father get shot.”
Rafe’s jaw tightened. “Yeah. I saw it. And I saw Celeste weep and weep during the entire helicopter flight when she realized what had happened. I thought she would jump right out after her father.”
Flynn swallowed at the image. After the past three months he hadn’t thought he had much of his heart left to break, but he was most definitely wrong.
“I also shot two revolutionaries who were trying to keep us from leaving with them,” Rafe went on. “You might, in fact, say I’ve had CeCe’s back since she was eleven years old.”
Yeah. The man definitely knew he had walked in on them kissing.
“She’s very important to me,” the other man said. “The whole Nichols family is mine now.”
He met Flynn’s gaze and held it as if he wanted to be perfectly clear. “And make no mistake. I protect what’s mine.”
He could choose to be offended, he supposed. He hadn’t been called out for kissing a woman in...ever. Somehow he couldn’t drum up anything but respect for Rafe. He was actually touched in an odd way, grateful that she had someone looking out for her.
“Warning duly noted.” He made his own voice firm. “But anything between Celeste and me is just that. Between the two of us.”
Rafe seemed to accept that. “I just don’t want to see her hurt. Despite everything she’s been through, CeCe somehow has still managed to retain a sweetness and a generosity you won’t find in many people on this planet. If you mess with that, I won’t be the only member of this family who won’t be happy about it. Trust me. You do not want to tangle with the Nichols women.”
This, more than anything else the man had said, resonated with truth. She had become a friend, someone he liked and respected. He didn’t want to hurt her, either, but he couldn’t see any other outcome. He had a business, a life in LA. Beyond that he wasn’t in any position right now to start a new relationship with anyone, not when Olivia was still so needy.
He had made a mistake, kissing her. A mistake that couldn’t happen again.
He gave the other man a steady look. “I got it. Thanks. Now can we just finish this job so I can grab my daughter and go home?”
After a moment, Rafe nodded and turned back to work, much to Flynn’s relief.
* * *
The walk from the lodge to the main house helped a great deal to cool her flaming cheeks, but it didn’t do much for the tumult inside her.
Oh, that kiss. How was she supposed to act around him now when she was afraid that every second she was near him she would be reliving those wild, hot moments in his arms? His hands on her skin, his mouth on hers, all those muscles pressing her against the cabinet.
She shivered in remembered reaction. How was she supposed to pretend her world just hadn’t been rocked?
It had happened. She couldn’t scrub those moments from her memory bank—indeed, she had a feeling they would haunt her for a long time—but surely she was mature enough to be able to interact with him in a polite, casual way. What other choice did she have?
When she reached the house, she drew in a deep breath, hoping all trace of those heated moments was gone from her features in case either of her eagle-eyed sisters was inside, then she pushed open the door.
The scents of cinnamon and pine and sugar cookies greeted her and the warmth of the house wrapped around her like one of Aunt Mary’s hand-knitted scarves. As she stood in the entry, she had a sudden, familiar moment of deep gratitude for her aunt and uncle who had taken in three lost and grieving girls and given them safe shelter from the hard realities of life.
This was home. Her center.
Some of the storm inside her seemed to calm a bit. This was how she made it through, by focusing on what was important to her. Her family, her stories, the ranch. That was what mattered, not these fragile feelings growing inside her for Flynn and Olivia.
Before she could even hang up her coat, she heard the click of little paws on the floor. A moment later Linus burst into the room and greeted her merrily. She had nearly forgotten she’d brought him up to the house during the rehearsal to hang out with Mary, since Lucy had been in one of her snooty moods where she just wanted to be left alone.
“Hi, there. There’s my darling boy.” She scooped him up in her arms, and he licked her face and wriggled in her arms as if they had been away from each other for years instead of only a few hours.
“Have you been good?” she asked. He licked her cheek in answer, then wiggled to be let down again. She followed him and the sound of laughter to the kitchen, where she found her niece and nephews decorating cookies with Aunt Mary and Olivia.
“Look at all our cookies!” Barrett said. “The old people are going to love them.”
He was such an adorable child, with a huge reservoir of compassion and love inside him for others.
This was a prime example—though she decided at some point she probably would have to gently inform him that the senior citizens coming to the show next week might not appreciate being called “old people.”
“What a great job.”
“Look at this one, Aunt CeCe. See how I made the stars sparkle with the yellow sugar things?” Joey, joined at the hip with Barrett, thrust his cookies at her.
“Fabulous.”
“And look at my Christmas trees,” Barrett said.
“I see. Good work, kid. And, Lou, I love how you swirled the icing on the candy canes. Very creative.”
She turned to Olivia. “What about you? Have you decorated any?”
“A few.” She pointed to a tray where a dozen angel cookies lay wing to wing. They all had hair of yellow frosting, just like the blonde and lovely Elise Chandler. Celeste had a feeling that wasn’t a coincidence.
“I love them. They’re beautiful, every one.”
“Decorating cookies is hard,” Joey declared. “You have to be careful you don’t break them while you’re putting on the frosting.”
“But then you get to eat them when they break,” Barrett pointed out.
“They’ve all been very good not to eat too many broken cookies,” Aunt Mary said from the stove, where she was stirring something that smelled like her delicious ham-and-potato soup.
“Can you help us?” Louisa asked.
She had a million things to do before the show—not to mention a pile of unwrapped gifts in the corner of her office at home—but this suddenly seemed to take precedence over everything else.
“Of course,” she answered her niece with a smile. “I can’t imagine anything I would enjoy more.”
Mary replaced the lid on the stockpot on the stove and turned down the burner. “Since you’re here to supervise now, I think I’ll go lie down and put my feet up. If you don’t mind anyway. These swollen ankles are killing me today.”
“Go ahead, my dear. You’ve done more than enough.”
“I’ve got soup on the stove. The children had some earlier, but there’s more than enough for anyone who pops in or out.”
Celeste left the children busy at the table and headed over to hug her aunt before she reached in the cupboard for a bowl. “I know Hope and Rafe are back. I bumped into Rafe.” She felt herself blush when she said it and hoped Aunt Mary wouldn’t notice. “What about Faith? Is she around?”
“No. She ran into Idaho Falls for some last-minute g-i-f-t-s,” Aunt Mary spelled, as if the children were tiny instead of excellent readers. Fortunately none of the children seemed to be paying attention to them.
“Poor girl,” her aunt went on. “She’s been too busy around the ranch to give Christmas much thought, and now here it is just a few days away.”
The reminder instantly made Celeste feel small. She was fretting about a kiss while her sister had lost a husband and was raising two children by herself—albeit with plenty of help from Aunt Mary, Rafe, Hope and Celeste.
She was so grateful for her loving, supportive family—though she experienced a pang of regret for Flynn, who had no one.
She sat down at the table with her soup and listened to the children’s chatter while she ate each delicious spoonful. When she finished, she set her bowl aside and turned to the serious business of cookie decorating.
“All right. Help me out, kids. What kind of cookie should I decorate first?”
“The angels are really hard,” Olivia said.
Well, she’d already faced down a bunch of holiday-excited children and been kissed until she couldn’t think straight. What was one more challenge today? “Bring on an angel, then.”
Aunt Mary always had Christmas music playing in the house and the children seemed to enjoy singing along. Olivia didn’t join them, she noticed. The girl seemed a little withdrawn, and Celeste worried maybe the day had been too much for her.
After she had decorated her third cookie, the song “Angels We Have Heard on High” came over the stereo.
“Ooh, I love this one,” Louisa said. Her niece started singing along to the Glorias with a gusto that made Celeste smile.
“My mom is an angel now,” Olivia said in a matter-of-fact sort of tone that made emotions clog Celeste’s throat.
“I know, sweetheart,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Our dad is an angel, too,” Barrett informed her.
“Mom says he’s probably riding the prettiest horses in heaven right now,” Louisa said.
“My mom is in jail,” Joey offered. That made her just as sad for him.
“Aren’t you lucky to have Uncle Rafe and Aunt Hope, though?”
“Yep,” he answered.
Barrett nodded. “And we still have our mom. And you have your dad,” he reminded Olivia.
“Your mom and your dad are angels, aren’t they?” Louisa said to Celeste. “I asked my mom once why Barrett and me don’t have a grandma and a grandpa, and she told me.”
The pain of losing them still hurt, but more like an old ache than the constant, raw pain she remembered.
“They both died,” she agreed. “It’s been a long time, but I still feel them near me.”
At some moments she felt them closer than others. She was quite certain she had heard her father’s voice loud and clear one wintry, stormy night when she was driving home from college for the holidays. As clear as if he had been sitting beside her, she’d heard him tell her to slow down. She had complied instantly and a moment later rounded a corner to find a car had spun out from the opposite lane into hers. She was able to stop in time to keep from hitting it, but if she hadn’t reduced her speed earlier, the head-on collision probably would have killed her and the other driver.
“Do you ever see your mom and dad angels?” Olivia asked, studying Celeste intently.
Oh, the poor, poor dear. She shook her head. “I don’t see them as they were, but whenever I see the angel decorations at Christmastime, it helps me think about them and remember they’re always alive in my heart.”
“I really need to ask my mom something,” Olivia said, her little features distressed. “Only I don’t know how.”
Celeste reached for the girl’s hand and squeezed it. Oh, how she recalled all those unspoken words she had wanted to tell her parents, especially her father, who had died so abruptly. With her mother, she’d had a little more time, though that didn’t ease the difficulty of losing her.
She chose her answer carefully, trying to find the right words of comfort.
“When you see an angel decoration you really like, perhaps you could whisper to the angel what you need to say to your mom. I believe she’ll hear you,” she said softly, hoping she was saying the right things to ease the girl’s grief and not just offering a useless panacea.
Olivia considered that for a long moment, her brow furrowed. Finally she nodded solemnly. “That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that.”
She smiled and gave the girl a little hug, hoping she had averted that particular crisis. “Excellent. Now, why don’t we see how many more cookies we can decorate before your father comes in?”
“Okay.”
They went to work, singing along to the Christmas music for another half hour before the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it!” Joey announced eagerly. He raced for the door and a moment later returned with Flynn.
She had known it would be him at the door, but somehow she still wasn’t prepared for the sheer masculine force of him. Suddenly she couldn’t seem to catch her breath and felt as if the vast kitchen had shrunk to the size of one of Louisa’s dollhouse rooms.
The memory of that kiss shivered between them, and she could feel heat soak her cheeks and nerves flutter in her stomach.
She shoved aside the reaction and forced a smile instead. “That was faster than I expected. Are you finished?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Your brother-in-law is a handy dude. With both of us working together, it didn’t take us long.”
“Wonderful. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, especially with everything else you have going on. Thank you.”
He met her gaze finally, and she thought she saw an instant of heat and hunger before he blinked it away. “You’re very welcome.”
His gaze took in the table scattered with frosting bowls, sugar sprinkles and candy nonpareils. “This looks fun,” he said, though his tone implied exactly the opposite.
“Oh, it is, Daddy,” Olivia declared. “Look at all the cookies I decorated! About a hundred angels!”
More like fifteen or sixteen, but Celeste supposed it had felt like much more than that to a seven-year-old girl.
She handed over one of the paper plates they had been using to set the decorated cookies on when they were finished. “Here, fill this with several cookies so you and your dad can take some home to enjoy.”
“They’re for the old people, though, aren’t they?”
“I think it would be just fine for you to take five or six. We’ll have plenty. Don’t worry,” she answered, declining again to give a lecture on politically correct terminology.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Go ahead. Pick some of your favorites.”
Olivia pondered her options and finally selected five cookies—all blonde angels, Celeste noted—and laid them on the paper plate while Celeste found some aluminum foil to cover them.
“Here you go,” she said, holding them out to Flynn.
“Thanks,” he murmured and took the plate from her. Their hands brushed and she gave an involuntary shiver that she seriously hoped he hadn’t noticed.
His gaze met hers for just an instant, then slid away again, but not before she saw a glittery, hungry look there that made her feel breathless all over again.
“Find your coat,” he told his daughter.
“Can we stay a little bit longer?” Olivia begged. “Louisa and Barrett and Joey said they’re going to have sleigh rides later. I’ve never been on a sleigh ride.”
“We have a lot to do today, bug. We’ve already hung around here longer than we probably should have.”
If he and his daughter had left earlier, the kiss never would have happened. Judging by the edgy tension that seethed between them now—and despite the flash of hunger she thought she had glimpsed—Celeste had a feeling that was what he would have preferred.
“Please, Daddy. I would love it.”
As he gazed at his daughter a helpless look came into his eyes. She remembered him saying he hated refusing Olivia anything after what she had been through.
“How long do these sleigh rides take?” he asked Celeste.
“Less than an hour, probably.”
“They’re super fun at night,” her niece suggested helpfully. “You could go home and do your work and then come back later. Then you can see all the lights and stuff. There’s even caroling.”
“Ooh. Caroling!” Olivia looked delighted at the idea, while her father looked vaguely horrified.
“I must agree. It is really fun,” Celeste said.
He sighed. “Would that work for you, Liv? We can go home and try to finish another room at the house, and then come back later.”
“Will you all be there?” she asked her new friends.
“Sure! We love to take the sleigh rides.”
Olivia looked enchanted by the idea.
“Our last sleigh ride for regular visitors of The Christmas Ranch is back at the St. Nicholas Lodge about 8:00 p.m. Why don’t you meet us at the lodge a little before that, and we can take one that’s not as crowded?”
“Oh, yay! I can’t wait!” Olivia exclaimed. She spontaneously hugged Celeste, and she looked so adorably sweet with her eyes bright and pink frosting on her cheek that Celeste couldn’t help it, she kissed the top of the girl’s head.
When she lifted her head, she found Flynn gazing at her with a strange look on his features that he quickly wiped away.
“I guess we’ll see you all later tonight, then,” he said.
He didn’t sound nearly as thrilled as his daughter about the idea.