Chapter Thirteen
Faith stared at him, stunned by the anger that seemed to seethe around them like storm-tossed sea waves.
“Do...what?”
“You know. You just tried to set me up with Ella Baker again.”
Her face flamed even as she shivered at his hard tone. Oh. That.
“All I did was mention that the Renegade has dancing on Saturday nights. I only thought it would be fun for the two of you.”
His jaw worked as he continued to stare down at her. “Is that right?”
“Ella is really great,” she said. She might as well double down on her own stupidity. “I’ve seen her with the kids this week and she’s amazing—so patient and kind and talented. You heard her sing. Any single guy would have to be crazy not to want to go out with her.”
“Really, Faith. Really?” The words came at her like a whip snapping through the cold air.
He was furious, she realized. More angry than she had ever seen him. She could see it in every rigid line of his body, from his flexed jaw to his clenched fists.
“After everything that’s happened between us these last few weeks, you seriously want to stand there and pretend you think I might have the slightest interest in someone else?”
She let out a breath, ashamed of herself for dragging an innocent—and very nice—woman into this. She didn’t even know why she had. The words had just sort of come out. She certainly didn’t want Chase dating Ella Baker but maybe on some level she was still hanging on to the hope that they could somehow return to the easy friendship of a few weeks ago and forget the rest of this.
“I can’t help it if I want you to be happy,” she said, her voice low. “You’re my dearest friend.”
“I don’t want to be your friend.” He growled an oath that had her blinking. “After everything, can you really not understand that? Fine. You want me to be clear, I’ll be clear. I don’t want to be your buddy and I don’t want to date Ella Baker. She is very nice but I don’t have the slightest flicker of interest in her.”
“Okay,” she whispered. She shouldn’t be relieved about that but she couldn’t seem to help it.
He gazed down at her, features hard and implacable. “There is only one woman I want in my life and it’s you, Faith. You have to know that. I’m in love with you. It’s you. It has always been you.”
She caught her breath at his words as joy burst through her like someone had switched on a thousand Christmas trees. She wanted to savor it, to simply close her eyes and soak it in.
I love you, too. So, so much.
The words crowded in her throat, jostling with each other to get out.
Over the last few weeks, she had come to accept that unalterable truth. She was in love with him and had been for a long time.
Perhaps some little part of her had loved him since that day he drove her into town when she was a frightened girl of fifteen.
What might have happened between them if his father hadn’t been dying, if Travis hadn’t come back to the Star N and she hadn’t been overwhelmed by the sweet, kind safety he offered, the anchor she had so desperately needed?
She didn’t know. She only knew that Chase had always been so very important in her world—more than she could ever have imagined after Travis died so suddenly.
The reminder slammed into her and she reached out for the rough planks of Sparkle’s enclosure for support.
Travis.
The images of that awful moment when she had found him lying under his overturned ATV—covered in blood, so terribly still—seemed to flash through her mind in a grim, horrible slide show. She hadn’t been able to save him, no matter how desperately she had tried as she begged him not to leave her like her father, her mother.
She had barely survived losing Travis. How could she find the strength to let herself be vulnerable to that sort of raw, all-consuming, soul-destroying pain again?
She couldn’t. She had been a coward so many years ago as a helpless girl caught up in events beyond her control and she was still a coward.
Faith opened her mouth to speak but the words wouldn’t come.
The silence dragged between them. She was afraid to meet his gaze but when she forced herself to do it, she found his eyes murky with sadness and what she thought might be disappointment.
“You don’t have to say anything.” All the anger seemed to have seeped out of him, leaving his features as bleak as the snow-covered mountains above the tree line. “I get it.”
How could he, when she didn’t understand? She had the chance for indescribable happiness here with the man she loved. Why couldn’t she just take that step, find enough strength inside herself to try again?
“It doesn’t matter how much time I give you. You’ve made up your mind not to let yourself see me as anything more than your dearest friend and nothing I do can change that.”
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t true. She saw him for exactly what he was. The strong, decent, wonderful man she loved with all her heart.
Fear held both her heart and her words in a tight, icy grip. “Chase, I—” she managed, but he shook his head.
“Don’t,” he said. “I pushed you too hard. I thought you might be ready to move forward but I can see now I only complicated things between us and wasted both of our time. It was a mistake and I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said softly, but he had turned around and headed for the door and she wasn’t sure he heard her.
The moment he left, she pressed a hand to her chest and the sharp, cold ache there, as if someone had pierced her skin with an icicle.
She wanted so badly to go after him but told herself maybe it was better this way.
Wasn’t it better to lose a friendship than to risk having her heart cut out of her body?
* * *
Chase didn’t know how he made it through the next few days.
The hardest thing had been walking back inside the Saint Nicholas Lodge and trying to pretend everything was fine, with his emotions a raw, tangled mess.
He was pretty sure he fooled nobody. Celeste and Mary seemed especially watchful and alert as he and Addie dined with the family. As for Faith, she had come in about fifteen minutes after he did with her eyes red and her features subdued. She sat on the exact opposite side of the room from him and picked at her food, her features tight and set.
He was aware of a small, selfish hope that perhaps she was suffering a tiny portion of the vast pain that seemed to have taken over every thought.
She had left early, ostensibly with the excuse of taking some of the leftovers to Rafe and Hope, though he was fairly certain it was another effort to avoid him.
He did his best to put his pain on the back burner, focusing instead on making his remaining few hours with his daughter until after the New Year memorable for her.
Their premature Christmas Eve went off without a hitch. When they returned home, she changed into her pajamas and they played games and watched a favorite holiday movie, then she opened the one early present he allowed her—a carved ornament he had made from a pretty aspen burl on a downed tree he found in the mountains. In the morning she opened the rest of her presents from him and he fixed her breakfast, then she helped him take care of a few chores.
Too soon, her mother showed up after visiting her parents at the care center where Cindy’s mother was still recovering from her stroke.
Chase tried to put on a smile for Cindy, sorry all over again for the mess he had made of his marriage.
He had tried so hard to love her. Those early days had been happy, getting ready for the baby and then their early days with Addie, but their shared love of their daughter hadn’t provided strong enough glue to keep them together.
It hadn’t been Cindy’s fault that his heart hadn’t been completely free. Despite his best efforts, she somehow had sensed it all along and he regretted that now.
He understood why disappointment and hurt turned her bitter and cold toward him and he resolved to do his best to be kinder.
Addie had decided to leave some of the gifts he had given her at the ranch so she could enjoy them during her time with him there, but she still had several she wanted to take home. After he loaded them into her mom’s SUV, he hugged his daughter and kissed the top of her head. “Have a fun cruise, Addie-bug, and at Disney World. I want to hear every detail when you get back.”
“Okay,” she said, her arms tight around his neck. “You won’t be by yourself on Christmas, will you, Dad? You’ll go open presents at the Star N with Louisa and Barrett, right?”
His heart seemed to give a sharp little spasm. That’s what he had done for several years, even before Travis died, but that was looking unlikely this year.
“I’m not sure,” he lied. “I’ll be fine, whatever I do. Merry Christmas, kiddo.”
As they drove away, he caught sight of the lights of the Star N and The Christmas Ranch below the Brannon Ridge.
How was he going to make it through the remainder of his life without her—and without Lou and Barrett and the rest of her family he loved so much?
He didn’t have the first idea.
* * *
“Why isn’t Chase coming for dinner tonight?” Louisa asked as she and Barrett decorated Christmas cookie angels on the kitchen island.
“Yeah. He always comes over on Christmas Eve,” Barrett said.
“And on Christmas morning when we open presents,” Louisa added.
Faith had no idea how to answer her children. It made her chest ache all over again, just thinking about it.
That morning she had gathered her nerve and called to invite him for dinner and to make arrangements for transferring Louisa’s Christmas present from Brannon Ridge to the Star N. She had been so anxious about talking to him again after four days of deafening silence, but the call went straight to voice mail.
He was avoiding her.
That was fairly obvious, especially when he texted just moments later declining her invitation but telling her that he already had a plan to take care of the other matter and she didn’t need to worry about it.
The terse note after days of no contact hurt more than she could have imagined, even though she knew it was her own fault. She wanted so much to jump in her truck and drive to his ranch, to tell him she was sorry for all the pain she had put them both through.
“I guess he must have made other plans this year,” she said now in answer to her daughter.
Mary made a harrumphing sort of noise from her side of the island but said nothing else in front of the children, much to Faith’s relief.
Though her aunt didn’t know what had transpired between Faith and Chase, Mary knew something had. She blamed Faith for it and had made no secret that she wasn’t happy about it.
“Addie texted me a while ago. She’s worried he’ll be all by himself for the holidays,” Louisa said. Her daughter made it sound like that was the worst possible fate anyone could endure and the guilty knot under Faith’s rib cage seemed to expand.
Her children loved Chase—and vice versa. She hated being the cause of a rift between them.
“We should take him some of our cookies,” Barrett suggested.
“That’s a great idea,” Mary said, with a pointed look at her. “Faith, why don’t you take him some cookies? You could be there and back before everybody shows up for dinner.”
He didn’t want cookies from her. He didn’t want anything—except the one thing she wasn’t sure she had the strength to give.
“Maybe we can all take them over later,” she said.
The three looked as if they wanted to argue but she made an impromptu excuse, desperate to escape the guilt and uncertainty. “I need to go. I’ve got a few things I need to do out in the barn before tonight.”
“Now?” Mary asked doubtfully.
“If I finish the chores now, I won’t have to go out to take care of them in the middle of our Christmas Eve party with Hope and Celeste,” she said.
It was a flimsy excuse but not unreasonable. She did have chores—and she had plans to hang a big red ribbon she had already hidden away in the barn across the stall where she planned to put Lou’s new horse. She could do that now, since Louisa had no reason to go out to the barn between now and Christmas morning.
She grabbed her coat and hurried out before any of them could argue with her.
Outside, a cold wind blew down off Brannon Ridge and she shivered at the same time she yawned.
She hadn’t been sleeping much the last few weeks, which was probably why her head ached and her eyes felt as if they were coated with gritty sandpaper.
Maybe she could just go to bed and wake up when Christmas was over.
She sighed. However tempting, that was completely impossible. She had hours to go before she could sleep. It was not yet sunset on Christmas Eve—she still had to make it through dinner with her sisters and their families. Both of them were coming, since Hope had been cleared to return to her normal activities.
They would want to know where Chase was and she didn’t know how to answer them.
Not only that but her kids would likely be awake for hours yet, jacked up on excitement and anticipation—not to mention copious amounts of sugar from the treats they had been making and sampling all day.
She should take sugar cookies to Chase. He loved them and probably hadn’t made any for himself.
How could she possibly face him after their last encounter?
Tears burned behind her eyes. She wanted to tell herself it was from the wind and the lack of sleep but she knew better. This was the season of hope, joy, yet she felt as if all the color and light had been sucked away, leaving only uniform, lifeless gray.
She was in love with him and she didn’t know what to do about it.
The worst part was knowing that even if she could find the strength and courage to admit she loved him, she was afraid it was too late.
He had looked so bleak the last time she saw him, so distant. Remembering the finality in that scene, the tears she had been fighting for days slipped past her defenses.
She looked out at the beautiful landscape—the snow-covered mountains and the orange and yellows of the sunset—and gave in to the torment of her emotions here, where no one could see her.
After a few moments, she forced herself to stop, wiping at the tears with her leather gloves. None of this maudlin stuff was helping her take care of her chores and now she would have to finish quickly so she could hurry back to the house to fix her makeup before her sisters saw evidence of her tears and pressed her about what was wrong.
How could she tell them what a mess she had made of things?
With another sigh, she forced herself to focus on the job at hand. She walked through the snow to the barn and pushed the door open but only made it a few steps before she faltered, her gaze searching the interior.
Something was wrong.
Over the past two and a half years, she had come to know the inside of this barn as well as she did her own bedroom. She knew it in all seasons, all weather, all moods.
She knew the scents and the sounds and the shifting light—and right now she could tell something was different.
Someone was here.
She moved quietly into the barn, reaching for the pitchfork that was usually there. It was missing but she found a shovel instead and decided that would have to do.
No one else should be here.
She had two part-time ranch hands but neither was scheduled to be here on Christmas Eve. She had given both time off for the holidays and didn’t expect to see them until the twenty-seventh. Anyway, if it had been Bill or Jose, wouldn’t she have seen their vehicles parked out front?
With the shovel in hand, she headed farther into the interior of the big barn, eyes scanning the dim interior. Seconds later she spotted it—a beautiful paint mare in one of the stalls near the far end of the barn.
At almost that exact moment, she heard a noise coming from above her. She whirled toward the hayloft that took up one half of the barn and spotted him there, his back to her, along with the missing pitchfork.
“Chase!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
He swiveled around, and for an arrested moment, he looked at her with so much love and longing, she almost wept again.
Too quickly, he veiled his features. “Feeding Lou’s new horse. While I was at it, I figured I could take care of the rest of your stock in the barn so you wouldn’t have to worry about it tonight. I was hoping to get out of here before you came down from the house but obviously I’m not fast enough.”
He had done that for her, even though he was furious with her. She wanted to cry all over again.
Happiness seemed to bloom through her like springtime and the old barn had never looked so beautiful.
She swallowed, focusing on the least important thought running through her head. “How did you get the new horse down here? I never saw your trailer.”
“I didn’t want Lou to see it and wonder what was going on so I came in the back way, down the hill. I rode Tor and tied the mare’s lead line to his saddle.”
“You came down through all that snow?” she exclaimed. “How on earth did you manage that?” There were drifts at least four feet deep in places on that ridgeline.
“It was slow going but Tor is tough and so’s the new little mare. She’s going to be a great horse for Lou.”
She felt completely overwhelmed suddenly, humbled and astonished that he would go to such lengths for her daughter.
And for her, she realized.
This was only one of a million other acts over the last few years that provided all the evidence anyone could need that he loved her.
“I can’t believe you would do that.”
“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he said, his tone distant.
“It is a big deal to me. It’s huge. Oh, Chase.”
The tears from earlier broke free again and a small sob escaped before she could cover her mouth with her fingers.
“Cut it out. Right now.”
She almost laughed at the alarm in his voice, despite the tears that continued to trickle down her cheeks.
“I can’t. I’m sorry. When the man I love shows me all over again how wonderful he is, I tend to get emotional. You’re just going to have to deal with that.”
Her words seemed to hang in the air of the barn like dust motes floating in the last pale shafts of Christmas Eve sunlight. He stared at her for a second, then lurched toward the ladder. Before he reached it, his boot heel caught on something. He staggered for just a moment and tried to regain his balance but he didn’t have anything to hold on to.
He fell in what felt like slow motion, landing with a hard thud that sounded almost as loud as her instinctive scream.
* * *
He couldn’t breathe—and not because her words had stunned him. No. He literally couldn’t breathe.
For a good five seconds, his lungs were frozen, the wind knocked hard out of him. He was aware on some level of her running toward him to kneel next to him, of her panicked, tearstained features and her hands on his face and her cries of “breathe, breathe, breathe.”
He wasn’t sure if the advice was for him or herself but then, just as abruptly, the spasm in his diaphragm eased and he could inhale again, a small breath and then increasingly deeper until he dared talk again.
“I’m...okay.”
She was reaching for her phone when he spoke. At his voice, she gasped, dropping it to the concrete floor of the barn and throwing herself across him with an impact that made him grunt.
She immediately eased away. “Where does it hurt? I need to call an ambulance. It will probably take them a while to get here so it might be faster for me to just drive you.”
The panic in her voice seeped through his discomfort and he reached out a hand to cover hers.
“I don’t...need an ambulance. The breath...was knocked out of me...but I’m okay.”
The alfalfa he had been forking down for the animals had cushioned most of the impact and he knew there was no serious damage, even though everything still ached. He might have a broken rib in there, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
“Are you sure? That was a hard fall.”
“I’m sure.”
Her hand fluttered in his and he suddenly remembered what she had said and his complete shock that had made him lose his footing.
He sat up and wiped at her tears.
“Faith. What were you saying just before I fell?”
She looked down, her cheeks turning pink. “I... Nothing.”
It was the exact antithesis of nothing. “You said you loved me,” he murmured.
She rubbed her cheek on her shoulder as if trying to hide evidence of the tears trickling down. “That was a pretty hard fall,” she said again. “Are you sure you didn’t bump your head, too?”
“Positive. I know what I heard. Why do you think I fell? You shocked me so much I forgot I was ten feet up in the air. Say it again.”
Her hand fluttered in his again but he held it tight. He wasn’t going to let her wriggle away this time. After a moment, she stopped and everything about her seemed to sigh.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve known it for a while now. I just... I’ve been so afraid.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t wanted to make her suffer more than she already had. But maybe they both had to pass through this tough time to know they could make it through to the other side.
He pulled her toward him and his breath seemed to catch all over again—and not at all from the pain—when she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her cheek against his chest.
Joy began to stir inside him, tentative at first and then stronger.
She belonged exactly here. Surely she had to know that by now.
“After Travis died, I never wanted to fall in love again. Ever,” she said, her voice low. “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t.”
He frowned in confusion, nearly groaning at the possibility of more mixed signals from her.
And then she kissed him. Just like that. She lifted her head, found his mouth and kissed him with a fierce emotion that sent joy rushing through him like the Cold Creek swollen with runoff.
“I didn’t need to fall in love,” she said, her beautiful eyes bright with more tears and a tenderness that made him want to weep. “I was already there, in love with my best friend. That love surrounded me every moment of every day. I just had to find the strength to open my heart to it.”
“And have you?”
She kissed him again in answer and he decided he wanted to spend every Christmas Eve right here with her in her barn, surrounded by animals and hay and possibilities.
He had no idea how all his Christmas wishes had come true but he wasn’t about to question it.
“I love you, Chase Brannon,” she murmured against his mouth.
He didn’t want to ask but he had to know. “What changed?”
“Why am I not afraid to admit I love you?” She smiled a little. “Who said I’m not? But I have been thinking about something my dad told us over and over when we were held prisoner in Colombia. Remember, girls, he would say in that firm voice. Faith is always stronger than fear. He was talking about faith in the abstract, not me in particular, but I have decided to listen to his words and apply them to me. I can’t let my fear control me. I am stronger than this—and during the times when I’m not, I’ve got your strength to lean on.”
He kissed her, humbled and overwhelmed and incredibly grateful for this amazing woman in his arms, who had been through incredible pain but came through with grace, dignity and a beautiful courage.
He wiped a tear away with his thumb, grateful beyond words that such a woman was willing to face her completely justifiable fears for him.
“I thought I was going to have a heart attack just now when you fell. For an instant, it was like Travis all over again—but it also confirmed something I had already been thinking.”
“Oh?”
She pressed her cheek against his hand. “I’ve been worried that I’m not strong enough to open my heart to you. The real question is whether I’m strong enough to live without you. When I saw you fall, in those horrible few seconds when you weren’t breathing, I realized the answer to that is an unequivocal, emphatic no. I can’t bear the idea of not being with you.”
He couldn’t promise nothing would ever happen to him—but he could promise he would love her fiercely every single day of his life.
“I love you, Chase. I love you, my kids love you, my entire family loves you. I need you. You are my oldest and dearest friend—and my oldest and dearest love.”
He framed her face in his hands and kissed her with all the pent-up need from all these years of standing on the sidelines, waiting for their moment to be right. He almost couldn’t believe this was real. Maybe he was simply hallucinating after having the wind knocked out of him. But his senses seemed even more acute than usual, alive and invigorated, and the joy expanding in his chest was too bright and wild and beautiful to be imaginary.
People said Christmas was a time for miracles.
He would never doubt that again.