RaeAnne Thayne – The Holiday Gift (страница 2)
Okay, maybe she had been careful not to be so casual with her affection for him the last six or seven months, for reasons she didn’t want to explore, but she couldn’t imagine he would go all cold and cranky over something as simple as a little kiss.
No. His mood had shifted after that, but all her subtle efforts to wiggle out what was wrong had been for nothing.
His mood certainly matched the afternoon. Faith glanced out at the uniformly gray sky and the few random, hard-edged snowflakes clicking against the windshield. The weather wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t horrible either. The snowflakes weren’t sticking to the road yet, anyway, though she expected they would see at least a few inches on the ground by morning.
Even the familiar festive streets of Pine Gulch—wreaths hanging on the streetlamps and each downtown business decorated with lights and window dressings—didn’t seem to lift his dark mood.
When he hit the edge of town and turned into Cold Creek Canyon toward home, she decided to try one last time to figure out what might be bothering him.
“Did something happen at the auction?”
He glanced away from the road briefly, the expression in his silver-blue eyes shielded by the amber lenses of his sunglasses. “Why would you think that?”
She studied his dearly familiar profile, struck by his full mouth and his tanned, chiseled features—covered now with just a hint of dark afternoon shadow. Funny, how she saw him just about every single day but was sometimes taken by surprise all over again by how great-looking he was.
With his dark, wavy hair covered by the black Stetson he wore, that slow, sexy smile, and his broad shoulders and slim hips, he looked rugged and dangerous and completely male. It was no wonder the waitresses at the café next to the auction house always fought each other to serve their table.
She shifted her attention away from such ridiculous things and back to the conversation. “I don’t know. Maybe because that’s the longest sentence you’ve given me since we left Idaho Falls. You’ve replied to everything else with either a grunt or a monosyllable.”
Beneath that afternoon shadow, a muscle clenched in his jaw. “That doesn’t mean anything happened. Maybe I’m just not in a chatty mood.”
She certainly had days like that. Heaven knew she’d had her share of blue days over the last two and a half years. Through every one of them, Chase had been her rock.
“Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Are you sure that’s all? Was it something Beckett McKinley said? I saw him corner you at lunch.”
He glanced over at her briefly and again she wished she could see the expression behind his sunglasses. “He wanted to know how I like the new baler I bought this year and he also wanted my opinion on a...personal matter. I told him I liked the baler fine but told him the other thing wasn’t any of my damn business.”
She blinked at both his clipped tone and the language. Chase didn’t swear very often. When he did, there was usually a good reason.
“Now you’ve got my curiosity going. What kind of personal matter would Beck want your opinion about? The only thing I can think the man needs is a nanny for those hellion boys of his.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just watched the road and those snowflakes spitting against windshield. When he finally spoke, his voice was clipped. “It was about you.”
She stared. “Me?”
Chase’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “He wants to ask you out, specifically to go as his date to the stockgrowers association’s Christmas party on Friday.”
If he had just told her Beck wanted her to dress up like a Christmas angel and jump from his barn roof, she wouldn’t have been more surprised—and likely would have been far less panicky.
“I... He...what?”
“Beck wants to take you to the Christmas party this weekend. I understand there’s going to be dancing and a full dinner this year.”
Beck McKinley. The idea of dating the man took her by complete surprise. Yes, he was a great guy, with a prosperous ranch on the other side of Pine Gulch. She considered him a good friend but she had never once thought of him in romantic terms.
The unexpected paradigm shift wasn’t the only thing bothering her about what Chase had just said.
“Hold on. If he wanted to take me to the party, why wouldn’t Beck just ask me himself instead of feeling like he has to go through you first?”
That muscle flexed in his jaw again. “You’ll have to ask him that.”
The things he wasn’t saying in this conversation would fill a radio broadcast. She frowned as Chase pulled into the drive leading to his ranch. “You told him I’m already going with you, didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. “No,” he finally said. “I didn’t.”
Unease twanged through her, the same vague sense that had haunted her at stray moments for several months. Something was off between her and Chase and, for the life of her, she couldn’t put a finger on it.
“Oh. Did you already make plans?” She forced a cheerful smile. “We’ve gone together the last few years so I just sort of assumed we would go together again this year but I guess we should have talked about it. If you already have something going, don’t worry about me. Seriously. I don’t mind going by myself. I’ll have plenty of other friends there I can sit with. Or I could always skip it and stay home with the kids. Jenna McRaven does a fantastic job with the food and I always enjoy the company of other grown-ups, but if you’ve got a hot date lined up, I’m perfectly fine.”
As she said the words, she tasted the lie in them. Was this weird ache in her stomach because she had been looking forward to the evening out—or because she didn’t like the idea of him with a hot date?
“I don’t have a date, hot or otherwise,” he growled as he pulled the pickup and trailer to a stop next to a small paddock near the barn of the Brannon Ridge Ranch.
She eased back in the bench seat, a curious relief seeping through her. “Good. That’s that. We can go together, just like always. It will be a fun night out for us.”
Though she knew him well enough to know something was still on his mind, he said nothing as he pulled off his sunglasses and hooked them on the rearview mirror. What did his silence mean? Didn’t he want to go with her?
“Faith,” he began, but suddenly she didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
“We’d better get the beautiful girl in your trailer unloaded before the kids get home.”
She opened her door and jumped out before he could answer her. Yes, sometimes she was like her son, Barrett, who would rather hide out in his room all day and miss dinner than be scolded for something he’d done. She didn’t like to face bad things. It was a normal reaction, she told herself. Hadn’t she already had to face enough bad things in her life?
After a moment, Chase climbed out after her and came around to unhook the back of the trailer. The striking black-and-white paint yearling whinnied as he led her out into the patchy snow.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Faith said, struck all over again by the horse’s elegant lines.
“Yeah,” Chase said. Again with the monosyllables. She sighed.
“Thanks for letting me keep her here for a couple of weeks. Louisa will be so shocked on Christmas morning.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
He guided the horse into the pasture, where his own favorite horse, Tor, immediately trotted over as Faith closed the gate behind them. As soon as Chase unhooked the young horse from her lead line, she raced to the other side of the pasture, mane and tail flying out behind her.
She was fast. That was the truth. Grateful for her own cowboy hat that shielded her face from the worst of the frost-tipped snowflakes, Faith watched the horse race to the other corner of the pasture and back, obviously overflowing with energy after the stress of a day at the auction and then a trailer ride with strangers.
“Do you think she’s too much horse for Lou?” she asked while Chase patted Tor beside her.
He looked at the paint and then down at Faith. “She comes from prime barrel racing stock. That’s what Lou wants to do. For twelve, she’s a strong rider. Yeah, the horse is only green broke but Seth Dalton can train a horse to do just about anything but recite its ABCs.”
“I guess that’s true. It was nice of him to agree to take her, with his crazy training schedule.”
“He’s a good friend.”
“He is,” she agreed. “Though I know he only agreed to do it as a favor to you.”
“Maybe it was a favor to you,” he commented as he pulled a bale of hay over and opened it inside the pasture for the horses.
“Maybe,” she answered. All three Dalton brothers had been wonderful neighbors and good friends to her. They and others in the close-knit ranching community in Cold Creek Canyon and around Pine Gulch had stepped up in a hundred different ways over the last two and a half years since Travis died.
She would have been lost without any of them, but especially without Chase.
That vague unease slithered through her again. What was wrong between them? And how could she fix it?
She didn’t have the first clue.
* * *
What was a guy supposed to do?