Maverick Christmas Surprise

Chapter Four

Beth winced. “I’m sorry.”

Wilder immediately waved off her apology. “No reason to be. You couldn’t know.”

“All the more reason not to speak without thinking.” Then, in an apparent effort to smooth over the awkwardness, she quickly changed the subject. “Tell me about your brothers.”

He responded readily, happy not to delve any deeper into the details of his mother’s abandonment—especially when he honestly didn’t know most of them. “Logan, the oldest, is married to Sarah. Hunter’s a year younger, the one with the six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and now engaged to Merry—that’s with a capital ‘M’ followed by an ‘e,’” he clarified. “Although I suppose it’s also accurate the other way, too.

“Anyway, next after Hunter is Xander, who’s married to Lily. Then there’s Finn, who’s married to Avery and expecting a baby in the spring, and finally Knox, who’s married to Gen.”

“So all of your brothers are married or engaged,” she mused.

He nodded.

“You’re not feeling any pressure to follow in their footsteps?”

“Not at all. I’m perfectly happy with my life the way it is,” he assured her.

Then his gaze slid in Cody’s direction, and when it shifted back again, the look on Beth’s face told him she knew that what he really meant was that he’d been perfectly happy with his life the way it was.

He turned to the fridge, away from her knowing expression. “I promised you food,” he said. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Oh, um, just some toast would be fine,” she said, as she settled into a chair at the table and positioned the bottle close to the baby’s mouth. Cody immediately latched onto the nipple and began sucking.

“How about a sandwich?” he suggested.

“That sounds even better,” she agreed.

“Do you like turkey?”

“Almost as much as coffee.”

He pulled a cellophane-covered platter from the refrigerator.

“That’s a lot of turkey,” she noted.

“We had a full house for the Christmas meal, so my dad insisted on two birds to ensure we’d have leftover for sandwiches,” he explained.

“I’d love a turkey sandwich—if you’re sure he wouldn’t mind sharing,” Beth said.

“There’s plenty.” He pulled the plastic wrap off the meat. “I guess you didn’t get to enjoy Christmas dinner, did you?”

She shook her head. “I mostly fueled myself on coffee and doughnuts.”

More coffee than doughnuts, Wilder guessed, with a glance at her thin frame. He generally preferred the women he dated to look like women, with curves rather than angles. Beth was all angles, and yet, there was something about her—an innate warmth and sweetness that appealed to him.

The observation made him frown. Because while he appreciated the female form in various shapes and sizes, Beth wasn’t a female to be ogled—she was Cody’s aunt. Leighton’s sister.

And definitely not his type.

“White or dark meat?” he asked, turning his attention back to his task.

“Either or,” she said. “And I can make my own sandwich.”

“You’re feeding the baby,” he noted. “And that’s something I’m not so good at.”

“Your brother didn’t give you a tutorial?” she teased.

“Apparently I’m not a very quick learner.”

Beth smiled at that. “You’re lucky your family is so supportive.”

“Is ‘supportive’ another word for ‘nosy and interfering?’”

“When it comes to family relationships, there’s often some overlap,” she acknowledged.

“Is your family supportive?”

“There’s just me and Leighton—and Cody—now,” she told him. “Our parents were killed during a bank robbery gone wrong almost ten years ago. Innocent bystanders.”

Though the words were spoken matter-of-factly, the flatness of her tone suggested that the passage of time had done little to dull the heartache. As someone who’d grown up without a mother, he understood how the pain of loss could linger and wished he could take back the question.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, sounding and feeling awkward.

“Thanks.” She eased the nipple of the already empty bottle from the baby’s mouth and turned him onto her shoulder, gently rubbing his back.

Was it a maternal instinct that allowed women to anticipate and respond to an infant’s needs? Or was it, as his brother had suggested, a parenting instinct? In which case, it was an instinct that Wilder obviously lacked.

“He was hungry,” he noted.

“He always is,” Beth remarked.

“And so are you,” he remembered, refocusing on his task. “Cranberry or mayo?”

“Both.”

Wilder made a face but retrieved the condiments from the fridge.

“Coleslaw?” he asked, when he’d cut the sandwiches and set them on two plates.

Her stomach grumbled a response before she did. “Sure.”

He spooned some onto the plate beside her sandwich and set it on the table. After Cody had burped, she put him in his car seat and picked up her sandwich.

Wilder expected her to nibble around the crust, pretending more than eating, so he was surprised to see her take a hearty bite. And even more so when she closed her eyes and let out a blissful sigh that he was more accustomed to hearing in the bedroom than the kitchen.

“Oh. My. Goodness.” She chewed slowly, swallowed. “You make a really good turkey sandwich.”

It wasn’t the only thing he did really well. In fact, sandwich-making didn’t even crack the top ten list of things he did to please a woman, but he’d be happy to show her—

No. He immediately cut off his wayward thought, unwilling to go there with Beth, who wasn’t just a guest under his roof but the baby’s aunt.

He cleared his throat along with his mind. “I only assembled the ingredients,” he told her. “Lily worked her magic with the bird.”

“Lily is...married to Knox?”

He shook his head. “Xander. She runs her own business—Lily’s Home Cookin’—now, but she used to be a cook at Maverick Manor.”

“What’s Maverick Manor?”

“The only decent hotel between here and Kalispell. It was originally an enormous house, nicknamed Bledsoe’s Folly in honor of the man who built it. When he died, it stood dark and empty for a lot of years until Nate Crawford bought it and turned it into a hotel.”

“A relative of yours?” she guessed.

“Apparently.”

“Do you have a lot of family in Rust Creek Falls?” she asked.

“You can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford—or two or three,” he told her. “I thought I’d miss the anonymity of living in a big city, but there’s something about this place that makes it feel like home already.”

“Maybe the fact that you can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford,” she said, echoing his own words.

He chuckled. “That might be part of it.”

She picked up the second half of her sandwich. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I had turkey,” she told him. “But I’m sure I don’t remember it tasting this good.”

He popped the last bite of his own sandwich into his mouth. “Last Christmas?”

“What?”

“You said you couldn’t remember the last time you had turkey,” he reminded her. “I suggested that it was probably last Christmas.”

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