Holiday in Stone Creek: A Stone Creek Christmas

Oh. My. God, Olivia thought, feeling the color drain out of her face.

“You used a computer?”

Ashley nodded. “I’m thinking of getting one. Setting up a website to bring in more business for the B and B.”

Things were changing, Olivia realized. And she hated it when things changed. Why couldn’t people leave well enough alone?

“There are more Delia O’Ballivans out there than you would ever guess,” Ashley rushed on. “One of them must be Mom.”

“Ash, Mom could be dead by now. Or going by a different name…”

Ashley looked offended. “You sound like Brad and Melissa. Brad just clams up whenever I ask him about Mom—he remembers her better, since he’s older. ‘Leave it alone’ is all he ever says. And Melissa thinks she’s probably a crack addict or a hooker or something.” She let out a long, shaky breath. “I thought you missed Mom as much as I do. I really did.”

Although Brad had never admitted it, Olivia suspected he knew more about their mother than he was telling. If he wanted Ashley and the rest of them to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie, he probably had a good reason. Not that the decision was only his to make.

“I miss having a mother, Ash,” Olivia said gently. “That’s different from missing Mom specifically. She left us, remember?”

Remember? How could Ashley remember? She’d been a toddler when their mother boarded an afternoon bus out of Stone Creek and vanished into a world of strangers. She was clinging to memories she’d merely imagined, most likely. To a fantasy mother, the woman who should have been, but probably never was.

“Well, I want to know why,” Ashley insisted, her eyes full of pain. “Maybe she regretted it. Did you ever think of that? Maybe she misses us, and wants a second chance. Maybe she expects us to reject her, so she’s afraid to get in touch.”

“Oh, Ash,” Olivia murmured, slouching against the back of her chair. “You haven’t actually made contact, have you?”

“No,” Ashley said, tucking a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear when it escaped from her otherwise categorically perfect French braid, “but if I find her, I’m going to invite her to Stone Creek for Christmas. If you and Brad and Melissa want to keep your distance, that’s your business.”

Olivia’s hand shook a little as she set her cup down, causing it to rattle in its delicate saucer. “Ashley, you have a right to see Mom if you want to,” she said carefully. “But Christmas—”

“What do you care about Christmas?” Ashley asked abruptly. “You don’t even put up a tree most years.”

“I care about you and Melissa and Brad. If you do manage to find Mom, great. But don’t you think bringing her here at Christmas, the most emotional day of the year, before anybody has a chance to get used to the idea, would be like planting a live hand grenade in the turkey?”

Ashley didn’t reply, and after that the conversation was stilted, to say the least. They talked about what to contribute to the Thanksgiving shindig at Brad and Meg’s place, decided on freshly baked dinner rolls for Ashley and a selection of salads from the deli for Olivia, and then Olivia left to make rounds.

Why was she so worried? she wondered, biting down hard on her lower lip as she fired up the Suburban and headed for the first farm on her list. If she was alive, Delia had done a good job of staying under the radar all these years. She’d never written, never called, never visited. Never sent a single birthday card. And if she was dead, they’d all have to drop everything and mourn, in their various ways.

Olivia didn’t feel ready to take that on.

Before, the thought of Delia usually filled her with grief and a plaintive, little-girl kind of longing. The very cadence of her heartbeat said, Come home. Come home.

Now, today, it just made her very, very angry. How could a woman just leave four children and a husband behind and forget the way back?

Olivia knotted one hand into a fist and bonked the side of the steering wheel once. Tears stung her eyes, and her throat felt as though someone had run a line of stitches around it with a sharp needle and then pulled them tight.

Ashley was expecting some kind of fairy-tale reunion, an Oprah sort of deal, full of tearful confessions and apologies and cartoon birds trailing ribbons from their chirpy beaks.

For Olivia’s money, it would be more like an apocalypse.

TANNERHEARDTHERIG roll in around sunset. Smiling, he closed his newspaper, stood up from the kitchen table and wandered to the window. Watched as Olivia O’Ballivan climbed out of her Suburban, flung one defiant glance toward the house and started for the barn, the golden retriever trotting along behind her.

She’d come, he knew, to have another confab with Butterpie. The idea at once amused him and jabbed through his conscience like a spike. Sophie was on the other side of the country, homesick as hell and probably sticking pins in a daddy doll. She missed the pony, and the pony missed her, and he was the hard-ass who was keeping them apart.

Taking his coat and hat down from the peg next to the back door, he put them on and went outside. He was used to being alone, even liked it, but keeping company with Doc O’Ballivan, bristly though she sometimes was, would provide a welcome diversion.

He gave her time to reach Butterpie’s stall, then walked into the barn.

The golden came to greet him, all wagging tail and melting brown eyes, and he bent to stroke her soft, sturdy back. “Hey, there, dog,” he said.

Sure enough, Olivia was in the stall, brushing Butterpie down and talking to her in a soft, soothing voice that touched something private inside Tanner and made him want to turn on one heel and beat it back to the house.

He’d be damned if he’d do it, though.

This was his ranch, his barn. Well-intentioned as she was, Olivia was the trespasser here, not him.

“She’s still very upset,” Olivia told him without turning to look at him or slowing down with the brush.

For a second Tanner thought she was referring to Sophie, not the pony, and that got his hackles up.

Shiloh, always an easy horse to get along with, stood contentedly in his own stall, munching away on the feed Tanner had given him earlier. Butterpie, he noted, hadn’t touched her supper as far as he could tell.

“Do you know anything at all about horses, Mr. Quinn?” Olivia asked.

He leaned against the stall door, the way he had the day before, and grinned. He’d practically been raised on horseback; he and Tessa had grown up on their grandmother’s farm in the Texas hill country, after their folks divorced and went their separate ways, both of them too busy to bother with a couple of kids. “A few things,” he said. “And I mean to call you Olivia, so you might as well return the favor and address me by my first name.”

He watched as she took that in, dealt with it, decided on an approach. He’d have to wait and see what that turned out to be, but he didn’t mind. It was a pleasure just watching Olivia O’Ballivan grooming a horse.

“All right, Tanner,” she said. “This barn is a disgrace. When are you going to have the roof fixed? If it snows again, the hay will get wet and probably mold….”

He chuckled, shifted a little. He’d have a crew out there the following Monday morning to replace the roof and shore up the walls—he’d made the arrangements over a week before—but he felt no particular compunction to explain that. He was enjoying her ire too much; it made her color rise and her hair fly when she turned her head, and the faster breathing made her perfect breasts go up and down in an enticing rhythm. “What makes you so sure I’m a greenhorn?” he asked mildly, still leaning on the gate.

At last she looked straight at him, but she didn’t move from Butterpie’s side. “Your hat, your boots—that fancy red truck you drive. I’ll bet it’s customized.”

Tanner grinned. Adjusted his hat. “Are you telling me real cowboys don’t drive red trucks?”

“There are lots of trucks around here,” she said. “Some of them are red, and some of them are new. And all of them are splattered with mud or manure or both.”

“Maybe I ought to put in a car wash, then,” he teased. “Sounds like there’s a market for one. Might be a good investment.”

She softened, though not significantly, and spared him a cautious half smile, full of questions she probably wouldn’t ask. “There’s a good car wash in Indian Rock,” she informed him. “People go there. It’s only forty miles.”

“Oh,” he said with just a hint of mockery. “Only forty miles. Well, then. Guess I’d better dirty up my truck if I want to be taken seriously in these here parts. Scuff up my boots a bit, too, and maybe stomp on my hat a couple of times.”

Her cheeks went a fetching shade of pink. “You are twisting what I said,” she told him, brushing Butterpie again, her touch gentle but sure. “I meant…”

Tanner envied that little horse. Wished he had furry hide, so he’d need brushing, too.

“You meant that I’m not a real cowboy,” he said. “And you could be right. I’ve spent a lot of time on construction sites over the last few years, or in meetings where a hat and boots wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead of digging out my old gear, once I decided to take this job, I just bought new.”

“I bet you don’t even have any old gear,” she challenged, but she was smiling, albeit cautiously, as though she might withdraw into a disapproving frown at any second.

He took off his hat, extended it to her. “Here,” he teased. “Rub that around in the muck until it suits you.”

She laughed, and the sound—well, it caused a powerful and wholly unexpected shift inside him. Scared the hell out of him and, paradoxically, made him yearn to hear it again. “That would be a little drastic,” she said.

Tanner put his hat back on. “You figure me for a rhinestone cowboy,” he said. “What else have you decided about me?”

She considered the question, evidently drawing up a list in her head.

Tanner was fascinated—and still pretty scared.

“Brad told me you were widowed,” she said finally, after mulling for a while. “I’m sorry about that.”

Tanner swallowed hard, nodded. Wondered how much detail his friend had gone into, and decided not to ask. He’d told Brad the whole grim story of Kat’s death, once upon a time.

“You’re probably pretty driven,” Olivia went on, concentrating on the horse again. “It’s obvious that you’re successful—Brad wouldn’t have hired you for this project if you weren’t the best. And you compartmentalize.”

“Compartmentalize?”

“You shut yourself off from distractions.”

“Such as?”

“Your daughter,” Olivia said. She didn’t lack for nerve, that was for sure. “And this poor little horse. You’d like to have a dog—you like Ginger a lot—but you wouldn’t adopt one because that would mean making a commitment. Not being able to drop everything and everybody and take off for the next Big Job when the mood struck you.”

Tanner felt as though he’d been slapped, and it didn’t help one bit that everything she’d said was true. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t deny it.

“I love Sophie,” he said grimly.

She met his gaze again. “I’m sure you do. Still, you find it easy enough to—compartmentalize where she’s concerned, don’t you?”

“I do not,” he argued. He did “compartmentalize”—he had to—but he sure as hell wouldn’t call it easy. Every parting from Sophie was harder on him than it was on her. He was the one who always had to suck it up and be strong.

Olivia shrugged, patted the pony affectionately on the neck and set aside the brush. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she told the animal. “In the meantime, think good thoughts and talk to Shiloh if you get too lonesome.”

Tanner racked his brain, trying to remember if he’d told Olivia the gelding’s name. He was sure it hadn’t come up in their brief but tempestuous acquaintance. “How did you…?”

“He told me,” Olivia said, approaching the stall door and waiting for him to step out of her way, just like before.

“Are you seriously telling me I’ve got Mr. Ed in my barn?” he asked, moving aside so she could pass.

She crossed to Shiloh’s stall, reached up to stroke his nose when he nuzzled her and gave a companionable nicker. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, with so much smug certainty that Tanner found himself wanting to prove a whole bunch of things he’d never felt the need to prove before.

“Because I compartmentalize?” Tanner gibed.

“Something like that,” Olivia answered blithely. She turned from Shiloh, snapped her fingers to attract the dog’s attention and started for the barn door.

“See you tomorrow, if you’re here when I come by to look in on Butterpie.”

Utterly confounded, Tanner stood in the doorway watching as Olivia lowered a ramp at the back of the Suburban for Ginger, waited for the dog to trot up it, and shut the doors.

Moments later she was driving off, tooting a merry “so long” on the horn.

THATNIGHTHEDREAMED of Kat.

She was alive again, standing in the barn at Butterpie’s stall gate, watching as the pony nibbled hay at its feeder. Tall and slender, with long dark hair, Kat turned to him and smiled a welcome.

He hated these dreams for being dreams, not reality. At the same time he couldn’t bring himself to wake up, to leave her.

The settings were always different—their first house, their quarters in the American compound in some sandy, dangerous foreign place, even supermarket aisles and gas stations. He’d be standing at the pump, filling the vehicle de jour, and look up to see Kat with a hose in her hand, gassing up that old junker she’d been driving when they met.

He stood at a little distance from her, there in the barn aisle, well aware that after a few words, a few minutes at most, she’d vanish. And it would be like losing her all over again.

She smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes, in the set of her full mouth. “Hello, Tanner,” she said very softly.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Somehow he knew that this visit was very different from all the ones that had gone before.

She came to stand in front of him, soft as summer in her white cotton sundress, and touched his arm as she looked up into his face.

“It’s time for me to move on,” she told him.

No.

The word swelled up inside him, but he couldn’t say it.

And Kat vanished.

Chapter Four

OLIVIAAWAKENED on the following Thursday morning feeling as though she hadn’t slept at all the night before, with Ginger’s cold muzzle pressed into her neck and the alarm clock buzzing insistently. She stirred, opened her eyes, slapped down the snooze button, with a muttered “Shut up!”

Iridescent frost embossed the window glass in intricate fans and swirls, turning it opaque, but the light got through anyway, signaling the arrival of a new day—like it or not.

Thanksgiving, Olivia recalled. The official start of the holiday season.

She groaned and yanked the covers up over her head.

Ginger let out an impatient little yip.

“I know,” Olivia replied from under two quilts and a flannel sheet worn to a delectable, hard-to-leave softness. It was so warm under those covers, so cozy. Would that she could stay right there until sometime after the Second Coming. “I know you need to go outside.”

Ginger yipped again, more insistently this time.

Bleary-eyed, Olivia rolled onto her side, tossed back the covers and sat up. She’d slept in gray sweats and heavy socks—less than glamorous attire, for sure, but toasty and loose.

After hitting the stop button on the clock so it wouldn’t start up again in five minutes, she stumbled out of the bedroom and down the hall toward the small kitchen at the back of the house. Passing the thermostat, she cranked it up a few degrees. As she groped her way past the coffeemaker, she jabbed blindly at yet another button to start the pot she’d set up the night before. At the door she shoved her feet into an old pair of ugly galoshes and shrugged into a heavy jacket of red-and-black-plaid wool—Big John’s chore coat.

It still smelled faintly of his budget aftershave and pipe tobacco.

The weather stripping stuck when she tried to open the back door, and she muttered a four-letter word as she tugged at the knob. The instant there was a crack to pass through, Ginger shot out of that kitchen like a clown dog from a circus cannon. She banged open the screen door beyond, too, without slowing down for the enclosed porch.

“Ginger!” Olivia yelled, startled, before taking one rueful glance back at the coffeemaker. It shook and gurgled like a miniature rocket trying to lift off the counter, and it would take at least ten minutes to produce enough java to get Olivia herself off the launch pad. She needed to buy a new one—item number seventy-two on her domestic to-do list. The timer had given out weeks ago, and the handle on the carafe was loose.

And where the hell was the dog headed? Ginger never ran.

Olivia shook the last clinging vestiges of sleep out of her head and tromped through the porch and down the outside steps, taking care not to slip on the ice and either land on her tailbone or take a flyer into the snowbank beside the walk.

“Ginger!” she called a second time as the dog streaked halfway down the driveway, shinnied under the rail fence between Olivia’s place and Tanner’s and bounded out into the snowy field.

Goose-stepping it to the fence, Olivia climbed onto the lowest rail and shaded her eyes from the bright, cold sun. What was Ginger chasing? Coyotes? Wolves? Either way, that was a fight an aging golden retriever couldn’t possibly win.

Olivia was about to scramble over the fence and run after the dog when she saw the palomino in the distance, and the man sitting tall in the saddle.

Tanner.

The horse moved at a smooth trot while Ginger cavorted alongside, flinging up snow, like a pup in a superchow commercial.

Olivia sighed, partly out of relief that Ginger wasn’t about to tangle with the resident wildlife and partly because Tanner was clearly headed her way.

She looked down at her rumpled sweats; they were clean, but the pants had worn threadbare at the knees and there was a big bleach stain on the front of the shirt. She pulled the front of Big John’s coat closed with one hand and ran the other through her uncombed hair.

Tanner’s grin flashed as white as the landscape around him when he rode up close to the fence. Despite the grin, he looked pale under his tan, and there was a hollow look in his eyes. The word haunted came to mind.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he drawled, tugging at the brim of his hat. “Just thought I’d mosey on over and say howdy.”

“How very Western of you,” Olivia replied with a reluctant chuckle.

Ginger, winded by the unscheduled run, was panting hard.

“What in the world got into you?” Olivia scolded the dog. “Don’t you ever do that again!”

Ginger crossed the fence line and slunk toward the house.

When Olivia turned back to Tanner, she caught him looking her over.

Wise guy.

“It would be mighty neighborly of you to offer a poor wayfaring cowboy a hot cup of coffee,” he said. He sat that horse as if he was part of it—a point in his favor. He might dress like a dandy, but he was no stranger to a saddle.

“Glad to oblige, mister,” Olivia joked, playing along. “Unless you insist on talking like a B-movie wrangler for much longer. That could get old.”

He laughed at that, rode to the rickety gate a few yards down the way, leaned to work the latch easily and joined Olivia on her side. Taking in the ramshackle shed and detached garage, he swung down out of the saddle to walk beside her, leading Shiloh by a slack rein.

“Looks to me like you don’t have a whole lot of room to talk about the state of my barn,” he said. His eyes were twinkling now under the brim of his hat, though he still looked wan.

It was harder going for Olivia—her legs were shorter, the galoshes didn’t fit so they stuck at every step, and the snow came to her shins. “I rent this place,” she said, feeling defensive. “The owner lives out of state and doesn’t like to spend a nickel on repairs if he can help it. In fact, he’s been threatening to sell it for years.”

“Ah,” Tanner said with a sage nod. “Are you just passing through Stone Creek, Doc? I had the impression you were a lifelong resident, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Except for college and veterinary school,” Olivia answered, “I’ve lived here all my life.” She looked around at the dismal rental property. “Well, not right here—”

“Hey,” Tanner said, quietly gruff. “I was kidding.”

She nodded, embarrassed because she’d been caught caring what he thought, and led the way through the yard toward the back door.

Tanner left Shiloh loosely tethered to the hand rail next to the porch steps.

Inside the kitchen, Olivia fed a remorseful Ginger, washed her hands at the sink and got two mugs down out of the cupboard. The coffeemaker was just flailing in for a landing, mission accomplished.

“Excuse me for a second, will you?” Olivia asked after filling mugs for herself and Tanner and giving him his. She slipped into the bedroom, closed the door, put down her coffee cup and quickly switched out the chore coat and her sweats for her best pair of jeans and the blue sweater Ashley had knitted for her as a Christmas gift. She even went so far as to splash her face with water in the tiny bathroom, give her teeth a quick brushing and run a comb through her hair.

When she returned to the kitchen, Tanner was sitting in a chair at the table, looking as if he belonged there, and Ginger stood with her head resting on his thigh while he stroked her back.

Something sparked in Tanner’s weary eyes when he looked up—maybe amusement, maybe appreciation. Maybe something more complicated.

Olivia felt a wicked little thrill course through her system.

“Thanksgiving,” she said without planning to, almost sighing out the word.

“You don’t sound all that thankful,” Tanner observed.

“Oh, I am,” Olivia insisted, taking a sip from her mug.

“Me, too,” Tanner said. “Mostly.”

She bit her lower lip, stole a glance at the clock above the sink. It was early—two hours before she needed to check in at the clinic. So much for excusing herself to go to work.

“Mostly?” she echoed, keeping her distance.

“There are things I’d change about my life,” Tanner told her. “If I could.”

She drew nearer then, interested in spite of herself, and sat down, though she kept the width of the table between them. “What would you do differently?”

He sighed, and a bleak expression darkened his eyes. “I’d have kept the business smaller, for one thing,” he said. The briefest flicker of pain contorted his face. “Not gone international. How about you?”

“I’d have spent more time with my grandfather,” she replied after giving the question some thought. “I guess I figured he was going to be around forever.”

“That was his coat you were wearing before.”

“How did you guess that?”

“My grandmother had one just like it. I think they must have sold those at every farm supply store in America, back in the day.”

Olivia relaxed a little. “How’s Butterpie?”

Tanner sighed, met Olivia’s gaze. Held it. “She’s not eating,” he said.

“I was afraid of that,” Olivia murmured, distracted.

“I thought my grandmother was going to live forever, too,” Tanner told her.

It took Olivia a moment to catch up. “She’s gone, then?”

Tanner nodded. “Died on her seventy-eighth birthday, hoeing the vegetable garden. Just the way she’d have wanted to go—quick, and doing something she loved to do. Your grandfather?”

“Heart attack,” Olivia said, running her palms along the thighs of her jeans. Why were they suddenly moist?

Tanner was silent for what seemed like a long time, though it was an easy silence. Then he finished his coffee and stood. “Guess I’d better not keep you,” he said, crossing the room to set his cup in the sink.