A Thunder Canyon Christmas (2 page)

“Is that right? What did you play?”

“Clarinet,” she answered. “I'm really good at blowing things.”

He choked on his drink. It took her several beats of listening to him cough and splutter to figure out what she'd said and then she gasped. Her face flared—she wanted to sink through the floor. She was apparently a really cheap drunk. After three and a half margaritas, she excelled at unintentional double entendres.

“That's not what I meant,” she exclaimed. “I really did play the clarinet. Oh!”

He laughed roughly, wiping his mouth with a napkin he'd grabbed off the bar. “I'd love to see you…play the clarinet.”

Okay, she should really leave. Right now, before Jake Halloran got any ideas about checking out her embouchure.

Despite her discomfort, she laughed at her own joke but when she looked up, Lily Divine seemed to be undulating up there on the wall like a snake dancer. Elise blinked. Maybe she needed to switch to water for a while. Apparently the fourth margarita hadn't been her greatest idea.

“Hey, you wanna dance?” Jake suddenly asked. Either he was slurring his words or her ears weren't firing on all cylinders.

She considered his invitation, taking in the small dance floor that had been set up in front of the small stage where the band had now switched to a bluegrass
version of Jingle Bells. Only a handful of couples were out there: an older man and woman doing a complicated Western swing like they were trying out for some television dancing show, another pair who weren't really even dancing, just bear-hugging like they were joined at the navel, and a couple about her age, dancing with a painful awkwardness she instantly pegged as a first date, even through her bleary brain.

Ordinarily she loved to dance. But since she had probably spent enough time in the Thunder Canyon spotlight the last few weeks, she decided she didn't need to be the center of attention by dancing out there in front of everyone. Everyone being primarily Matt Cates.

“I'm not much of a dancer,” she lied. “Why don't we just talk? Get to know each other a little better?”

“Talking's nice.” Jake grinned and put his hand on her knee. Through the material of her favorite skinny jeans, his hand felt uncomfortably hot. “Gettin' to know each other better is even nicer.”

Drat Haley and her stupid rhinovirus.

She tried to subtly ease her knee away, wondering if she ought to ask Carl for a cup of coffee.

“Where are you from, Jake?” she asked a little desperately. “Originally, I mean.”

“Over Butte way. My daddy had to sell off our little ranch a few years ago so I've been on my own since then. What about you?”

“Um, I live in Billings most of the time. I'm only in town for the holidays. I think I said that already.”

“You did. And doesn't that work out just fine for me?”

She barely heard him. Out of the corner of her gaze,
she saw a woman in tight Wranglers and a chest-popping holiday sweater approach Matt's table and a moment later, he headed out to the dance floor with her. Elise refused to watch and shifted a little more so her would-be Romeo was blocking her from view.

He didn't seem to mind. “Hey, what do you say we get out of here? Take a little drive and see the Christmas lights?”

She might be tipsy, but she wasn't completely stupid. She wouldn't go with him, even if his breath
wasn't
strong enough to tarnish the frame on Lily's picture.

“I'd better not. I don't want to miss the music. That's the reason I'm here, after all.”

Just her luck, at just that moment, the lead singer stepped up to the mike. “We're going to take fifteen, folks. Meantime you can keep dancing to the jukebox.”

“What do you say? Want to at least walk outside and get some air?”

Air might be nice. Even cold air. The faster she worked the margaritas out of her system, the faster she could leave. Where she would go until the dinner party with Erin was over was a question she didn't want to consider yet.

Though she was leery about going anywhere with a man she had just met and didn't trust, how much trouble could she get into walking out into the snowy parking lot on a frigid Montana night? Anything had to be better than sitting here trying to avoid being seen.

“Sure. Let me grab my coat.”

The coat and hat racks at The Hitching Post lined
the hallway on the way to the restrooms. She decided to make a quick stop at the ladies' room first to check her lipstick and maybe splash a little water on her face to clear her head.

It helped a little, but not much. When she emerged a few moments later, she found Jake lurking in the hallway.

“I thought you might be having trouble finding your coat,” he murmured. For some reason, she thought that was hilarious. As if she was so stupid she couldn't recognize her own coat, for heaven's sake.

“Nope. I just stopped to fix my lipstick.”

“It looks real pretty.”

“Um, thanks.” Maybe going outside with him wasn't such a great idea. Actually, she was beginning to think walking through The Hitching Post doors tonight ranked right up there with her worst decisions ever. Second only to her ridiculous lapse in judgment in ever agreeing to date that cheating louse Jeremy Kaiser in college.

Jake cornered her just to the edge of the row of coats. “Bet that lipstick tastes as good as it looks,” he said in what he probably thought was a sexy growl. Instead, he sounded vaguely like a cat whose tail just had a close encounter with a sliding door.

He leaned in closer and she edged backward until her hands scraped the dingy wood paneling.

He dipped his head but she managed to shift her face away at the last minute. “Um, I think I changed my mind about going outside. Too cold. Let's go dance.”

“I reckon we can do a pretty good tango right here,” he murmured.

He tried again and she planted her palms on the chambray of his Western-cut dress shirt. “No, I really want to go dance,” she said and realized her voice sounded overloud in the still-empty hallway.

Where was everybody? Didn't anybody in the whole place need to use the bathroom, for Pete's sake?

They struggled a little there in the hallway and she started to feel the first little pinch of fear when she realized she wasn't making a lick of headway against those cowboy-tough muscles.

“Come on, darlin'. A little kiss won't hurt nobody.”

“I don't think so. I don't know you.”

His face hardened and she wondered why she ever thought he looked a little like Viggo. More like Ichabod Crane. “You sure knew me well enough to be all snuggly over at the bar,” he snarled.

“Hey,” she exclaimed when his hand slid behind her to hold her in place. She pushed at the pearl buttons on his shirt. “Let go.”

“Come on. Just a kiss. That's all.”

“No!” She wriggled and squirmed but was faced with the grim realization that her 110-pound, five-foot-four frame was no match for somebody who wrangled tons of Angus cattle for a living. “Let me go!”

“Looks to me like the lady's not interested, Halloran.”

The familiar steely voice managed to pierce both her sudden attack of nerves and her muzzy head.

She swallowed a curse. Matt. Her miserable night just needed this. Her face blazed and she knew she must be more red than a shiny glass Christmas ornament. Of
every single person out in the crowded bar, why did he have to be the next one who happened into the hallway to come to her rescue?

M
att stood a few feet away from them in the otherwise empty hallway, an almost bored look on his rugged features.

Jake Halloran had muscles, but he was no match for Matt, who helped run his family's construction business. He loomed over the other man, big and dark and dangerous.

“This ain't none of your concern, Cates,” the wrangler currently trying to wrangle
her
snarled. “You don't know what you're talkin' about, so just walk on by.”

“I don't think so.” Matt stepped forward, looking tough and dangerous and heartstoppingly gorgeous. Elise slammed her eyes shut.

“Hey, Elise.”

She opened them to find him watching her, a slight
smile playing around his mouth. She certainly wouldn't be wriggling and squirming like a lassoed calf if
that
mouth had been the one coming at her.

“Hi,” she whispered. She was never drinking again. Never drinking and certainly never talking to strange men in bars again.

“Let's let the lady decide, why don't we?” Matt said calmly. “Elise, you want me to walk on by and leave the both of you to whatever was going on here that you didn't particularly appear to be enjoying a minute ago?”

What kind of choice was that? She didn't want him here, but she certainly didn't want to be the star attraction in octopus cage fighting anymore.

“No,” she whispered, then cleared her throat when she heard that pitiful rasp. “No,” she repeated more firmly. “Don't go.”

“That sounded pretty clear-cut to me, Halloran. The lady isn't interested. Better luck next time.”

Matt reached around the cowboy to grab her arm and extricate her from yet another humiliating situation. With a tangled mixture of relief and trepidation, she reached to take his hand.

She wasn't sure exactly what happened next. One moment she was stuck to the cowboy's side, the next Matt had her elbow firmly in his grip and was leading her away.

“Come on, Elise. Let's get you something to eat.”

They took maybe three steps away from the situation when the wrangler grabbed her other arm and yanked
her back. Pain seared from her shoulder to her fingers and Elise gave an instinctive cry. Why in
Hades
hadn't she just put on her big-girl panties and stayed at the ranch to deal with Erin? Anything would be better than this. She did not want to be here right now, caught in a tug-of-war between two tough, dangerous men.

Something dark and hot flared in Matt's expression as he eyed the other man. “You're going to want to let go of her arm now,” he said in a low voice, all the more ominous for its calmness.

“I saw her first,” Jake muttered, just as if she were the last slice of apple pie in the bakery display case.

Elise managed to wrench her wrist out of his grasp and after a moment, Matt continued leading her back toward the bar, but apparently Jake didn't get the message.

“I saw her
first,
” he said more insistently and shoved his way in front of them to block their path.

A muscle flexed in Matt's firm jaw. He certainly didn't look like the kind of guy
she
would want to tangle with. “Come on, Halloran. Take it easy. The lady wasn't interested, but I'm sure there are plenty more back at the bar who will be.”

“Want this one,” he said, reaching for her arm again. This time Matt stopped him with a sharp block from his own arm. In the tussle for her appendage, Matt shoved the wrangler away. Halloran stumbled back, but came up swinging with a powerful right hook that connected hard with Matt's eye.

Elise gasped and jerked away from both men in time to evade Matt's defensive punch in return.

And that was it. Halloran leaped on him, yelling and swinging.

“Fight!” somebody yelled inside the bar, resulting in a mad rush of people into the narrow hallway. The only thing patrons of The Hitching Post liked better than a good band was a rousing brawl.

Matt's buddies at his booth joined in to pull the wrangler off. As soon as he was clear, he grabbed Elise and pushed out toward the nearest booth and out of harm's way, but apparently the cowboy had friends at The Hitching Post, too, and soon it was a free-for-all that spilled from the restroom hallway into the main room of the bar.

Everybody seemed to be having a grand old time until Carl took matters into his own hands.

“Knock it off, you idiots,” the bartender yelled out, working the pump action of an old Remington shotgun, just like he was out of some cheesy old Western like the kind her dad used to love to watch.

Another voice joined in. “What the hell is going on here? Who started this?”

About a dozen hands pointed toward Matt and Jake, roughly equally divided between the two, as Elise recognized Joe Morales, a Thunder Canyon sheriff's deputy, who didn't look happy to have his dinner interrupted when he was obviously off duty.

“Cates. Should have known you'd be involved,” he grumbled, his brushy salt-and-pepper mustache quivering. “What the hell happened?”

Since he seemed to be focusing on the two of them, the rest of the crowd seemed happy to slip away from any scrutiny and return to their drinks and their food. Elise really wanted to join them all and started easing away, but Matt pinned her into place beside him with a glare, as if this was all
her
fault.

“Sumbitch stole my girl.” A thin trail of blood spilled out of the corner of Jake Halloran's mouth and he wiped at it with a napkin.

The deputy frowned at Elise. “You his girl?”

She shook her head, grateful she was still sitting down in the booth when the room spun a little. “I just met him tonight.”

“You're Elise Clifton, aren't you? Grant's sister?”

Wouldn't her brother just love to hear about this little escapade? She couldn't wait to try explaining to Grant why she had let herself get cornered in an empty hallway by a drunk cowboy. “Yes.”

“Well, Ms. Clifton, the guy seems to think there was more to it than a little chatting at the bar.”

“He's wrong,” she said, then was appalled at the note of belligerence in her voice. Must be the margaritas. She normally was not a belligerent person. Just another reason she needed to swear off drinking for a long time.

“We were only talking, Deputy Morales,” she went on in what she hoped was a much more cooperative tone of voice. “I met him maybe half an hour ago. We talked about walking outside for some fresh air while the band was taking a break. I came back here to get my coat and he just…kissed me.”

She drew in a shaky breath, more mortified than she
ever remembered feeling in her life. Even more embarrassed than the time she had been bucked off by her horse in the junior rodeo for Thunder Canyon Days when she was eleven and Matt had been the first one to her side.

“I tried to tell him I wasn't interested but he didn't listen,” she said. “Then Matt came into the hallway and saw I was having a tough time convincing him to stop, so he stepped in to help me and Jake hit him.”

“How much have you had to drink, Ms. Clifton?”

She looked down at the speckled Formica tabletop then back up, drawing a breath and hoping she sounded more coherent than she felt. “Not so much that I don't know how to be perfectly clear when I'm saying no to a man, sir.”

“That what happened?” he asked Halloran. “Did she say no?”

“I heard her say no, Joe,” Matt said. “Loud and clear.”

“I don't believe I asked you,” the deputy growled. Elise suddenly remembered he had a younger sister who had once carried a very public torch for Matt back in Matt's younger, wilder days when bar fights probably weren't an uncommon occurrence.

“Did the girl say no?” he asked Jake again.

“Well, yeah. But you know how women can be.”

The deputy gave him a long, disgusted look, then turned back to Elise. “Do you want to press charges for assault?”

She gave him a horrified look. “No. Heavens no! It was just a misunderstanding.” Yes, the man had been
wrong to paw her, especially when she'd made it clear she didn't want him to. But she had been wrong to flirt with him back at the bar, to use him only so she could hide from Matt.

“What about you, Cates? You want to press charges?”

Matt shook his dark head. “I know how things can get out of hand in the heat of the moment.”

“Fine. All of you get out of here, then, so I can go back to my wife and my steak. Can you make sure she makes it back to Clifton's Pride okay?” he asked Matt.

Matt gave her a look she couldn't decipher, then nodded.

The moment the deputy ushered Jake over to the other Lazy D cowboys who had come to his rescue, Elise rushed back to the hallway, grabbed her red peacoat off the rack and twisted her scarf around her neck. She had to escape. What a nightmare. As if she needed more gossip about her flying through town.

She heard someone call her name but she didn't stop, only pushed through the front door out into the cold night.

The streets of Thunder Canyon glittered with brightly colored Christmas lights. They blinked at her from storefronts and the few houses she could see from here. A light snow drifted down, the flakes plump and soft. Away from the front door, she lifted her face for a moment to feel their light, wet kisses on her face.

She found a strange sort of comfort at the realization that she'd been seeing the same holiday decorations in Thunder Canyon since she was a girl. Her entire life
may have changed in the last few weeks, but some things remained constant.

“You're not thinking about driving in your condition, are you?”

She opened her eyes, somehow not very surprised to find Matt standing a few feet away, looking big and dark and dangerous in a shearling-lined ranch coat. His eye was beginning to swell and color up and he had a thin cut on his cheek she very much feared would leave a scar.

“Thinking about it,” she admitted.

“Sorry, El, but I can't let you do that. You heard what the deputy said. I need to take you home.”

“And how are you going to stop me?” she asked, with more of that unexpected belligerence.

He smiled suddenly and she blinked at the brilliance of it in the dark night. That must be why she was taken completely off guard when he reached for her purse. After a moment of fishing through the contents, he pulled her keys out, dangled them out for a moment, and then pocketed them neatly in his coat.

“I can give you a ride back to the ranch and find somebody later to take your car home. Face it, Elise, you're in no shape to drive.”

She couldn't go back to Clifton's Pride yet. Just the thought of walking inside the ranch house in her condition made her queasy.

She didn't need to see that same wary look in everyone's eyes she'd been dealing with since before Thanksgiving, as if she were somebody who had been given some kind of terminal diagnosis or something. Her
mother hugged her at the oddest moments and Grant and his wife, Stephanie, went out of their way to include her in conversations.

She especially didn't want to show up tipsy when Erin was there in all her perfection, the daughter they
should
have had.

“I don't want to go home yet,” she whispered, grimly aware the words sounded even more pathetic spoken aloud.

“No?”

“Not yet. I'll only be in the way. My…my mother and Grant have…well…guests for dinner.”

He gave her another of those long, considering looks and she could feel herself flush, certain he could guess what—or rather whom—she meant.

“Want to go back inside?”

She shook her head. “I don't think I need to see the inside of The Hitching Post for a while.”

Or ever again.

“Fair enough. Do you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere? I'm sure we can find somewhere still open.”

“Not really.”

He gave a half laugh. “Well, I'm running out of options. You'll freeze to death if you sit out here in the parking lot for another hour or two until your head clears.”

“I know.”

After another pause, he sighed. “My place is just a block or two away. If you want to, I can get cleaned up
and fix you something to eat and we can hang there until you think the coast is clear back at Clifton's Pride.”

She hated that he had to come to her rescue, just like when they were kids. She had been a clumsy kid and it seemed like every time she fell, he had been right there to help her back up, brush off the dirt, gather her books, whatever she needed.

From the time he had fought two schoolyard bullies bigger than he was—and won—he had been stepping in to protect her from the world.

She was twenty-six years old. Surely it was high time she found the gumption to fight her own battles. Still, the idea of somebody else taking care of her for a few minutes sounded heavenly.

“Don't you ever get tired of rescuing me?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he laughed and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His hand was warm in the cold December air and she wanted to lean into him, close her eyes and stay there forever.

“Come on. Let's get you out of the snow.”