Page 42 of Cowboy SEAL Christmas

“Sometimes. But you have to be willing to open yourself up to it, and my mom isn’t one for asking for help.”

“Gee, that doesn’t sound familiar.”

She glared at him as she tossed some napkins and plastic cups into the trash. “I had a lot of help in the early years.”

“Then what?”

“Then I wanted… Well, it felt necessary to do some things on my own. I finished school. Colin started school. I was an adult and I’d been through a lot, but it had all been with my parents. After Dex died, I moved into their house. I lived with them until Colin was five. Suddenly I was twenty-five and I’d only lived for little over a year without them. It seemed…important to stand on my own two feet.”

He didn’t say anything to that, so she glanced his way as she pulled tablecloths off the handful of tables in the corner. He’d taken off his suit jacket a while ago, since the heaters kept the barn suitably warm. Now he had his sleeves rolled up as he folded chairs and stacked them.

She watched him for a moment, because there was an effortless grace in the way he moved. There was a mesmerizing quality to the way his forearms flexed when he picked up a chair and relaxed when he moved for the next. And comparing and contrasting the arm without a scar and the one with a jagged one down to his wrist was damn near irresistible.

“Want me to flex a little? Give you a real show?” He angled his head to meet her gaze and grinned.

“I was looking at your scars,” she said as haughtily as she could manage with the heat stealing into her cheeks.

“That crash did quite the number on this canvas of human perfection, I have to say.”

She rolled her eyes and turned back to her work folding and stacking tablecloths. When she glanced over at him again, he was carefully rolling up the aisle runner. A big man, rough and tumble, in a suit, rolling up a pretty little scrap of fabric. And yet the way he crouched as he did the chore was somilitary.

She was reminded of their conversation last night. He didn’t just let anyone know why he’d joined the military, and she said she’d take the challenge to be a somebody. Well, here was her chance.

“Your father was military.”

He frowned and looked up at her. “Huh?”

“I’m trying to figure out what made you join. Following in your father’s footsteps is my first guess.”

He shook his head and finished rolling up the runner. “Only thing I know about my father’s footsteps is they were Dominican, and I inherited his double crown.” Gabe rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair.

“You joined to pay for college.”

He shrugged and placed the rolled-up runner across a line of chairs that didn’t fold. “Didn’t go.”

“You joined to getawayfrom your family.”

There was the slightest moment where he tensed and hesitated, and she knew if not exactly it, she was close. “You know, you should be mad at me.”

She blinked, trying to understand him atall. “Mad at you? Why?”

“Because if you weren’t a therapist, just a regular woman—”

“Iama regular woman,” she interrupted between clenched teeth.

“—you would’ve been mad I ditched you on the dance floor. And you’d make me pay for it. Instead, you’re trying to figure me out. You should be mad. You know, if you’re learning how to be Monica or whatever.”

Oh, shewasmad. Now. She tapped her chin, affecting her best “shrink” voice. “No father at home, but someone mentioned you had a big family. So, your mother must have remarried.”

“Because let me guarantee you, a woman not trying to play therapist would be pretty irritated—”

“And you didn’t get along with your stepfather?”

“—to the point where she would have taken off when I told her I didn’t need help cleaning.”

“If I had to guess, as both a mental health profession and a damn real woman, I’d say your mother had children with your stepfather and you felt left out.”

He stopped working then, and she didn’t see any of the fury she’d expected. No, it was like he gathered himself up intosoldiermode. So stoic and tense and menacing simply because he somehow changed the air around them, not because his expression was threatening.

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