Page 104 of The Holiday Gift

“Sing!” Maya commanded as the girls broke into “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

She laughed and picked the girl onto her lap, grateful for her small, warm weight and the distraction she provided from this very inconvenient attraction she didn’t know what to do about to a man who was sending her more mixed signals than a broken traffic light.

She was taken further off guard when Ben began to sing along with Maya and the girls in a very pleasing tenor. He even sang all the extra lines about lightbulbs and reindeers playing Monopoly.

She had to turn away, focusing instead on the homes they passed, their holiday lights glittering in the pale moonlight.

This wasn’t such a bad way to spend an evening, she decided. Even with the caroling, she was surrounded by family she loved, by beautiful scenery, by the serenity of a winter night. She was happy she had come, she realized with some shock.

The girls broke into “Silent Night” after that, changing up the lighthearted mood a little, and she hummed softly under her breath while Maya mangled the words but did her best to follow along. In the middle of the first “Sleep in heavenly peace” injunction, Ben leaned down once more.

“Why aren’t you singing?” His low voice tickled her ear and gave her chills underneath the layers of wool.

She shrugged, unable to answer him. She wasn’t sure she could tell him at all and she certainly couldn’t tell him on a jangly, noisy sleigh ride surrounded by family and Destry’s friends.

“Seriously,” he pressed, leaning away when the song ended and they could converse a little more easily. “Do you have some ideological or religious objection to Christmas songs I should know about?”

She shook her head. “No. I just...don’t sing.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Taft said. She must have spoken louder than she intended if her brother could overhear from the row of hay bales ahead of them.

“Caidy has a beautiful voice,” he went on. “She used to sing solos in the school and church choir. Once she even sang the national anthem by herself at a high school football game.”

Goodness. She barely remembered that. How did Taft? He had been a wildlands firefighter when she was in high school, traveling across the West with an elite smoke-jumper squad, but she now recalled he had been home visiting Laura and had come to hear her sing at that football game.

He was the only one of her brothers who had been able to make it. Ridge had still been feuding with their father and had been living on a ranch in Montana and Trace had been deployed in the Middle East.

She suddenly remembered how freaked she had been as she walked out to take the microphone and had seen the huge hometown crowd gathered there, just about everybody she knew. Despite all her hours of practice with her voice teacher and the choir director, panic had spurted through her and she completely forgot the opening words—until she looked up in the stands and saw her mother and father beaming at her and Taft and Laura giving her an encouraging wave. A steady calm had washed over her like water from the irrigation canals, washing away all the panic, and she had sung beautifully. Probably the best performance of her life.

Just a few months later, her parents were dead because of her and all the songs inside her had died with them.

“I don’t singanymore,” she said, hoping that would be the end of it. She didn’t want to answer the question. It was nobody’s business but her own—certainly not Ben Caldwell’s.

He gave her a long look. The wagon jolted over a rut in the road and his shoulder bumped hers. She could have eased far enough away that they wouldn’t touch but she didn’t. Instead, she rested her cheek on Maya’s hair, humming along with “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and gazing up at the few stars revealed through the wispy clouds as she waited for the ride to be over.

* * *

He sensed a story here.

Something was up with the Bowmans when it came to Christmas. He noticed that while Laura and the children were singing merrily away, Caidy’s brothers seemed as reluctant as she to join in. The police chief and fire chief would occasionally sing a few lines and Caidy hummed here and there, but none of them could be called enthusiastic participants in this little sing-along.

At random moments over the evening he had picked up a pensive, almost sad mood threading through their family.

He thought of that beautiful work of art in the dining room, the vibrant colors and the intense passion behind it, and then the way all the Bowmans shut down as if somebody had yanked a window screen closed when he had asked about the artist.

Their mother. What happened to her? And the father was obviously gone too. He was intensely curious but didn’t know how to ask.

The three-quarter moon peeked behind a cloud, and in the pale moonlight she was almost breathtakingly lovely, with those delicate features and that soft, very kissable mouth.

That kiss hadn’t been far from his mind all day, probably because he still didn’t quite understand what had happened. He wasn’t the kind of man to steal a kiss from a beautiful woman, especially not at the spur of the moment like that. But he hadn’t been able to resist her. She had looked so sweet and lovely there in her kitchen, worry for her ailing dog still a shadow in her eyes.

Holding her in his arms, he had desired her, of course, but had also been aware of something else tangled with the hunger, a completely unexpected tenderness. He sensed she used her prickly edges as a defense against the world, keeping away potential threats before they could get too close.

He remembered her cutting words to her brothers’ wives and that awkward moment when he had walked into the kitchen just in time to hear her call him arrogant and rude.

Why hadn’t he just slipped out of the kitchen again without any of the women suspecting he might have overheard? He should have. It would have been the polite thing to do, but some demon had prompted him to push her, to let her know he wasn’t about to be dismissed so easily.

She had apologized for it, said she hadn’t meant any of her words. So why had she said them?

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