Page 24 of The Holiday Gift

How could he ever go back to being friends with her, trying like hell to be respectful of the subtle distance she so carefully maintained between them? He couldn’t scrub these moments from his mind. Every time he looked at her now, he would remember this cold, star-filled night with the glittering holiday lights of Pine Gulch spread out below them and her warm, delicious mouth tangling with his.

Some small but powerful instinct for self-preservation clamored at him that maybe he better stop this while he still could, before all these years of pent-up desire burst through his control like irrigation water through a busted wheel line. He couldn’t completely lose his head here.

He drew in a sharp breath and eased away from her. Her features were a pale blur in the moonlight but her lips were swollen from his kiss, her eyes half-closed. Her hair was tousled from his hands and she looked completely luscious.

He nearly groaned aloud at the effort it took to slide away from her when his entire body was yelling at him to pull her closer.

She opened her eyes and gazed at him, pupils dilated and her ragged breathing just about the most erotic sound he’d ever heard.

He saw the instant awareness returned to her eyes. They widened with shock and something else, then color soaked her cheeks.

She untangled her hands from around his neck and eased away from him.

“It’s been a long time since I made out with a pretty girl in a pickup truck,” he said into the suddenly heavy silence. “I forgot how awkward it could be.”

She swallowed hard. “Right,” she said slowly. “It’s the pickup truck making things awkward.”

They both knew it was much more than that. It was the years of history between them and the weight of a friendship that was important to both of them.

“I so wish you hadn’t done that,” she said in a small voice.

Her words carved out another little slice of his heart.

“Which? Kissed you? Or stopped?”

She shifted farther away from him and turned her face to look out at the town below them.

Instead of answering him directly, she offered up what seemed to him like a completely random change of topic.

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

Of course he remembered. Most guys remembered the days that left them feeling as if they had been run over by a tractor.

“Yes. You and your sisters had only been here with Mary and Claude a day or two.”

“It was February 18, a week after our mother’s funeral. We had been in Idaho exactly forty-eight hours.”

She remembered it so exactly? He wasn’t sure what to think about that. He only remembered that he had been sent by his mother to drop off a meal for “Mary’s poor nieces.”

The whole community knew what had happened to her and her sisters—that their parents had been providing medical care in a poor jungle town in Colombia when the entire family had been kidnapped by rebels looking for a healthy ransom.

After all these years, he still didn’t know everything that had happened to her in that rebel camp. She didn’t talk about it and he didn’t ask. He did know her father had been shot and killed by rebels during a daring rescue mission orchestrated by US Navy SEALs, including a very young Rafe Santiago, now Hope’s husband.

He didn’t know much more now than he had that first time he met her. When the news broke a few months earlier and her family returned to the US, it had been big news in town. How could it be otherwise, given that her father had grown up in Pine Gulch and everyone knew the family’s connection to Claude and Mary?

Unfortunately, the family’s tragedy hadn’t ended with her father’s death. After their rescue, her mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that might have been treatable if she hadn’t been living in primitive conditions for years—and if she hadn’t spent the last month as a hostage in a rebel camp.

That had been Chase’s mother’s opinion, anyway. She had been on her way out of town to his own father’s cancer treatment but had told him to drop off a chicken rice casserole and a plate of brownies to the Nichols family.

He remembered being frustrated at the order. Why couldn’t she have dropped it off on her way out of town? Didn’t he have enough to do on the ranch, since he was basically running things single-handedly?

Claude had answered the door, with the phone held to his ear, and told him Mary was in the kitchen and to go on back. He had complied, not knowing the next few moments would change his life.

He vividly remembered that moment when he had seen Faith standing at the sink with Mary, peeling potatoes.

She had been slim and pretty and fragile, with huge green eyes, that sweet, soft mouth and short, choppy blond hair—which she later told him she had cut herself with a butter knife sharpened on a brick, because of lice in the rebel camp.

He also suspected it had been an effort to avoid unwanted attention from the rebels, though she had never told him that. He couldn’t imagine they couldn’t see past her choppy hair to the rare beauty beneath.

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