Page 2 of Christmas Music
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When I got into the kitchen, the room bright and sunny and made even brighter by the fact that at some point, my mother had insisted on painting the whole place a shocking, buttery yellow, I found my dad actually sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by the wreathes my mom had decided to build for Christmas.
He looked up at me, his face hollower and thinner than it had been but his eyes just as bright and intelligent, and lifted one overgrown eyebrow. “Out early this morning, aren’t you?”
“Hard to sleep in when I hear the pounding of hooves right outside my window,” I replied, giving him what I knew was a cocky smile.
A smile designed to show him that everything was fine. Everything was great.Nothing to see here, Dad. I’ve got it all under control.
Even though I never for one second thought I would be running this place, and therefore never bothered to learn what you did so I could prepare myself.
He returned the grin, thank God, including just enough cockiness to make me think he must be feeling really good this morning. “Let me guess. The heifer with the star on her forehead.”
I dropped into the chair across from him and reached for the coffee, which I desperately needed. “She’s already apologized to me. For what it’s worth.”
“Ain’t worth much,” he muttered, taking a sip of his own coffee.
I watched him, noticing the shake in his hand and the shadows under his eyes, and then looked up and found my mother watching me, her face twice as serious as my dad’s and almost as pale.
She lifted a brow of her own, and I knew what that meant, too.
She’d taken over the books once my dad got really sick, and was the one who’d called me home from Nashville. She was the one who’d told me that she needed my help running the ranch because she couldn’t do it on her own. She was also the one who’d told me that we were on the verge of losing it, courtesy of my dad’s inability to work and the quickly mounting medical bills.
And if I was reading that eyebrow correctly, we were due for another conversation about how we were going to try to save it. It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have at all, much less this early in the morning, and before I’d even had breakfast.
“You know what?” I said suddenly, getting to my feet so quickly that the chair I’d been sitting on clattered to the floor. “I think I’m going to go into town and hassle Dev. I have some things that need fixing around here and he’s the best set of hands around. Guess I’ll take him out to breakfast before I ask him. Butter him up.”
I exchanged a grin with my dad, who had always treated my best friend like he was another son, and then ducked out of the kitchen.
I didn’t look at my mom on the way out. I already knew what she’d think of me running away from another conversation with her. I didn’t need to see her face to know I’d have hell to pay when I got back home.
Right now, I just wasn’t sure I could handle any more responsibility. And I certainly couldn’t handle watching my mother trying to be strong in the face of my father’s sickness.
The woman had never met a battle she couldn’t win, and she had the scars to prove it. But this time, I was afraid she’d run into something she couldn’t beat.
CHAPTER2
Olivia
Iwas officially in hell.
Well, not really. Honestly, I was just back in Arberry. And there was some sort of joke there, something clever and tongue-in-cheek, but I was currently way, way too stuck in my own head to figure out what it might be.
I looked down Main Street, my guts churning and my heart doing a crazy sort of squeezing dance while I stared at the town where I grew up.
The place hadn’t changed at all in the past five years.
This right here was the main artery of town, and the place where all the most important shops and offices were. The bar, the coffee shop, the grocery store. The place that sold musical instruments and doubled up as a library. I knew this street like the back of my hand, and better. I’d spent most of my life walking these very sidewalks with my friends.
Even now, having been gone for five years, I could see familiar faces in the shops and on the street. People I knew, and people I’d grown up with. People I’d shared midnight parties in the fields with—and people who’d come out with flashlights and angry faces, telling us to get the hell home before they called our parents.
Being back here felt like I was slipping into an old pair of slippers. Christmas-flavored slippers, actually, as we were just a couple weeks out from Christmas and the town had evidently lost its ever-loving mind over the season.
Just like they did every year.
I smiled a bit at that, taking in the wreaths attached to every light pole and the miniature Christmas trees lining the sidewalk, and let myself breathe out a little bit. The electric wires above us were lined with garland—a fire hazard, for sure—and every single building had been decked out in Christmas lights and decorations. We didn’t have snow, not yet—and maybe not at all—but the fine mist along the ground could have passed for something like it, and the effect was...
A little bit like the North Pole. And if you asked any one of the residents, they would have told you that it was, in fact, the most Christmasy of Christmas villages around.
