Page 12 of Her Cowboy Prince Charming

He swung the hatchet decisively, and took a big chunk out of the tree. Then he swung it again, and again. And let it fall where it was.

“I’ll help carry it,” she said.

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m good.”

He picked it up by the center of the trunk and hefted it up over his shoulder, letting the tip drag as they walked back through the snowy splendor.

He could hear her feet crunching in the snow behind him, and it was just the damnedest thing that he was so physically aware of her. But it wasn’t new. Jessie had been a problem. And as far as he was concerned, relationships were too valuable for him to screw them up.

Levi had always felt like a brother to him. And he knew Levi had enough brothers, so his friend didn’t necessarily feel the same, but Damien didn’t have any. And growing up, a fatherless child in a very small town, Levi had been a buffer between him and a whole lot of judgment.

He could remember clearly when Levi’s parents had died. He’d been seventeen, Levi had been eighteen. He’d done his level best to be there for his friend.

But it was tough. And now... The empathy that he felt was pretty off the charts.

It had been such an abstract thing to him then. And he had thought of it more in terms of how Levi was supposed to care for all those siblings. But now he wondered how the hell his friend had weathered losing two people who mattered as much as his mother did, in such a short span of time. And taken all that responsibility on board on top of it.

They arrived back at the main house, and he left the Christmas tree propped up against the wall outside.

“Do you know where the decorations are?”

“Well, it might take a trip to the attic. But I think we can find them.”

“Lead the way.”

She did, up the stairs, and to a spot in a hallway with wood paneling that was a slightly different color than the rest of the ceiling. She reached up, but her fingertips fell immediately short of taking hold of anything.

“What was your plan, Jessie?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking grumpy.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Lucky you that you had me around.”

“Yeah. Well. It definitely makes a difference compared to the last couple of years.”

He stopped for a moment, then reached up and found the rope that was stuffed up in a hole in the ceiling, and tugged down the little trapdoor. He could see a wooden ladder folded up that was likely attached to the opening. He grabbed the end and yanked it down. And when he turned to look at her, she was staring.

“Do I need to answer that? I mean, answer for it? I had a business to build. I bought into a mature winery, because I didn’t want to sit around and wait for things to grow. Now I’m expanding, so I’m coming back.”

And he realized that she did want a deeper answer than that. That she wanted more. She was looking at him with irritated expectancy.

“That’s it,” he said.

“You know, it just always felt like you left because of what I did.”

“Oh, hell, Jessie. I did not uproot my entire life because you tried to kiss me.”

Her cheeks turned scarlet, and she scrambled up the ladder ahead of him. He followed behind, more slowly. And he realized it was a mistake. Because for all the attic was dim, inhospitable and possibly filled with mice, it was also a small enclosed space. And the memory of the softness of Jessie’s skin, and the tightness of her body, made the idea of mice just not such a big deal.

“I just felt... It felt like a pretty full-body rejection,” she said.

“Well, it was,” he said. “Because Levi means the world to me. And you know what he would think if...”

“I know. I guess I just thought that... I thought that we were something. Even if it wasn’t romantic. But you just left and you didn’t talk to me again.”

And there was something unspoken in the way her eyes shone in the darkness of the room.

It was like death. He knew it well. That wall of silence where a person had once been.

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