A Cowboy Christmas
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Ann Major
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14
Prologue
The Dairy Princess, which served better gossip than hamburgers, never lacked for a crowd. That particular Christmas in Kinney, Texas, the hottest flavor on the DP menu was once again the latest development in the star-crossed romance of the local rich girl and the town’s favorite bad boy cowboy.
“Did you hear that Leander Knight won Heddy Kinney in a game of five-card stud?”
An expectant hush fell over the DP.
“No!”
“And her supposed to marry that millionaire—”
“Well, she up and ran off to Mexico with Pepper—on her wedding night!” “Pepper” was the townsfolk’s nickname for Leander.
As one-horse towns go in south Texas, Kinney was pretty dull. It had a rusty water tower that could be seen from the highway. It had a grocery store, a hardware store, a gas station, the Dairy Princess and two very disreputable bars.
Other than the fabled comings and goings at the big Kinney Ranch, there never was much to talk about. So, when Jim Bob Janovich phoned his mother on Christmas Eve from the French Quarter to say that Pepper had shown up drunk in the bar of the hotel where Heddy and her famous groom were about to take up honeymooning and had taunted the bridegroom into a card game while the bride was upstairs sprucing herself up for the big night, everybody got mighty interested. Especially after Jim Bob said Pepper had won her.
“Pepper always was a wild one.”
“He was wild about Heddy, if that’s what you mean,” Flora Janovich said.
“You’d better worry about Old Man Kinney putting a bullet right between Pepper’s pretty black eyes.”
“No chance of that,” someone else said. “I hear Heddy and Pepper hightailed it to Mexico.”
The telephone lines buzzed. When the Kinneys returned New Year’s Eve in a snit without Heddy, neither Barret, Heddy’s father, who was usually a jovial fellow, but who’d been behaving mighty erratically of late, nor Tia, her imperious grandmother, would talk to a soul or show their faces in town.
So, without so much as a morsel of fresh gossip to chew on that week, all a curious body could do was rehash the old story that they all knew by heart about how Leander Knight and Heddy Kinney had got started in the first place.
They’d been born the same hour, under that same too-bright star, on that same Christmas Eve in Kinney, but nobody would have ever thought of matching them up then. For the golden-haired girl’s birth had been looked forward to by her proud family, who were members of the local ranching aristocracy. Her birth was feted and written about even though her father, Barret Kinney, would have preferred a son.
The little boy, born less than a minute after she, was found half-dead in a garbage Dumpster by a wino who’d crawled inside to get warm that Christmas Day. Black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy-skinned, the infant was swaddled in a plastic garbage sack and rushed to the same hospital and laid beside her crib in the brightly lit, warm nursery. He began to kick the instant he was fed, his vulgar energy upstaging the pale little princess beside him and amazing and disgusting her family when they came to bestow their gifts of admiration upon her. But an old nurse, who loved both babies, would rock them together after all Heddy’s fancy visitors had gone, and she told everybody who would listen that when Heddy was taken to her mother to nurse, the boy fretted till she was brought back and placed beside him in his crib.
Heddy was dressed in imported lace and taken home to a huge mansion decked in holly and ivy. The house sat on a low hill on her father’s legendary ranch. There she was adored and petted, especially by her grandmother. Her family wanted only the best for her. Beneath their tall Christmas tree in the center of the ballroom, her gifts that had not been opened were piled high for her. Two hundred guests attended her christening the next month.
He was bounced from one shabby foster home to the next.
When her mother died the next year, and the little girl grew into a tomboy who preferred to run wild and free with her father and the vaqueros, Tia, her strong-willed grandmother, began to worry. For Tia, whose husband had recently died in a New Orleans hospital of a mysterious illness, had grand plans for her baby princess.
From their two separate worlds, these children came. They were ten years old when they met at school and were instantly attracted. He had suffered shame and loneliness and grown tough. Having lost her own mother, Heddy was drawn to Pepper, who had lost both parents.
He had just been adopted by the Widow Janovich, and it was his first day at school. Since she was a Kinney, she was the most admired child in their school. The bullies had knocked him and Jim Bob to the ground and were chanting at him, “Bastard! We don’t like you! We won’t play with you! Not ever!”
Heddy pushed through them. Two boys lay on the ground hemmed in by the hostile throng—the bigger of the pair, Jim Bob Janovich was red-faced and blubbering. But the center of attention was the slim boy lying in the dirt who hadn’t given up the fight. When Tom Yates tackled him from behind, he fought back, rolling on the pavement, clawing and kicking like a wildcat until five more jumped him.
“Stop it!” she screamed.
The bullies scowled at her, but she scowled harder. Until finally, with blood trickling from their mouths, they slunk several feet away, leaving the stranger lying on the ground alone.
When she knelt closer he glared up at her, his insolent black eyes burning with a fierce animal excitement that sickened her. He was skinny, yet he was the most magnificently fearsome boy she had ever seen. For a long moment she studied his torn clothes, his dark sullen face that was somehow so incredibly attractive despite its bruises and cuts and that terrifying wildness that was so much a part of him.
She spun on her silent classmates. “You leave him alone. I’ll play with him.”
As if by magic his tormentors vanished. Not that the new boy showed any gratitude as she led him to a water fountain where she cleaned him up and told him he wouldn’t look nearly as awful if he’d smile and say a thank-you.
“Who made you queen of the world?”
“I did,” Heddy replied with a pert smile. “And my grandmother, Tia.”
“So—does everybody always do what you say?”
“Mostly.”
“Not me. I don’t do what anybody says.”
Her chin went up a notch. “We’ll see.”
He picked up a rock and threw it defiantly so that it arced high over the seesaws into the piercing blue sky.
She picked up one and threw it, and it sailed just as far. “I can catch fireflies, dozens of them, with my bare hands and not hurt them. I’ve got a pet snake and a pony I can ride better than any of the vaqueros. I can—”
“Who cares? What are you trying to prove with all your braggin’, girl?”
“Same thing you are—that I’m just like everybody else.”
“But you’re not,” he said. “You’re different—like me. I’m all alone. I don’t need anybody. And you’re queen of the town.”
“But I feel all alone, too.”
She had looked into his dark eyes and been startled to find her own soul mirrored there.
When Heddy found out they shared the same birthday, she said, “That means our destiny’s the same, too.”
“That’s silly.”
They had become instant best friends, a relationship her snobbish family considered undesirable. Especially when he grew more handsome as time passed and more acceptable to the other kids in their class. Especially when, except for the occasional lapses of youthful wildness, his career through school was amazingly honorable. When he wasn’t studying or playing football, he worked to help Mrs. Janovich. He had a way with words and was always winning writing contests.
Every Christmas Eve, Leander always found Heddy and said, “Happy birthday. Merry Christmas.” Then they exchanged presents.
Not that their relationship was perfectly harmonious. She was outgoing while he was a loner. She was rich and headstrong and spoiled. He was sometimes defensive about his low position in the town compared to hers. Occasionally he got angry at her or her family for their imagined or real high-handed treatment of him.
But they were always so miserable when they quarreled that they made up quickly.
Eight years later, when Heddy’s family sent her away to college and she made her debut in New Orleans, the Kinneys thought they had separated her forever from the cowboy who didn’t have a cent to call his own and probably never would. Though they never said so, they thought he lacked everything that mattered most to them in a prospective son-in-law—breeding, moneyed connections and land. The fact that Heddy and he were soul mates and star siblings did not matter in the Kinneys’ wealthy world of privilege. Nor did they wish to gamble on his innate talent and intelligence. They weren’t impressed when he sold his very first short stories to good magazines. They believed writers were a starving, unpredictable breed and that their Heddy would be happier and safer with her own kind.
They thought she would realize that rich girls didn’t marry poor boys like Leander Knight.
But in that they misjudged her....
* * *
Intermittent bursts of lightning lit the shimmering wet black windowpanes. Standing by the window, with her gleaming hair and violet blue eyes, Heddy was a vision of golden loveliness in her gossamer nightgown.
It was her wedding night, and her bridegroom had abandoned her. Most girls would have been devastated; Heddy Kinney was drinking champagne and enjoying the thunderstorm.
The New Orleans newspapers had called it the wedding of the century. They had described the groom’s thirty-room mansion, his twenty-two polo ponies, with immense enthusiasm. Her ranch had been photographed with equal attention. She and Bronier DuChamp had stood arm in arm, staring at each other adoringly in countless pictures...at countless parties. As if being beautiful and rich and having lots of great stuff really meant they were the perfect couple.
Ha!
What would everybody think if they found out the lonely bride was getting herself thoroughly tipsy?
Some wedding night!
But so far it was better than she’d expected.
The champagne caught the light from the lamps as Heddy swiveled the crystal stem of her glass between her fingers. Her creamy skin glowed.
She wondered if Bro was ever coming.
Worse, she wondered if she even cared.
Heddy’s travel alarm clock ticked steadily as she tipped her champagne flute to her lips. She’d been listening to the little black clock for over an hour—ever since Bro had misinterpreted her dread for shyness and offered to go down to the bar and have a drink with his best man while she got ready.
She went to the champagne bucket, pulled the bottle from the ice and poured herself another glassful. She wondered suddenly if he loved her, or if he was as scared as she was, if her marriage was doomed, as all her relationships had been since she’d left Kinney...and...Leander.
Outside in the Quarter, the rain drummed fiercely.
Last night had been beautiful and balmy.
Last night she had walked in the silvery moonlight with another man. She frowned slightly. She couldn’t let herself think of that.
Instead she concentrated on the storm and the ticking clock. When she went to the window to watch the rain again, the night chill seeping through the windows made her shiver.
She heard the elevator bell, then a man’s stumbling steps in the hall, his mumbled curses when he dropped something on the carpet—maybe his key.
When he fell against the door and then turned his key in the lock, she tensed.
Pretend you love him. Maybe someday you will.
She’d played the pretend game all this past year. Ever since that awful night when Jim Bob had called and told her that Leander had left her for a new girl.
No matter that Leander had shown up last night at the rehearsal dinner, swearing there had never been another girl, that he had only asked Jim Bob to call to make it easier for her to forget him and live the high life her family wanted her to.
He’d been passionately sweet, coaxing her out for a moonlit walk where she’d melted into his arms. One kiss, and he’d begged her to run away with him, swearing he’d been so lonely without her he’d nearly died. One kiss, and she might have gone if Bronier and Tia hadn’t found her, and she’d recovered her senses.
The door swung open as Heddy took another gulp of champagne. It tasted warm and flat, and she felt a vague nausea as she smoothed her hair.
Instead of racing toward the door, she set her glass down.
Which was a mistake.
Because it was Leander, not Bro, who staggered inside. Leander, looking rougher and more unkempt, wilder and angrier and yet somehow more unsure of himself than she’d ever seen him. Leander, whose hot, insolent black eyes sent a paralyzing shaft of fear darting through her.
Other than her hand going to her throat, she remained motionless. Which gave him the precious seconds he needed to bolt the door and jam the key deep inside his tight jeans.
Dressed in the same black T-shirt and scuffed boots as last night, his expression was icily dangerous. There were smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, and black stubble shadowing his jaw.
His shoulders were wide; his biceps bulged. His wavy, coal black hair was uncombed and falling across his dark brow.
Her skin was bathed and scented; her long hair had been brushed a hundred times; her nails polished pearl pink. She was as meticulously groomed as he was uncouth.
“Howdy, Sugar,” he drawled in a measured voice that told her he’d had too much to drink. He took off his hat, bowed in a mockingly respectful gesture and pitched it toward the nearest gilt chair. It sailed across the antique sofa and landed on a plump pillow of her magnificent bed.
“Oops.” He grinned at her and stumbled forward. “And happy birthday, and Merry Christmas and all that rot—”
Their old greeting. And yet it wasn’t.
He held out two wrapped boxes.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, aware suddenly that at the mere sight of him, angry and liquored-up though he was, her body had caught dangerously on fire.
When his devil black eyes went over her and lit with a fire of their own, she realized that her negligee and peignoir were so transparent she might as well be nude.
“This is my wedding night,” she whispered, grabbing a blanket to cover herself.
“Was your wedding night, Sugar.” His slurred, sexy voice was ice. “Don’t remind me.”
“You have no right.”
He tossed his presents toward a low table and fanned four crumpled playing cards in her face proudly. “I won you, Sugar. Not fair and square. First time I ever cheated.” He flipped the cards into the air. “Check out the winning hand!”
Not knowing what he was talking about, she stared as four cards, a pair of two’s and a pair of three’s, fell onto the carpet. “What did you do to Bro? Why isn’t he here?”
“Your precious bridegroom can’t hold his liquor. He’s not much of a card player, either. He drank himself into a stupor after he lost you to such a lousy hand. I left him in the bar sprawled on the floor, holding a pair of jacks.”
When Leander grinned cockily, she swayed toward him. “You bastard...”
“Now, go easy, Sugar.” His gentle purr was savage now. “You know how I prefer orphan or adopted or some politically correct piece of garbage like disadvantaged by birth.“
When she lunged at him, he staggered backward against the wall. He grinned as he caught her wrists and hauled her into his arms. Then he glimpsed her wedding rings, and his smile died.
The circlets of platinum suddenly felt as cold as ice burning her finger. His narrow, hooded eyes pierced her soul. He held her firmly, yet he was careful not to hurt her.
Close up, his face was lean and hard, his carved features possessing a dangerous beauty that left her breathless. Close up he reeked of cheap liquor and sweat. But she didn’t care.
“I wanted to put you out of my mind forever, Sugar. I hated always being told I wasn’t good enough.”
“I—I never—”
“Not you, baby. But everybody else in town thought you were grand and I was dirt. Especially Tia.” His expression darkened. “I tried to forget you. I tried again last night after you left me for Bro. Then I watched you together.”
His roughly callused hands were entangled in her golden hair, jerking her head back. “You looked so unhappy in his arms. I kept thinking how you lit up when you first saw me last night. How maybe your know-it-all family didn’t know what was best for you after all. I went to a bar and damn near drank myself to death, but, drunk or sober, all I saw was your face. I couldn’t live with the thought of you being unhappy.”
Her pulses were beating heavily as he lowered his mouth to hers. “So, Sugar, is it really over between us?”
“Yes.”
Then why was her voice so raspy and soft? Why couldn’t she breathe? Why was her body tense with expectation because his mouth was so near?
“Or do you still have the hots for me?”
“Are you crazy? You smell like a brewery!”
“Sorry about that, Sugar. No toothbrush. Guess I’ll have to borrow yours—” He dragged her toward the bathroom.
She should have slapped him or tried to run. But her body burned, and her heart ached.
He was spraying water everywhere when she turned the faucet off and took her toothbrush from him.
He turned back to her. She was tense and still. When he saw the hunger in her eyes, his voice softened. “I love you, Sugar.”
Those four velvet words resonated in her soul.
She didn’t move as his mouth met hers. His hands slid over her, molding her slender curves to his hard flesh.
“I’ve always loved you,” he said as the warmth of his body engulfed hers. “I always will.”
Then her heart began to beat violently.
She didn’t know whether he was taking her to heaven or to hell—but she didn’t care. She wanted his mouth on her lips again, his mouth all over her body.
Slowly he kissed her, a long, soft, undemanding kiss. But it seemed to her that the world shook and that he was the only solid thing she could cling to. And she knew that if his single drunken kiss could ignite such blazing need, her grand marriage to Bronier was a travesty.
When Leander picked her up to carry her to the bed, her arms wound eagerly around his neck. Her family, especially Tia, would do everything in their power to destroy them. But she didn’t care. Tomorrow she would go down on her knees and beg Bro’s forgiveness when she told him she couldn’t be his wife because no matter how she had tried to pretend otherwise, she had always belonged to Leander.
Slowly she took off her engagement ring and her wedding band and laid them on the nightstand.
“Merry Christmas,” she said as she’d said so many times during their childhood when they’d secretly exchanged forbidden presents. “Happy birthday.” Her throat tightened. “I’m sorry I don’t have presents for you.”
There was an enigmatic darkness to his eyes. “Oh, but you do.” He slid her peignoir from her shoulders and cupped her breasts. “You’re about to give me the best presents I ever had.”
“How do you know? You haven’t unwrapped them yet.”
“Ah, Heddy,” she heard him say right before he pulled her under him. “You were always so sweet to me when we were kids. You could be a royal pain, too. But nobody was ever as sweet.”
She fumbled urgently with his shirt, pushing it over his head, needing to feel his bare skin under her hands. He did not resist when she eagerly splayed her fingers through the crisp, black hair that matted his chest and then ran her hands downward, exploring the virile muscled contours of his body.
He felt so good. So perfect. With every passing moment, she grew hotter for him. She wished he would hurry, that his fingers and mouth would touch her more intimately. That he would take her fast and hard. And then make love to her again very slowly.
He smiled at her, laughing softly, pulling away a little, now that he knew she was as eager as he.
He began ripping at the snaps of his jeans, sliding them down, hopping on one foot, then the other to get out of them as he backed away from the bed.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To take a shower. To brush my teeth.”
“No—”
“Sugar, I slept in a storm sewer last night with three homeless guys that didn’t smell too good.”
She lay in bed, feeling lonely and restless while he showered.
He returned almost instantly, his black hair wet and shining as he lay down beside her. His minty-tasting mouth sought her lips, his tongue sliding inside.
“The first time I saw you, it was as if I already knew you,” he said a long time later. “As if I’d lived somewhere in some other time or planet with you. As if you had always been a part of me and always would be.”
She ran a fingertip down the length of his nose, liking the way he shuddered even from her light touch. “I felt the same way. But my family—”
He slid his hand under the straps of her nightgown. “What can they do, if we love each other?”
He pushed her nightgown lower and kissed each nipple. Her gown was only halfway off when she began arching her body against his and moaning his name. Sensing her need, he didn’t bother to undress her. Ripping the sheets back, he lifted her gown above her thighs, searching out the hot damp sweetness between her legs. When she felt his hand there, she inhaled sharply. Then he was lowering his body to hers, and she was urging him inside her, her arms gripping him fiercely. When he thrust forward, ripples of pleasure convulsed through every part of her.
His heart pounded like thunder.
It had been too long for them both.
He moved once, and they exploded.
“Sorry, Sugar,” he murmured, burying his face against her cheek.
She wrapped her arms around him, clinging to him, drawing him closer as he began to make love to her again.
She kissed his damp brow, ran her hand through his wet hair. He was everything. She loved him, and she was sure that her family, even Tia, would love him too once they realized what he meant to her.
* * *
Two weeks later, after her marriage had been annulled and she’d legally married Leander in Mexico, they went home to Kinney.
Shortly after that the trouble started.
* * *
Within a year, Leander was one of the richest and most famous horror novelists in the world.
But his marriage was over.
And he had an unsavory, if undeserved reputation.
It was a widely known fact that Barret Kinney thought Leander Knight had married his daughter for their ranch and that Barret hated him and berated him constantly. Thus, when Barret was found shot in the head after a quarrel with Leander, Leander was suspected of murder. Then Tia suffered a heart attack shortly afterward, and Leander was blamed for that, too.
Not that there had been a shred of evidence against Leander.
Not that he was ever formally charged.
Not that Tia, who hated him, or Heddy, who loved him, ever said a word in public against him.
The gossips tried him, found him guilty, and damned him.
But it was Heddy’s coldness that drove him out of town.
Alone in New York, Leander wrote his first novel, Dead Ringer—to exonerate himself.
Leander hated the sordid publicity surrounding his book, but it made him one of the hottest names in the publishing world. The journalistic slant was that he was a creepy killer who murdered his famous, wealthy father-in-law and wrote a novel about it to get rich.
He hadn’t written the book to bring more scandal on the Kinney family. Nor to drive Heddy and his baby daughter even further away. Nor to make everybody in Kinney resent him even more. But that was what happened.
His fame soon grew to international proportions. Every time a new Leander Knight title hit the stands, the media rehashed the sordid story, magnifying the horror of Barret’s mysterious death and implicating Leander as a gold digger and a murderer, as an opportunist who’d reaped fame and fortune after marrying into and then destroying one of the most famous families in Texas. Leander’s early novels were reissued, especially the first. Nobody noticed that in his first novel, the hero had been framed.
The more successful Leander became, the more scary the media made him out to be. In the beginning Leander granted interviews in a naive attempt to clear his name. But his words were always twisted against him. The photographs of him that appeared in magazines were darkened to make him look more macabre.
In the end he grew so fed up with all the lies that he moved to a remote island in southern Alaska. And because it was impossible to hound anyone if he chose to flee to an uninhabitable winter wilderness where unpaved roads and ports were cut off by glaciers and snowstorms and mountains, where the few existing airstrips were fogged in by low clouds for weeks at a time, he escaped them.
For eight years Leander lived simply in Alaska and produced two megabestsellers a year, each outselling the one before. Each adding to his notoriety and his unsavory reputation as a killer-writer. Each widening the chasm between himself and his wife and daughter. He was at the top of bestseller lists all over the world. He reached the fantasy level of success that all writers dream about.
But he despised his fame. Because it had cost him his family and his reputation.
As for the writing—it was simply something he had to do. He would have done it for nothing. But it was a lonely occupation, and he was a lonely man. He was afraid to drink because liquor loosened his inner control and made his loneliness dangerously unbearable. Halfway through a bottle something inside him would break and he would feel a desperate, long-buried yearning for Texas and the golden-haired woman he had loved and lost. For Christina, their daughter, who had grown up without him.
He would have exchanged all his millions for an honorable life with the two of them.
