Santa's Twin Surprise
Автор
Melissa Senate
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Chapter One
Christmas used to be Asher Dawson’s favorite time of year. This Christmas he could barely look at a lit-up shop window without wanting to get back into bed, pull the blanket over his head and not emerge till January.
Everything about the season reminded him of Katie. The best friend he’d ever had.
Right now, as he stood in front of the decorated tree on the town green, he thought about the time he and Katie played trees in the kindergarten holiday play, both of them wrapped in red tinsel with silver stars they’d made out of construction paper on their heads. This morning, when he’d gone into town for breakfast, the multicolored lights on the windows had reminded him of when Katie, just eighteen and aged out of her group foster home, had moved into her first apartment, a studio above the laundromat, and he’d surprised her by stringing lights around her door. Even the music in the diner while he’d had his pancakes and coffee had his chest aching at the memory of Katie singing along to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on the radio in his red pickup—just days before he’d lost her.
And because it was unseasonably warm today for Wyoming in December, a beautiful fifty-two degrees, many of those who’d come out for the holiday event in the park were wearing only Christmas sweaters, flashing him back to his and Katie’s long-standing competition of finding the goofiest possible one to wear on Christmas Day. Last December, he’d found a bright red-and-green fuzzy one with a cartoon moose made up of working tiny lights, the small switch at the neck really uncomfortable but worth it. And he’d won, of course.
Then lost everything.
Katie Crosby was gone the day after Christmas.
As people milled around, trying to get closer to the tree, taking photos, singing along to the group of carolers by the Santa hut, he wondered why he thought he could do this. Be here. Be part of this.
“You all right, Ash?” his cousin Ford asked from beside him.
Nope, Asher thought. Not all right. But he was here, trying.
“Gotta be hard,” his other cousin Rex said, slinging an arm around his shoulder.
Hard didn’t begin to cover what this was.
“I’m okay,” he told them. He glanced around. “Good crowd today,” he added to get the subject off him. There must have been three hundred people gathered around the tree. Bear Ridge was sponsoring a Secret Santa Wish Request. Anyone could write down an anonymous Christmas wish and drop it in a box in the town hall, and the holiday committee had created little plastic pouches to hang on the tree containing those wishes. Today, residents would take a request and fulfill it, then bring the gift to the town hall where it would be matched with the recipient via a corresponding number. The Secret Santa event was hosted by the Bear Ridge Police Department, where Ford and Rex were both officers.
Where Katie had been a rookie. Ford had been her training partner, and Asher knew his cousin had taken the loss particularly hard.
The accident, on a snowy, curvy mountain road the day after Christmas last year, felt like yesterday and forever ago. Yesterday for how raw the grief felt. Forever for how much Asher missed the woman he’d known since he was five. The best friend who’d do anything for him—even agree to marry him, platonically, for a year so he could inherit his grandmother’s ranch.
In his grief and desperation over the loss of his beloved gram a year ago last November, he’d proposed the deal to Katie. She’d said she’d have to think about it, then five seconds later said yes, of course she’d help him out. His grandmother’s funeral, the reading of the will, asking Katie to give up a year of her life for him, the idea of getting married, even platonically, had all done a number on him. His family, friends, people he barely knew in town had been congratulating him on his engagement, no idea about the terms of the will, and suddenly the enormity of what he’d proposed—the idea of actually getting married and to Katie in some crazy arrangement—had sunk in. He’d had a few drinks at the bar where he and Katie liked to play darts, then texted her. He’d figured they’d talk it over a little more. Instead, they’d both had too much to drink.
And had ended up in bed.
Maybe after this the marriage will be real, Katie had whispered naked beside him before she’d fallen asleep. And he’d lain there, eyes wide-open, staring at the ceiling in a panic. She’d been very tipsy, of course, so maybe she hadn’t meant it.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said. Twenty minutes of ruminating and staring out the window at the inky night, and he’d been stone-cold sober. He’d quickly gotten dressed in a kind of panic, Katie suddenly sitting up and catching him trying to quietly slip out the door. It had been so awkward. The terrible conversation about how they were drunk, that it was a mistake, Katie nodding and turning away, pulling the blanket up to her chin. They’d avoided each other for a month until she’d come to the ranch on Christmas Eve, found him in the barn milking Minnie and told him they’d been friends for twenty-five years and could get through anything, even a drunken night of wild sex that he’d clearly regretted.
That part had stuck with him for the next couple of days. So she hadn’t regretted it? She’d meant what she’d said about the marriage being real? He hadn’t wanted to think about that, or what she’d said before she’d fallen asleep.
Instead, he’d hugged her hard and then they were back, best friends. There’d been a lot going on then, in both their lives, and they’d needed each other, as they’d always had. Wearing their ugly sweaters, they’d spent Christmas Eve together like always and Christmas Day with his Dawson cousins at their dude ranch since both his parents, long divorced and on their third and fourth marriages, had other plans, and his grandmother was gone. Neither mentioned the night they’d shared. Or the marriage proposal. But his cousins and their spouses kept asking about the marriage plans, and Asher had gone quieter and quieter as the evening wore on.
By the next morning, he’d known he couldn’t marry Katie, couldn’t ask her to give up her life for a year, couldn’t risk their friendship again. What had been clear to him was that she could see them truly together. Marriage—even on a platonic deal for a year—would get complicated. They were both complicated. So he’d taken back the proposal.
That conversation had been even worse than the awkward middle-of-the-night escape from her bedroom. But he’d never had a chance to explain better. That he loved her too much, cared about her too much to put her in such a position for an entire year of her life. She’d run out, driving off in the snow that had started coming down hard. It was the last time he’d seen her.
And now here he was a year later, the deadline looming to marry by this December 25 or lose the ranch and Asher having no intention of doing anything about it, as he hadn’t for the past year.
He had to sell his grandmother’s small ranch and dairy business whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. There was already a for-sale sign at the front gate and on the road where the turnoff was to the property. The sight of those signs always made his chest constrict. But he had no choice. He wasn’t going to marry anyone else. He’d messed up—bad—and that was that.
“I feel like someone is kicking me hard in the chest,” Asher found himself saying, shoving his hands in the pockets of his down jacket. “But maybe that’s a good thing. At least I’m feeling something.” No one, not even his cousins, had known about the stipulation in his grandmother’s will. That he’d proposed because of it. That’d he ended the engagement. He’d wanted to shout from the barn roof that he was a fraud.
This time Ford slung an arm around his shoulder. “We all miss her so much,” he said. “The town wish request was her idea. She’d be touched to know we were doing it. And that you’re a part of it even though it’s rough on you.”
That made him feel better. Asher had helped Ford and Rex hang the little wish holders around the tree like ornaments, and he’d actually agreed to take on a few shifts as the town Santa in the Christmas hut a few feet away because he and Katie had done it every year and he had to do it for her. She’d loved sitting on the big red velvet chair in her Santa costume with the line of children outside, listening to their wishes, telling them she knew they’d tried to be good and that counted.
Her face flashed into his mind. The pale brown eyes, brown chin-length hair, the freckles across her cheeks that she’d always complained about. God, he missed her. His grandmother had always asked when he and Katie were going to realize they were meant to be. He’d tried to explain that they were meant to be best friends but his gram would scowl and wave her arm around. More than once his grandmother had said he should look beyond the “plain-Jane tomboy,” as Katie had always referred to herself, to see what was really important. His grandmother had never warmed to any of his girlfriends, who maybe had been on the flashy side in heels and makeup. He’d always thought Katie was the loveliest person he’d ever known, inside and out, but he’d only ever seen her as his best friend. Which he’d always thought was a good thing, since no matter who’d flitted in and out of his life over the decades in long and short romances, she was the one constant in his life. With parents who’d had multiple marriages, stepparents in and out of his life, constancy meant something to Asher.
He’d almost messed up after they’d slept together. Then he had messed it up for good the night he’d told her the proposal was off the table.
“Asher, you should know something,” Ford said, his blue eyes intense. “The Bear Ridge PD got word this morning that the ex-con who’d threatened Katie, and who might have had something to do with her accident, was killed yesterday in an armed robbery two hours north of here.”
Asher dropped his head back. He didn’t want to think of that ex-con at all. Last Christmas Eve, Katie had been threatened by a thief she’d arrested and testified against; the woman had gotten off on a technicality and vowed to kill everyone Katie loved. Katie, still a rookie, had been terrified, but her colleagues had rallied and worked around the clock to find the woman who’d hid out too well, and Asher hadn’t left her side, the worry giving them something to focus on besides the strain between them. When Christmas had come and gone without incident, everyone had breathed a sigh of relief.
But that next night, faint tire marks on the snowy road had indicated the possibility that a second car had been the reason Katie’s car had struck the guardrail on a curve in the road and gone over the cliff. The ex-con? No one had known for sure and she’d seemed to disappear. Katie’s car had been found in the Bear Ridge River, her body never recovered.
And Asher had blamed himself. She shouldn’t have been alone until that woman was caught, but because of him, she’d driven off in the falling snow before he could stop her. He’d gone after her, to make sure she’d gotten home okay. But when he’d arrived at her apartment in town, her car hadn’t been there. It hadn’t been at the bar they liked. Or at any of her girlfriends’ places. So he’d called Ford and asked him to keep an eye out. It was Ford who’d noticed the smashed guardrail, shattered glass from a car windshield at the cliff below and Katie’s shoulder bag and red mittens found hours later half in the river, half tangled on a rock at the shoreline. However the accident had happened, because of the weather or because of the ex-con, Katie Crosby was lost to him.
Asher closed his eyes for a moment, trying to shake himself of the memories that had haunted him for nearly a year. He forced himself to watch a happy family—a set of parents and a little boy around six or seven years old—taking photos in front of the tree. The kid wore a Santa hat just like Asher, Ford and Rex with Bear Ridge, WY, embroidered on it. The hats were free at the town hall. It had taken a lot to shove the thing on his head before getting out of his SUV. The dad asked Asher if he’d take a family photo, and Asher said sure and took two just in case his focus was off, which of course it was these days.
As he handed back the phone, the little boy sidled next to him and raised his hand.
Asher smiled. “You have a question for me?”
The boy nodded. “Should I tell Santa what I want for Christmas if I already have a wish on the tree?”
“Sure,” Asher said. “This way you have double the chance of getting your Christmas wish.”
The smile that broke out on the boy’s face almost had Asher remembering how sweet and innocent Christmas had once seemed. The huge turkey dinner, basically a repeat of Thanksgiving, and cups of spiked egg nog and way too many gifts under the tree at his grandmother’s ranch, Katie coming every year since she didn’t have family of her own. Even when he was a kid his parents would go out of town with a new significant other or spouse for major holidays. His grandmother and Katie had been the only constants. Now they were both gone.
As Asher watched the boy race back to his parents, he noticed a woman with long blond hair pushing a double stroller, both babies in tiny Santa hats, up the path. She was struggling a bit since there was some snow lodged into the brick joints. For a moment he almost jogged over to push the stroller for her, but something about her reminded him so much of Katie that his legs had turned to lead. She wore big black sunglasses and had a pink wool hat pulled down low so he couldn’t see her face, but just something about the way she moved, plus her height and slender figure in the long gray puffy coat, was all Katie Crosby.
The ache spread in his chest at the thought of her, the reminder, and he closed his eyes again and lifted his face to the bright sun. He forced himself to turn away from the woman with the stroller, just like he forced himself not to look at the for-sale signs when he passed them on the way to pack up his grandmother’s ranch, which was taking him forever. And now he only had a few weeks.
“Well, I’d better get to the ranch,” Asher told his cousins. “I’ve got every room left to go through.”
“You need help, we’re there,” Ford said. “Wives and kids too.” His cousins all had small children and a few on the way. Asher loved the little rug rats, lifting them up and flying them overhead to huge giggles. But he wasn’t exactly Fun Cousin Ash these days.
“Toddlers are great at packing,” Rex said with a grin.
“I’ve got it, but thanks,” Asher said, stepping closer to the tree and lifting the flap of one of the plastic pouches. He pulled out the wish request and tucked it into his pocket. He’d read it later.
As he walked away he could feel his cousins watching him, worrying about him. But he was fine now. Or as fine as he could be. This was the new normal and he’d gotten used to it. Between packing up his grandmother’s house, taking care of her beloved goats and his job as a cowboy and wilderness guide at the Dawson Family Guest Ranch, he was busy and distracted.
But he’d never be the same guy he was. A guy who used to love Christmas.
Katie Crosby sat in her car in the town green parking lot, her heart pounding in her chest. She glanced in the rearview mirror at the backs of the twins’ rear-facing car seats, wishing she could see their sweet faces right now. Maybe she’d calm down.
She’d seen Asher Dawson in the crowd near the Christmas tree.
Her best friend.
Her former fiancé—however briefly.
The father of her twin baby sons.
The man who thought she was dead.
Asher had been standing with his cousins, her dear friends Ford and Rex Dawson, who’d been her colleagues at the Bear Ridge Police Department, Ford her partner, who’d been training her. When she’d spotted them as she’d been pushing the stroller up one of the little brick pathways, she’d gasped and had been afraid every head would turn to her to see what was wrong, but there was such a crowd by the tree, a group singing “Frosty the Snowman” that the gasp hadn’t carried.
She’d only risked stretching her legs and taking the twins out to see the tree because of the huge crowd, never imagining Asher would be there, that there’d been an event going on. With her long wavy blond wig, big sunglasses and hat pulled down low, she’d been unrecognizable. She still couldn’t believe she didn’t have to disguise herself anymore. But until she could talk to Asher, explain everything, she had to be careful.
A few times a day for a year, Katie had read the news, watched the news, scoured social media accounts for any word about the ex-con who’d threatened to kill everyone she loved, including her “hot fiancé,” Asher Dawson. Katie had been desperate to see that the woman had been arrested again for something, anything. But there was always nothing. And Katie had remained in hiding, hours south of Bear Ridge in a tiny remote town, wearing her wig, keeping her head down, never getting close to anyone, except maybe the dear grandmother next door who babysat the twins while Katie had worked as a waitress at the diner those first months.
But this morning, the news Katie had been waiting for an entire year, through her pregnancy and the first three months of her twins’ lives, had come. The ex-con who’d threatened her had been killed last night during a robbery.
It was over.
Katie, who’d been driving on that mountain road, in tears over Asher breaking their engagement—the irony adding to her broken heart—had seen the ex-con behind the wheel of a dark SUV suddenly behind her, hitting her so hard that she’d lost control of her little car and hit the guardrail before going over the side of the cliff.
My baby, she’d remembered thinking as her car hit the water and sank. Disoriented, panicked, Katie had managed to get out, the current carrying her so fast that she could barely keep her head above water.
She’d been in such despair that she might not have fought so hard to survive had she been alone in that water. But that morning, she’d discovered she was pregnant. She’d gone to Asher’s earlier that night to tell him, but before she could get out the words, he’d called off the engagement, the platonic marriage, and she’d been so beside herself that she’d fled. Forgetting for a moment that a vengeful lunatic was out there.
She’d finally found herself clinging to a rock a town over, across the county line, and something about it not being her jurisdiction made her feel a little better about her next move. Which was to get out of the water and find a place to hide out for the night and sleep, her head throbbing. In the morning, when she was still alive and found some soaking wet cash in her pocket, she’d taken a bus out of town and then another that would get her at least three hours away.
In her new town, she’d found word of her presumed death, that her car had been located in the river, her purse and mittens in the rocky shoreline. The ex-con would be satisfied—and those Katie loved would be safe. And Katie would wait. Surely a woman that twisted would be in jail soon enough and Katie could come home, explain herself.
It had taken until this morning.
Now she had to hope like hell that everyone would understand—and forgive her.
Particularly Asher.
But what if he’d married someone else and was now happily a husband, living at his grandmother’s ranch? Surely he’d married so he wouldn’t lose the the place. His wife could be pregnant. Was Katie supposed to burst into his life a year later with the shocking news that not only was she alive but that Asher was the father of twin three-month-old boys?
She closed her eyes for a moment. She’d already made her plan before leaving Thornberry, the tiny town she’d been hiding out in the past year. She would drive over to the goat ranch and park in the stand of trees that would hide her small car from view, keeping herself down low. And she would watch, see if there was a woman around with a gold ring on her hand. She’d look as hard as she could at Asher’s face to see if he was happy. And she’d know.
Then she’d decide. If she was staying and telling him the truth—all of it. Or if she should just stay hidden. Dead.
That was wrong, though. Terribly wrong.
More wrong than ruining the happiness he might have found this past year.
She couldn’t keep the truth from him. Or his children.
That precious man she’d seen standing near the holiday tree, a santa hat over his burnished brown hair, the intense blue eyes, the black leather jacket and the red-and-green scarf she’d knitted him two Christmases ago, was Dylan and Declan’s father. The two men beside him, such good, compassionate, dedicated men, were relatives—and Katie had none herself. She was going to deny her sons their family?
If Asher is happily married, and you come knocking on his door, you’ll just be complicating his life—not ruining it. She’d always been just his best friend—except for one night when they’d been much more—and he’d never thought of her otherwise. Her return and the babies would be a shock, but then things would settle down. They’d make it work.
She’s go on acting like she hadn’t been in love with Asher Dawson from the moment she’d met him in kindergarten, a feeling that had never abated. And her babies would have their father. Their uncles and cousins too since there were a slew of Dawsons here in Bear Ridge. They might even have a very nice stepmother, since she knew Asher wouldn’t marry just anyone for the inheritance.
She’d looked for a ring on his finger at the tree, but he’d been wearing gloves.
Now, ducked low in her car, she watched Asher head for the parking lot, far enough from where she was parked. She waited until another vehicle pulled behind him on the way out, then slid behind that car. If Asher made a left, he’d be heading for the Dawson Family Guest Ranch where he’d worked as a cowboy and wilderness guide, likely still did. If he made a right, he was going to his grandmother’s small ranch, Dawson’s Sweet Dairy, where he’d long been the foreman.
He made a right.
She followed at a slow distance since she knew the way by heart.
Fifteen minutes later, she got to the turnoff by a big weeping willow they’d climbed and hidden in as kids. But what was that big sign stuck into the ground?
For Sale.
What?
Why would—
She gasped for the second time that morning. If the estate was selling the ranch, it was because Asher hadn’t gotten married to fulfill the terms of his grandmother’s will—and didn’t plan to in the next three weeks by the Christmas deadline. He was letting the ranch go? This place he’d loved since he was born? That didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t he married someone in the year she’d been gone?
At least there wasn’t a wife to contend with. Less complicated.
But she still had to tell the only man she’d ever loved that the past year had been a necessary lie. That she wasn’t dead, after all.
And that he had twin baby boys.
