Holiday in Stone Creek: A Stone Creek Christmas. Linda Miller Lael
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from Sophie was harder on him than it was on her. He was the one who always had to suck it up and be strong.
Olivia shrugged, patted the pony affectionately on the neck and set aside the brush. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she told the animal. “In the meantime, think good thoughts and talk to Shiloh if you get too lonesome.”
Tanner racked his brain, trying to remember if he’d told Olivia the gelding’s name. He was sure it hadn’t come up in their brief but tempestuous acquaintance. “How did you…?”
“He told me,” Olivia said, approaching the stall door and waiting for him to step out of her way, just like before.
“Are you seriously telling me I’ve got Mr. Ed in my barn?” he asked, moving aside so she could pass.
She crossed to Shiloh’s stall, reached up to stroke his nose when he nuzzled her and gave a companionable nicker. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, with so much smug certainty that Tanner found himself wanting to prove a whole bunch of things he’d never felt the need to prove before.
“Because I compartmentalize?” Tanner gibed.
“Something like that,” Olivia answered blithely. She turned from Shiloh, snapped her fingers to attract the dog’s attention and started for the barn door.
“See you tomorrow, if you’re here when I come by to look in on Butterpie.”
Utterly confounded, Tanner stood in the doorway watching as Olivia lowered a ramp at the back of the Suburban for Ginger, waited for the dog to trot up it, and shut the doors.
Moments later she was driving off, tooting a merry “so long” on the horn.
THATNIGHTHEDREAMED of Kat.
She was alive again, standing in the barn at Butterpie’s stall gate, watching as the pony nibbled hay at its feeder. Tall and slender, with long dark hair, Kat turned to him and smiled a welcome.
He hated these dreams for being dreams, not reality. At the same time he couldn’t bring himself to wake up, to leave her.
The settings were always different—their first house, their quarters in the American compound in some sandy, dangerous foreign place, even supermarket aisles and gas stations. He’d be standing at the pump, filling the vehicle de jour, and look up to see Kat with a hose in her hand, gassing up that old junker she’d been driving when they met.
He stood at a little distance from her, there in the barn aisle, well aware that after a few words, a few minutes at most, she’d vanish. And it would be like losing her all over again.
She smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes, in the set of her full mouth. “Hello, Tanner,” she said very softly.
He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Somehow he knew that this visit was very different from all the ones that had gone before.
She came to stand in front of him, soft as summer in her white cotton sundress, and touched his arm as she looked up into his face.
“It’s time for me to move on,” she told him.
No.
The word swelled up inside him, but he couldn’t say it.
And Kat vanished.
Chapter Four
OLIVIAAWAKENED on the following Thursday morning feeling as though she hadn’t slept at all the night before, with Ginger’s cold muzzle pressed into her neck and the alarm clock buzzing insistently. She stirred, opened her eyes, slapped down the snooze button, with a muttered “Shut up!”
Iridescent frost embossed the window glass in intricate fans and swirls, turning it opaque, but the light got through anyway, signaling the arrival of a new day—like it or not.
Thanksgiving, Olivia recalled. The official start of the holiday season.
She groaned and yanked the covers up over her head.
Ginger let out an impatient little yip.
“I know,” Olivia replied from under two quilts and a flannel sheet worn to a delectable, hard-to-leave softness. It was so warm under those covers, so cozy. Would that she could stay right there until sometime after the Second Coming. “I know you need to go outside.”
Ginger yipped again, more insistently this time.
Bleary-eyed, Olivia rolled onto her side, tossed back the covers and sat up. She’d slept in gray sweats and heavy socks—less than glamorous attire, for sure, but toasty and loose.
After hitting the stop button on the clock so it wouldn’t start up again in five minutes, she stumbled out of the bedroom and down the hall toward the small kitchen at the back of the house. Passing the thermostat, she cranked it up a few degrees. As she groped her way past the coffeemaker, she jabbed blindly at yet another button to start the pot she’d set up the night before. At the door she shoved her feet into an old pair of ugly galoshes and shrugged into a heavy jacket of red-and-black-plaid wool—Big John’s chore coat.
It still smelled faintly of his budget aftershave and pipe tobacco.
The weather stripping stuck when she tried to open the back door, and she muttered a four-letter word as she tugged at the knob. The instant there was a crack to pass through, Ginger shot out of that kitchen like a clown dog from a circus cannon. She banged open the screen door beyond, too, without slowing down for the enclosed porch.
“Ginger!” Olivia yelled, startled, before taking one rueful glance back at the coffeemaker. It shook and gurgled like a miniature rocket trying to lift off the counter, and it would take at least ten minutes to produce enough java to get Olivia herself off the launch pad. She needed to buy a new one—item number seventy-two on her domestic to-do list. The timer had given out weeks ago, and the handle on the carafe was loose.
And where the hell was the dog headed? Ginger never ran.
Olivia shook the last clinging vestiges of sleep out of her head and tromped through the porch and down the outside steps, taking care not to slip on the ice and either land on her tailbone or take a flyer into the snowbank beside the walk.
“Ginger!” she called a second time as the dog streaked halfway down the driveway, shinnied under the rail fence between Olivia’s place and Tanner’s and bounded out into the snowy field.
Goose-stepping it to the fence, Olivia climbed onto the lowest rail and shaded her eyes from the bright, cold sun. What was Ginger chasing? Coyotes? Wolves? Either way, that was a fight an aging golden retriever couldn’t possibly win.
Olivia was about to scramble over the fence and run after the dog when she saw the palomino in the distance, and the man sitting tall in the saddle.
Tanner.
The horse moved at a smooth trot while Ginger cavorted alongside, flinging up snow, like a pup in a superchow commercial.
Olivia sighed, partly out of relief that Ginger wasn’t about to tangle with the resident wildlife and partly because Tanner was clearly headed her way.
She looked down at her rumpled sweats; they were clean, but the pants had worn threadbare at the knees and there was a big bleach stain on the front of the shirt. She pulled the front of Big John’s coat closed with one hand and ran the other through her uncombed hair.
Tanner’s grin flashed as white as the landscape around him when he rode up close to the fence. Despite the grin, he looked pale under his tan, and there was a hollow look in his eyes. The word haunted came to mind.
“Mornin’, ma’am,” he drawled, tugging at the brim of his hat. “Just thought I’d mosey on over and say howdy.”
“How very Western of you,” Olivia replied with a reluctant chuckle.
Ginger, winded by the unscheduled run, was panting hard.