A Very Maverick Christmas - Rachel Lee

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the snow got deep, making sure the bales provided windbreaks against the worst weather, took a lot of time but not a lot of thought.

      So he was thinking about Julie and telling himself he was a fool. At least Dallas was over on a different section of their pastures, because he would have noticed his woolgathering and given him a hard time about it. Someplace deep inside, he did not want to be teased about his fascination with Julie Smith.

      That alone should probably have warned him, he thought almost grimly.

      What was it about the woman anyway? She seemed frightened of almost everything, poised on the edge of taking flight...and then she’d relax briefly, and he was sure he saw the real woman peek through. Maybe.

      Will the real Julie Smith stand up? he thought with sour amusement. She looked so innocent, so angelic with those big blue eyes, that he couldn’t believe there was anything bad about her. She’d been in town since June, and there sure hadn’t been any unkind whispers about her. If she were a bad sort, he’d have heard something by now.

      But even on the rumor mill it was almost as if she were invisible, which was kind of hard to do. People who knew her mentioned her briefly; she did things with the Newcomers Club; she’d made some good friends. Upstanding friends. If they thought there was anything wrong with her, they wouldn’t keep her in their circle.

      So whatever was going on had to be something other than that she was a fleeing felon.

      He almost laughed at that thought. Yeah, right.

      But the urge to protect her remained; the desire to know more about her goaded him. The coffee experience...well, he didn’t know for sure how to characterize that. Maybe she had just had something to do. After all, the meetup had been impromptu, and she could well have had some chores awaiting her.

      He slung another bale onto the wall he was building to give the cattle a windbreak, and hoped like hell that Winona Cobbs was wrong about a record-breaking blizzard on its way. The weather reports certainly showed no indication of any big front coming, even as far away as the Pacific Coast. So far it looked as if they were in for a relatively normal December.

      He didn’t want to ponder Winona, however. She could be intriguing at times, but mostly he thought of her as a character, part of the charm of the place. For some reason, that brought his thoughts around to another character, Homer Gilmore. The old coot was a little crazy, wandering around and telling everyone he was “The Ghost of Christmas Past.”

      Weird, but the weather was going to take a severe turn for the worse eventually, and he couldn’t imagine that Homer could get by relying on charity handouts. Lord only knew where the guy was sleeping. Grunting as he hefted another bale, Braden decided that something needed to be done for the man. Surely there was a warm hidey-hole somewhere in this town where they could shelter him for the winter. If it came to it, Braden would pay for it himself.

      It would be heartless to leave the man’s fate to the elements.

      His mother’s remark floated back to him, and he suddenly grinned. Parsival, huh? If she had any idea where his thoughts wandered on the subject of Julie Smith, she wouldn’t liken him to a “pure and perfect knight.” Hah!

      A laugh escaped him even as Julie rose in his mind’s eye. That wool sheath she had worn to the pageant had draped her gentle curves in a way that drew a man’s thoughts far from the angelic. Her face might bring to mind an angel, but the rest of her called to a man’s demons.

      He paused for some coffee from his thermos and wiped his brow. Cold or not, a man could work up a sweat doing this. And apart from sweat, there was the damn prickly hay. It had managed to get inside his jacket, and probably his shirt.

      He scratched a bit, letting his mind wander over Julie’s gentle curves. Closing his eyes as he sipped warming coffee, he imagined running his hands over them. Even through that wool sheath they’d be able to set him on fire. Hell, picturing them was enough to put his motor in high gear.

      Leaning back against the wall of hay, he gave himself up to the daydream for a few minutes. Julie in his arms. Her lips welcoming his kiss, her soft curves pressed against his hardness. He imagined pulling down the zipper on that dress, reaching inside to feel warm, silky skin.

      Damn it! His eyes popped open, and he stopped himself in midfantasy. Just that little bit, and he was ready to bust out of his jeans. Over a woman he hardly knew, one who seemed a damn sight too skittish to be interested in any kind of intimacy. In fact, she seemed to be avoiding it.

      Mentally, he stomped down on his male urges as if he was trying to put out a small grass fire. Cool it, he ordered himself.

      It might have been easier to call a halt if he hadn’t remembered that tomorrow was the Presents for Patriots event at the Community Church. Holy hell. He was going to see her again, and it suddenly struck him that she might spend the whole time avoiding him.

      He drained his coffee, wondering if he should skip the whole evening, then realizing he’d never hear the end of it if he let down the Traub family by failing to appear.

      Stuck, he thought. Shaking out his cup, he then screwed it back onto the thermos and hit those bales again with every bit of energy in him.

      Work could drive out demons, even if it couldn’t make him forget an angelic face.

      * * *

      Living a lie didn’t make Julie happy. And while she was mostly engaged in just surviving while she hunted for some evidence of her past, it didn’t make her happy to realize that she was surrounded by a web of deceit of her own making.

      Vanessa and Mallory called a couple of times, asking what she was up to, and the lie came too easily to her lips. “Writing,” she said.

      Because that was her cover story. She had to explain why she was hanging out here, why she didn’t have a job—mainly because she wasn’t at all sure she could hold much of a job successfully. She’d managed working in retail shops and one antiques store, but the strain had overwhelmed her. All the strangers, her uncertainty about so many basic things, the other employees who asked way too many questions about her...well, she had a little money now, thanks to selling that coin, and that meant she didn’t have to try to pull off the role of a shopgirl while she was here, a huge relief for her. In a town this size, her seeming standoffishness would eventually be noted and commented on.

      So she claimed to be working on a novel on the cheap laptop that sat on a wooden table. It explained how she survived, why she didn’t have an ordinary job and why she disappeared sometimes when she felt too troubled.

      But it was a lie. She hated the lies so much that she’d even taken a stab at writing something. The problem was, fiction seemed like a way to escape the really important things she needed to deal with, and nonfiction all came down to “My journey as a woman without a memory.” As if.

      It didn’t help that her life seemed like a plot ripped out of the pages of a novel, or that her writing was mostly a meandering diary.

      So she wasn’t being honest with her new friends, which didn’t make her feel one whit more comfortable. Maybe she should just blurt the truth, tell everyone that she’d been born and given a name only a short time ago. Yeah, they’d probably call her crazy and drop her like a hot potato. Who was going to believe that?

      So much had happened in the weeks after she returned to awareness of where she was, things that had made her feel that even professionals suspected she might be lying, and finally just made her feel like a bug under a microscope.

      Go forth and build a life sounded easy, but it was hard.

      Like coffee with Braden. It should have been so simple, but the evasions began to get to her. You couldn’t have a relationship based on lies, and the truth was too painful.

      Pulling on her outdoor gear, she decided to take a walk in the woods. She left her phone behind, even though she knew she should take it in case she had an accident, but she didn’t want another call reminding her about tomorrow, asking how her writing was going, and did she ever intend

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