The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby (15 page)

She straddled his waist and quickly stripped his shirt off his body then tasted every
inch of his skin from the waist up. His belt wouldn’t pull from the loops when she
got the buckle open, so she left it hanging and unzipped his jeans. He was erect and
ready when she slipped her hand inside.

“Commando?” she asked.

“It’s a hell of a lot more comfortable. Now my turn again. It’s been a long, long
time, Natalie. I’d like to play a lot longer, honey, but I’m already about to explode,”
he groaned.

“Me too on the exploding issue,” she whispered softly. “And it’s been a long time
for me too. I was too wiped out to even remember much about the last time.”

He shifted enough to finish undressing her but not so much that she had to remove
her hand. He tossed her jeans to one side and brought her underpants down an inch
at a time, caressing and tasting as he did. He kissed her toes and then worked his
way back up. By the time he got to her lips, she had wrapped her long legs around
his waist and their tongues were doing a mating dance.

“First time might not last long,” he warned her.

“I can count to ten,” she panted.

“What does that mean?”

“I bet the tenth time lasts a long, long time.” It came out of her mouth a word at
a time between more hungry, demanding kisses.

He slid into her with a long hard thrust. She groaned and worked with him, rocking
at the right time to bring them both the most pleasure. He took her to breathtaking
heights half a dozen times and then backed off before the thrusts finally became shorter
and faster.

“God, that feels so good,” she said.

“I know,” he panted.

“I’m going to fall off this cliff and die,” she moaned.

“Ready?” he panted.

Lord, the man even drawled when he was having sex. She managed to nod, but she didn’t
have the breath to say another word.

He slipped his hands under her bottom and with a dozen fast and furious thrusts, he
brought her right up to the biggest climax she’d ever known before he said something
that sounded like her name and collapsed on top of her.

“Holy hell!” The words came out in a deep throaty grown when he could breathe again.

“Mmmm!” She tightened her legs but there were no words to describe the weightlessness
that she felt. She didn’t want him to leave. Never, not in any experience, had she
felt such passion, and she didn’t want it to ever end.

“That was… wow!” she finally said.

“It’s because it’s been so long,” he said.

“No, it was awesome. I’ve never…” she panted.

“Never what?” He toyed with an errant strand of hair that had fallen across one eye.

“Never ever felt like my body and soul separated and I was floating.” She inhaled
deeply and straightened her legs. He rolled to one side and gathered her tightly in
his arms. She was reminded of a scene on a television show where the couple fell back
on the pillows, stared at the ceiling, and panted. The viewer knew what had gone on
before that big moment even if they hadn’t seen it. Until that night she’d figured
those times really only existed in scripts for actresses and actors.

She shivered.

He wrapped the side of the comforter around them and kissed her on the forehead. “Well,
sweet cheeks, it might take me a few minutes to build up to a second round after that.”

“Who needs ten when one is perfect?” she mumbled sleepily.

Having sex with a man that much taller was a brand-new experience. She could bury
her face into his neck instead of looking him right in the eye.

“Lucas, this isn’t going to make it all awkward between us, is it?”

He propped up on an elbow and studied her face by the light of the moon, drifting
through the mini-blind slats on the window across the room. “Why would you ask that?”

“It did between me and Drew. Crazy thing is we were both so drunk that we weren’t
even sure what had happened.”

“No, it’s not going to be awkward. We didn’t take a vow to be just friends forever
and after what we just had, wild horses or hellfire couldn’t force a vow like that
out of me.” He chuckled.

He plopped back down and she settled back into the curve of his muscular body. The
flickering colors of the afterglow dimmed as she shut her eyes and fell asleep.

Natalie dressed for church in a long denim skirt, bright blue sweater, and boots.
She made a pan of quick cinnamon rolls from sweet biscuit dough that morning since
she only had to cook for two. They were almost ready to take out of the oven when
a blast of winter wind blew Lucas in the back door.

“Better bundle up good before we go this morning… wow! You look gorgeous, and is that
cinnamon rolls? You didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said.

“It’s no trouble. About last night,” she said.

She’d never been one to sit on the fence or worry about something for days. Like an
old Angus bull set loose in a fancy China shop, she dealt with problems head-on.

He hung his coat and hat on a rack and raised an eyebrow. “What about last night?
I thought I was pretty awesome considering that I haven’t had sex in almost a year.”

“I don’t want it to make us awkward,” she said.

Lucas poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with it. “I missed you this
morning. I thought you were cuddled up to my back, but when I turned over it was the
pillow. If it was going to be weird between us, I wouldn’t have wanted you to still
be there in bed with me.”

“Joshua woke up at two o’clock for his bottle,” she explained.

“I figured as much. You could have come back to bed afterward. You’ve got that monitor
thing,” he said.

She set the pan of cinnamon rolls on the table and sat down across from him. “I started
to but I thought I might be pushing my luck.”

“I thought guys got lucky.” A big sexy grin split Lucas’s face, and there was laughter
in his eyes.

“You know what I mean. We’ve been such good friends and…”

“Like I told you last night, I’m not Drew. I liked him. He was my friend and I miss
him. But I’m not just your friend, Natalie. Haven’t been in a long time. Now pass
those cinnamon rolls. My mouth is watering,” he said.

Joshua’s swing made a clicking noise. He looked from one to the other, as if trying
to decide who to grace with his smile that morning.

Lucas changed the subject as he shifted three rolls onto his plate. “Joshua woke up
in a good mood.”

Natalie appreciated that more than he’d ever realize, but she had to know where she
stood. “What am I at this point, Lucas? Housekeeper, cook, friend, lover?”

Lucas pushed back his chair and rounded the table. He put a hand on each of her shoulders
and leaned in for a kiss. He tasted like hot coffee and sweet, sweet cinnamon rolls.

When he pulled back, he said, “I want more than a friendship with you, Natalie.”

“Okay, I can live with that,” she said.

He kissed her again and ran a hand down her arm. Her hormones started humming and
begging for more.

“Lucas, Joshua is…”

He put a finger over her lips before she could finish. “I don’t think he minds if
we share a kiss.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” He sat down on his side of the table and finished off his
cinnamon rolls. “You should have told me about him, Natalie. He’s a good kid and I
like him a lot.”

“I wanted to meet you so bad. Your visits were all that kept me going most days right
after Drew died. And then when we started talking on the phone on weekends and things
were going from friendship to something more, I really wanted to tell you. But I was
afraid you’d tell me to stay away from you. So I came and then Hazel fell and why
would she make me promise to stay here anyway?”

He reached across the table and covered her hands with his. “I talked to you every
morning before I went to work. I talked to Hazel and Dad and whoever else was in the
house every evening before I went to sleep. Guess I told them all about you, so they
knew how much you meant to me. Didn’t you tell your folks about me?”

“Hell, no!” she said so loud that Joshua jumped.

His dark eyebrows shot so high that they looked like they’d touch the ceiling. “You
didn’t?”

“Not until last week.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Fallout.”

“Which means? Are you ashamed of me?” He frowned.

She shook her head emphatically. “Hell, no! My folks and my brothers don’t believe
in the Internet dating thing. They’d have a fit if they knew I’d met you that way
and was coming halfway across Texas to meet you. They’d think that you should come
to Silverton if you wanted to meet me and we should date the proper way. And that
means without the Internet or late-night phone calls. And then there was the Drew
thing, and we’d talked it to death, but I was afraid that you had just stepped into
his shoes and what if that’s all we had. Oh, hell, Lucas, we don’t have time to pick
this thing to the bare bones right now.”

The grin returned. “Maybe this evening we’ll take a ride over to Sherman. Joshua is
probably getting stir-crazy. And we’ll pick it apart then. What do you think?”

“That sounds fine. We’ve got half an hour to get to the church. And you still have
to get dressed,” she answered.

He downed the last of his coffee. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes. You can go ahead
and get Joshua into his seat and I’ll carry him out to the truck. Oh, and you really
do look beautiful this morning. Maybe not as gorgeous as you were last night with
nothing but a sheet pulled up over you, but beautiful all the same.”

Natalie blushed from her toenails to her eyebrows. When Joshua had begun to fuss in
the middle of the night, she’d been so deep into sleep that she hadn’t even heard
the monitor until he set up a real howl. She’d scuttled out of Lucas’s bedroom without
a stitch of clothing on her body. When she stepped out into the hallway, she glanced
at Jack’s bedroom door and was glad that he’d moved out into his own house.

She’d jerked on a nightshirt that barely came to her knees and fresh underpants before
she did anything. Joshua was already mad as hell. Thirty more seconds wasn’t going
to make bit of difference. She carried him to the kitchen and prepared a bottle. There’d
been no grins or cooing when she put the nipple in his mouth. He’d latched onto it
like it was the last thing he’d ever get to eat and glared at her.

“You are like your father when you are hungry, little boy. He was an old bear too
when he was hungry, but when you get older, you won’t get away with throwing fits.”
She smiled as she settled him into his car seat that morning. “Hopefully, you’ve gotten
the temper all out of you and you’ll be good this morning. We’re going to church,
and I don’t want to see one of those temper fits. You’ve had your bottle and even
a bit of rice cereal, so you shouldn’t want to eat again until noon. Church should
be over by then.” She talked as she fastened all the straps.

Lucas’s boots on the hardwood floor announced that he was on the way. “Make sure he’s
bundled up good. It’s sixteen degrees out there and spittin’ sleet again. We don’t
usually get this much bad weather until February in these parts.”

“We don’t either, out in the Panhandle.”

She didn’t want to think about snow or even Christmas. She wanted to stare at Lucas
all morning instead of going to church. He was so sexy in those black jeans and light
tan Western-cut shirt. Not as sexy as he’d been all wrapped around her in the bed
the night before, but still enough that she talked too much to cover up the effect
he had on her.

“Dad talked about that storm. He got prepared for it to hit the ranch, but it weakened
and bypassed us on the north. Oklahoma got it worse than we did. Where’s your coat?”

She nodded toward a chair in the living room where she’d draped her coat earlier.
The place still looked like it had when the party ended the night before. The folks
who owned the tables and chairs would be back that afternoon to pick them up and the
crew would return the furniture to its rightful place. She glanced at the big open
space in the middle of the living room floor and remembered the dances. Then she looked
at the Nativity scene. From dancing to the honky tonk moon song to going to church
to hear the Christmas story, all in less than ten hours. Talk about cultural shock!

His fingertips brushing against her arms as he helped her with her coat sure enough
made her wish she was still dancing beneath the honky tonk moon rather than going
to church.

Savoy, like Silverton, might be small, but by golly, they celebrated Christmas. Windows
glittered with lights from Christmas trees and yards were filled with decorations.
The sleet and snow lent the perfect touch to the season.

Well, that and the mistletoe
, Natalie thought. Could that stuff really have magic in it? Ever since that first
kiss under the mistletoe, he’d been different and it had been very, very good. But
still, Natalie kept her guard up. Sometimes when the magic show was over, all that
remained was fairy dust and a puff of wind.

Lucas parked on the west side of the church. “We all dreamed about having a white
Christmas when I was a kid. This is real Christmas weather even if it is a bitch to
work in.”

“I remember some holidays that we played football out in the yard without a coat,
but we always dreamed about white Christmases too. I think it was because we thought
Santa Claus could fly better in the snow,” she said.

“I deserve this kind of Christmas after the last one. We had a sandstorm that was
the mother of them all. I swear we even limited our intake of fluids so we wouldn’t
have to go outside to the bathrooms,” he said.

She unbuckled her seat belt and pulled the collar of her coat up around her ears.
“Well, you’d best keep your mouth shut about that today.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Why’s that?”

“You reckon these little elderly folks like this kind of messy weather, or the mailman
or the folks who are running around the country fixing all the power lines ice breaks
down? If they find out that God just froze up this part of Texas for you, they’ll
haul your sexy ass out into the road and stone you to death,” she said.

He bailed out of the truck, jogged around the front side, and opened the door for
her. “Oh, you think my ass is sexy, do you?”

Everything about him was sexy—from his grin to his fingertips. And the way he looked
at her made her feel sexy.

“You going to answer me?”

“Not today. I have to be nice because the three wise men will glare at me if I’m not,”
she said.

“I bet Mary told Joseph his ass was sexy,” Lucas said.

“If she did, she was talking about the donkey he rode into town on, and she didn’t
use the word sexy. She said the jackass was cute.” Natalie slid out of the seat and
helped unfasten the harness holding Joshua in the seat. She scooped him up into her
arms, slung his diaper bag over her shoulder, and bent her head against the wind as
she headed toward the front door.

She looked up at the gray sky just before she climbed up the three porch steps.

Lucas held the door open for her. “What are you looking at?”

“Checking to see if the clouds have parted enough for lightning bolts. You were edging
up on sacrilege right talking about the Virgin Mary like that,” she said.

He ushered her inside with his hand on her back. The second she walked inside the
warm church, Sonia and Melody grabbed her arm.

“You need to put the baby in the nursery. We need both of y’all to sing in the choir,
and we’ve got to get you in choir robes. Weather has kept some folks at home and we’re
short,” Melody said.

“No, ma’am. I’m not singing in a choir because I promised the three wise men who are
Grady, Dad, and Gramps that Joshua would be sitting right up front and he could see
them,” Lucas declared.

Sonia frowned and tapped her foot. “We need choir members. You sure that kid can’t
go to the nursery?”

Natalie nodded. “I’m very sure. He stays with me.”

“I took my boys to the choir with me when they were little. I can hold a baby and
sing, and I bet Natalie can too,” Melody said. “And a front row seat right there by
the Nativity scene will give the baby a lot better view of the three wise men.”

“Thank you,” Henry whispered to her left.

Lucas winked as he followed Grady, Jack, and Henry to a different room. “Boys and
girls don’t get to dress in the same room,” he threw over his shoulder.

The ladies’ choir robes were stored in a closet in the Sunday school room meant for
preschoolers because all the chairs were small and the tables low. She damn sure didn’t
intend to lay Joshua on one of those tables. Lord, he could wiggle off there and land
on his head. The floor wasn’t even carpeted to break the fall if he did.

“Hello, I’m Mary Alice,” a small dark-haired woman said. “What a cute little boy.
He looks just like Lucas. My baby girl, Ziva, looks like my husband’s mother. Red
hair and blue eyes. We’ll have to get together and have a play date when they are
a little older.”

“That would be nice.” Natalie picked out the longest robe in the closet.

“Here, I’m already dressed. I’ll hold the baby while you get the robe on.” Mary said.

Natalie hesitated.

“I won’t break him, I promise. Ziva is my first girl but she’s my third child. I know
how to hold a little boy,” Melody said.

Natalie shifted the baby into her arms and set the diaper bag on a nearby table.

“He’s just adorable with that dark hair, and I like the way you comb it like a cowboy’s
hair. I bet the guys at the ranch are just crazy about him,” Mary said.

“Not as crazy as he is already about them.” Natalie adjusted the white collar and
pinned it down.

“Your robe is the longest one we have in the church and it is still too short. I’m
glad that the banister will keep everyone from seeing your legs. You’ll be sitting
on the back row so…” Sonia said.

“No, I will not. I’ll sit on the front row. You can put me at the far end and leave
the chairs behind me empty if my height is a big problem, but Joshua will see the
three wise men, and he can’t from the back row,” Natalie said.