A Cowboy for Christmas

A Cowboy for Christmas

Lori Wilde

Dedication

To Michael Lee West,

one of my favorite authors

and my dearest new friend. Bake on, sister.

Contents

Special Acknowledgment

W
riting a book takes a lot of research. I must thank two people who helped me learn about military benefits and how sometimes military families can fall through the cracks in the system and end up without support when their loved ones die in combat. To Colonel Tom Fossen USAF and Army Captain Jessica Scott, who is also a phenomenal writer in her own right. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Chapter One

W
hen she got right down to it, Lissette Moncrief's infatuation with cowboys was what
really
started all the trouble.

There was something about those laconic alpha males that stirred her romantic soul. Their uniforms of faded Wranglers, scuffed cowboy boots, jangling spurs, and proudly cocked Stetsons represented rugged strength, fierce independence, and a solemn reverence for the land. Their stony determination to tame wild horses, mend broken fences, and tend their families made her stomach go fluttery. Their cool way of facing problems head-on, no shirking or skirting responsibilities, weakened her knees.

A cowboy was stalwart and steady, honest and honorable, stoic and down-to-earth. At least that's what the movies had taught her. From John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to Sam Elliott, she'd crushed on them all. She loved Wayne's self-confident swagger, Eastwood's steely-eyed ethics, and Elliott's toe-tingling voice.

When she was sixteen, Lissette and her best friend, Audra, had sneaked off to see a fortune-teller at the Scarborough Renaissance Fair in Waxahachie. Inside the canvas tent, Lady Divine, a pancake-faced woman in a wheelchair, spread spooky-looking cards across an oil-stained folding table. She wore dreadlocks tied up in a red bandana, and a flowy rainbow caftan. On the end of her chin perched a fat brown mole with long black hairs sprouting from it like spider legs. The tent smelled of fried onions and the farty pit bull–terrier mix stretched out on a braided rug in front of her.

Lady Divine studied the card alignment. She tapped her lips with an index finger and grabbed hold of Lissette's tentative gaze, but she didn't say anything for a long, dramatic moment.

“What is it?” Lissette whispered, gripping the corner of the cheap greasy table, bracing for some horrific prognostication like
You have no future
.

“Cowboy.”

“What?” Lissette thrilled to the word.

“There's a cowboy in your future.”

“Will he become my husband?”

“Only time can say.”

Eagerly, she leaned forward. “Is he handsome? What's he like?”

“Dark.” Lady Divine's voice turned ominous.

“In personality or looks?”

“This cowboy will influence you deeply. He brings great change.”

“In a bad way?” She knotted a strand of fringe dangling from the sleeve of her jacket.

Lady Divine shrugged. “What is good? What is bad? Who can know? You can't avoid this cowboy. He is inevitable.”

The fortune-teller continued with the reading, but Lissette absorbed none of the rest of it. She was so stunned by how the woman had zeroed in on her cowboy infatuation. Later, she and Audra had dissected the woman's uncanny prediction. They were in Texas, after all. The likelihood of running across an influential cowboy at some point in her future was far above fifty-fifty. Not such a mystifying forecast in that context.

Most people would have blown off the reading, dismissing it as nothing more than the slick pitch of a smarmy woman who made her money telling gullible people what they wanted to hear, but for a girl besotted with cowboys, the fortune-teller's prophecy had not only mesmerized Lissette, it also set her up for heartache.

If she hadn't been convinced that a cowboy was her future, she would never have ignored the warning signs. If she hadn't romanticized Jake into a modern-day version of John Wayne, she wouldn't have married him. If he hadn't sounded like Sam Elliott on steroids, she wouldn't have heard the lies he told her. If she hadn't duped herself into thinking that he was the second coming of Clint Eastwood, she wouldn't have had a child with him. If she hadn't swallowed the cowboy mystique hook, line, and sinker, she wouldn't be here in Jubilee, Texas, the cutting horse capital of the world, dealing with this new, life-shattering situation all by herself.

Then again, how could she regret anything that had given her a son?

She glanced at her two-year-old, Kyle, who was seated in the grocery cart. Unable to draw in a full breath, she ran a hand over Kyle's soft brown curls as he sat in the grocery cart eating cheddar Goldfish crackers from a lidless sippy cup decorated with images of gray Eeyore. Cheesy yellow crumbs clung to his cupid bow lips and there was a grape juice stain on his light blue T-shirt.

Genetic nonsyndromic autosomal recessive progressive hearing loss.

The words were a mouthful that boiled down to one gut-wrenching truth. Kyle was slowly going deaf, medical science could not cure him, and it was all her fault.

It turned out both she and her late husband, Jake, unwittingly carried a recessive connexin 26 mutation and poor Kyle had lost the genetic lottery. So said the audiologist, geneticist, and pediatric otolaryngologist whose Fort Worth office she'd just left with the astringent smell of cold antiseptic in her nose and a handful of damning paperwork and referrals clutched in her fist.

Deaf.

Such a frightening word. It sounded too much like “dead.”

Deaf.

Her poor, fatherless baby.

Foggy as a sleepwalker, Lissette pushed her grocery cart down the baking products aisle of Searcy's Grocery, past an array of orange and black cupcake sprinkles, candy molds in the shapes of ghosts and pumpkins, and gingerbread haunted house kits.

Her lips pressed into a hard line, resisting any stiff attempts she made to lift them into a smile for fellow shoppers. Misery bulged at the seams of her heart until it felt too swollen to fit inside her chest. It beat, as if barely stitched together, in halting ragtag jolts. A sense of impending doom pressed in on her, hot and smothering.

It couldn't be true that her child was losing his hearing in slow, agonizing increments, never to be reclaimed. She had to seek a second opinion.

A third.

And a fourth if necessary.

But with what? Consultations did not come cheaply.

Swallowing back her pain, Lissette refocused on her goal of shopping for baking supplies. That was the answer to her money troubles.

Searcy's was the only locally owned supermarket in Jubilee, the cowboy-infused town that Jake had settled her in four years ago before he first shipped off to the Middle East. In the beginning, she'd embraced the place, the community, the culture, the cowboys, but then, bit by bit, her eyes had been opened to the truth. Cowboys were like everyone else. Some good. Some bad. All fallible. It had been a mistake to romanticize a myth. No man could give her a fairy tale. She understood that now and she was determined to provide for herself. No more depending on a man for anything.

The store, with its narrow aisles, sometimes felt like a womb—comforting, cozy, communal—but today, it felt like a straitjacket with the straps cinched tight. Maybe it was the candy pumpkin molds, but an unexpected nursery rhyme popped into her head.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well.

“Da . . .” Kyle gurgled with the limited vocabulary of a child half his age. “Da.”

Shoppers crowded her. She needed to get to the flour, but Jubilee's version of two soccer moms—i.e., Little Britches rodeo moms—stood leaning against the shelves gossiping, oblivious to those around them.

Lissette cleared her throat, but the moms either ignored her or didn't hear her, something she'd grown accustomed to as the middle child, bookended by more attractive, gregarious sisters.

“Um,” she ventured, surrendering a smile. “Could one of you ladies please hand me a ten-pound sack of cake flour?”

“Did you hear about Denise?” the shorter of the two women asked the other as if Lissette hadn't uttered a word. “She up and left Jiff for a man eight years younger than she is.”

“Get out! Denise? No way.”

“I tell you, losing all that weight went straight to her head. She thinks she's God's gift to men now that she can squeeze into a size four.”

“My cousin Callie is single and searching,” the taller one mused. “I wonder if Jiff's ready to start dating.”

Feeling invisible, Lissette sighed and bent over, trying to reach around them to get to the flour, but the ten-pound bags were on the bottom shelf. The woman with the single cousin had her fashionable Old Gringo cowboy boots cocked in such a way that Lissette couldn't reach it.

Normally, she would have stopped at Costco for a fifty-pound bag when she'd been in Fort Worth, but those big bags were so hard for her to lift, and besides, she'd driven the twenty-six miles back to Jubilee in a such a fog she didn't even remember leaving the medical complex.

She straightened. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask the women to kindly step aside when a ten-year-old boy on wheeled skate shoes darted past, almost crashing into Lissette's elbow. She jumped back and gritted her teeth, anxiety climbing high in her throat.

Kyle was staring at her, studying her face.

Calm down
.

She was on edge. Kyle would pick up on her negative energy and that was the last thing he needed. If she thought her morning had been lousy, all she had to do was imagine what it felt like to her son—poked and prodded and unable to understand why.

It hit her then, how confusing life must be when you couldn't hear, how much communication you missed. Then again, in some regards, that might be a blessing. Did she really need to hear about Denise and Jiff's crumbling marriage? Her own marriage had been filled with so many thorns that the occasional sweet bloom couldn't make up for all the painful sticks.

“Da.” Kyle raised his small head, his usual somber expression searching her face through impossibly long eyelashes—Jake's eyelashes—as if seeking an answer to the silent question.
Why can't I hear you, Mommy?

Why hadn't she suspected something was wrong? Why hadn't she realized that her baby could not hear? Why had it taken a nudge from her best friend, Mariah Daniels, for her to make a doctor's appointment?

She'd been angry at first when Mariah said, “It's funny that Kyle doesn't respond when you ask him to do something.”

Lissette told herself Mariah was jealous. Kyle was so much quieter than her son, Jonah, who was six months younger. But then she started noticing how Kyle watched her hands more than he watched her face, how he never cared for toys that made noise, how his language skills lagged behind Jonah's, and how he often seemed so willful, never listening when she cautioned.

Her chest tightened. Her son hadn't been ignoring her. He wasn't willful. He simply had not heard her warnings. At times, she'd been so impatient with him. She pressed her lips together, her throat clogged with shame and regret. How could she have been so clueless?

“Sweetie,” said a tiny elderly woman with a severe, blue-tinged bun piled high on her head and tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of her nose. She wore a lumpy floral print dress that scalloped around saggy calves and didn't quite hide the tops of her coffee-colored, knee-high stockings.

“Yes ma'am?”

“Would you mind reaching that box of powdered milk on the top shelf for me?”

Lissette forced a smile. She wouldn't be rude like the rodeo moms. Mariah Daniels was five-foot-one, so even though she wasn't particularly tall herself at five-foot-five, Lissette was accustomed to retrieving things off top shelves. “The blue box or the red?”

“The blue, please.”

Lissette had to stand on tiptoes to reach it, but she got the box down.

“Bless you, my dear. Be proud of your height.”

“I'm not that tall.”

“To me, you're a tower.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “And who is this little man? How old are you?” she asked Kyle.

Busily eyeing the baking chocolate, Kyle crunched a Goldfish and did not respond.

The elderly lady bustled closer. “Are you two years old? You're about the same size as my great-grandson. You look like you're two years old.”

Kyle did not react.

The woman cocked her head like a curious squirrel. “Is something wrong with him, sweetie? He's not answering me.”

A dozen impulses pushed through Lissette. The defensive part of her wanted to tell the woman to mind her own business. The “nice girl” started thinking of a delicate way to explain. Her shell-shocked psyche curled the words
He's deaf
around her tongue, but she couldn't bring herself to say it out loud.

Not yet. Not when she hadn't even practiced saying it in private.

Instead, she completely surprised herself by blurting out, “His father got blown up by an IED in Afghanistan on the Fourth of July.”

The gnomish woman stepped back as if Lissette had slapped her. She gasped and put her hands to her mouth. “Oh my Lord, you're that poor young widow that I read all about in the
Jubilee Daily Cutter
. Oh sweetie, I'm so sorry. I know exactly what you're going through.”

You have no idea what I'm going through
, Lissette wanted to scream, but she kept her taut smile pinned in place. “Thank you.”

“I'm so sorry,” the woman repeated and patted Lissette's forearm, and then a tear trickled down her wrinkled cheek. “I lost my boy in 'Nam.”

“I . . . I . . .” Lissette stammered. She could not imagine—never wanted to imagine—losing her child. She clenched her jaw, unable to find the right words.

The elderly woman dug into a purse the size of Vermont and came up with a crumpled tissue clutched in arthritis-gnarled fingers. “They never did find his remains.” She pressed a knobby knuckle against her nose, blinked through the tears. “Johnny Lee's been gone forty-four years, but I think of him every single day. He was only eighteen when the Lord called him away. Just a baby. My boy.”

Their gazes locked. Two mothers united in loss.

Lissette squeezed the woman's shoulder. “Is there anything else I can get you from the top shelf?”