Holidays on the Ranch (Burnt Boot, Texas #1)(10)

But then how could a room, a house, even a whole base or a whole ranch be empty with Callie on it? She brought energy and warmth to every place she went. He’d been a fool not to act on the attraction he’d had for her that first year, but he’d vowed to follow orders. His had been a strange situation, what with having a woman for a spotter.

A picture of the first Christmas he and Callie spent in canvas tents stuck in his mind. She’d ordered a fake Christmas tree that was about six feet tall. They didn’t have real decorations, and by the time the tree arrived what few were available on base had long since been sold out. The only thing left was one ornament—a real leather cowboy boot about three inches tall and stuffed full of tiny little fake presents. He’d bought the thing and they’d hung it on their tree.

“But you couldn’t see it for all the paper.” He chuckled.

They had colored birds, ornaments, and even icicles she’d drawn on copy paper to hang on the tree with jute twine. And then they’d created yards of paper chain to use for garland. It was the ugliest damn thing he’d ever seen, but she’d loved it. On Christmas morning she’d burned a candle that smelled like pine trees and snow all mixed up together and they’d opened their presents. She’d given him Rudolph antlers with red blinking lights, Rudolph socks, and a Frosty the Snowman mug full of instant coffee packets. He’d given her a long scarf with jingle bells hanging from the ends, a bottle of some kind of perfume that she’d mentioned liking, and a box of chocolates. She was still squealing over her presents when they got the news to suit up for a mission in ten minutes.

The Rudolph antlers and socks were packed in one of the boxes over there against the far wall. The mug was still in its wrapper with coffee inside and sitting on the end of his dresser.

A movement near the fireplace caught his eye, and he slowly reached for the pistol in his nightstand. Then Shotgun yawned loudly, whimpered, and ambled across the floor to lay his head on the other side of the bed.

“You want to make one last trip outside, do you?” Finn put the gun back into the nightstand and slung his feet out from under the covers.

Shotgun’s tail thumped on the floor.

When he reached the living room, Callie was curled up on the end of the sofa with a quilt over her. He hurried across the cold floor and opened the door for the dog and then came back to the sofa to tuck his feet up under the edge of the quilt, his cold toes touching her warm ones and heating up far more than his feet.

“I should have put on socks. The floor feels like an ice-skating rink,” he said.

She moved her feet over to warm his. “I took the chill off mine by the fire after I figured out the same thing.”

“Mmmm, that feels wonderful.” He wiggled his toes in closer to hers, and then something furry settled itself around their feet.

“Please tell me the cat is under there and a mouse hasn’t joined us,” he said.

“Her name is Angel and she likes me. And, honey, if that was a rat, I would be plastered to the ceiling,” Callie said.

“I said mouse, not rat.”

“There is no such thing as a mouse. They’re all rats and they grow big as raccoons or sometimes as big as baby calves, depending on how much they scare me,” she said.

Callie was so damn cute snuggled up in the curve of the sofa with her black hair flowing past her shoulders and the dim light putting highlights in her eyes. The book she’d laid to the side had a man with a lasso over his shoulder on the cover, and the title had the word “cowboy” in it.

“So you still read Western romance? Never quite understood that when you hate ranchin’ so bad that you joined the army to get away from it.” He pulled the quilt a little more his way.

“I like to read about cowboys. The ones in the books are like you, Finn. They’re trustworthy and steady. But for the most part, men are men, whether they’re in boots or flip-flops. My sister damn sure taught me by example that not many of them can be trusted as far as they can be thrown,” she said.

“Trustworthy and steady…that’s a pretty tall order to live up to,” Finn said. “Why are you in the living room this late?”

“Nightmares again. I thought maybe the flickering fire would help calm my nerves. You ever get the nightmares?”

He stretched out, his legs plastered against hers all the way to the curve of her butt, where his toes rested. Even with two layers of flannel separating his skin from hers, it still put him into semi-arousal. “Of course I do. What we did scarred us, Callie. Nightmares are normal for us. I was remembering our Christmas over there in Afghanistan.”

She smiled and the whole room warmed by several degrees. “That was a hoot, wasn’t it? I still have the perfume bottle. It’s empty, but I kept it to remind me of the good times, and the candy box holds my jewelry. When I look at them, the ugly stuff we had to live through kind of fades away and I remember that Christmas.”

“And the argument? Do you remember it, too?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I really was mad at the army for sending us out on that mission and I was right; the ham was all gone when we got back.”

“Well, I was right, too. We took out the insurgents who were hell-bent on blowing up that girls’ school. Those kids might not have celebrated Christmas in their world, but at least they woke up the next morning,” he said.