Suzannah Davis - A Christmas Cowboy

“Yes. Uh, thanks.” Weakly, Marisa took the stool next to Nicky’s and gave the boy a good-morning hug. Thankfully the lad hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary about his mother’s reaction to their visitor. “How’re you doing, partner?”

“Call me Tex today, Mommy.”

“All right, Tex. Was your bedroll comfortable last night?”

“Yup.” Nicky grinned, his face shining with impish pleasure at the imaginary role. “Me and Mac got up with the roosters. Didn’t we, Mac?”

Mac grunted something unintelligible.

“That’s Mr. Mahoney, Tex,” she corrected.

“Leave it,” Mac ordered. “We don’t need that kind of formality. Right, Tex?”

“Right, Mac!”

Marisa would have argued, but then Mac shoved a mug of black-as-sin coffee at her, automatically pushing the sugar and dry creamer in her direction. “Thanks.” Marisa swallowed hard around a sudden thickness in her throat.

After all this time, he still remembered how she liked her morning coffee. A little thing, but the realization touched some chord deep inside her, softening her wariness and hostility— Marisa reined in this new feeling with a firm hand. This was treacherous territory. She couldn’t afford to let down her guard, not with Nicky’s future at stake!

And what had Nicky meant about a “new daddy”? Had her little boy been pining for a male role model without her even being aware of it? she wondered guiltily. Being a single parent wasn’t easy, but she’d done her best since Victor’s death. However, for Nicky misguidedly to settle his affections on a cynical, hard-nosed reporter who was intent on ruining their lives would be pure disaster! Yes, the sooner Mac Mahoney was on his way and out of her life again, the better.

Stirring her coffee, she flicked Mac a brief glance. His bronze nipples pebbled in the cool air, winking from a light thatching of brown hair that tapered down the corrugated muscles of a belly just as flat and hard at thirty-seven as it had been a decade earlier. Swallowing, she dragged her gaze away. “Ah, I suppose you’ll want to make an early start....”

One dark eyebrow lifted, and the edges of his hard mouth curved upward in a pitying smile. “Never give up, do you, princess?”

Her chin tilted in preparation for battle. “I thought I’d made myself clear—”

“So has the weatherman.” Mac tapped an index finger on the small, battery-operated weather-band radio sitting on the counter. “Good thing Paul keeps his pantries well stocked. Time to batten down the hatches.”

Marisa’s fingers clenched around the handle of the mug. “Wh-what does that mean?”

“Travelers warnings are everywhere, all roads are closed and nothing’s moving in or out of these mountains. They say we’ve got three or four more days of this at least. Might let up by Christmas Eve, earliest.”

“A white Christmas? Oh, boy!” Nicky crowed. “I never had snow for Christmas before! Is the chimney big enough for Santa? I better go look!”

He scrambled off the stool and raced into the den. Dismayed, Marisa stared after him. Trapped up here with Mac Mahoney, forced to endure his accusations, his cross-examinations and her own wayward responses every time he came too near—for Christmas? It was too much to contemplate! Fuming, she glared at him. “I’m not staying here with you. If you won’t leave, I will!”

“Don’t be a fool, Marisa. The roads are treacherous. You wouldn’t get ten feet.”

She knew she was being unreasonable, fighting the inevitable, but her mouth was mulish. “I might. And at least I wouldn’t have to endure your odious company!”

“You can’t fool me. You might risk your own neck—and I’d be happy to let you, believe me—but you’d never risk the kid’s.”

Her shoulders slumped. “No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The smugness of his expression made her long to smack it off his face. But violence wasn’t the answer, so to restrain the impulse she lifted her mug to take a fortifying sip. The bitterness of the double-strength brew made her choke.

“Too strong?” Mac asked mildly.

Marisa climbed off the stool and emptied her mug in the sink. She followed with the entire pot of coffee. “Everything about you comes on too strong.”

“Yeah, too bad you’re stuck with me, huh?”

She bit her lip, frustration and helplessness choking her.

All right, she thought, she had to accept the situation, uncomfortable as it made her—but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Nor did it mean she had to give Mac any answers just because circumstances forced them together. She had better sense than to let outdated emotions cloud the fact that his actions had made him her enemy now. There were larger issues at stake—keeping warm and fed on top of the list.

Yes, that was the ticket. Stay cool but civil, wait out the storm and make certain she gave Mac Mahoney nothing that he could use in his damned story! He’d eventually get bored and move on to seek other prey.

“Since you barged in without an invitation, you’ll have to earn your keep, Mahoney. Get dressed, for God’s sake. We need more wood inside, buckets of snow to melt for washing and flushing. I won’t have any freeloaders, is that clear?”

“I can do my part.” He raised his eyebrows. “You intend to feed me breakfast before I brave the storm?”

Belligerence gave her voice an edge. “What do you want?”

Mac bared his teeth—a peculiar, predatory smile that made the hair on the back of Marisa’s neck stand up. “Porridge?”

* * *

He got oatmeal. A bowl of oatmeal sporting a happy face made with a jelly smile and two raisins for eyes. Nicky, dressed in corduroys, sweater and six-guns, had insisted. “You’re bigger than me. You must get hungrier.”

The boy’s bright blue eyes looked so expectant, Mac didn’t have the heart to tell him that he despised oatmeal, no matter how artfully it was decorated. Grimly, Mac pushed back the cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt and picked up his spoon. It couldn’t be any worse than Bedouin goat-milk couscous.

Marisa, her face freshly scrubbed and hair pulled back in a ponytail, but still wearing the slacks and sweater she’d slept in, set another bowl before Nicky and ruffled his fair hair affectionately. “Eat up. Cowboys need their energy.”

Trained to observe, Mac noted the easy manner between mother and son. It didn’t jibe with the picture of the affluent “star” foisting the upbringing of her child on paid servants, only seeing the little tyke when he was paraded before the dinner guests. Instead, they shared a rapport that could only have been built with genuine love and hands-on diligence.

Marisa had help, of course. When he’d gone to the pseudo-Spanish Beverly Hills monstrosity Victor Latimore had built for his new bride, intent on offering Marisa a chance to say her piece about the Morris matter, Mac had met Gwen Olsen, Marisa’s nanny-housekeeper. Pulling the truth out of Gwen that Marisa had vanished without leaving so much as a note behind had produced a powerful feeling of déjà vu, launching Mac into the chase that had led him here, straight to a damned bowl of oatmeal!

Grimacing, he shoveled in the first mouthful. To his surprise, it wasn’t half-bad. She’d laced it with brown sugar and a touch of cinnamon.

Nicky grinned up at him. “Good, huh?”

Mac tried another bite, decided the kid was right and dug in. Maybe if his own mother had possessed the imagination to draw faces in his cereal bowl, he wouldn’t have grown up so wild and rebellious.

But Vivian Mahoney, abandoned by her husband and beaten down by life and the two menial jobs she worked merely to keep herself and her son fed, hadn’t had the time for such niceties or the energy to cope with her street-smart son. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the coach down at the local Boys’ Club and a stint in the Golden Gloves boxing circuit, no telling what kind of turn—for the worse—Mac’s life might have taken. His mother had died when he was seventeen, and he’d always thought she had not so much given up on life as simply been worn out. But growing up on the mean streets had given Mac his drive, propelling him through Princeton on a scholarship while he worked double shifts and weekends at a foundry. When you’d never had much of anything, you took nothing for granted.