Maverick Christmas Surprise

Though the words were spoken matter-of-factly, the flatness of her tone suggested that the passage of time had done little to dull the heartache. As someone who’d grown up without a mother, he understood how the pain of loss could linger and wished he could take back the question.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, sounding and feeling awkward.

“Thanks.” She eased the nipple of the already empty bottle from the baby’s mouth and turned him onto her shoulder, gently rubbing his back.

Was it a maternal instinct that allowed women to anticipate and respond to an infant’s needs? Or was it, as his brother had suggested, a parenting instinct? In which case, it was an instinct that Wilder obviously lacked.

“He was hungry,” he noted.

“He always is,” Beth remarked.

“And so are you,” he remembered, refocusing on his task. “Cranberry or mayo?”

“Both.”

Wilder made a face but retrieved the condiments from the fridge.

“Coleslaw?” he asked, when he’d cut the sandwiches and set them on two plates.

Her stomach grumbled a response before she did. “Sure.”

He spooned some onto the plate beside her sandwich and set it on the table. After Cody had burped, she put him in his car seat and picked up her sandwich.

Wilder expected her to nibble around the crust, pretending more than eating, so he was surprised to see her take a hearty bite. And even more so when she closed her eyes and let out a blissful sigh that he was more accustomed to hearing in the bedroom than the kitchen.

“Oh. My. Goodness.” She chewed slowly, swallowed. “You make a really good turkey sandwich.”

It wasn’t the only thing he did really well. In fact, sandwich-making didn’t even crack the top ten list of things he did to please a woman, but he’d be happy to show her—

No. He immediately cut off his wayward thought, unwilling to go there with Beth, who wasn’t just a guest under his roof but the baby’s aunt.

He cleared his throat along with his mind. “I only assembled the ingredients,” he told her. “Lily worked her magic with the bird.”

“Lily is...married to Knox?”

He shook his head. “Xander. She runs her own business—Lily’s Home Cookin’—now, but she used to be a cook at Maverick Manor.”

“What’s Maverick Manor?”

“The only decent hotel between here and Kalispell. It was originally an enormous house, nicknamed Bledsoe’s Folly in honor of the man who built it. When he died, it stood dark and empty for a lot of years until Nate Crawford bought it and turned it into a hotel.”

“A relative of yours?” she guessed.

“Apparently.”

“Do you have a lot of family in Rust Creek Falls?” she asked.

“You can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford—or two or three,” he told her. “I thought I’d miss the anonymity of living in a big city, but there’s something about this place that makes it feel like home already.”

“Maybe the fact that you can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford,” she said, echoing his own words.

He chuckled. “That might be part of it.”

She picked up the second half of her sandwich. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I had turkey,” she told him. “But I’m sure I don’t remember it tasting this good.”

He popped the last bite of his own sandwich into his mouth. “Last Christmas?”

“What?”

“You said you couldn’t remember the last time you had turkey,” he reminded her. “I suggested that it was probably last Christmas.”