A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

The back of his neck went hot, tension rising inside of him.

Odds were, anyone out in the middle of nowhere at this hour was up to one thing. And he didn’t especially want to walk in and find two people having sex in the middle of the woods, interrupting his drinking and sleeping time. The teeth on that would be just a little bit too sharp to bear.

But then, if he wasn’t getting any, nobody else should, either.

Especially not right next to his house.

That only increased his irritation as he continued on toward the light, the wind whipping through the trees, the bitter cold biting through the flannel shirt he was wearing. He should’ve put a jacket on, but he hadn’t thought of it.

He swore, and then he swore again as he approached the light.

He frowned. Right. There was a cabin back here, but it was dilapidated. One of the original buildings on the property, from back in the late 1800s. One that hadn’t been inhabited in a long time. At least, not by humans. He had a feeling there had been several raccoons, and about ten thousand spiders. But not humans.

And raccoons did not light lanterns. So he could safely assume this was not a raccoon.

He was on the verge of storming in—because why the hell not?—but something stopped him. Instead, he softened his footsteps and walked up to the window.

It was not what he’d been expecting.

It was a person, but not people. And nobody was having sex.

Instead, there was a small woman, curled up beneath the threadbare blanket. She looked like she was asleep. The camping lantern next to her head was turned on, a thin, yellow band of light stretching across what he could see of her face.

She was not one of the guests; at least, he was reasonably certain. He didn’t make a practice of memorizing what they all looked like.

Mostly because he didn’t care.

It was also difficult to identify her positively because she was curled up in a ball, the blanket halfway up over her head. He shifted his position and saw there was a backpack in the corner of the room. But nothing else.

He frowned, looking at her again, and he saw that there were shoes on her feet, which were sticking out just past the edge of the blanket.

He dragged his hand over his face.

She could be a criminal. A fugitive from the law. But then, most likely she was a woman running from a difficult situation. Possibly from a man.

Which could mean there was a safety issue. And he had guests on his ranch, not to mention his younger sister, Jamie.

Jamie knew how to handle herself, of course. She was a tough-as-rawhide cowgirl who was often packing heat. But that didn’t mean Grant would knowingly expose her to danger.

It was a lot of drama that he didn’t want coming to roost.

He stood there, debating for a moment, and then he turned away from the cabin, jogging back to his house and grabbing his cell phone off the bedside table. He dialed his brother Wyatt’s number, knowing that he was going to wake up spitting mad. Because it was four-thirty in the morning, and nobody wanted to be woken up at that hour. Though the Dodges were frequently up before the sun. They had responsibilities to take care of on the ranch that dictated early mornings. Though not this early.

“What the hell?” Wyatt asked by way of greeting.

His voice was gruff, evidence that he had been asleep.

“We have a visitor,” Grant said, keeping his own voice low.

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” Grant said.

At least, he didn’t think he was. But even if he were he wouldn’t hallucinate a woman sleeping in a cabin on their land.

“Really?” Wyatt pressed.

“Not anymore,” Grant said.

“What’s our visitor?” Wyatt asked, clearly confused.

“I woke up early,” Grant said, by way of explanation. There was no need to tell Wyatt that he had fallen asleep in a chair in his living room after drinking a glass of whiskey. And that the pain in his back from sitting sleeping up had been the thing that had woken him. “I went and looked out the window and saw a light coming from the woods. I investigated. There’s a woman sleeping in one of the cabins.”

“What?”

“I wanted to call you and find out what the hell you want to do about it.”

“You could call the police,” Wyatt suggested.

“No,” Grant said. He wasn’t sure why that was his conclusion, only that it was. Just that... He had no idea what the circumstances might be. She could be young. A runaway teenage girl, and if they called the police...who knew who might come for her. It might be the very people she was running from. And he would rather make sure he wasn’t throwing her back into harm’s way.

Grant didn’t consider himself a particularly compassionate person, not these days. He’d drained all that out of him over eight years of being a caregiver to the woman he was married to. He didn’t resent it. Didn’t resent Lindsay at all. But that didn’t mean he had anything left to give anyone else. Particularly a random stranger.

That artery had been bled dry.

Still, he couldn’t ignore the fact that there was something incredibly vulnerable in the way she was sleeping. With the light on. Like she was afraid of monsters even out there in the middle of nowhere.

“Okay,” Wyatt said slowly. “Then what do you suggest?”

“She’s a tiny little woman,” Grant said. “I imagine we can handle her. Go in and talk to her. Maybe Lindy should talk to her.”

“Hell,no,” Wyatt said. “We are not sending my wife in to talk to a random stranger squatting on our property.”

Wyatt had gotten married only a couple months earlier—extremely quickly—after finally getting together with the woman he’d been obsessing over for years. Although Wyatt would never say he’d been obsessing over Lindy for that long, but Grant knew it was true.

When you were a man with no social or sex life you had a lot of time to observe things. The entire world was Grant’s own personal Where’s Waldo game. He had nothing to do but sit around and identify hidden feelings and truths in the lives of other people.

And drink. There was the drinking.

“We’re going to end up giving her a damn heart attack,” Grant said.

“She’s sleeping on our land,” Wyatt said. “As much as I don’t relish the idea of terrifying a woman, it’s not like she checked into the Embassy Suites and bought herself some privacy.”

Grant shrugged. Mostly, he didn’t want to hassle with her personally. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up in a world where he didn’t have to contend with another person or care about their feelings or whether or not he scared them.

“You’re right there,” Wyatt pointed out. “Why don’t you wake her up?”

“And then what?”