Montana Sky

brightly, pitifully cheerful tree with the pretty presents under it.
    “If you’re going to sleep, you should go to bed.”
    She heard Ben’s voice, resigned herself to it. “I’m not sleeping. I’m just resting a minute. Go away.”
    “I don’t know; when I come over here you don’t tell me to leave again.” So he sat down, settling in the middle of the sofa. “You’re wearing yourself out, Will.” Reaching down, he turned her face away from the back of the sofa. The tears on it made him drop his hand as if she’d burned him. “You’re crying.”
    “I am not.” Humiliated, she pressed her face into leather again. “I’m just tired. That’s all.” Then her voice hitched, broke, and disgraced her. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. I’m tired.”
    “Come here, darling.” Though he had little experience with weeping females, he figured he could handle this one. As easily as if she’d been a child, he lifted her up, cradled her on his lap. “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing. I’m just . . . Everything,” she managed, and let her head rest on his shoulder. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not crying.”
    “Okay.” Deciding they were both better off pretending she wasn’t, he gathered her closer. “Let’s just sit here awhile anyway. You’re a comfortable armful for a bony woman.”
    “I hate Christmas.”
    “No, you don’t.” He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “You’re just worn out. You know what you should do, Will? You and your sisters should take a few days off and go to one of those fancy spas. Get yourself pampered and pummeled, take mud baths.”
    She snorted, felt better. “Yeah, right. Me and the girls swapping gossip in the mud. That’s my style, all right.”
    “Better yet, you could go with me. We could get a room with one of those big bubble tubs, a heart-shaped bed with a mirror over it. That way you can see what’s going on when we make love. You’ll learn faster that way.”
    It had a certain decadent, dizzying appeal, but she shrugged. “I’m not in any hurry.”
    “I’m getting to be in one,” he muttered, then tilted her head back. “Haven’t done this in a while.” And closed his mouth over hers.
    She didn’t pretend to resist or protest, not when it was exactly what she needed. The warmth, the steady hand, the skilled mouth. Instead, she slid her arms around his neck, turned into him, and let all those worries and doubts and bad memories fade away.
    Here was comfort and, regardless of anything, someone who would listen, and perhaps even care. She sank into that, into the wanting of that as much as the wanting of him.
    He felt the need he’d kept carefully reined strain at its tether. The unexpected sweetness of her, the surprising and arousing pliancy, the little licks of heat that hinted of passion simmering beneath innocence.
    The combination came close to snapping that straining tether.
    So it was he who drew back, she who protested. Struggling to temper instinct with sense, he shifted her again, settled her head once more in the curve of his shoulder. “Let’s just sit here awhile.”
    She felt his heart beat, fast, under her hand. Heard her own pound in her head. “You get me stirred up. I don’t know why it’s you who gets me stirred up, Ben. I just can’t figure it.”
    “Well, I feel heaps better now.” He sighed once, then rested his head against hers. “This isn’t so bad.”
    “No, I guess it isn’t.” So she sat in his lap while her feelings settled again. She watched the twinkle of the lights on the tree, and the fall of light snow, just a whisper of white, through the window beyond. “Tess went over to Nate’s,” she said at length.
    He heard the tone, knew her well enough to interpret it. “You’re worried about that?”
    “Nate can handle himself. Probably.” She made a restless movement, then gave up and let her eyes drift closed.
    “It’s Tess you’re worried about.”
    “Maybe. Some. Yes. Nothing’s happened for weeks now, but . . .” She exhaled. “I can’t watch her every minute of the day and night.”
    “No, you can’t.”
    “She thinks she knows all the answers. Miss Big City Girl with her self-defense courses and her snappy clothes. Shit. She’s as lost out here as a mouse in a roomful of hungry she-cats. What if the rig breaks down, or she runs off the road?” She drew a deep breath and said what was most on her mind. “What if whoever killed Pickles is