made a growling noise deep in his throat. “I’ll see to the horses.” And then he turned and went back out the door.
Amy loved it at the old homestead. She loved the handmade throw rugs on the wide-planked floors, the scarred centuries-old harvest table, the crackling fire in the fireplace. She loved the worn furniture and the paned windows. She loved the cat curled up on the hearth. She loved the smell in the air, the tart scent of the pine boughs, a hint of wood smoke, the delicious aroma of something baking.
She shrugged off her coat, and Beth made a fuss about her bandaged hand and clucked sympathetically when Amy told her what had happened.
“I was a nurse before I retired. Do you mind if I look at it?”
Baby in his lap, Hunter wheeled over to the table. So, while he found a set of keys and entertained the baby with them, Amy sat down and Beth looked at her hand.
“Ty did a great job on this. It looks fine. I’ll just change the dressing.”
Amy was aware she was in the company of strangers, and yet she felt safe and loved and entirely at home.
Ty stood in the doorway, surveying the scene, his face impassive. “What do you need done?” he said to Beth.
His father answered. “I can do it myself.”
Ty blew out an impatient breath, went back out the door. A few seconds later they heard an ax thumping into wood. It managed to sound quite angry.
“So,” Beth said, setting a teapot on the table—most likely antique—and scones steaming from the oven, “what brings you to Halliday Creek Ranch, Amy?”
And while Hunter broke scones into bits and fed them to Jamey, who opened his mouth and cooed like a small eager bird, she found herself telling them. And not feeling the least ashamed of her ineptitude with the GPS device.
Beth and Hunter seemed to think her descending by accident on Ty was one of the most hilarious stories they had ever heard.
When Ty came back through the door, his arms loaded with freshly split wood, he found them all laughing. Looking like thunder, he dumped the wood in the wood box by the fireplace and went back out the door.
They heard the angry bite of the ax blade into wood again.
The next hour was a delight of laughter and easy conversation. But in the background Amy was aware of Ty’s seething presence. Ty chopped wood and filled the wood box to overflowing. Then he climbed up on the porch roof and cleared snow. When he was done that, they could see him out the window, heaving snow off the path to the garage.
When he finally came back in, he had worked himself into such a sweat that steam rose off him.
“Amy, we should go.”
“I was hoping you’d stay for lunch,” Beth said.
“Maybe another time,” Ty said. Polite. Terse.
His father glanced at him.
And Amy saw clearly a whole gamut of emotions going through the elder Halliday’s eyes. Pride. And something deeper than pain. Sorrow.
How could Ty be like this? So stubborn? So indifferent to the pain he was causing people?
What had happened between this father and son? And was there any chance, any chance at all, that maybe she could help fix it? So that they all could experience a Christmas miracle?
“WHAT happened to your dad?” Amy asked.
The horses were more eager to get home than they had been to leave, and it was necessary to have a firm hand on the reins to keep them in check. The snow was falling lightly again, too.
Ty glanced at her. He was aware that she hadn’t wanted to leave his dad and Beth, aware of the reproving look she had cast at him when he’d refused lunch.
His father had worked his charm on her. The old bastard could be charming when he set his mind to it. He’d never been short of female companionship.
“He’s an old-style cowboy,” Ty said, stripping his voice of any emotion. “They bronced out horses. Throw a saddle on a green colt, let him buck it out, put it to work right away, work the knots out as you go. It’s dumb. And dangerous. But you could never tell my dad anything. He knew it all. And then one day he met a horse who had more buck than he had stick.”
“It must be very hard on a man who lived like that to make the adjustment to being in a wheelchair,” Amy said.
Her voice begged him to show some sympathy.
Instead, he just shrugged.
“What’s wrong between you two, Ty?”
Her voice was so soft, her eyes so warm. Inviting him to lay it at her feet. Inviting him to share his burdens.
He had seen that word wish peeking out from the dark green of Beth’s wreath.
And he was aware, in a very short time, that’s what Amy had done to his world. Breathed life into a wish he thought he had managed to kill a long time ago.
With her Christmas tree and her filling his house with the smells of baking, with her enthusiasm to try new things, with her soft voice, and her wit and her intelligence, and her unguarded tenderness toward the baby, she was making him wish for a different life.
But he’d done that when he was a kid. Wished and wished and wished.
Around Christmas, he had wished even harder. There was magic in the air. And joy. Unexpected gifts. In these country communities, Christmas was a big deal. Community events, baking marathons, sleigh rides, home decorating contests, neighbors gathering, tables groaning under the weight of food.
He and his father had always been included in everything. They had so many invitations for Christmas dinner they were always left with a hard choice of where to go.
But instead of soothing him, being included in other people’s family Christmases had only made Ty more aware of his own lack, so aware of the warmth and good cheer that other people’s families brought them.
And so he had wished harder.
But his wishes had never come true. And then, the night his father had given him that pack of letters, when he was seventeen, that place in him that had fostered hope had died.
Or at least he thought it had.
Now he could clearly see that an ember of that hope had remained. He could clearly see that Amy could fan it back to life.
But he had no desire to have it live again, to be open to the world of pain and disappointment that empty wishes brought.
“Amy,” he said, his voice deliberately cold, “don’t go there.”
She flinched as if he had slapped
