Christmas at Home (Spikes & Spurs #5) - Carolyn Brown Page 0,51

the fence between the house and the barn. It’s just a matter of putting them up.”

“Are you teasing?”

“I am not! That way there’s lights to be seen from every window in the house. When I was a little girl, I’d run into Grand’s room and jump on her bed. And lights would shine through the window.”

“Does each cow get jingle bells around her neck?” he asked.

Sage stared at his boots, which were dripping water onto the floor right along with the Christmas tree. “No, just the bulls. I’ve got a special string of red ones for you.”

Creed chuckled. “Do I get to choose where you hang them?”

Sage blushed crimson. “No, that’s my decision.”

“Some days a homely old cowboy just can’t win for losing.” He sighed. “Let’s go fetch the box with the stand in it and get this tree standing upright.”

The decorations were stacked neatly in one of the three bedrooms in the bunkhouse. Back when Grandpa Presley was still alive they’d had all three bedrooms filled up and the hired hands did their own cooking. But one by one Grand had let them go through the following years, and by the time Sage was old enough to remember, the bunkhouse was used for storage. Later, after she’d come home from college, she’d used the big living room and kitchen combo for her spring, summer, and fall work space, but it had been years since the water and gas had been turned on to the place.

She wondered if Creed would bring the whole ranch back to its original status: five or six times as many head of cattle, hay fields, and much, much less mesquite dotting the land.

Creed read the writing on the masking tape stuck to the top of the blue plastic bin. “Tree stand. Outside lights. I pictured cardboard boxes.”

“That’s the right one to start with. We used to keep them in cardboard boxes, but the mice kept getting in them so we replaced the boxes with bins.”

“Okay, let’s go get it upright so it can drip on the floor while we string the barn lights. Then we’ll mop up the mess and start decorating,” he said.

She picked up a second box marked tree lights. “Mr. Organization.”

“It takes a fair amount of that to run a ranch.”

They were almost to the house when they stopped at exactly the same time and turned their ear toward the highway.

“Snowplows!” she said excitedly. “That means the electricity will be back on before long and I can do laundry.”

“Me too! I’m almost out of clean socks and there’s a whole basket full of dirty clothes in my room. I dreaded washing by hand,” he said.

His room! Grand’s room!

The whole concept was so tangled up that it made Sage’s head hurt, so she pushed it away. Today she was decorating the tree and putting up lights. When it was all done, she intended to send pictures to Grand. And when she saw the pictures, it would make her so homesick that she would come home, maybe even before Christmas Eve. She could bring Essie with her and Sage would look after both of them. Hell, she’d give Essie her bedroom and clean up the bunkhouse to live in. She liked to go there to paint in the spring and fall anyway, and with very little work, it could be a nice big comfortable house just for her.

“What’s on your mind, Sage?” Creed asked when they reached the back porch.

“Decorating,” she said.

“You’ve been pretty quiet all morning. Something happened out there at the rock formation. What did you see?”

“What is probably a glimpse of the future.”

“And that makes you mad?”

“Why mad?” she asked.

“Because it did not make you happy or you would have reacted differently.”

“Not mad, but sad. I don’t adapt well to change. I like my rut. I love it, as a matter-of-fact. It is my stability, my rock, and I know what’s happening next.”

“That’s not life, darlin’.”

“I know, but I don’t have to like it.”

* * *

Creed fastened the tree stand onto the trunk of the tree and stood it upright in front of the window. And like the sun coming out after days and days of dreary rain, Sage’s mood turned from dark to sunny instantly. She clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek in her excitement.

“It’s beautiful. It’s the best one ever and I mean it. Look how perfect the limbs are and it’s just the right height for the angel. She won’t even hit her head on