The Cowboy's Pride and Joy

“Yes, it was.” Elise sighed a little and he heard the love in her voice when she said, “But you learn from a mistake and move on. Jake, Cassie isn’t Lisa, and you’re doing a disservice to both of you if you can’t see that. Cassie deserves better and frankly honey, so do you.”

Well, hell. Oh, he could admit that right from the beginning, he’d been waiting for Cassie to somehow morph into Lisa. To become demanding and complaining. But she hadn’t. She’d more than proven herself, yet apparently there was still some small part of him that didn’t believe.

“I know she’s not Lisa.” He did. Jake had seen that for himself during the first week she was here, and he’d seen it again after she showed up with Luke. Cassie had made a place for herself here. She had friends on the ranch. She knew how to work and wasn’t afraid to step in and do what needed doing.

Yes, he’d been waiting for her to fail. To prove to him that she couldn’t handle ranch life. But she hadn’t. Not once. She did what was needed and more. And she did it with a smile. Unlike Lisa, Cassie didn’t complain about the ranch being so far from “civilization.” Hell, she didn’t complain about much of anything.

Frowning, he did silent battle with his own feelings. Want fought against caution. Need scuffled with fear.

Fear?

Jake wasn’t a man who admitted to being afraid. Not on the battlefield. Not when he was caught in a blizzard. Nothing shook him—well, nothing had until Cassie.

“I knew if I threatened to take Luke from her, Cassie would go to you,” Elise was saying, and Jake struggled to focus. “I hoped that you two would find a way to work out what was keeping you apart.”

“It’s not that easy,” he whispered.

“It could be if you let it,” his mother argued. “Jake, I love you. But you’re a fool if you let this chance at the family you always wanted get away from you.”

When his mother hung up, Jake stayed right where he was, thinking. Surrounded by the scents and sights of Christmas, he pulled up mental images of Cassie and lost himself in them. Her, smiling up at him. Her, rising over him in the night, taking him into her body and holding him there. Cassie playing with Luke. Cassie working alongside the men to clear snowdrifts, and still finding the time to pack a few snowballs and get a war started to break up the tedium of the work.

Cassie laughing. Cassie sleeping beside him. Cassie sitting on the floor of the main room, pieces of long past Christmases scattered around her.

His heart ached and his head pounded. Misery settled on his shoulders and he couldn’t shake it off. Maybe he didn’t deserve to. Maybe Cassie was a gift and because he’d been too stupid to see it, he was destined to lose her and the family they might have made, leaving misery as his only companion.

And if what they had ended, it would be his fault.

Cassie hadn’t failed. He had. Through his own reluctance to try again.

And didn’t that make him a coward? Instinctively, he turned from that word, but it was, he told himself, the only one that fit.

He looked out the window again at the house across the yard. Draped in snow, blurred lamplight was the only thing he could see through the treated windows. His woman and his child were in that house.

Was he going to fail them?

Hell no.

* * *

“It’s not enough, Claudia.” Cass sat on the window seat in Jake’s bedroom. He was out on the ranch somewhere and Luke was downstairs with Anna. They’d let her sleep in today and though she appreciated the thought, she hated sleeping away what little time she had left at the ranch.

“Cass,” her sister said quietly, “you’ve got to stop judging all men by Dad’s sterling example.”

“Easy to say,” Cass murmured, watching the guys plowing paths through the snow. The sky was blue, the wind was still, and she knew that if the weather held, she’d be leaving in a few days.

Her heart ached at the thought, but what choice did she have?

“You’ve only been there a week, Cass. Are you really ready to give up so easily? I thought you loved him.”

Stung, Cass frowned. “I do love him. And I’m not giving up, I’m just accepting reality rather than waiting around for it to bite me in the butt.”

“Right.” Claudia blew out a breath in exasperation. “You’ve spent most of my life telling me to stand up for myself. To acknowledge what I want and go after it. To not let anything get in my way.”

“Yes, so?”