Page 10 of Yuletide Cookies (Christmas Card Cowboys #1)

Chapter Ten

They stepped from Zeke’s into the gathering dusk. The town square now blazed with lights entwined through the trees and looped from rooftop to rooftop.

Music carried on the air and mixed with the laughter of children and the clank of machinery.

Behind the courthouse, a great lighted wheel turned against the stars, cages rocking as it lifted folks higher than church steeples. Painted horses circled on a platform, brass poles catching the light as if the beasts galloped through fire, their wooden eyes somehow alive in the glow.

Wyatt blinked. “What in the Sam Hill...”

Eliza followed his gaze. “It’s the Christmas carnival.”

“Carnival?”

“It’s like a county fair.”

He knew county fairs. He remembered the one back home in Des Moines in ’69, before he hired on as a chuckwagon cook and he lost a month’s wages at the ring toss trying to win a carved wooden bird for his sister Rose’s sixteenth birthday. She never had a seventeenth.

“Can we go to it?” he asked.

The naked want in his voice embarrassed him, but Lord, a county fair was something he recognized.

“It’ll be crowded.”

“Please?” He stepped closer. “I’ve been dragged through time like a fish on a hook. Nearly flattened by those demon carriages you call cars. Let me see something that makes sense.”

She looked at him long enough that he thought she’d refuse, but then she nodded. “Just for a little while.”

He grinned. “Thank you.”

At the entrance, a boy with metal in his face, places Wyatt didn’t want to think about, took Eliza’s money and gave back tickets in return.

Inside the gates, Wyatt stopped, rooted to the spot. The lights were everywhere. Strung between poles, wrapped around trees, and making patterns in the air.

Eliza bought him something called cotton candy. Pink spun sugar on a paper cone. He touched it suspiciously, then tasted. It dissolved on his tongue like sweet snow, leaving nothing but memory and a ghost of sweetness that evaporated between his teeth.

“This is impossible,” he said, laughing. “It’s like eating sugared clouds!”

They walked closer to the wheel. It rose into the sky higher than any building should, carrying people in little cages that swayed with each turn. His stomach dropped just looking at it; a cold sweat broke out along his spine despite the winter chill.

“That’s called a Ferris Wheel. Want to ride it?” Eliza asked. “Or would you prefer the carousel?” She waved toward the painted horses suspended from poles.

Terror and want collided in his chest, a dizzying mixture that left him breathless. He eyeballed the Ferris Wheel. “That thing? It lifts folks into the sky for no earthly reason.”

“That’s the general idea.”

Wyatt watched a couple exit their cage, laughing and holding each other. They looked happy. Alive. Untouched by the terror that should come from being suspended so unnaturally.

“I’ll do it if you’ll ride it with me.”

“Wyatt...” Uncertainty flickered across her face.

“You’ve been teaching me to trust your world.” He held out his hand despite the fear climbing his spine like ivy. “Let me trust this. But with you.”

She took his hand, her touch sending a current through him more powerful than any of the electric lights surrounding them.

The man running the wheel latched them into a cage that rocked with their weight. A metal bar came down across their laps. Wyatt gripped it hard.

“Keep everything inside,” the man droned, boredom dripping from every syllable. “No rocking. No standing. No proposals. Someone tried that last week and dropped the ring.”

The wheel lurched up. The ground fell away. Wyatt’s stomach stayed behind. Panic clawed at his throat; the wrongness of being suspended in the air by mere metal and wire screamed danger.

“Breathe,” Eliza said, her voice an anchor.

“I am breathing.”

“No, you’re holding it hostage. Let it go.” She rubbed her thumb along his knuckles.

She was right. He was drowning on dry land. Or dry air. Sky land. Lord, they were so high. He forced air out, sucked it back in, his chest burning with the effort.

The town spread below, drawn in lights. Streets he’d walked ran like grids. Buildings he knew looked like toys, diminished and perfect all at once.

“Oh.” The word escaped, wonder replacing terror in a single heartbeat. “Oh, would you look at that.”

“Pretty amazing, right?” She was watching him instead of the view, her eyes reflecting tiny pinpricks of colored light.

“No one from my time ever saw this. The whole world laid out like God’s own map.

How it all fits together. How small we are.

” He spotted the bakery, its crooked chimney visible even from here, and his heart swelled with homecoming; though this century wasn’t his home, the town was. “That’s your place.”

“The one with the terrible roof patch.” She sounded embarrassed.

“It’s beautiful from up here.”

“It’s falling apart.” She looked away, but not before he caught the flush rising to her cheeks.

He turned to look at her fully. The colored lights from below painted her in shifting hues. Blue then red then gold. Like she was made of stained glass. His breath caught again, but not from fear this time.

“Beautiful things can be falling apart. Doesn’t make them less beautiful. Sometimes makes them more so.”

The wheel stopped at the very top. The cage swayed gently. The whole town spread below, the stars above, and they hung suspended.

For the first time since he’d been ripped from his century, Wyatt felt right, as if he’d found the exact place in the universe where he belonged.

“Eliza. I think I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you. Just didn’t know I’d have to travel through time to do it. I would do it again. Would travel twice as far.”

Her breath caught, a small sound that seemed to fill the space between them. Before she could answer, the wheel lurched back into motion, pulling them down toward earth.

But she didn’t let go of his hand until they were on the ground and out of the cage.

“Eliza!” A voice cut through the carnival noise.

Wyatt turned to see a woman approaching from the carousel, pulling a boy alongside her. The child wore strange black cushions over his ears, thick as winter mittens but covering the sides of his head. His eyes darted everywhere but at the people around him.

Eliza’s spine straightened and she moved toward the woman. “Fiona, hello!”

They met in front of the ring toss. Fiona hugged Eliza, then glanced at Wyatt with raised brows. “And you’ve got company tonight.”

Eliza put a hand on his shoulder, and his heart stirred. “This is Wyatt. He’s helping at the bakery through the holidays. We’re doing a marketing campaign featuring Foster’s from the year it began, 1878. Isn’t he just perfect for the part?”

“Yes, he is. Nice to meet you, Wyatt.” Fiona gave him a nod, measuring him the way mothers do with strangers near their children.

“Ma’am,” he tipped his hat, the way Pa taught him when greeting a lady.

Fiona arched an eyebrow and gave Eliza a thumbs up.

Wow, she must approve of him. That warmed him inside out.

The boy never looked at them. His attention fixed on the prize rack where a stuffed palomino dangled. He pointed. “Pony.”

“Jamie,” his mom said. “We’re not spending money on that today.”

But the certainty in that small voice caught Wyatt square in the chest. A boy wanting a pony. Some things stayed true across centuries.

He stepped to the counter, laid down the money Eliza had given him earlier. “Give the boy three chances.”

“Wyatt,” Fiona said. “It’s kind of you but unnecessary. Jamie is able to take no for an answer.”

“Please, ma’am. I want to. Don’t deprive me of the pleasure of being nice to Eliza’s friend.”

“All right then.” Fiona gave an uncertain laugh and shot a glance at Eliza.

The game operator took the money and shoved three rings across to the boy.

Jamie’s first throw spun wide, clattering across the boards. The second nicked a peg and bounced clear. Jamie’s jaw set on the last ring. He pulled back, threw…

…and missed.

The boy’s shoulders slumped, and he ducked his head.

Wyatt crouched in front of him, catching his eye. “Nothin’ wrong with that. Every man misses. Means the win ain’t cheap. Let’s try one more time.”

Wyatt put down more money, took the three rings the barker gave him, and pressed it to Jamie.

The boy shook his head. “You do it.”

The pressure was on. After that big talk, he needed to prove himself. He warmed up his arm with a few practice swings, then let the ring fly.

First toss rang true. Then the next. Then the last. Each one dropped clean, neat as a loop over a steer’s horns.

The operator groaned, unhooked the palomino, and shoved it across. Wyatt placed it in Jamie’s arms.

The boy clutched it tight, his face lit as though he’d roped the thing himself.

“This fellow needs a good rider. Think you’re up to it?”

“Uh-huh.”

The mother’s eyes misted, gratitude and something deeper shining there. “Thank you.”

Eliza stood watching him with a tender expression that sent his heart stumbling.

They told Fiona and Jamie goodbye and walked back through the carnival. Children ran by waving plastic wands that glowed. A mechanical Santa rang a bell and laughed, ho, ho, ho, the sound both jolly and unsettling to Wyatt’s ears.

Miracles stacked on miracles, and all he could think about was the weight of Eliza’s hand in his on the Ferris wheel.

The gratitude in her eyes when he won that horse for her friend’s son.

The way she looked at him now, as if seeing something valuable where before he felt only lost and out of place.

* * *

Back home, in her apartment above the bakery, Eliza tried to convince Wyatt to take the sofa in her apartment instead of sleeping on the floor of the storeroom.

He stood in her doorway, hat in hand, and shook his head with that polite immovability she was starting to recognize.

“The storeroom suits me better, Miss Foster.”

“It’s cold down there. And hard.”

“Too many comforts up here.” His gaze flicked around the room. “A man could forget where he comes from surrounded by all this ease.”

“All right, but you’re at least taking the air mattress.”

“Yes, ma’am, if you insist.”

He helped her drag down the air mattress from the hall closet, the one she bought for overnight guests.

Wyatt had helped her carry it to the storeroom and watched with wonder as the electric pump filled it in three minutes flat.

She left him quilts, linen, and a pillow.

He thanked her with grave formality, as if she had gifted him gold instead of basic human comfort. Nutmeg followed them down and claimed the center of the mattress, purring like a diesel engine.

Eliza tried to coax the cat back upstairs, but Nutmeg refused to budge. “I guess you got yourself a new bunkmate.”

Now Eliza lay under Gram’s lavender quilt, the one with the worn binding, missing her furry bed warmer.

She thought about Wyatt down there in the dark, still awake, staring at that painted Christmas card and willing it to take him home.

Or maybe willing it not to.

She couldn’t tell which way his wanting leaned. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted him to stay. At least for a little while longer.