Page 5 of Yuletide Cookies (Christmas Card Cowboys #1)

Chapter Five

Zeke’s Diner had held Eliza and her friends through every crisis since high school.

No-nonsense Megan now ran Evergreen Springs Elementary as their first female principal and who was still grieving the death of her mother last Christmas.

Fiona, three years free of the rascal husband who dimmed her shine, kept the Chamber of Commerce’s social media cheerful and chatty, worked the movie-theater counter on weekends, and babysat for half the town.

Tessa, the youngest of them, burned with more ideas than hours in the day, juggling her equine therapy program with miniature horses and Rent-a-Reindeer the she started on a dare.

Together they’d faced bad boyfriends, good divorces, Gram’s diagnosis and now a time-traveling cowboy.

Except she wasn’t about to tell her friends about Wyatt. She hardly believed it herself.

Tessa waved both arms from the corner booth like she was guiding an aircraft. “Eliza Marie Foster, you’re late.”

“Thirteen minutes,” Eliza said, slipping into her chair across from Megan.

“We were about to send out the National Guard,” Tessa said. She nudged the basket of jalapeno poppers toward Eliza. “And you didn’t answer my text about whether you wanted ranch or blue cheese, so I got both. Crisis management requires proper dipping sauce.”

“Crisis? What crisis?”

Fiona looked up from her notebook, already three pages into whatever schedule she was crafting.

Ink stained her fingers, and her sweater had a tiny hole at the cuff she kept worrying at.

As the single mom of an autistic seven-year-old son, she didn’t have much time for herself, but she never missed their Monday nights if she had a choice.

“You look like you ran here. Your cheeks are all pink,” Fiona said.

“It’s cold out.” Eliza unwound her scarf. The truth was she’d practically sprinted the last two blocks.

Megan passed the martini glass with Eliza’s name written on it in purple Sharpie. “It pairs well with whatever that look on your face is about.”

“What’s that?”

Megan paused, studying Eliza with astute hazel eyes that missed nothing. “It’s your ‘I’m-holding-back-information’ face. You wore it when you didn’t tell us about Brad cheating on you for three whole weeks.”

Eliza took a sip. The gin burned all the way down, mixing with the knot of anxiety in her chest. She pictured Wyatt as he appeared yanking his hand back from the faucet when the water roared like a miracle, the automatic “pardon my language” for saying “durn.”

“What happened?” Megan leaned in. “And please do not say nothing, because you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Not a ghost. A being from another time.

Behind them, someone’s baby started crying, and the mother made shushing sounds while bouncing the carrier.

Normal problems. Normal world. Not like having a nineteenth-century cowboy in her home.

Eliza rubbed the smeared Sharpie, eradicating her name and leaving a purple smudge on her thumb.

If she told them about Wyatt, they would think she’d lost her mind. Perhaps she had. The stress of Gram’s death, dealing with selling her grandmother’s house to pay the medical bills, and now the loan had her overtaxed brain simply conjuring a distraction?

Except she could still feel the roughness of his coat, smell the leather and horse and sagebrush scent that had clung to him. The way Nutmeg purred against him like she had been waiting her whole cat life for him to arrive.

“I got a letter from Gram’s lawyer,” she said, and told them everything about the letter and her call to the bank.

Silence settled over them as the implication of her situation sank in. Tessa’s jalapeno popper hung in the air halfway to her mouth. Fiona’s pen stopped moving.

“Forty thousand.” Fiona looked aghast. “Two weeks to raise forty thousand? That’s almost three thousand dollars a day.”

“Tell me about it.” Eliza grabbed a popper. The heat from the jalapeno made her eyes water.

The jukebox changed to “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Tessa’s grin amped full wattage, the kind that meant she was about to do something brilliant or mortifying. “One song. Shake it out.”

“Absolutely not.” They hadn’t done this since Fiona’s divorce was finalized.

“Absolutely yes.” Tessa slid from the booth, her body lithe and fluid from years of working with horses, and pulled Eliza with her into the narrow aisle between tables. “Remember junior year? When you thought you’d failed chemistry? We danced to ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and you ended up with a B+.”

“That was because I studied for the makeup exam, not because we danced at Zeke’s.”

“Correlation is causation when I say it is.”

People were looking. A toddler in a reindeer sweater clapped his hands.

The men at the bar, regulars who’d been coming here since before she was born, whistled and catcalled good-naturedly.

Behind them, Jim the bartender snapped his fingers in time to the beat, his gold tooth flashing when he grinned.

“C’mon, c’mon, everybody!” Tessa coaxed half the patrons on their feet to join in. Even grumpy Mr. Elliot from the hardware store was tapping his foot.

They bopped and shimmied, shook and jiggled. Megan joined them, martini still in hand, somehow not spilling a drop. Fiona stayed seated but clapped along, laughing. By the end of the song, Eliza was laughing too, breathless and lighter.

Tessa led the way back to their table where the server, Jenny, whose daughter was in Fiona’s son’s class, brought their food. They’d ordered Eliza her usual. Chicken Caesar salad, dressing on the side, extra croutons.

“Aww, you guys, you’re the best.”

“To friendship!” Tessa raised a glass, and they all clinked rims and echoed, “to friendship.”

While they ate, her friends strategized how to help her earn the money. Tessa suggested a GoFundMe. Megan voted for selling things on eBay. Fiona started calculating interest rates and payment plans for refinancing the bakery, but Eliza had nothing to offer for collateral.

She let them plot, even as she knew none of their ideas had a chance of earning the amount she needed in two short weeks. She had already crunched the numbers herself.

Tessa’s eyes softened. “What do you need right now? Tonight, this minute?”

“Room to think,” Eliza said. The words came out more honest than she meant. “I love you all for wanting to help. Tonight, I do not have the space for plans. Tomorrow, I will see what’s even possible.”

Her friends exchanged glances, the kind of wordless conversation that only came after fifteen years of friendship. The look that said we’ll let this go for now.

Talk drifted to small-town gossip.

Fiona sighed. “City council wasted twenty minutes on debating over ‘restoring’ the old mural on Holbrook’s Hardware. Nobody can agree what it even was. Trout? A train? Angels? The paint’s so faded it could be anything.”

“What’d they decided,” Eliza asked absentmindedly.

“To go through with it. That mural’s been there since Holbrook’s was built the same year as Foster’s Bakeshop.”

That caught her attention. “A mural from 1878?”

“You know Holbrook’s, Foster’s and the building that houses the law offices are the only three original structures from the founding of Evergreen Springs, right?”

No, Eliza hadn’t realized that.

“Let me tell you about, Einstein,” Tessa interrupted.

Einstein was one of her miniature horses who had learned to unlatch gates and kept letting himself into Mrs. Yancy’s garden to eat her roses.

“She threatened to call animal control. On a tiny horse. He weighs less than her Newfoundland. I told her to put up a better fence, and she told me to train my ‘livestock’ properly. Livestock! Einstein has his own Instagram account.”

Megan supplied an update on the missing wreath from Town Hall, complete with theories.

“Molly at the post office swears she saw Harold Givens loading something wreath-shaped into his truck, but Harold claims he was in Bozeman all day. The plot thickens. My money’s on the Myrick twins. They have a history.”

Eliza nodded where she should but kept losing the conversational threads, her mind wrapped around Wyatt. What must he think of her world?

“Earth to Eliza, where did you go?” Megan asked, waving a hand in front of her face.

“Sorry. Just tired.”

“You are far away,” Fiona said. “Not just tired. Preoccupied. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

They were too smart and knew her too well. She polished off her drink. The gin sat cold in her stomach like swallowed winter. She checked the time. An hour had slipped past. Wyatt had been alone in her apartment for over an hour.

“I should go,” she said, leaving enough money to cover her bill along with a generous tip for Jenny, and reaching for her coat. “Thank you for listening. Thank you for not pushing.”

“Text when you’re home,” Tessa said, helping her into her coat with practiced ease. “I mean it. I’ll drive over if you don’t. You know I will.”

“I will,” she promised.

“And Eliza,” Fiona said, closing her notebook, “whatever else you’re not telling us, when you are ready, we’re here.”

“Thanks. I love you guys so much.”

They said their goodbyes, hugging and cheering her on. Megan slipped a candy cane into her pocket “for the road.”

The door shut, and the carols went soft behind the fogged windows. Tires shushed through slush on Main Street, and somewhere a dog barked at shadows or squirrels or the general audacity of winter. The courthouse clock chimed eight o’clock, the bronze bells carrying clear across town.

Five blocks. Then stairs. Then a stranger in her apartment. A man from 1878 trying to survive in her world and trusting her to help him.

Five blocks had never felt so long.