Page 8 of Yuletide Cookies (Christmas Card Cowboys #1)

Chapter Eight

Wyatt fisted the kitchen towel he used to wipe her chin, his heart sprinting like a newborn colt, fast and wobbly.

He stared at her, and she stared back, lips slightly parted, breath light, eyes wide in the stove glow. That look on her face, like she’d been struck by the same lightning, burned through him.

Time stopped.

Neither of them moved. He could lean forward six inches. Six inches, and he could find out if she tasted as sweet as she looked. Six inches, and he’d be lost forever.

“We should…” Eliza cleared her throat. “I need to get the cinnamon rolls in. Can you handle three dozen biscuits for the breakfast rush? We open at six.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He bobbed his head like a fool, grateful for the excuse to look away.

His hand still tingled where her skin touched it. The spot on his thumb where her lips brushed felt branded. Oh, this was bad. Worse than bad. Catastrophe in an apron, smelling like vanilla and sunshine and everything he couldn’t have.

They worked in silence, moving around each other like dancers who knew the steps but feared contact. The kitchen shrank to half its size. Every turn brought near collisions.

She rolled cinnamon into her dough. He cut rounds and tried not to think about her fingers on his face.

She whisked frosting. He tended the fire.

Each near miss when they reached for the same thing tightened his chest. Each soft “behind you” when she passed had him holding his breath until she was safely past.

The very air between them buzzed electric, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks.

The modern oven, the one with knobs and numbers that still seemed like witchcraft, held her cinnamon rolls, bread loaves, and cookies. His biscuits went into the black cookstove, batch after batch.

And then they both reached for the spatula at the same time.

Their hands knocked, the kitchen tool slipped.

Both lunged.

She knocked against the counter behind her. He stopped short, one hand braced on either side of her, caging her without meaning to.

The spatula lay forgotten at their feet.

She was so close. Close enough to see her pulse jumping at her throat. Close enough to count her freckles. Close enough to kiss.

“Sorry, I—” he said.

“No, I should have?—”

They stopped. She looked up, and her gaze dropped to his mouth for one desperate beat.

Every rule he’d ever learned about proper behavior crumbled. His hand moved without his permission, rising toward her face. He jumped back fast, nearly catching his boot on the rubber mat. His whole body felt wrong and out of place.

She picked up the spatula and took it to the sink to wash it.

“I better check those biscuits,” he said, though he’d just checked them.

“Right. Yes. Biscuits.” She didn’t turn around.

Each minute in her presence dug him deeper into something that had no good end. Every look, every accidental brush of hands, every time she said his name in that soft way pulled him by inches. He was drowning in broad daylight, and the worst part was how much he wanted to go under.

The Christmas card waited in the back room. His way home. His escape from this sweet torture.

Back home, if there was still a home, whoever was making biscuits would have burned them by now.

The boys would be joking he’d run off with a farmer’s daughter, not knowing how close to the truth they’d struck.

That’s if 1878 still held a place for him.

If he hadn’t been erased like chalk off a slate, like he’d never existed at all.

But even if time swallowed him whole, even if going back meant starting over with nothing but his name and the clothes on his back, it beat this.

Better to be nobody in his own time than to be here, falling hard for a woman he couldn’t have, in a year he didn’t understand, feeling things that would tear him apart when he left.

Because he would leave. He had to. A man couldn’t live with his heart pulled in two directions.

“I need something from in back,” he said.

Eliza glanced up from the frosting, and something in his voice must have warned her. Her face changed, closed off like a door swinging shut.

“Now? We only have thirty minutes before we open.”

“Be back in two shakes.” But that was a lie, and they both knew it. If he could get that blasted card to work, if it would have mercy on him, he’d be back at his chuckwagon and none of this terrible sweetness eating him alive.

Her mouth pressed into a thin line. She knew. Of course she knew. She was too smart not to see him running.

“Wyatt?” Just his name, but the way she said it, half question, half plea, nearly broke his resolve.

“It’s okay,” he said, already backing toward the door like the coward he was. If she said his name again like that, if she looked at him with those eyes, he’d never move. He’d stay right here and let himself burn.

He fled to the storeroom like the devil was on his heels. The cool air shocking after the blazing kitchen.

His hands shook a little as he lifted the Christmas card from the shelf. His painted self stared back, frozen between one breath and the next, reaching for something... He knew for what now.

Her. He’d been reaching for her all along.

“Take me back,” he whispered to the card, to whatever force brought him here. “Before I can’t leave her. Before this gets worse. Before I do something that’ll hurt us both.”

The card stayed silent in his hands.

“Please.” The word came out broken. He thought of 1878, trail dust and cattle lowing and coffee that could strip paint.

Bad food and hard ground and loneliness that was at least familiar.

A life where he didn’t have to watch Eliza Foster move through her kitchen like sunshine while knowing he could never keep her. “Please send me back where I belong.”

Nothing. The card stayed cold and dead as winter ground.

He pressed his forehead against it. Behind him, through the walls, he could hear her working. The clatter of pans, the oven door, her footsteps. Each sound was a hook in his chest, pulling.

“Please,” he begged again, quieter now. “Send me home before I can’t remember why I need to leave.”

* * *

“Wyatt?” Eliza pushed the storeroom door.

He stood with his back to her, shoulders rigid, the Christmas card clutched in both hands like a lifeline.

Or a lifeboat.

The card shimmered.

Not bright, not obvious, but a glimmer of golden light seeped from between his fingers.

The air wobbled like heat waves off summer asphalt. The temperature in the storeroom dropped enough that her breath came out in small frosty puffs.

He was leaving. Actually leaving. Without a word, without a goodbye, without?—

“Please don’t go.” The words tumbled out of her without thought or care.

He spun around, eyes rounded wide, and the light dimmed.

“Eliza.” Just her name, but the way he said it, guilty, sorry, sad, burned her chest.

“You were just going to disappear?” Her voice cracked. “Leave me to wonder if the card worked or if you just walked out into traffic?”

“I thought it would be easier?—”

“For who?” She stepped all the way into the storeroom, anger easier than the hurt underneath. “For you? Because it sure wouldn’t be easier for me, finding the storeroom empty, never knowing what happened to you.”

The card’s glow flickered, but she could still feel something in the air, some possibility hanging like a door not quite closed.

“I can’t stay.” He shook his head. “You know I can’t.”

“I know you’re scared.” She took another step closer. “I know this is impossible and crazy and makes no sense. But running away?—”

“I’m not running.”

“Then what do you call vanishing without even saying goodbye?”

He flinched. “Protecting you.”

“I don’t need protecting. I need—” She stopped, the words too dangerous to speak.

“What? What do you need?”

The smart thing would be to step back. Let him go. He was right. This was impossible. A man from 1878 couldn’t stay in 2025.

She had a bakery about to be foreclosed on, and he had a whole life waiting a century and a half ago.

“You,” she said. “I need you. Which is insane, I know. We’ve known each other less than twenty-four hours, and you’re from another century, and my cat likes you better than me, and none of this makes sense, but?—”

“Eliza.”

“—but when you’re here, I can breathe. When you make biscuits and tend that old stove and look at me like I’m something wonderful, I feel like maybe everything isn’t falling apart.”

Her eyes burned. She would not cry. She knew this was not rational, knew it made no sense, but she spoke straight from the heart. “And if you need to go, then go. But don’t you dare leave without saying goodbye.”

“You’re right.” He set the card on the shelf. The glow was completely gone now, the storeroom just a storeroom. “You deserve better than a coward who’d sneak off rather than face saying goodbye.”

“Then why?”

He crossed to her in two strides, and for a moment, she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he caught her hands in his.

“I don’t belong here.” His thumbs brushed over her knuckles. “You’ve been kind, real kind, but I’m just in your way.”

“I don’t see it like that.”

“Doesn’t matter. The card wasn’t working anyway.” He chuckled, but it sounded wrong in the cold, small storeroom. “I asked it kindly twice, but each time it started to pull me back, and I’d think of you, and it stopped.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” she said, startled to realize it was true, and what she was about to say next cost her a lot. She didn’t like asking for help. She was used to doing everything on her own. “I… I need you.”

“You need me ?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“You’re an excellent baker.” She paused, gulped. “See, my grandmother took a loan before she died, but I just found out yesterday. I owe forty thousand dollars, and I don’t know how I’ll pay it. But those biscuits of yours… they give me hope.”

His face lit up. “I don’t really want to go, but that durn old card might just have other plans.”

Eliza’s stomach clenched. He was right. Neither of them had control over this wild Christmas magic.