A Cowboy For Christmas. Rachel Lee

ought to know better after Porter. She thought she had known better, but apparently not. Somehow she had to quell her growing desire for him.

      If there was one thing she was sure about, it was that there could be no future with Rory McLane, so why have a messy present?

      * * *

      Rory was sorry to see her go, but he knew he’d intruded on her evening. He’d never meant for her to be at his beck and call round the clock, and considered her evening hours to be sacrosanct. Yet tonight he’d intruded.

      It wasn’t just the music, although that had been part of it. He occasionally liked some feedback from a naive listener, and from what she’d said, he gathered Abby didn’t know much about who he was or his music.

      That was fine by him. Running back to Conard County he had hoped to escape a lot of that. Oh, he had friends in the business, people who shared all the highs and lows, the stresses, the good times and bad. But it was like a closed loop, and one day he’d realized that it had closed him in and cut off part of him.

      Maybe it was ridiculous of him to want to reach back in time to a boy he’d once been. After all, life happened to everyone, changed everyone, and twenty years had happened to him, for better or worse.

      But that feeling of being homesick for something you couldn’t quite remember—that was a powerful feeling. Abby had nailed that one. It had been troubling him more and more until he had decided that he needed to get away for a while.

      But even here in his hidey-hole, life wasn’t what it had been when he was sharing a ranch with his parents as a kid. No, he was surrounded by luxury, living a self-indulgent life. How many people had the choice of throwing over their work for months to take a sabbatical? Not many.

      He was a lucky man and he knew it. Luckier now that he had custody of Regina. Lucky that for the first time since the divorce he’d have her for both upcoming holidays.

      At least Abby hadn’t seemed to mind being called upon to be his audience for a while. He wondered if the song was going to be about her, because he sensed in her many of the same discontents and sorrows he knew. Undoubtedly a different degree, undoubtedly not exactly the same, but still he felt an emotional recognition of something in her.

      The little bit she’d said about her marriage made him wonder about her. Deserted by her husband for her former boss? Ugly. Wounding. He couldn’t imagine the skein of bad feelings that must have left her with. At least with Stella, he hadn’t been either surprised or especially wounded when she decided to move on. Except for Regina it would have been a clean, cheerful split.