chapter Twelve
“Uh-oh,” Dante said. “Boy, is she ticked with you!”
“Me?” Xav really had no good way to refute that—Ash had been aggravated. “I’m crazy about her. She’ll eventually say yes to the dress idea, but she doesn’t want six or more noses in her business. Anyway, I know my girl, and she’s annoyed with you lot.” He sighed, knowing exactly why she’d told her brothers she didn’t want to wear the magic wedding dress—because she thought it was gone.
It was worth a recon mission into the attic to find out exactly what was going on. “Is this meeting over? I’ve got things to do, and Ash is right. Nothing’s getting done here.”
“You’re just itching to run off and get yourself in our sister’s good graces,” Tighe said. “We respect that. We’re married. We know how to keep our nests properly feathered.”
Xav frowned. “You guys need to give your sister some space. Ash will do what she wants when she’s good and ready. In the meantime, I’m out of here.”
He exited the library, not sure why the Callahans were so riled about their sister getting married. He’d never seen them so protective, in such a stew over their petite, precious Ash. Xav understood, but at the same time, he figured they ought to be darn grateful she was going to marry him—a long-standing friend of the Callahan family..
“I’m the man for her,” he muttered, heading up the attic stairs. “Magic dress or no. Interfering, overprotective brothers or not.”
But he had the feeling she really wanted exactly what her brothers had been advising: A home wedding, surrounded by family and friends, wearing the gown that was meant for her—the only Callahan female—to wear.
Of course she did.
Up in the attic, he jerked open the closet, cursed just a bit when it felt as if the doorknob burned his hand. That was totally his imagination running wild, spooked by Ash’s tale.
There was the white, poufy bag, just as Ash had described it. He unzipped it, stared at the voluminous white gown inside.
He blinked. Holy crap. Something’s terribly wrong here.
Grabbing his cell phone from his pocket, he called Ash. She picked up, sounding as though she was out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Gorgeous, can you come up to the attic for a second?”
“No,” Ash said slowly, “I most certainly can’t.”
“You need to see this.”
“Xav,” she said impatiently, “I know what you want to show me, and while I appreciate your attempt at romance, I’m not in the mood at this moment. I’m changing the babies into warmer clothes to take them out for a bit.”
The gown didn’t shimmer, didn’t change, didn’t go poof. He shook his head. “I’m going to send you a photo of something. Hang on.”
He snapped a photo and texted it to her.
“What do you think about that?” he asked.
“Oh, Xav,” she said. “That’s so sweet of you. But not necessary.”
“What’s not necessary?” A wedding dress felt very necessary to this situation.
“That you found another gown to replace the one I burned up. But it doesn’t really work that way. It’s not like buying another fish to fool the children when their pet fish dies.”
“I didn’t buy this fish—er, gown!”
“Someone did,” she said patiently. “That isn’t the magic wedding dress.”
He eyed the white lacy material. “How can you tell? Wedding dresses all look the same to me.”
“I know it’s not because I saw it burn,” Ash said. “Believe me, it was a horrible moment.”
He sighed. “So this one won’t do?”
“Not really. You can’t just buy a gown for a woman and expect that she’ll love it. It’s got to be hers,” Ash explained.
Maybe it was time to go back to the Vegas plan. “Maybe we could do a casual wedding in blue jeans and cowboy boots? Dress the babies up to match and take a family photo?”
“I think my brothers were right,” Ash said. “As much as I wanted to disagree with them. I think we’re going too fast.”
“I can never go fast enough with you. In fact, this thing’s moving so slow, I’ll probably have gray hair by the time I get around to being a proper husband. I don’t just want to live with my girl and my children. It’s a matter of my reputation.”
“I don’t think the Phillipses ever worried much about their reputations.”
She had him there. “Are you sure you don’t want to come see this? I’m no expert but it may not be half-bad.”
“It could be a tablecloth, Xav, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”
Damn, she’d pinned him again. He zipped up the garment bag and headed down the stairs to find her, phone still in hand. “I think you ought to marry me before I change my mind.”
She took the phone from him, switched it off and put both their phones down. Handed him Skye, who snuggled into his shoulder as if she was part of his heart. Which she pretty much was.
“I think my brothers are right about letting Fiona plan a big wedding. I’m her only niece, and she’s waited a long time for this. Somehow I’m going to have to confess that the gown and I were a terrible match, and that it didn’t want me anywhere near it.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
She nodded. “I’m the hunted one. The gown didn’t want me to ruin the magic. So it destroyed itself. That’s exactly what happened.”
“Argh,” Xav said, kissing the top of Skye’s downy head. “Can we at least set a date?”
She kissed him, and he felt a little better.
“You’re not ticked at me? Because it seemed like you were when you left the library.”
“I was ticked at my brothers, who were being knuckleheads. But then I realized they’re pretty much right.”
“I don’t know,” Xav said. “I think they’re enjoying watching me twist in the wind.”
“Believe me, if they thought for one minute that you didn’t have honorable intentions, they would have rolled you into a cave and kept you there until you agreed to marry me.”
“I want to marry you. I wanted to marry you before you went away.”
She put Thorn into the stroller. “That makes no sense.”
“Hey, I’m not exactly lightning. But I did buy out your bid last year at the Christmas ball. I didn’t want anyone else to have you.” He looked at Ash. “That ought to speak volumes about how I’ve always felt about you. I just don’t think you feel quite the same about me,” he said with a sudden strike of intuition. “Ashlyn Callahan, I believe you just wanted my hot, godlike body.”
“I chased you for years,” Ash said. “I’m crazy about you.”
“So you’re ready to do the big I do.”
“We just need time.”
“If I was milk, I’d have curdled by now I’ve had so much time. Hell, I’d have aged into cheese. These babies need a family, and nothing else matters.”
Ash shook her head, put the other babies in the large stroller. “Nothing good can come of you marrying me.”
“I don’t believe in curses or bad karma or jujitsu,” Xav said flatly. “And even if there were such things, I’m a pretty hard-baked guy. I can take care of myself.”
“Juju,” she murmured, “not jujitsu.”
“Whatever. What I do believe in is hearing wedding bells.”
“Christmas Eve,” she said suddenly.
He narrowed his gaze. “You want to get married on Christmas Eve? I can do that.”
“Then tell my brothers the plans, and pick a best man.”
“One of my brothers, of course. Shaman or Gage.”
“Fiona can be my matron of honor.” She looked at him. “Christmas Eve will give her time to do plenty of planning.”
He wondered about her sudden change of heart. “Less than two weeks isn’t plenty.”
“It is for Fiona. She’s got all her notes and routes planned. She can run a wedding like nobody else.”
He turned her back toward him as she started to wheel the babies out the door. “Why are you changing your mind?”
“I just don’t want a quickie in Vegas.”
“But you’ll still be cursed by Christmas Eve, won’t you? Not that I care, I kind of like you that way, obviously. In fact, maybe I don’t want you uncursed. It’s not affecting my desire for you, so don’t worry about that, sugarplum. In fact, it’s probably got me hotter than ever. Obviously your bad-girl vibe works for me quite well.”
She shook her head. “Xav, never tease about such things.”
“It’s hard not to. I’m a facts-and-figures kind of guy. My father was a hard-core pragmatist. In fact, some people called him a hard-core a*shole. I’m just saying, I don’t normally let myself be bothered by—”
He stopped at the look in Ash’s eyes, quickly noting he was walking on thin ice.
“I don’t worry too much about things I can’t see,” he finished. “So, I can tell the deacon to get his rig ready for Christmas Eve? We’d better do it really early, like three in the afternoon, if we don’t want to conflict with the Christmas Eve church schedule.”
“It will be all right.” She pushed the bundled up babies out the door, and he stared after her.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To see my grandfather,” she said. “He hasn’t been to see his great-grandchildren, and I’m going to make sure he meets them.”
“I’ll go with you,” Xav said quickly, not wanting his tiny wife out near the canyons by herself with their four babies. He settled Skye in the stroller.
“This is something I have to do on my own,” Ash said and, blowing him a kiss, she rolled off.
He was probably going to have a heart attack, courtesy of his independent wife.
* * *
XAV PACED, THEN HEADED to the burned-out barn. If the lady didn’t want to be accompanied, he knew Ash well enough to understand that there’d be all kinds of blowback if he shadowed her journey. He didn’t like it, but he had to trust that she knew what she was doing.
He tried to comfort himself with her promise to marry him soon.
Those two weeks were going to feel like a lifetime. Xav had the worst feeling that time was not his friend; craziness had been known to hit the fan around Rancho Diablo with the speed of light.
Xav studied the barn’s blackened beams, the remaining walls that were covered with soot. The sheriff had come out to take a look and insisted on an arson team taking a look, as well. Whoever had set the fire had been too clever to leave any trace of accelerants around, nor any overt sign of arson. They were left with the sheriff’s pronouncement that the fire might have been started by something as simple as an electrical failure, given the barn’s age.
Xav doubted it, and he didn’t think the Callahan brothers thought much of that, either.
He heard something move behind him, braced himself for whatever lurked in the barn. The fire had eaten holes in the roof, leaving it unusable until it was repaired, so there was plenty of light in the building on this sunny but cold day. Xav glanced around, tensed to pull his firearm.
Nothing but a cold, stern breeze whipping through the building from end to end. Xav walked outside, looked toward the canyons to see if he could see the jeep. He figured Ash must be planning to hunt Running Bear up in the canyons. The elderly Navajo chief hadn’t been around the house as much as he had been in the past, enjoying Fiona’s baking. Why hadn’t he yet visited the babies?
This seemed highly unusual to Xav, but the chief had a lot on his hands. Xav shrugged it off.
He tried to shrug off the noise he’d heard in the barn, too—nothing but creaking timbers weakened by the fire.
Maybe he’d just head out and pretend he had canyon duty. The truth was he had no duty at the moment, his future brothers-in-law telling him he needed to spend time with his children. He went to the main barn to saddle his horse and then walked him out into the sunshine.
“Where are you going?” Fiona demanded as she walked past him with an armload of Christmas decorations.
“The canyons.”
“Ash went that way,” Fiona said, indicating the main road with a nod. “She was trundling toward town.”
He frowned. “Are you sure? She said she was going to hunt up Running Bear.”
“I’m sure,” Fiona said. “You’re not far behind her, I’d imagine.”
He wheeled his horse in the direction of Diablo and called over his shoulder, “Thanks, Fiona!”
She went in the house, and he went after Ash at a cautious canter, not wanting her to yell at him for creeping after her. She’d tell him he was overbearing, that she could take care of herself, it was a bright, sunny day and Wolf wouldn’t bother her in broad daylight—he could hear everything she’d say.
And those reasons made him even more nervous.
* * *
THE ONLY WAY to find out the truth was to draw Wolf into the open. Ash strolled her babies toward the main road, and when Dante pulled up at their meeting place, she put the babies in the car seats in his truck.
“What’d you tell Xav?” Dante asked.
“That I was going to find Running Bear to show him the babies. It’s partially true.” She looked at her brother. “Is everyone in position?”
“Yes. Your beau’s going to chew all our ears off for letting you do this.”
“He’s not a Callahan. Drive.”
Dante nodded and pulled away. Ash pushed the stroller toward the main road, her scalp prickling. If everything went as they’d planned, hopefully Wolf would follow her right into the trap they’d set for him. As Xav had said, a lone wolf was dangerous. Now that his right-hand man was dead, Wolf had every reason to want to strike.
She heard a horse canter up behind her, turned. “Xav!”
He pulled alongside her. “Hi, babe. What’s up?”
She stopped, caught.
He looked in the stroller, met her gaze. “Where are the babies?”
She sighed. “Headed back to the house.”
“You’re running an operation?” He sounded outraged, and she couldn’t blame him.
“Yes, we are. I couldn’t tell you because this isn’t your problem.”
She could see her big, sexy cowboy didn’t appreciate being left out of the plan.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
“You can’t. Wolf will never show himself if you’re with me.”
He got off the horse, put his hand on the stroller. “You’re bait?”
“I’m just drawing him out in the open for my brothers,” Ash said. “It’s really not dangerous at all. I’m simply a decoy.”
He stared at her. “Your brothers are using you as bait? I’m going to kick their collective asses.”
“He’s after me, Xav.” She rolled the stroller on. “He told my brothers a long time ago that he had his eye on the biggest Callahan prize when he kidnapped Fiona, that there was a more valuable prize than even her, which would help him neutralize Running Bear. The only thing that furthers his goal is to get to me. That’s what he’s been after all along.”
“Why?” Xav demanded. “Not that I’m happy about this, but why?”
“I told you. If he can get to me, he gets to Running Bear. And that’s what he’s wanted more than anything. I knew it when the magic wedding dress burned away, and when the barn caught on fire.”
“What does one have to do with the other?”
“It means,” Ash said patiently, “Wolf is making his move and is determined to destroy the spirit of Rancho Diablo.”
“He already tried taking the Diablos. It’s not necessary to endanger yourself just to trap Wolf. Nothing will work out for him.”
“He gets closer all the time out of desperation. The best way to lure him is to make him think he can win. If he thinks he can kidnap me, he’ll make a mistake. And then we can sweep him off the ranch once and for all.”
“I’m going with you. I can’t take the chance of losing you. You’re not an operative anymore. You’re going to be my wife.”
She was an operative. She always would be. Ash looked at the father of her children, glowering at her, not understanding because there was no way he could. He hadn’t grown up all his life trained for this mission.
She had no other choice. “Xav,” Ash said slowly, “you need to understand that I may never be your wife. There’s a possibility it’s just not meant to be, no matter how much I hope it is.”
He shook his head. “Listen, darling, when and where we get married is to be determined. What you wear is obviously up for grabs, but I’m not much for what you wear to the altar as much as what you don’t wear when you’re in my bed. We have four little babies who need us, and long after Rancho Diablo is no longer standing, that’s what will be written in history.” Xav stared at her, his gaze firm, sexy, determined as hell. “You’re just going to have to get good with the fact that you chased me for years, and now you’ve got me. For good.”