That just didn’t work.

Taking advantage of her hospitality didn’t sit well with him either.

Even though he knew...

He knew things about her. Not just things about her past, though they shared plenty of stories about their messed-up childhoods. And who would’ve thought that one designed to repress you would have so many commonalities with one designed to make you a career criminal? He certainly wouldn’t have. But it turned out they had more in common than they had different.

He knew how she liked her tea. That she drank black tea up until five, and then switched to chamomile. And she liked coffee in the morning. She really liked hot drinks.

She loved winter, and she had never really had a nice Christmas before. Because her mother hadn’t believed in celebrating it, and after that she’d been on her own.

She had taken college so seriously she had never stopped to enjoy anything extra.

He knew that she got a little crease between her brows when she was grading papers. And she looked genuinely worried when she read things that she considered a sad indictment of the state of today’s youth.

She was old-fashioned. She loved those frilly nightgowns, and he loved taking them off of her.

For all that she was old-fashioned, she wasn’t shy. And she wasn’t a prude. Not with him. She seemed to love everything they did and want more.

And he wanted to do something. Wanted to give her something. Well hell, he wasn’t poorly, not anymore. There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t go out and do some things for her. She had gone and gotten him clothes at a certain point. So now he had some respectable things to wear. Even if they were just a little bit nineties. The denim jacket that she had picked out for him made him think of something his dad might’ve worn.

He put his black cowboy hat on and walked around the woods until he found it. The cabin. He went inside and lifted the floorboards and found his black bag full of his rodeo prize winnings. He had known he could never have the bulk of his life stored in a bank. Not when everything could fall apart.

He took some cash, stowed the rest back where he’d found it, then started walking till he got to the main road. It took a couple hours, all up, but he managed to get himself down to the general store. And there he found Christmas decorations. A whole heap of them.

“Any possibility you could make a delivery up to Sullivan’s Point?” he asked the man manning the register.

“Sure could do,” the man said. “I’m off soon.”

“I thank you kindly for it. Especially if you could put a Christmas tree into the mix.”

“I could do that too. You need a ride?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

And that was how he found himself in the bed of a pickup truck with a Christmas tree, wondering how the hell it was he’d found himself doing all this just for a few strings of tinsel, so that he might make a woman smile.