“Christmas,” Tate replied.

“What?”

Tate’s eyes got funny and not in a good way before he explained, “Jim-Billy used to be married to a woman named Elise. Pretty thing, reminded me of Betty. Lots of energy, f**kin’ sweet. They were tight, always tight. Jim-Billy was a trucker but, he was in town, you wouldn’t see them apart.”

“And?” I prompted when he stopped and I did this even though I wasn’t certain, with the way his story had started, that I wanted to know.

“Christmas, ‘bout seven years back, faulty lights on the tree, tree caught fire, house caught fire, smoke detector didn’t go off and Elise was burned alive.”

Even though I wasn’t guessing Tate’s story was a jolly one full of Christmas cheer, this wasn’t what I expected to hear or wanted to hear. Not about anybody but especially not about Jim-Billy’s wife. Jim-Billy was a barfly but he was also a good guy straight to the core.

I closed my eyes tight and whispered, “Oh my God.”

“Yeah, babe,” Tate whispered back and I opened my eyes.

“Was Jim-Billy on the road?”

“Yep, Billy was on the road. Billy was also the guy who didn’t change the batteries in his smoke detector.” Tate shook his head and glanced at Jim-Billy before his eyes came back to me. “Blamed himself and then unraveled. Remember it. It was difficult to witness.”

Feeling my heart break, I peeked at Jim-Billy and Krys then looked back at Tate and said, “I bet.”

“He went off the rails. Took him a few years to get it out of his system. A few more to clean up his shit. He never went back to work. Managed somehow to get Disability and lives off that and the insurance payout.”

“Poor Jim-Billy,” I whispered and I did this with feeling.

“For obvious reasons, he ain’t good at Christmas. Krys takes care of him and I’m thinkin’ she agreed to Bubba takin’ shifts because Bubba is good with him. They’ll see him through.”

I looked at Jim-Billy and said, “Maybe I can, I don’t know…” My mind was shifting through all my fix-it strategies and coming up with zilch when my eyes went back to Tate and I tossed out a long shot. “Captain, I think maybe Nadine’s sweet on him.”

Tate shook his head. “Don’t go there.”

“Well, I don’t know if she is but she comes in a lot and she almost always sits with him. I can talk to her first, feel her out, see if –”

“Yeah, Ace, she’s into him. He ain’t much to look at but he’s a good guy and she saw his devotion to Elise. Her first husband was an ass**le, her second one a drunk and an ass**le and her third one a drunk ass**le who beat her. She knows Jim-Billy likes his beer but he can also hold it and he’s so far from an ass**le, it ain’t funny.”

“So –” I started but stopped when Tate’s face changed, went from serious to deadly serious and he leaned in super close.

And when he spoke, his voice was near to a growl. “A woman gets under your skin, the kind of woman that feeds the muscle, the bone, the soul, no replacing that. Jim-Billy knows it. Nadine’s a good woman but once you have that, there’s no replacing it.”

I stared at him and he stared back.

Then I whispered, “Tate –” but stopped speaking when his hand moved and his thumb tweaked the diamond he’d slid on my finger six weeks before.

“No replacing it,” he repeated on his own whisper.

He was right. I knew it because he was under my skin too. He was feeding the muscle, the bone but mostly my soul. And if I ever lost him, there’d be no replacing him. I didn’t know if I’d give up and drink beer in a biker bar for the rest of my days. What I did know was a life without Tate didn’t bear thinking about.

“I want to make out with you right now,” I blurted but I did it quietly.

His head jerked almost imperceptibly at my words and he asked, “Come again?”

“You’re being sweet and when you’re being sweet, I always want to make out with you. So, I want to make out with you.”

He grinned then he said, “Have at it, Ace.”

“Not in front of Jim-Billy,” I whispered.

His grin became a smile.

Then he said, “Office, in five.”

I smiled back and said, “Gotcha.”

I peeled away, checked on my very few customers, none of whom needed drinks and, after five minutes, I met Tate in the office where I participated in a heated and highly enjoyable make out session on the couch with my boss.

* * * * *

I had Christmas music playing softly (something Tate and Jonas could take, in small measures, then they couldn’t take anymore so I was enjoying it while I could) and was standing in the opened door of the fridge, staring at its contents, determined to make a good dinner out of whatever was in there in order to eat up all the food prior to us going off for two weeks when I heard a knock on the sliding glass door.

Tate and Jonas were in town running an errand the purpose of which they did not share. I didn’t pry. It was Christmas and when someone ran an unexplained errand at Christmas you didn’t ask questions.

Tate had been right that night six weeks ago, we were more than comfortable. We were good. I knew this because I’d taken over dealing with our bank accounts. Mine was still hefty because Tate didn’t let me pay for anything but food, clothing and the variety of household items I’d been buying to make his house a home. Tate’s was hefty because the bar was doing an excellent turnover and the skips he brought in earned him a whack and he (or, now, me as I prepared, sent and processed his invoices) charged expenses.

Considering the fact that Tate seemed dedicated to the cause of making certain I never regretted my move from a life of martinis and manicures in the gated community of Horizon Summit to a family life in a house on a hill in Colorado, I suspected that my Christmas was going to be good that year. I didn’t want him to worry about this because it didn’t matter to me. It also didn’t penetrate the many times I shared this fact with him. Therefore, I’d come to terms with the fact that it was something he was driven to do so I was going to let him do it. Really, who was I to complain?

I turned to the door and walked to it, seeing Dalton standing outside. This was a surprise and a worry. Outside of coming to get me or taking me home when he’d been called into Lauren Duty by Tate, Dalton didn’t hang out at my house and he’d never stopped by unannounced. He wasn’t on that night at Bubba’s but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t popped by for a drink, something he did, if not regularly then regularly enough. That meant he might be there about Jim-Billy.