Unbound Pursuit Read Online Free Page B

it. When I went to sleep in my room, Wyatt snuck in there with a huge roll of red ribbon that Mom was going to use to wrap packages for Christmas. I never heard him. When I woke up the next morning, Wyatt had ‘papered’ my bed. I had a hundred feet of red ribbon tied from one post to another across my bed.
    “I was so excited about the ribbon that I ran downstairs to tell Mom and Dad that Santa had visited me last night. Wyatt was down there with them and he started laughing.” Cathy gave him an evil look. “And that’s when I realized he’d done it.”
    Daisy wiped her eyes and went over to hug her daughter. “I’m sorry, honey, I couldn’t help myself. It was funny in one way, but in another way, it wasn’t.”
    “Which,” Hank Lockwood said as he came down the hall from the office, “is why Wyatt got his butt tanned out in the woodshed for that mean prank he played.”
    “Rightly so,” Tal agreed, giving Wyatt a really dark look. “That was mean of you to do that to Cathy. Children should be allowed to have their dreams and fantasies, Wyatt. How could you?”
    Wyatt gave her a hangdog look. “It was,” he confessed. “I’ve pulled a lot of jokes on family members, but that wasn’t one of my finer moments.”
    Hank went into the kitchen, his height and bulk dwarfing the area. “Actually,” he said, “it was the only time you got your butt paddled, son.” He rolled up the sleeves on his shirt and then washed his hands in the sink.
    Wyatt grinned, perking up as he held Tal’s accusing green stare. “See? I learned. Butt paddled only once. That’s a pretty good track record considering how many jokes I played on my poor siblings.”
    Cathy smiled. “Mom rescued me from your joke.”
    “Yeah,” Wyatt grumbled, “by telling a lie.”
    “Now, Wyatt,” Daisy warned, shaking her finger in his direction, “it was a white lie. There’s a difference.”
    “Sure is,” Cathy agreed. She shifted her focus to Tal. “Mom lied and told me that only children who had been especially good in the last year were given the gift of red ribbons by Santa himself. It was his way of saying I’d been a really good girl all year long.”
    Wyatt snorted. “I know where I got my storytellin’ from.” He waved his finger in the direction of his smiling mother, who was drying her hands on her dark green apron.
    “Yes, son, you did,” Daisy agreed amiably.
    “Do you know what else they did to me for playing that dirty trick on Cathy?” Wyatt asked Tal.
    “I feel like all the family skeletons are coming out of the closet, Lockwood. And you probably own ninety percent of ’em,” she murmured, a grin edging her lips.
    “I love a woman who gives as good as she gets,” Wyatt said, leaning forward and kissing Tal’s cheek.
    “Go on,” Cathy goaded, smirking, “tell her, Wyatt. What else happened to you that day? Five days before Christmas, I might add.”
    Wyatt’s grin grew, and he looked at Tal. “I woke up the next morning and sitting next to my pillow was this gunnysack. I never heard anyone come into my room to put it there, but it was there when I woke up. Of course I was curious, so I jumped out of bed. It was a hundred-pound oat gunnysack, and there was something in the bottom of it. It was wrapped up in twine, so I quickly untied it, excited. I thought it was a gift of some kind.”
    Cathy snickered. Daisy and Mattie began to laugh uncontrollably again, bent over, hands on their knees.
    Tal frowned. “What was it?”
    Hank ambled over to the table with his long, casual stride. “Somethin’ real special for a firstborn son to learn from,” he rumbled, a sour grin on his face as he pulled out the chair at the end of the table and sat down. “Tell her, son.”
    Tal saw ruddiness coming to Wyatt’s cheeks. He rarely blushed, but he did now. And there was some humility in his expression. “What was it?” she asked.
    “A bucket of coal.”
    Tal blinked. And then she got it: coal in the sock at