Together for Christmas

by Debbie Macomber

  “We had three wonderful daughters and a wonderful life together. So, as you can see, all ended well for us.”

  “You lived happily ever after,” Aurora said dreamily.

  “Because my grandma didn’t steal your boyfriend,” Clara added, and shot an angry look at her former BFF.

  “No,” Muriel said gently. “Because we both wound up with the men we were supposed to be with. Jimmy Wilder came to town and your grandma found the man of her dreams, too. And one of the things that’s made me so happy all these years is my friendship with her. I’d hate to have lost that because we quarreled over a man.”

  “Anyway, people can’t help who they love,” put in Bailey.

  “If a guy’s not into you he’s not the right one for you,” Cecily added.

  “Besides, being mad at your friends is bad for your digestion,” Dot said, and popped a mini quiche into her mouth.

  Clara frowned, still not convinced that losing the boy of her dreams was a good thing.

  Cecily sat next to her on the floor and put an arm around her. “I have a feeling that the perfect boyfriend for you is right around the corner.”

  Clara looked at Cecily as if she knew the secrets of the universe. “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Cecily said. “But I can tell you he’ll be worth the wait.”

  “So that means you can keep your girlfriend,” Bailey added.

  “Keep the girlfriend and lose the guy,” Dot advised. “Men are a pain in the patootie.”

  That made the girls giggle and Dot’s friends frown in disapproval.

  Aurora stole a look at Clara, who was suddenly very busy picking lint off her sweater. “Want to get some punch?” she ventured.

  Clara nodded and they made their way to the punch bowl with the other girls following suit.

  “Crisis averted,” Samantha said as she watched the two girls hug each other. “Good job, Mom.”

  Muriel smiled and shook her head. “I can’t really take credit for that. The girls would have made up eventually.”

  “Yeah, but you saved us from having to endure teen girl drama,” Dot said.

  “And maybe you opened their eyes just a little,” Pat said. “Friendship is one of God’s greatest gifts.”

  “Right up there with family,” Cecily said, and smiled at Bailey.

  “And so is being together at Christmas,” put in Olivia.

  “Gack,” said Dot in disgust. “Next, one of you is going to say, ‘God bless us, everyone.’”

  “God bless us, everyone,” Samantha said, deadpan, making Dot frown and the other women laugh.

  Dot shook her head. “Never mind all that sweet, syrupy stuff.” She raised her cup of punch. “Let’s stick to our traditional toast,” she said to her friends. “Here’s to us, none like us.”

  “Amen to that,” said Pat, raising her cup. “And here’s to Christmas and to being able to gather with family and friends.”

  “To love and BFFs,” added Cecily, looking at the next generation, gathered around the punch bowl and giggling.

  Muriel followed her daughter’s gaze and smiled. Family, friendship, romance—love had a way of working things out no matter where trouble sprang up. Oh, yes, it was going to be another wonderful Christmas in Icicle Falls.

  * * *

  Starstruck

  RaeAnne Thayne

  Also available from HQN

  The Cowboys of Cold Creek series

  from New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne

  STARSTRUCK

  LIGHT THE STARS

  DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT

  DALTON’S UNDOING

  THE COWBOY’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

  A COLD CREEK HOMECOMING

  A COLD CREEK HOLIDAY

  A COLD CREEK SECRET

  A COLD CREEK BABY

  CHRISTMAS IN COLD CREEK

  A COLD CREEK REUNION

  A COLD CREEK NOEL

  A COLD CREEK CHRISTMAS SURPRISE

  A COLD CREEK STORY

  THE CHRISTMAS RANCH

  THE HOLIDAY GIFT

  THE RANCHER’S CHRISTMAS SONG

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  AS USUAL, the annual Christmas party at Carson and Jenna McRaven’s house was crowded, crazy and her absolute favorite night of the year—next to Christmas Eve itself, of course.

  Ruby Hartford sat with her three BFFs, Destry Bowman, Gabi Parsons and Ava Webster, in their favorite corner, looking through the big glass windows into the pool inside the McRavens’ supercool house.

  They had a big plate of delish snacks in front of them—cookies of every description, a few melt-in-your-mouth brownies and these little swirly appetizer things that looked as if they would be gross but were absolutely fantastic.

  Her best friends, Christmas decorations and music all around them, and good stuff to eat. Best. Party. Ever. In all her thirteen years, she’d never been to a better one.

  She glanced through the glass and spied the very cute Drew Wheeler standing at the pool’s edge. He seemed to be talking to his little sister Jolie, but his attention was most definitely on her and her friends.

  Ruby nudged Destry. “He’s so checking you out. I told you. I think Drew has a thing for you.”

  “What happened to that kid?” Gabi said. “Last year he was this quiet kid in glasses who always had his nose in a book. This year he’s suddenly, whoa.”

  It was definitely true. In the board shorts he was wearing, Ruby could see the muscles that had suddenly popped out overnight and he must have shot up a foot since the Christmas before. He wasn’t as built as his brother Hayden, but Hayden was sixteen and in high school.

  “He is cute, I’ll admit,” Destry said, peeking out the corner of her gaze at him and then quickly turning back to them. “Why would you think he’s looking at me?”

  “Just trust me. He is,” Ruby assured her. Even though he was a year ahead of the rest of them in school, Ruby considered herself pretty good friends with Drew since their ranches were close to each other and they rode the bus together.

  More than once, Drew had not-quite-casually asked about Destry, but she didn’t want to betray their friendship by admitting that since she knew it would embarrass him.

  Gabi, always the skeptic, gave a snort. “He doesn’t even have his glasses on. He’s not looking at anything. He probably doesn’t even know we’re here.”

  “Oh, he knows,” Ruby insisted.

  “Who is he and what does he know?”

  At the curious adult voice, she turned around and saw her mom and dad had wandered over. They were holding hands, as usual, which always made her heart happy.

  “Oh, nothing. I think Drew likes Destry, that’s all.”

  “Ruby!” Destry exclaimed, her face turning almost the same red as the ornaments on the tree next to them.

  “I just think you guys would be cute together. What’s the harm in a little matchmaking? Tell them what a good track record I have at it!”

  Her dad made a face but her mom only smiled softly. Ruby never called Ashley her stepmother. Even though her parents hadn’t married until she was six, Ashley was the only mom she had ever known.

  “Who else have you brought together?” Ava asked
curiously.

  Ruby grinned and pointed at her parents. Yeah. She rocked at matchmaking.

  “Really?” Destry asked, eyes wide. “I always wondered how a Hollywood movie star met and married the best kindergarten teacher in Pine Gulch.”

  “It’s a great story,” Ruby assured her.

  “I bet it’s so romantic,” Ava said, her voice barely a whisper. It weirded Ruby out, but Ava—who used to be so normal—could barely talk around Justin Hartford after watching several of his movies with her cousins when she went back to Chicago for a week over the summer.

  “Oh, yeah.” Her father grinned. “Romantic. I was a regular knight in shining armor.”

  “You were. Eventually.” Her mom gave him the kind of secretive, goofy look they were always exchanging. “Of course, it took a while for me to see you that way after you thought I was some kind of celebrity stalker and threatened to have me arrested.”

  “Oh, you have to tell us the whole story now!” Destry exclaimed.

  “Well, if you insist.” Her mom handed Ruby’s little brother Jess over to Ruby’s dad and settled onto the sofa next to Des. “You see, it all started with a rascal of a kindergartener who wouldn’t do her schoolwork....”

  One

  JUSTIN HARTFORD WAS a jerk.

  Ashley Barnes leaned against the hood of her car glaring at the locked gates to the sprawling Blue Sage ranch and repeated the words like a mantra. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.

  He was a narcissistic egomaniac who thought the entire world had nothing better to do but impinge on his personal space. Of course he would have locked gates. He wasn’t about to give mere mortals easy access to him.

  Too darn bad. She had to talk to him today. If repeated phone calls, letters and emails weren’t going to do the trick, she would just have to bust down these gates until the man agreed to talk to her.

  She sighed. Well, okay, that probably wasn’t the most brilliant idea she had ever come up with. As much as she adored her lime-green VW bug, she was afraid it didn’t have the necessary gumption to break through a couple of eight-foot-high iron gates.

  Failure was not an option, though. She and the jerk in question had been heading for this shoot-out for three weeks. Whether he knew it or not—or whether he even cared—she had given Justin Hartford an ultimatum in her mind. His time for avoiding her had just run out.

  She eyed the gates, all eight menacing feet of them. She hadn’t grown up on a horse ranch with four older brothers without learning a thing or two about hurdling fences, shinnying up trees and swinging out of barn lofts on old, fraying ropes. Climbing the man’s gate wouldn’t exactly be easy, but he wasn’t giving her a lot to work with here.

  She sighed, grateful at least that she was wearing jeans. She had to jump three times before she could reach the crossbar on the fence. From there, it was easy enough to hoist herself up. She perched along the top bar for just a moment—only long enough to catch a terrifying glimpse of a horse and rider heading toward her at a neck-or-nothing pace.

  Rats. It was too far to jump unless she wanted to risk a broken ankle, so she had to slither down like one of her kindergarten children on the monkey bars. She hit the ground and turned around just as a gorgeous Arabian raced up in a swirling cloud of dust.

  Ashley caught a quick glimpse of the horse’s rider and her pulse rate kicked up a notch. Her mouth suddenly felt as dry as a Cold Creek tributary after a three-year drought. It was the jerk himself. She couldn’t mistake those chiseled features and that strong jaw for anyone else.

  She had a quick mental picture of him in Last Chance, when he had played a wounded outlaw with a tragic secret. She loved that movie. She loved all his movies.

  Too bad they were all Hollywood make-believe.

  Two

  STORY:

  Justin reined the horse in and tipped his hat back. Ashley took an instinctive step back at the menace on his features. Had she ever really been so young and so stupid to think she was hopelessly in love with him?

  “You’ve got two choices here, lady,” he growled. “You either climb back the way you came or we wait here until the sheriff shows up to arrest you for trespassing. Which one do you prefer?”

  A chorus line of nerves started tap-dancing in her stomach, and she couldn’t seem to think straight with those midnight-blue eyes boring into her.

  “Go ahead and call the sheriff, Mr. Hartford. In fact,” she added brightly, “I can do it for you if you’d like, since I’ve got him on speed dial on my cell phone. I have all my brothers on speed dial. Luke is number two, right after Mom and Dad. It’s only fair, since he’s the oldest and that seemed the easiest way to keep the numbers straight. I should probably put Evan at number two since I call him most often. He’s the brother just older than me. We’re only two years apart so we are probably the closest. Still, he’s at number three. I don’t call the twins very often since they live on the coast, so they’re at five and six. But like I said, Luke is number two, so it would be easy to get him here fast if that’s what you want to do—”

  By the time she had the sense to realize she was rambling and could manage to clamp her teeth together to stem the gushing flow of stupidity, Justin Hartford’s famously gorgeous eyes had started to cross.

  This was all his own fault, she thought, crabby all over again. He didn’t need to sit there on his horse and glower at her as if she was the treasonous spy in one of his movies.

  “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “You don’t care about any of that. When I’m nervous I ramble.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he muttered, with such condescension she wanted to smack him. “Enlightening family history aside, you’re still trespassing—an eight-foot-high locked iron gate is usually a big tip-off there.”

  She drew in a cleansing breath and let it out again. This wasn’t going well. She needed to put aside her instinctive nervous reaction to her silly teenage heartthrob and focus on the crisis at hand—the reason she was there.

  “It’s your own fault. If you weren’t such a...a darn hermit maybe I wouldn’t have to resort to such drastic measures.”

  He blinked. “A hermit?”

  “Yes! How am I supposed to talk to you if you hardly leave the Blue Sage?”

  “I happen to like my privacy, Ms....”

  She drew herself up to her full five-foot-three inches tall and glared at him with all the frustration that had been burning through her for three weeks. “Ashley Barnes. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. Whether you want to be bothered or not, it is imperative I talk to you about your daughter.”

  Three

  JUSTIN LOOKED DOWN at the soft little blonde peach in the dusty-pink sweater who had just scaled his gate like some kind of Olympic gymnast. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. He winced, embarrassed he had mistaken her for an obsessed fan.

  Though he had walked away from Hollywood six years ago and moved to eastern Idaho without a backward glance, away from the attention he had never wanted, sometimes it followed him. He wasn’t obsessive about security. But what else was he supposed to think when he spied a woman climbing over his gate?

  “Kind of drastic measures to take for a parent-teacher conference, don’t you think?” he asked as he slid down from his horse.

  Her hazel eyes narrowed at him and he had to admit, up close she was seriously cute. Small and feminine, with short blond curls held back in a headband and dimples that appeared even when she was glaring at him.

  She looked like a cream puff. Like a delicious, sugary, melt-in-your-mouth confection. He had sworn off sweets a long time ago, but that didn’t make the sudden intense craving any easier to ignore.

  “I wouldn’t have had to resort to such drastic measures as climbing your stupid gate if you could be bothered just once to answer one of my dozens of pleas to set up a meeting.”

  She didn’t let him answer—not that he had the first ide
a what she was talking about.

  “I realize you’re a very busy, very important man,” she snapped, her hands fisted on her hips.

  How did the curl of those luscious lips make the words sound like an epithet? he wondered.

  “I’m sure you must have scores of people to see and all that,” she went on. “But you’re an actor—or you used to be, anyway. Couldn’t you at least pretend you care about your child?”

  He jerked his attention from her lips as her words filtered through. “Excuse me?”

  “You probably pay more attention to that horse of yours than you do to your own daughter!”

  Justin was usually pretty good at keeping his temper under wraps. But he wasn’t about to let some sanctimonious schoolteacher question how he raised his daughter. Ruby was the most important thing in his life. The only thing that mattered. Everything he did was for her and he didn’t take kindly to anyone insinuating otherwise.

  “You don’t know anything about me or about my daughter if you can say that.”

  The cream puff didn’t exactly deflate in the face of his anger, but she did back down a little.

  “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “But for three weeks I have been trying every method under the sun, except carrier pigeons, to get your attention, and you have ignored every single one of my attempts to contact you. If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you have the same impression, of an uninvolved parent who doesn’t care a hill of beans about his daughter’s education? I finally decided I would talk to you today, even if I had to climb your gate to do it.”

  Four

  HE TIPPED HIS hat back farther, completely baffled by the obvious concern in her voice. “I’m sure this is some kind of a mistake. I haven’t heard anything about any problems Ruby might be having in school. Did you talk to her great-aunt about it?”