A Cowboy Christmas Miracle (Burnt Boot, Texas Book 4)

by Carolyn Brown

  “He will have his place in the business, but you will run the ranch as a whole.”

  A picture of the little house where Angela and Jody lived flashed through Betsy’s mind. That’s what she wanted. Not a house with a ballroom big enough to seat two hundred people or a ranch that took hours to drive around on a four-wheeler.

  * * *

  Darkness comes early at the end of November in Texas, but the moon was bright, and it would light up her truck no matter where she parked it, so that evening, she took the old ranch work truck into town. She nosed it into the gravel lot behind the bar, where the beer and liquor vendors parked to bring their wares through the back door.

  She had barely turned off the engine when Declan’s big, black truck slid in beside her and he slung the passenger door open. She picked up her purse, which had her phone and her list of folks she’d fight to keep, and crawled in beside him.

  “We still going to do this, or have you chickened out?” he asked.

  “We are doing it,” she said.

  He wiggled his eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, Declan. Is that all you think about?”

  “Sometimes I do think about food, but that could be simply because I need it as fuel so I can chase women,” he said.

  “You and Tanner are probably related somewhere in the pre-feud days.”

  “Hey, now, them are fightin’ words, and we’ve called a truce until we get this Christmas crap done.”

  “Have we?” She shot a long look toward him.

  He parked behind the church and turned to meet her gaze. “If we’re going to work together, we should agree not to insult each other.”

  “Why? What we’re doing is business, not personal.”

  “And it can end right here before it ever starts,” he said.

  Betsy flashed her sweetest smile. “Little touchy tonight, are we?”

  “Not a little—a whole lot, so all kidding aside, let’s get into the church where it’s warm and decide our next step. I want Gladys and Polly, and since they won’t be able to keep their mouths shut to Sawyer and Jill, I’ll take them too.”

  She opened the truck door and dashed across the narrow distance to the porch and fished the key from her purse. “Then I get Rosalie and Verdie and the family at Salt Draw.”

  He followed her into the church. She flipped on a hallway light and entered the first available room. He sat down in a rocking chair in the nursery and remembered the warm and fuzzy feeling at Fiddle Creek earlier in the day, when he’d dragged a rocker up to the fire. “And since Leah is my sister, I get her and Rhett.”

  She pulled her list from her purse and sat down in the other rocking chair. “Where’s your list?”

  He tapped his forehead. “Right here. I’ve got the Brennans and the ones I just mentioned and the man at the feed store in Gainesville.”

  Dammit! Why hadn’t she thought of him?

  “Then I’m taking the staff at the western wear store.” She wrote the store name on her paper.

  “I get Billy Bob’s Barbecue and anyone who comes into the bar.”

  “Oh, no, not in a million years. You can have Billy Bob’s, but we’re sharing the bar. I get three nights a week and you can have three.”

  “Then I want Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”

  “In your dreams, cowboy. You can have Thursday and Friday and your choice of the other days. I get Saturday and the other two days you don’t want. That’s fair since Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest nights.”

  He grinned. “You drive a hard bargain, Gallagher.”

  “I drive a fair bargain, Brennan,” she said, smarting off.

  “We can start in the morning, then, and bring our goods here on Thursday nights, right?”

  “That would be the plan. Is the meeting adjourned?”

  “I do believe it is. Nice doin’ business with you.” He stood up and waited beside the door to the hallway for her to go out first.

  “You don’t have to act like a gentleman. This is business, not personal. I’m not your date,” she said.

  “Heaven forbid.” He grinned.

  * * *

  The next morning at breakfast, Declan had poured a cup of coffee and was in the process of loading his plate from the sideboard in the dining room when his grandmother breezed into the room. Her jet-black hair accentuated every single wrinkle in her eighty-plus-year-old round face.

  “I hear that wild hussy Betsy Gallagher drove the ranch work truck into town last night and parked behind the bar. She got into another truck, but no one knows who she was with or where they went. And someone was in the church last night. Kyle has gone home to Oklahoma to be with his fiancée for the holidays, so it wasn’t him. I’m wondering if Betsy is having a fling with one of the deacons,” Mavis said. “If I find out that it’s true, I swear I’ll have him thrown out of the church.”

  “Granny, the deacons, all except Quaid, are sixty years old and married. You think she’s having an affair with Quaid?”

  Mavis laid a palm over her heart and gasped. “He’d best not be flittin’ around that woman. I’ll have him neutered. I swear to God I will. Why’d you have to put that picture in my mind? Leah has brought down enough shame on this family, marryin’ that hippie cowboy like she did.”

  Declan set his food on the table and started to eat. “If it is Quaid, can Leah come back home? After all, she didn’t get hooked up with a Gallagher.”

  Mavis’s hand left her chest and waved in the air like a frayed flag on a windy day. “She’s made her bed and now she can lie in it. You might do well to remember that, Declan. Which reminds me, it’s high time you started thinking about settling down. Honey can’t run this ranch by herself. She’ll need a strong male presence.”

  “Then tell her to get married. I’m not interested,” Declan said.

  Suddenly, he wasn’t hungry. He carried his plate to the sink, scraped it off, and turned on the garbage disposal.

  “You are wasting good food!” Mavis shouted above the noise.

  “Yep. See you later today.”

  He grabbed a notepad with the ranch logo on the top on the way to his truck and wrote the first message to put into the can:

  Have to figure out some other way to get this done. Someone saw you last night. Meet me in Gainesville tonight. Movie theater. Back row at the show that starts at seven thirty.

  Chapter 5

  Betsy could feel her grandmother’s glare the minute she walked into the country kitchen that morning. Since only four or five people had breakfast at the big house on Wild Horse, each person made their own and sat around the old oak table that had been in the family since before the feud started. Tension was so thick that a sharp machete couldn’t have cut through it, but Betsy wasn’t saying a word until she figured out who had already pissed in Naomi’s coffee that morning.

  “I hear that Quaid Brennan picked you up behind the bar last night. Y’all went to the church, back into the nursery, and spent about fifteen minutes there and then you went back to your truck,” Naomi said in an ice-cold voice.

  Betsy poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the table. “You heard wrong. I was at the church, but not with Quaid.”

  “With who, then?”

  “My college friend Iris. I left the old work truck at the bar and she picked me up.” She was thankful for her imaginary college friend, Iris. If the poor girl had been real, Betsy would have owed her too many favors to count.

  “The mail doesn’t run on Thanksgiving,” Naomi said.

  “The mail doesn’t bring the programs. The UPS man delivers them and puts them on the back porch, but he didn’t bring them yesterday after all, since it was a holiday. I left a note for Kyle and I’ll pick them up today and put them in the church. I’m hungry so I’m going to make my morning smoothie. You wan
t one?” That wasn’t a lie; anxiety always made Betsy hungry.

  “You should be eating eggs and bacon, not those glorified shakes.” A little of the ice had thawed in Naomi’s tone.

  “I put protein into the shake, and it doesn’t have all those fat grams.”

  “Promise me that you weren’t at that church with Quaid Brennan.”

  Betsy dumped two tablespoons of protein powder into the blender, added yogurt and a banana, and looked right into Naomi’s eyes. “Do we need the Bible for me to put my right hand on?” she asked.

  Naomi slapped the table so hard that the salt and pepper shakers rattled. “Stop stalling and give me your word.”

  In a few strides, Betsy was standing in front of Naomi, right hand raised and eyes locked solidly with her grandmother’s. “I solemnly swear, right here before God and you—and please know that I’m far more afraid to lie to you than him—that I was not at the church with Quaid last night, and I have no intentions of ever being there with him other than Sunday mornings, when he sits on one side and I’m on the other and never the twain shall meet in the middle. I did not get into his truck or go anywhere with him, and I would never, ever do that anyway. Is that good enough? Can I make my smoothie now and go help Eli and Tanner with the chores?”

  Naomi gave her a curt nod. “That’s good enough. I swear the gossiping tongues in Burnt Boot are flapping at both ends most of the time. That’s a good thing you’re doing for the preacher. Next time, park your pink truck right there beside the back door and I’ll make sure everyone knows that you are doing something religious. It’ll be a good thing, like you slowing down on the drinking.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You sure you don’t want a smoothie?”

  “I had fried eggs and ham fifteen minutes ago. And I want you back here to go over books with me at ten o’clock. If the chores aren’t done by then, Eli and Tanner can finish them.”

  Betsy hated the office and being inside the house all day, but that’s what Granny would have her doing the rest of the day. Naomi had never entered the modern technology world and still kept a set of books in longhand, but before she gave up her golden scepter and crown, she intended for all the information to be put into the computer. That way, she’d declared, Betsy would be familiar with the past and the present way things were done on Wild Horse.

  “Did you hear me?” Naomi asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Ten o’clock in the office. Want me to clean the shit off my boots?”

  Naomi’s forefinger shot up faster than a speeding bullet and pointed right at Betsy’s heart. “You take a shower before you come to work with me in the office. And I want the cussin’ to tone down right along with the drinking. Wild Horse needs a heavy hand but also a decent lady to run it.”

  “Then ten thirty, since I have to take a shower, or do I work until ten, drive from the back forty to here, take a shower and clean up, and be in there at eleven?”

  “Okay, okay,” Naomi said. “Come in at noon—have lunch and take a shower. We’ll work all afternoon getting things put into that computer. It doesn’t like me. It crashes every time I touch it. But I guess everything should be brought up to date before I step down.”

  “Time to enter the modern world, Granny.” Betsy poured her shake into a travel mug, screwed on the top, and dropped a kiss on Naomi’s forehead as she headed for the door. She set the shake on the foyer table, put on her work jacket and cowboy hat, and hurried out the door before Naomi changed her mind about the time.

  It took five minutes to go from Wild Horse to the church at the right speed. She made it in three, scribbled a note to put into the can telling Declan that they could not meet at the church on Thursday.

  The can had held apple pie filling at one time—apples, a symbol for the fruit from the forbidden tree.

  Very fitting.

  She found Declan’s note, tucked it into her pocket, and rewrote hers to say that she’d be there. Then she picked up the manila envelope with the programs inside and took them to Kyle’s office. The door was locked, so she propped them against it and sat down in the front pew.

  The hands of the clock, hanging to one side of the squeaky door, moved in slow motion, and the five minutes she was determined to sit there seemed like eternity. But the early morning gossips in Burnt Boot would see that she was at the church, alone, in her truck, and that she was supposed to be there.

  Exactly four minutes and thirty seconds after she’d sat down, her phone rang. She let it go to the fourth ring before she picked it up.

  “Want my recipe for a smoothie, Granny?” she asked.

  “What are you doing at the church?”

  “I came to put the programs in Kyle’s office. I was just leaving to go help Tanner. Do you have a tracker on my truck?”

  “I don’t need one. There is a whole town full of folks watching your hot-pink truck. Honey, you can’t sneeze without someone calling me. There are no secrets in Burnt Boot and you can’t get away with anything.”

  “I believe it. I’m on my way out. Programs delivered. No need to come back to church until Sunday morning now.”

  “I will see you later,” Naomi said, and the call ended.

  * * *

  Declan arrived at the theater first and paid for a ticket. The movie was one of the chick flicks that he’d never have chosen to watch, but it started at seven thirty and there weren’t many folks lining up to see it.

  He bought the popcorn-and-drink deal of the night and hung back until he caught sight of Betsy’s flaming-red ponytail bouncing along with every step she took. He nodded toward the movie when he caught her eye and held up the huge container of popcorn.

  The older people were joined by two more couples about their age, and they didn’t waste any time getting past the usher when he pulled back the velvet ropes. Declan gave them an extra few minutes to get seated before he went inside and sat in the back row. He’d barely gotten settled when Betsy joined him and stuck her hand into the popcorn box.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Starving. FYI, I eat when I’m stressed.”

  “What’s got your blood pressure up?” he teased.

  “Every bit of this. My granny thought I was sinnin’ with Quaid last night in the church nursery.”

  “Mine knew by breakfast this morning.” He passed the drink to her. “Don’t look at it like that. We’ve already shared a whiskey bottle and I got two straws. The short one is yours.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” she asked.

  “Just that you aren’t as tall as me.”

  The movie started, and she pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged so she could face him. He leaned toward her so they could talk without disturbing the people who’d actually come to see the show rather than to have a dark, quiet place to plan a Christmas program.

  “So I’ve got a plan,” he said.

  She grabbed another fistful of popcorn. “What is your plan? I got nothing, other than my truck can go to the church on Thursdays only, so I can put the programs inside. Other than that, I can’t even drive the old work truck to town and hide it behind the bar without someone seeing and, worse yet, telling, so if you can find a way to get inside without being seen, we could still meet at the church.”

  “I think we should rent a storage unit here in Gainesville to unload our things once a week,” he said.

  “And I could slip a note in the preacher’s program envelope telling him what we’re doing, so he wouldn’t be disappointed that there’s nothing piling up in one of the Sunday school rooms. Then, on the last Thursday that we have donations, I could give him the key to the storage unit,” she said. “I like it. That way it would be totally anonymous.”

  “Did you get anything yet?” he asked.

  Betsy shook her head. “Granny had me in the office all afternoon so I didn’t have time. You?”

  He
grinned. “I’m ahead by five items, then. And I’m only counting a box of twelve ornaments as one since they’re in a box.”

  “What did you get?” she asked.

  “The ornaments. A box of green garland stuff that likely doesn’t go on the tree but probably around the ceiling in the church; it looks like fake holly. And a package of gold tinsel, a bale of hay, and a little drummer boy costume. You need to write it down?”

  “What size is the costume?”

  “I don’t know. One of my cousin’s kids used it a couple of years ago when the Brennans did that part of the program and he was about this tall.” Declan measured three feet from the floor with an open hand.

  * * *

  One second, Betsy was looking at a big rancher’s hand showing her how big a little drummer boy was, and the next, Declan had wrapped both arms around her and his lips were on hers.

  Her first instinct was to pull back and slap him, but then his tongue traced the outline of her lips. From that moment, all she could think about was Declan. All she could see were sparks dancing behind her closed eyes. And all she wanted was for the kiss to never end.

  She opened her mouth enough to allow entrance, and their tongues did a mating dance that sent shivers down her spine. The sensible side of her brain kept shouting something about him being a Brennan, but the part that controls sensation and sexual desire hushed it up right quick.

  When he ended the kiss and pulled back, she was speechless for the first time in her life. Her knees had gone weak. Her brain was total mush. Her body wanted to haul him off to the nearest motel, or the back of her truck, and finish what they’d started.

  “Your cousin Eli walked in with a girl and I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

  She glanced around the furry edge of the parka hood of her coat, and sure enough, about midway down the theater’s aisle, Eli was sitting there with a woman.

  “I’d best leave,” she said.

  “I’ll give you time to clear the parking lot and then I’ll go,” he said. “You want the drink?”