The Humbug Man

by Diana Palmer

  It’s a Christmas miracle in Montana with New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer’s beloved story, THE HUMBUG MAN.

  Montana rancher Tate Hollister was the grouchiest man that widowed Maggie Jeffries had ever met. It’s Christmastime, and Maggie was determined not to let her Scrooge-like neighbor ruin her young son’s holiday. Nearly ten years old, Blake adored Tate for some reason Maggie couldn’t fathom.

  But there’s more to Tate than his brusque manner. As the holiday season progressed, Maggie discovered that Tate—with his smoldering black eyes and roguish good looks—wasn’t completely immune to the Christmas spirit. In fact, his loving embrace might just be the gift of a lifetime…

  “Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Renegade

  The Humbug Man

  Diana Palmer

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter One

  Tate Hollister lived alone, which wasn’t surprising to his nearest neighbor. He had a temper like black lightning and seemed to hate people in general, and boys in particular. Maggie Jeffries had gotten an earful about the taciturn rancher from her late father-in-law, and her son Blake was an ongoing verbal documentary on his life. If she hadn’t loved the boy so much, she might have had some terrible fights with him over the incredible case of hero worship he had for Hollister. Maggie had seen their black-eyed neighbor from time to time over the years, but he avoided her the same way he tried to avoid Blake. But he didn’t have a lot of success with the boy; Blake was almost ten and Hollister was his hero.

  It was hard to overlook Blake’s constant chatter about the man, but Maggie loved her son, so she tried not to be annoyed. She also kept in mind that Blake had never known his father. Bob Jeffries had been a war correspondent. He’d died in Central America covering a story, leaving Maggie destitute and three months pregnant. She’d supported herself by working as a secretary to a printing corporation executive. When the company had moved its headquarters from Tennessee to Tucson, Arizona, Maggie had decided to go along with little Blake. Her parents were dead and her three brothers were scattered all over the country, but Grandpa Jeffries had still been alive. She wanted to be close enough that Blake could spend some time with him on his rural Montana ranch.

  Over the years, Maggie had rapidly climbed to executive secretary and held a responsible job. Then Grandfather Jeffries had died unexpectedly in the fall and had left this small ranch to Maggie.

  Blake, who’d been in military school for the past year, had jumped at the chance to go to Montana. Couldn’t they, he pleaded, just for the Christmas holidays? Then Maggie could decide if she wanted to sell the place, couldn’t she? After all—he played his trump card with a dejected expression that was only partially faked—they hardly saw each other anymore.

  That had done it. Maggie missed her son, despite the fact that she wanted him to be independent and not tied to her apron strings. She’d asked for two weeks leave from her job, just through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Then she’d found them a temporary secretary to take her place, and she and young Blake had left for the wilds of Montana.

  And here they were. In two feet of drifting snow, on a rickety, run-down ranch facing the Bitterroot mountains, with no close neighbors except for the elusive and unfriendly Mr. Hollister, whom Blake seemed to worship from afar for God alone knew what reason.

  The ranch house was more of a large cabin than a house, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It had just four rooms, two of which were bedrooms. The living room and dining room were combined, with a small kitchen in one corner and a bathroom that was definitely an afterthought. The furnishings were wood, and all of it had a definite Indian influence, from the blankets and rugs to the paintings that decorated the rough wood walls. The only difference now was the few Christmas decorations that Maggie and Blake had added, like the pine boughs around the fireplace with their red velvet bows and the cheerful red and green candles and the artificial holly on the coffee table.

  Maggie found the idle pace of life in Montana familiar. It brought back memories of her childhood spent in the mountains of southern Tennessee, so close to the Georgia line that it had once been disputed border territory. She’d lived in the backwoods with her parents and her brothers, and it had been a satisfying life until Bob had passed through covering a story and had wooed Maggie out of her mountains and into Memphis and a small apartment.

  Sometimes that part of her life seemed like a long-ago dream. If it hadn’t been for the photos, she would hardly remember what Bob looked like, although she’d loved him desperately at the age of eighteen. Now she was twenty-eight, and there were faint threads of silver in her wavy, dark brown hair. She was tall and slender as a willow, but her eyes had a haunted look these days. She was restless lately, and sometimes she felt like she was searching—but she didn’t know for what.

  “It’s fun here.” Blake was grinning as he stared out the window at the snow. “I don’t miss prickly pear cactus and creosote and roadrunners and dry washes, you bet.”

  “At least in southern Arizona we didn’t have all that snow, or haven’t you glanced out the window lately?” she asked, smiling, and her eyes crinkled at the corners. She had an elfin face, very mischievous, and an elegant carriage, which had come from her mother’s insistence on proper posture. Those contradictions, added to the faint traces of her southern mountain drawl, made her something of an enigma. She did attract men occasionally, but her rigid Scotch-Irish upbringing didn’t allow for a casual outlook on life, and most of the city men she ran across were as easygoing about sex as they were about letting a woman buy them a meal. It was a kind of life that suited many, but Maggie had too many hang-ups. So she was still single.

  She wondered sometimes if Blake was being deprived of male companionship solely because of her attitudes. It bothered her, but she didn’t want to change.

  “Snow is awesome,” he sighed, using a word that he used to denote only the best things in his life. Cherry pie was awesome. So was baseball, if the Atlanta Braves were playing, and football if the Dallas Cowboys were.

  She smiled at his dark head, so like her own. He had her slender build, too, but he had his father’s green eyes. Bob had been a handsome man. Handsome and far too brave for his own good. Dead at twenty-seven, she sighed, and for what?

  She folded her arms across her chest, cozy in the oversize red flannel shirt that she wore over well-broken-in jeans. “It’s freezing, that’s what it is,” she informed her offspring. “And it isn’t awesome; it’s irritating. Apparently, the electric generator goes out every other day, and the only man who can fix it stays drunk.”

  “That cowboy seems to know how,” Blake said hesitantly.

  Maggie agreed reluctantly. “I know. Things were running great until our foreman asked for time off to spend Christmas with his wife’s family in Pennsylvania. That leaves me in charge, and what do I know about running a ranch?” she moaned. “I grew up on a small farm, but I don’t know beans about how to manage this kind of place, and the men realize it. I suppose they don’t have any confidence in working for a secretary, even just temporarily.”

  “Well, there’s always Mr. Hollister,” Blake said with pursed lips and a wicked grin.

  She glared at him. “Mr. Hollister hates me. He hates you, too, in fact, but you don’t seem to let that stand in the way of your admiration for the man.” She threw up her hands, off on her favorite subject again. “For heaven’s sake, he’s a cross between a bear and a moose! He never comes off his mountain except when he wants to cuss somebody out or raise hell!”

&nbs
p; “He’s lonely,” Blake pointed out. “He lives all by himself. It’s hard going, I’ll bet, and he has to eat his own cooking.” He sat up enthusiastically, his thick hair over his brow. “Grandpa said he once knew a man who quit working for Mr. Hollister just because the cook got sick and Mr. Hollister had to feed the men.”

  Maggie glanced at her son with a wicked gleam in her eyes. “He probably fed them some of his razor blades,” she murmured.

  “Oh, shame on you,” Blake said with a chuckle. “How did I wind up with a mother like this?” he asked the ceiling.

  “Well, they ran out of ugly, mean ones, and here I was,” Maggie sighed, striking a pose.

  Blake laughed harder. He would have agreed with her if he could have stopped laughing. He thought she was the best mom in the whole world, even if she did have this annoying hang-up about his beloved Mr. Hollister. “But really, Mom, you’re going to have to do something about the cattle and the men pretty quick,” he finally said, sounding grown-up and almost knowledgeable. “The cattle are straying real bad. I saw some down on Mr. Hollister’s place just this morning.”

  She drew in a breath. “Why didn’t you say so? For God’s sake, don’t just sit there. Get some barbed wire, and I’ll send for a few land mines….” She shuddered.

  “He’s a nice man. You just don’t understand him,” Blake said.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Are we talking about the same Mr. Hollister? The one who looks like a hat and mustache sitting on a rock?” she asked, turning away from Blake’s amused grin. “I’ll bet if he ever smiled, his face would break.”

  “Grandpa liked him,” he reminded her. “I do, too. You just don’t know him, that’s all. He’s a real jake guy.”

  “I don’t want to know him. That’s why I spent every minute I came up here hiding out from him. And I will never learn to understand the language you speak,” she informed him. “It goes from mumble to street jive to unintelligible—” A loud knock at the door stopped her in midsentence. “Maybe it’s the man who can fix the generator,” she said hopefully and went to open the heavy oak door.

  A rush of cold air hit her in the face, temporarily blinding her. Montana in winter was uncomfortable, even for natives. The windchill factor was nearly unbearable, and the snow never seemed to stop. This small ranch that she’d inherited from her father-in-law was located between the Bitterroot mountain range on the west and the Pryor mountains on the east, with the Wyoming border to the south. Tate Hollister’s much larger ranch and enormous house were on her north border and only about a quarter of a mile from the small frame house she shared with Blake.

  She wasn’t really surprised to find Tate Hollister on her doorstep when she got her eyes cleared of snowflakes. He was tall already, but he seemed to have grown two feet since Maggie last saw him. He glared down at her from black eyes in a thin-lipped, deeply tanned face, which was all hard lines and sharp angles. He looked to be in his late thirties, and he was as wild a man as Maggie had ever seen. In his battered black ranch hat and sheepskin jacket, worn jeans and black boots, he looked like an outlaw. He needed a shave and his mustache needed trimming. His thick, shaggy hair was disheveled. Just the sight of him was enough to intimidate most men, much less Maggie.

  “Yes?” she asked with forced pleasantness, her head cocked warily as he removed his gloves and slapped them into his palm.

  “Ten head of your cattle are grazing on my winter feed supply,” he said without preamble. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Award them the Croix de Guerre for bravery above and beyond the call of duty,” she answered without hesitation.

  He stared at her as if he wasn’t quite certain that he’d heard her. His head tilted slightly and his dark eyes narrowed, while Blake struggled with suppressed laughter. “I don’t think you understand the situation,” he tried again. “If you don’t get them off my land and out of my hay, I’m going to throw down on them.”

  “That is an old Western expression,” Maggie explained to Blake. “It means he’s going to shoot them.” She looked back at Tate Hollister. “I hope you plan to give them a sporting chance. They are, after all, unarmed.” She smiled vacantly.

  Hollister’s dark eyes were shadowed with surprise, and his mustache actually twitched, but there was no smile on his lips. “Mrs. Jeffries, this isn’t a laughing matter.”

  “Yes, sir.” She curtsied. “What would you like me to do about the cattle?”

  He looked as confused as a man could. He glanced at Blake, glowering at the boy’s grin, which was quickly erased.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, where’s Jack Randall?” he demanded, his deep voice like a bass fiddle with the wind howling outside the door.

  She stared at him. “Jack who?”

  “Your foreman, lady!”

  She sighed. “Oh, him. He left two days before we got here.”

  “Left!”

  She put a hand to her ear. “Please. I have sensitive ears. Yes, he left. He took his wife back east to visit her people for Christmas.”

  “Christmas!” he muttered, and Maggie stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to come out with a hearty “Bah, Humbug.” The sentiment was in his expression, even if he didn’t say the words, and she had to stifle a giggle. That made him scowl even more. “Are you really this boy’s mother?”

  Her eyebrows arched. Just because they’d never spoken to each other before was no reason for him to pretend he didn’t know who she was. He’d at least seen her a time or two. “Of course,” she said.

  “I found her under a cabbage leaf,” Blake volunteered with twinkling green eyes.

  Hollister wasn’t amused and after a moment, returned to the subject. “What about the other men?” he asked.

  “They’re out doing God knows what.” She sighed. “We’ve only been here three days and I can’t get one of them to stand still long enough to listen to anything I say. And the man who fixes the electrical generator is—” she hesitated, eyeing Hollister “—indisposed.”

  “He’s out in the bunkhouse drunk,” Blake countered, grinning when she glared at him. “Well, he is. I looked in the window.”

  “Honest to God, you’ll die up here in a week,” Hollister muttered, glaring at both of them. “City greenhorns! Why in hell didn’t you stay in New Mexico where you belong?”

  “Arizona,” Maggie corrected. “And we don’t really belong there. Blake and I moved there from Tennessee.”

  “Southerners,” Hollister grumbled. “Easterners.”

  She hated that cold, arrogant black stare. She drew herself up to her full height and still had to tilt her head back to look at him. He made her home state sound like the worst kind of insult. Maggie lifted her chin, and her gray eyes sparkled like flint chips. “Well, let me tell you, Mr. Hollister, if I was back home, I’d have plenty of willing help,” she replied. “These men seem to think they’re being paid by the tooth fairy, and the only mechanic I’ve got can’t walk unless he’s carrying a bottle of beer!”

  He didn’t even flick an eyelash. “No cowboy in his right mind is going to take orders from a city woman with no savvy about ranching. As for the generator, I can fix that.”

  He antagonized her as no man in her life ever had. She wanted to tell him what he could do with his offer. Damned bossy so-and-so…!

  “Well?” he asked, glaring. “I can’t work and shine a light all at once. Get me a flashlight, boy.”

  Blake didn’t hesitate. “Yes, sir!” he said smartly and rushed off to look for one.

  “Don’t order my son around,” Maggie said quietly. “I don’t like other people telling him what to do.”

  “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have jailed him in a military school,” he returned coldly, shocking her because she hadn’t realized he knew so much about Blake.

  She caught her breath, but before she could say anything, Blake was back with the flashlight. “I’ll come and hold it for you,” he offered.

  “Your mother can do that,” he r
eplied with an arrogant smile. “Or don’t you know how?”

  Her gray eyes flashed, and it was a good thing she didn’t see the expression of unholy glee on Blake’s face as all his secret plans for bringing these two together seemed to be coming true.

  “I’m an executive secretary for a printing corporation,” she informed him with blatant hostility. “I can do a lot more than hold a light.”

  “Oh, I can see how valuable you’d be in an emergency, with all that specialized knowledge,” he agreed and turned to open the door. “Get a coat on.”

  She absolutely gasped. In all her life, she’d never run into anybody like him. He threw out orders like a drill sergeant. And it didn’t help that Blake was sitting there with a book on his lap, looking the picture of a studious, polite boy. She stuck out her tongue at him as she put on her leather jacket, and he grinned like a Cheshire cat.

  “I’ll get you for this,” she mouthed at him and left him giggling on the sofa.

  She followed the big man around the house, because he hadn’t even bothered to wait for her to trudge through the snow with him. He had the flashlight in one enormous gloved hand. He paused by the housing that protected the generator, then thrust the flashlight at her while he uncovered the apparatus and then studied it silently.

  “Hold the light on the damned thing, if you please,” he shot at Maggie. “I can’t see in the dark.”

  “My God.” She whistled. “And you’re actually admitting it?”

  He muttered something she was glad she couldn’t understand.

  She grinned as she leveled the flashlight. Odd how refreshing it was to have a man actively dislike her. Most men seemed to feel obliged to chase her. This one wouldn’t chase anybody, she mused. He wasn’t a marrying man or a particularly romantic one, and it was really fun to antagonize him. She’d never tried to deliberately upset a man before, but it was wildly exhilarating. She felt alive in a way she hadn’t for over ten years. Strange, really, since Hollister was the last man in the world she could feel an attraction for.