Christmas With the Mustang Man

by Stella Bagwell

  He barked out a laugh of amused disbelief. “Believe me, Dallas, it wasn’t the horse deal I was thinking about.”

  She absently stroked the sorrel’s nose as she looked at this man, who apparently considered himself Boone’s protector. “Oh? Then what could possibly be on your mind? I’m just biding my time until my truck is repaired. I’m sorry if my presence bothers you, but I’ll be gone soon. Maybe you should hang on to that thought so you won’t be so worried about me carrying off the ranch,” she added sarcastically.

  Frowning, he looked away from her. “I’m sorry, Dallas. Forget I said any of this. It’s not my way to behave like a bastard. But Boone isn’t being himself and I’m worried about him.”

  “Why?”

  He let out a long breath as he rested a forearm on the sorrel’s saddle. “There’s no way you could know, but Boone went through a terrible time with his ex-wife.”

  “I do know.”

  This jerked his head around to Dallas. “You do? How—”

  “How doesn’t matter,” Dallas replied. “I understand that things were difficult around here.”

  Mick swore softly. “Difficult wasn’t the word for it. Joan was a mental wreck and she put Boone through hell. Oh, she wasn’t that way in the beginning,” he continued as though reading the questions in Dallas’s mind, “but it didn’t take long for her to unravel. But by then Boone was all wrapped up in her—especially after she got pregnant. He wanted things with her to work. In my opinion he hung on far too long.”

  Desperately trying to hang on to the woman he loved? Dallas wondered. Or had his main concern been for his daughter? Either way, she hated to think of such a strong man as Boone having to endure such a tragic situation.

  “I don’t think we should be discussing Boone’s personal life,” Dallas told him. “Besides, it has nothing to do with me.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Mick agreed. “But I think Boone is a bit taken with you.”

  Dallas mentally groaned. Was the simmering chemistry between her and Boone so obvious that this man could see it? “Taken with me? In what way?”

  He looked at her. “I think he’s attracted to you. And—”

  The remainder of his thoughts went unsaid as Hayley came racing into the barn with Boone not far behind.

  Clearing his throat, Mick quickly began to tighten the saddle cinch. Dallas stepped away from the horse and waited as Hayley, then Boone, reached her side.

  “Dad’s ready to go now, Dallas!” Hayley announced with excitement. “Are you?”

  She glanced at Boone to see he was studying her and Mick with guarded speculation. The idea made Dallas want to curse. The two men were behaving as though they’d never seen a woman before, especially on this ranch. And maybe they hadn’t, Dallas tried to fairly rationalize. With the drive from here to the nearest blacktopped highway taking nearly forty minutes, it wasn’t like friends and neighbors were constantly popping by. Perhaps Dallas was an anomaly that had disturbed their mundane routine.

  “Sure.” She caught Boone’s gaze with hers. “What about your customer?”

  “He’s coming back tomorrow and bringing a vet with him. He wants to make sure that whatever he buys is sound.”

  “Well to hell with him!” Mick exclaimed. “You should have run his a— You should have run him off the place.”

  Mick’s blunt suggestion caused Boone to roll his eyes. “I don’t care if he brings an army of vets out here. They’d find all the horses I have for sale are sound and healthy. Otherwise, they’d be sequestered away from the others. Anyway, I think he was a bit peeved because I refused to let him get near Midnight.”

  “Midnight?” Mick looked thoughtful. “I don’t remember a horse around here by that name.”

  “The black stallion. He belongs to Dallas now.”

  The knowing glance that Mick directed at Dallas caused her cheeks to turn pink, but thankfully Boone didn’t notice as he was already curling his arm around Hayley’s shoulder and urging her out of the barn.

  Dallas followed a step behind them.

  The bluffs, a place that Mick had mentioned earlier, was a good five miles from the ranch house, and with no direct road to follow, Dallas got the impression that they were simply driving to another spot in the desert. But halfway there, the landscape began to change to low mountains and dry creek beds. Slabs of rock and jagged outcroppings suddenly appeared and the faint trail that Boone seemed to be following turned even rougher.

  Each time they hit a rough bump Hayley laughed and bounced on the truck seat, while Dallas gripped the armrest for dear life.

  “Too rough for you, Dallas?” Boone asked as he swerved to miss a huge clump of sage.

  Dallas’s body was thrown toward Hayley, who was sitting between the two adults and seemingly loving every minute of the ride.

  “No. I’ll just probably be black-and-blue in the morning,” she joked as she struggled to straighten herself up in the seat. “I can certainly see why you drove this old ranch truck.”

  “Just hold on. We’re almost there,” he promised.

  “It’s really pretty, too, Dallas,” Hayley added. “It’s one of my favorite places on the ranch.”

  If Hayley missed some of the fun things her town friends enjoyed, she certainly wasn’t showing it at the moment. Her expression was radiant as she glanced all about her. And as Dallas watched a myriad of emotions cross her sweet face, she could see a bit of herself in the young girl. The close bond Hayley had with her father, her love of animals and appreciation of the land that was her home were all traits that reminded Dallas of herself. The notion drew her even closer to the girl and when Hayley suddenly turned a smile on her, Dallas’s chest filled with a flood of maternal emotions.

  The truck crested a steep incline and Dallas gasped at the same time Hayley instructed her to look at the panoramic view in front of them.

  “Oh! There’s a river! It’s beautiful!” Dallas exclaimed.

  Below them on the valley floor a strip of green vegetation followed the silver strip of water winding across the desert. “That’s the White. The river that the ranch is named after,” Boone informed her.

  Dallas leaned eagerly up in her seat. “It’s like an oasis,” she said with awe. “Are we going down there?”

  “Not to cut a tree,” Boone answered. “But we can go down later for a look, if you’d like.”

  Hayley bounced with excitement. “Oh, yes, Dad! That’d be great!”

  “You should first be asking our guest what she would like to do, Hayley,” Boone instructed his daughter.

  The girl twisted around to Dallas. “It’d be okay with you, wouldn’t it?”

  Dallas smiled at her. “I’d love to.”

  Boone drove along the top of the ridge for a short distance until he found a flat spot to park the old Ford. Afterward, he collected an ax from the bed of the truck and the three of them walked along the top of the bluff, where thick stands of juniper and pinyon grew from the loamy soil.

  “There’s no spruce around here,” Boone told Dallas as the two of them strolled abreast of each other. “To find one of those we’d have to go much farther north and we don’t exactly have time for that today.”

  Dallas shook her head. “One of these trees will be just as beautiful. It’s the symbol of the tree that’s most important. And I think Hayley gets that.”

  Boone gazed ahead to where his daughter was skipping and racing from tree to tree. “She’s enjoying this much more than I ever thought.” He glanced over at Dallas. “It makes me feel like I’ve been neglecting her. And I don’t like that. I don’t want to be anything like Newt. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that I might be turning into a man like him.”

  “Newt?”

  “Yeah. My dad,” he said bluntly.

  Since Dallas knew very little about his parents, it was hard for her to understand the disdain she heard in Boone’s voice. She could only surmise that something about Newt Barnett and his family had gone very wrong.<
br />
  “You haven’t been a neglectful father, Boone. I can see that.”

  The grateful look he cast her touched her as much as any smile could have, because he didn’t seem like the sort of man who needed or wanted approval from anyone. The fact that he appreciated hers made Dallas feel somewhat special.

  He said, “Being a parent…it’s not easy to do everything the right way. One of these days you’ll find that out for yourself.”

  Her heart winced as she bit back a wistful sigh. Would she ever know what it was like to be a mother? These past few years, since the debacle with Allen, she’d often wondered if a man—the right man—would ever come into her life. But Boone couldn’t be that man. To let her thoughts even go in that direction would be futile.

  “Maybe,” she said solemnly. “Someday.”

  His steps came to a halt and as he turned to Dallas, she paused to meet his gaze head-on. Was that regret or longing that flickered in his eyes? Either way, she felt her heart melt just a little.

  “Dallas, this morning—”

  He stopped, clearly uncertain about what he wanted to say. But Dallas didn’t have any trouble softly admitting, “I said some things without thinking.”

  “So did I.”

  She swallowed as emotions swelled in her throat. “Something happens to me, Boone, whenever I’m close to you.”

  “Yes,” he said gently. “It happens to me, too.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” she asked.

  He was about to speak when Hayley called out to them from a few yards away.

  “Hey, you two! Come look at this pine! It’s looks really perfect!”

  His lips took on a wry slant. “Sounds like we’re being summoned.”

  Dallas nodded. “Yes. And this outing is for Hayley.”

  He started walking toward his daughter and Dallas joined him. Once they reached Hayley, Boone took great pains to look over the size and shape of the tree before he aptly declared it a beauty.

  A few swings of Boone’s axe brought the tree quickly down and after he shouldered it, the three of them headed back to the truck. Along the way, Hayley reached for Dallas’s hand and the silent connection filled her with a warm, maternal feeling, a protectiveness that went far beyond her normal reaction to children.

  First the man and now his daughter, she thought desperately. If she wasn’t careful, before she left this ranch, the two of them were going to take over her heart completely.

  Once at the truck, Boone loaded the tree and as the three of them started to climb back into the cab, Hayley insisted that she wanted to ride next to the window.

  Dallas wondered if Hayley’s request had anything to with getting a better view or if she was subtly trying to throw Dallas and Boone together. Either way, she didn’t argue with the girl. Instead she climbed in and settled herself in the middle of the bench seat and tried her best not to notice that her thigh was crammed against Boone’s and each time the truck swayed, her shoulder brushed his.

  “I think I see a few snowflakes in the air,” Boone commented as he headed the truck off the ridge and toward the river. “That’s a surprise.”

  “What if it snows a lot, Dad? I’ve got to get to church tonight for the play, remember?”

  “I’ve not forgotten. But it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see any snow, much less get snowed in.”

  Sitting in the middle forced Dallas’s legs to straddle the stick shift in the floor, but Boone’s hand resting on the knob was the thing that was getting to her the most.

  This morning that same hand had touched her, caressed her, heated her like no flame could have. Or no other man ever had, she thought. The realization didn’t just surprise her, it troubled her.

  “Well, it still might not hurt if we went to town earlier, Dad? We could eat out for dinner at the Mine Shaft. That way it wouldn’t matter how much it snowed.”

  Boone cut Dallas a look of wry amusement. “My daughter doesn’t know how to give hints. She just comes out and says what she wants.”

  “Sort of like her father, I think,” Dallas couldn’t help but say.

  Ignoring Dallas’s remark, he said to Hayley, “We’ll see.”

  Hayley didn’t press him for a more concrete answer and that alone impressed Dallas. Clearly the girl didn’t get anything and everything she wanted, yet she respected her father enough not to hound, beg or argue. Boone had said, as a parent, he’d made mistakes with Hayley, but if that was the case, he’d certainly made up for them in other ways, she thought.

  “So you don’t get snowed in on the ranch very often?” Dallas asked.

  Boone shook his head. “It’s rare that we ever see a sprinkling of snow. The past few years it’s been extremely dry around here.”

  “We can always hope, Dad,” Hayley said as she focused her gaze out the window. “See! There goes a few flakes now!”

  Boone exchanged a private grin with Dallas. “Yes, we can hope, princess. A long time ago we had winters with lots of snow. But that was back…before my grandparents were killed.”

  The wistful note in his voice tugged on Dallas’s heart and without thinking she reached over and laid her hand on his knee.

  “I wish I could have met them.”

  He cast a brief look of regret at her. “I wish you could have, too,” he said gently.

  The truck bounced forward for several yards before Dallas realized her hand was still resting on his knee. She hastily pulled it back, then darted a glance at Hayley. Thankfully the girl was still staring out the passenger window and had missed the caring touch she’d given Boone. Not that there had been anything inappropriate about the gesture, Dallas reasoned. But she’d been getting the feeling that Hayley would like for something to develop between her father and Dallas and she didn’t want to feed into the girl’s childish dreams. Hayley was craving a mother, or at least, a mother figure. It would be heartless to let the girl think Dallas could ever be that mother.

  This brief time with Boone and Hayley would end in two or three days, at the most. After that she’d be back in New Mexico and this man and his young daughter would be nothing more than a memory.

  Or would they?

  Chapter Eight

  Once the three of them returned to the ranch and ate a light lunch, Boone erected the tree in the family room, then hung around for a few more minutes until Dallas and Hayley got busy pulling out strings of lights, garland and ornaments to decorate the huge pine.

  “It looks like the tree is going to stay upright, so you two don’t need me anymore,” he said, as he pulled on his coat and reached for his hat.

  “But Dad, don’t you want to help us decorate?” Hayley implored.

  “That’s a job for you and Dallas,” he told his daughter. “I’ve got more work to finish at the barns before we leave for town.”

  “Okay,” Hayley conceded. “We’ll have it looking really pretty by the time you come back in.”

  Pausing at the doorway of the room, he shoved back the sleeve of his coat to glance at his watch. “I’ll try to be back here at the house by four o’clock. So you girls need to be ready shortly after that. We’ll go early and have dinner at the Mine Shaft—if that suits the two of you.”

  As far as Hayley was concerned, his announcement certainly compensated for not being around for the tree decorating. She immediately began to bounce on her toes and clap her hands. “Yes, Dad! That’ll be great!”

  With a humorous twist to his lips, he cast a questioning look at Dallas. “What about you? Are you up to a bit of bright lights and big city?”

  The teasing note she heard in his voice surprised Dallas. He was not the sort of man that joked. The fact that he was exhibiting any sort of playfulness told her that he was actually looking forward to the evening ahead.

  The idea filled her with anticipation and she smiled back at him.

  “I’m ready for anything.”

  Are you? The question was clearly in his eyes and Dallas was wondering what in the world h
ad possessed such a remark to come out of her mouth, when he suddenly slapped his hat on his head and headed out the door.

  Later that evening, Dallas dressed in a long black skirt and a thin red sweater with ruffles edging the wrists and the V neckline. When she’d initially packed for the trip, her plan had been to be gone from the Diamond D for no more than three days, so she’d kept her wardrobe to a minimum. But thankfully, at the last moment, she’d tossed in the skirt and sweater, just in case it might be needed. Little had she known that she’d be attending dinner and a Christmas play with a man who made her heart stutter and stammer every time he got within ten feet of her.

  She was fastening a simple silver cross and chain at the back of her neck, when Hayley knocked on the bedroom door and quickly stepped inside.

  “Is it okay if I come in?” she asked.

  Dallas looked at her and smiled. “Sure. Do you need help with anything?”

  Hayley stood before her and held out her arms. “Do I look like a geek in this? I wear jeans all the time and this is something a friend gave me that she didn’t want anymore.”

  The little flared velvet skirt in deep purple coupled with a trendy vest to match made Hayley look like a different child. “Oh, you look so pretty, Hayley! That looks great.”

  Wrinkling her nose with uncertainty, Hayley looked down at herself. “At the play, I’ll have an angel robe that will cover everything up, so I guess it don’t matter much what I have on now. But I wanted to look nice for dinner. We don’t… Well, we go out and eat sometimes, but we—” Pausing, she glanced up, her eyes suddenly gleaming as she smiled at Dallas. “We’ve never had a guest with us. Especially a beautiful lady like you.”

  Hayley’s comment not only touched Dallas, but also told her a few things about Boone. He didn’t venture off the ranch on a regular basis. And he didn’t date. Neither fact surprised her, but both of them troubled her. He was a man who had so much to offer a woman, yet he obviously didn’t want to share himself with one. Nor did he believe he needed a steady connection to people or the outside world. He was either hiding from life, she thought, or refusing to join in. And either reason was not acceptable to her.