The Christmas Ranch (The Cowboys of Cold Creek)

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Cute,” Rafe said as he took in the scene.

  “It is cute. It’s adorable. Kids go crazy for the village, especially at night when all the scenes are turned on and the figures are moving around. It’s Christmas magic at its very best.”

  She was almost daring him to disagree. Something told her Rafe hadn’t had enough Christmas magic in his life.

  To her delight, he only nodded. “I can imagine. Where do we start?”

  “The lights are pretty self-explanatory. Uncle Claude and Travis were both great at organization, which makes it easy on us. Each building has a couple boxes of lights that go to it. They are all clearly marked and there should be a picture of the finished product in each so you know how to hang the lights. You and the boys take a couple of buildings and Louisa and I will take a couple. We should be able to finish in a few hours.”

  He looked doubtful at that estimate and she couldn’t blame him. Every job she had started on The Christmas Ranch was taking longer than she expected, which didn’t exactly bode well for the opening—but they had to start somewhere and the Ranch’s beginnings seemed the perfect place.

  Chapter Seven

  He could think of worse ways to spend a November afternoon.

  The air was clean and pure, scented with pine and sage and something earthy that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Raw mountains towered over the ranch on both sides—it was in a canyon, after all—yet even with their snowy crowns they seemed warm and comforting, rather than forbidding.

  As the sun went down, the shadows lengthened, stretching out across the landscape in fanciful shapes. The temperature was chilly but not freezing. He heard the cry of a hawk soaring on the current and the distant whinny of a horse—or maybe it was a reindeer. What did he know. Did reindeer whinny? He had no idea.

  He wasn’t a country boy. Never had been. He grew up in the gritty streets of urban Los Angeles, with concrete and gangs and graffiti.

  But there was a peace here he had found in very few other places.

  Joey seemed to have picked up on it, too. He had lost his shyness somewhere during that walk out here with the reindeer and now he and Hope’s nephew, Barrett, were chattering away like best friends.

  He strung another line of lights around the window of the little village church while he listened to them talk about their favorite Star Wars character and how the Clone Wars cartoon series was better than the original series. He strongly disagreed but decided to keep out of the discussion for now.

  After a moment, the conversation drifted to what they wanted for Christmas.

  “I want a new snowboard,” Barrett said. “After Christmas, we can ride the tow rope up the sledding hill anytime we want and snowboard down. It’s so fun. You should come try it. If I get a new board, you can use my old one.”

  “I won’t be here after Christmas,” Joey said, with a dark look at Rafe, who pretended he wasn’t paying attention. “We’re moving to California right when Christmas vacation starts.”

  “California? Why would you want to go there?”

  “Because he’s going to get a job there or something, I guess. I don’t know. It sucks.”

  Barrett digested this for a moment, then glanced at Rafe and said in what he probably thought was a low voice but which carried clearly in the cool air, “How come you live with your uncle? Where’s your mom and dad?”

  Joey frowned. “I don’t know where my dad is. He’s a pendejo.”

  Rafe winced and hoped Barrett didn’t repeat the word to his aunt, who was sure to know it was a particularly nasty pejorative.

  “I don’t know what that word means,” the other boy admitted.

  “It means he’s a dumbass,” Joey said, which wasn’t a much better word. Out of the corner of his gaze, Rafe saw his nephew give him a careful look to see if he was paying attention. When he continued to focus on hanging the lights, the boy continued, “He ran off when I was born.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She’s in trouble and has to go away for a while, so I have to live with my uncle.”

  “That does suck,” Barrett said. After a moment, he offered a confidence of his own. “My dad died this summer.”

  “Did he get shot?” Joey asked, which just about broke Rafe’s heart that his nephew had any exposure to a world that would lead him to jump immediately to something so violent.

  “No. He died in an accident. I miss him a lot. So now I just live with my mom, my aunt Celeste, my great-aunt Mary and now my aunt Hope, I guess, since she came back.”

  “All girls?”

  Barrett nodded. “I know! I’m the only boy, except for Jack Frost. That’s my dog.”

  “Dogs don’t count.”

  “Jack does because he’s super smart, the smartest dog in the whole wide world. He can commando crawl across the room and he can wash his face with his paws and he even kicks a soccer ball.”

  “No way!”

  “Seriously. Maybe if you come back tomorrow, I can bring him and show you.”

  The two boys went on to discuss the brilliance of Jack Frost, who apparently wasn’t even white, despite his name—go figure!—but was a very light-colored yellow lab. They were still at it, stopping only when he would ask them to hand him something up on the ladder.

  He was almost finished when a new voice intruded into the nonstop conversation.

  “How’s it going, guys? It looks fantastic from here.”

  He looked down from his position on the ladder to find Hope standing just below him. The fading sun picked out the golden highlights in her hair and she looked as fresh and beautiful as the mountain landscape around them.

  “We’re good. Almost done with this one,” he answered.

  “That’s good. I was thinking we should probably stop for the night. It’s after six and it’s going to be dark in a minute. If I don’t get Louisa and Barrett back to the house before dinner, Faith will be after my head for keeping them out this late.”

  “I just want to finish this structure. I’m close.”

  She nodded and turned to Louisa. “Why don’t you and Barrett take Sparkle and Twinkle back to the pen and unhitch them?”

  “Really? Can I?”

  “Sure. You’ve had plenty of experience. I know your dad let you take care of them all the time.”

  The girl beamed, thrilled at being given the responsibility.

  “Can I help?” Joey asked.

  “You’ll have to ask your uncle that.”

  Joey gave him a pleading look out of big brown eyes, the same expression Rafe always had a tough time resisting. “Please, Uncle Rafe?”

  He glanced at the reindeer with those big, scary-looking antlers.

  “You’re sure it’s safe?” he asked Hope again.

  “Very safe. They’re as gentle as a lamb. More gentle, actually. I’ve known some pretty aggressive sheep in my day.”

  It was only a few hundred yards to the reindeer pen. From the ladder, he should be able to see them go the whole way.

  “I guess it’s okay, then.”

  “Can we ride on the wagon?” Barrett begged.

  “Sure,” Hope said, “as long as you sit still and don’t move around to shift the weight.”

  Joey and her nephew climbed onto the back of the wagon and held on as Louisa took the lead line on Sparkle and ordered the reindeer to walk on.

  His nephew was riding on a wagon pulled by reindeer, led by a girl only a few years older than he was. He supposed that wasn’t too strange. In Afghanistan, he had seen girls not much older than Louisa who lived with their family goats by themselves in the mountains for weeks at a time.

  “They’re fine,” she assured him. “Let’s finish this so you can get out of here.”

  “Right.”

  He turn
ed back to the last string of lights he had to hang and continued attaching them to the little light holders along the lines and angles of the building.

  The whole time he worked, he was aware of her—the pure blue of her eyes, her skin, dusted with pink from the cold, the soft curves as she reached over her head to hand him the end of the light string.

  “That should do it for me,” he said after a moment. In more ways than one.

  “Good work. Should we plug them in so we can see how they look?”

  “Sure.”

  She went inside the little structure at the entrance to the village, where she must have flipped a few switches. They had only finished about half of it but the cottages with lights indeed looked magical against the pearly twilight spreading across the landscape as the sun set.

  “Ahhh. Beautiful,” she exclaimed. “I never get tired of that.”

  “Truly lovely,” he agreed, though he was looking at her and not the cottages.

  She smiled at him. “I’m sorry you gave up your whole afternoon to help me but the truth is, I would have been sunk without you. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. I can finish these up when I get here in the morning, after I take Joey to school. Now that I’ve sort of figured out what I’m doing, I should be able to get these lights hung in no time and start work on the repairs at the lodge by midmorning.”

  She smiled at him again, a bright, vibrant smile that made his heart pound as if he had just raced up to the top of those mountains up there and back.

  “You are the best Christmas present ever, Rafe. Seriously.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Am I?”

  He didn’t mean the words to sound like an innuendo but he was almost certain that sudden flush on her cheeks had nothing to do with the cool November air.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He did. She was talking about his help around the ranch. He was taken by surprise by a sudden fierce longing that her words meant something completely different.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever been anyone’s favorite Christmas gift before,” he murmured.

  She gave him a sidelong look. “Then it’s about time, isn’t it?”

  As soon as she said the words, she quickly changed the subject. “Louisa is probably just about done taking care of the reindeer. I should head over to make sure she doesn’t need help.”

  “What about the other lights? Where do you want them?”

  She glanced at the few remaining boxes he and the boys had unloaded from the wagon that hadn’t been hung yet. “Let’s just store them in the front cottage so they’ll be ready for tomorrow.”

  Between the two of them, it only took a moment for them to carry the boxes to the cottage and then Hope turned off the lights and they walked side by side back to the reindeer pen.

  “Barrett said something about how fun it would be to have you home for Christmas, for once. You’re apparently one of his favorite aunts.”

  She chuckled. “I hope I at least make the top three, since that’s all he has, if we count Aunt Mary.”

  “Why haven’t you been home for Christmas, since you obviously love it so much? What were you running from?”

  It was a question he hadn’t intended to ask and one that she obviously wasn’t expecting. She stared at him, bristling a little. “Why would you automatically assume I was running from something? Maybe I was running to something. Or maybe I just like running.”

  “Is that it?”

  “My sisters and I grew up traveling around the world. Our parents were medical missionaries. My dad was trained as a physician’s assistant and my mom was a nurse and they opened medical clinics slash outreach centers all over the world. We never spent longer than six months anywhere. Liberia, El Salvador, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia. You name it, we probably lived there. Until I was thirteen, I probably spoke other languages more than I ever had the chance to speak English. I guess it was just natural for me to inherit the travel itch from them.”

  He didn’t need to ask what had happened when she was thirteen. Again, he had the impression that now was the time to tell her he had participated in the rescue but he ignored it. He was enjoying this tentative friendship they were developing and the heady attraction simmering between them too much to ruin it yet.

  “You’re home now,” he pointed out. “Does that mean you’ve scratched the itch sufficiently, then?”

  She was quiet as they walked through the field, their boots crunching on dry growth. “I don’t know. I’m supposed to start another teaching job after the new year but I’m beginning to think perhaps I need to stay here and help Faith and Celeste and Aunt Mary. Things are kind of a mess around here.”

  “Will you be able to stick around in one place?”

  “That is an excellent question, sailor.” She gazed up at the mountains around them. “J.R.R. Tolkein said something about how not all who wander are lost. I agree with that. I also believe sometimes a person can be perfectly content wandering around for a long time and then...she’s not. I think it was time for me to come home. Past time, probably.”

  “I hope it’s everything you want.”

  She smiled at him and he had the thought that he could get used to this, too. Walking with a lovely woman across stubble fields as the sun dropped behind the mountains and the stars began to peep out. “Thanks. What about you? What are you going to do now that you’ve left the navy?”

  He was much more comfortable asking the deep questions than answering them. “I don’t know that either. We’re sort of in the same boat. I’ve got a buddy in private security back in San Diego. He’s offered me a job but I haven’t decided yet. Who knows? I might want to try my hand at construction. I guess we’re both at a crossroads with our lives, aren’t we?”

  She looked struck by that observation. “It’s scary as hell, isn’t it?”

  He laughed gruffly. “Terrifying,” he admitted. “At least you’re not responsible for a troubled kid.”

  “There is that,” she said with a smile.

  He suddenly wanted rather desperately to stop right there in the field and kiss her senseless, even though they were just a few dozen yards from the reindeer pen where he knew the children waited. He was drawn to her in ways he didn’t quite understand. His entire adult life, he had kept his relationships casual and uncomplicated. He had never been this fiercely, wildly attracted to a woman.

  He couldn’t be completely certain but he suspected she was feeling the heat spark and seethe between them, too. She blushed when he looked at her and he had caught her gaze more than once on his mouth, as if she were wondering what he tasted like.

  He let out a breath. This was not the time to put that to the test, as tempted as he might be. And he was very tempted.

  He was glad he resisted when Barrett and Joey hurried over to greet them just seconds later.

  “There you are,” Joey exclaimed. “What took you so long? Guess what, Uncle Rafe! I got to help take the harness off Sparkle and he’s not scary at all. He licked my face and it tickled. I fed him a treat and I got to pet a dog named Tank and Barrett has his own horse named Stinky Pete and he said maybe I could ride him sometime and I’m going to borrow his old snowboard when it snows more and guess what? You don’t even have to walk back up the hill ’cause you just hold on to a rope and it tows you back up and it’s fun as can be. Can we come back when it snows more?”

  Rafe struggled a moment to make the shift from sheer, raw lust to trying to make sense of a seven-year-old boy’s rapid-fire chatter.

  “Whoa. Slow down, kid.”

  “Can we come back tomorrow? Maybe I can ride Stinky Pete then.”

  “We’re coming back tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yay!”

  “But you have work to do, remember? You’re paying back Ms. Nichols for breaki
ng her window. We won’t be here to play.”

  His face fell. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Tell you what,” Hope said with a warm smile to Joey. “If you work really hard to help us tomorrow and Friday—and if you and your uncle aren’t too busy on the weekend—you can come back and ride Stinky Pete then. Deal?”

  “Yes. That would be great. Thanks. Thanks a lot!”

  He blinked a little, taken by surprise at Joey’s excitement. Who would have guessed that some reindeer and a floundering Christmas attraction would be the things to hit the right button with his nephew and help him feel a little joy again?

  He never would have expected it but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse—or reindeer—in the mouth.

  Chapter Eight

  Hope had a million plates spinning and all she wanted to do was find a warm corner where she could curl up and take a nap.

  She yawned for about the hundredth time and checked her watch. It was barely 9:00 a.m. and she had already been up for hours—with no naps on the horizon in the foreseeable future.

  Mustering all her strength, she shoved the small post hole digger deeper into the hard ground, then set the stake in, tamped the dirt around it hard and moved on to the next spot. Three down, only about a thousand more to go.

  Each walking path to the Christmas village, the sledding hill and the main house was usually bordered by waist-high strings of white lights, hung on stakes spaced at regular intervals—and each year, the stakes needed to be reset into the ground.

  She drew in a breath and let it out in a huff of condensation then shoved down the post hole digger, thinking how much easier this would have been on a warm day in September than now, when the ground was almost frozen.

  “What are you doing and why don’t you let me do it for you?”

  She had been so focused on the job, she hadn’t heard Rafe arrive. He stood beside her wearing a flannel work shirt over a dark green henley. Her knees suddenly felt wobbly but she told herself that was simply because she had only slept a few hours.