The Christmas Ranch (The Cowboys of Cold Creek)

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Oh. Hi! Sorry. I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “You looked a little busy.”

  She made a face. “It’s a stupid job. I don’t know why Uncle Claude or Travis didn’t install these posts permanently so we wouldn’t have to reposition them each year. I guess they wanted flexible walking paths in case they wanted to change things up, but it makes tons more work. I thought about skipping it this year but it really does help people know where to go and keeps the crowds contained a little.”

  “Give.”

  He was obviously a man used to giving orders. Must be a military thing. The woman-power part of her instinctively wanted to bristle at his highhandedness—but on the other hand, woman power was all well and good but not when it came with a side of stupid. She was tired, her shoulders were already aching after only three posts and he had all those lovely muscles to help with the job.

  She handed over the post hole digger with alacrity. “You don’t have to order me twice, sir.”

  He smiled at her pert tone. “Looks like you’re spacing them about six feet apart.”

  “Yes, just so the light strings will drape nicely. It goes faster as a two-person job. If you dig, I’ll set the posts.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  For the next several moments they worked in a companionable silence, settling into a comfortable rhythm. It was hard work but his help took a formidable task and made it much more manageable.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you would really show up or not.”

  “I told you I would. Did you doubt I meant what I said?”

  She had a feeling he was definitely a man of his word. “No. I just thought you might have come to your senses in the night and realized we were fighting a losing battle here.” The list of things she needed to do kept growing larger by the minute and she was beginning to fear the disheartening reality, that her sisters were right and she could never whip The Christmas Ranch into shape in only a week and a day.

  “I’ve been in my share of battles. If you want, I can give you all kinds of cheesy idioms about sticking to your guns and so forth.”

  “Please don’t.”

  He chuckled. “Okay. But how about this one—sometimes you just have to buckle up, put your head down and plow through whatever comes until you get through?”

  “I’ll take that one,” she said. Her sudden yawn on the tail end of the word came out of nowhere and took her completely by surprise. “Sorry.”

  “Rough night?” he asked, with a mix of amusement and concern in his expression.

  “Too short, anyway.”

  She probably looked like death warmed over. She suddenly had a completely vain wish that she had bothered with a little concealer that morning for what she was sure were probably king-size circles under her eyes. Or any makeup whatsoever, for that matter.

  “I can sleep in January, right? I need to strike while the iron’s hot and all that. Is that a battle idiom?”

  He shoved the post hole digger into the next position, twisted it and with what seemed like hardly any exertion managed to do in about three seconds what had taken her a good five minutes. “I think that one falls more in the blacksmith category. Either way, that doesn’t mean you should wear yourself to the bone over this place. How late were you working out here?”

  “I didn’t do anything else down here on the Ranch. I was up at the house. I’m working on a little side project.”

  “Because you obviously need a few more of those.”

  She made a face at his dry tone while she stuck the next stake in the ground in the hole he had dug. “This project is more for fun than anything else. My sister wrote this great story about Sparkle the reindeer and how he uses cleverness and a little magic to save Christmas at the North Pole. I decided to illustrate it and have some copies printed up to sell at the gift shop.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “I’ve got this friend who was in the Peace Corps with me. Now she and her partner own a printing company in the Seattle area and she’s agreed to rush print a couple hundred of them for me. If I can get the illustrations to her special delivery by Saturday, there’s a chance they’ll be here next week but definitely the week after the opening.”

  “Like you didn’t have enough to do?”

  “I know. But the story is wonderful and I wanted to share it with the world. I think it will be a huge hit—and the illustrations I’ve come up with are actually really cute, if I do say so myself. Some of my best work. I’ve been working on it at every opportunity. I finished the cover last night. I’ve got a couple more pages to finish tonight before I send it off to Deb and Carlo in the morning.”

  “Another all-nighter, then?”

  “I slept a few hours. Not enough, but a few. Anyway, it will be worth it. It’s adorable. Wait until you see the book. The title is Sparkle and the Magic Snowball. Isn’t that perfect?”

  She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and smiled at him.

  “Perfect,” he agreed.

  “I’ll give Joey a copy before you leave, so he can remember his time working for the crazy Christmas lady.”

  He shook his head and headed for the next spot. “I don’t think he’ll need a picture book to remind him of his time here, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. He couldn’t talk about anything else last night at dinner. He can’t wait for the chance to ride Stinky Pete.”

  “He seems like a great kid—now that he’s sworn off throwing snowballs at cars and breaking windows, anyway. Barrett was bubbling over all night at dinner about his new friend. They really seemed to hit it off.”

  “It’s good to see him making friends. The kid has had a tough road. My sister hasn’t exactly been the most stable of mothers, moving him around the country from boyfriend to boyfriend, dead-end job to dead-end job.”

  She had a feeling he needed to talk to someone and she was more than willing to provide a listening ear, especially since she found everything about him fascinating.

  “Is that what brought her to Pine Gulch? A man?”

  He grunted and shoved the post hole digger into the ground with more force than strictly necessary. “Yeah. A jackass by the name of Big Mike Lawrence. He runs a tavern in town. The Lone Wolf.”

  Her grimace was involuntary. The place always gave her the creeps. It was decent enough, the time or two she went there with friends during visits home, but she always had a weird feeling there. In comparison, The Bandito—Pine Gulch’s dingy, preferred drinking establishment—seemed almost warm and inviting.

  Rafe didn’t miss her expression. “Yeah. That’s the sense of the place I get, too. She met him through an online dating service and after only a few weeks of chatting, he talked her into quitting her waitress job in California and coming out here to work for him.”

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t a wise decision.”

  “You could say that. He turned out to be selling illegal prescription drugs out of the back room and embroiled her in the whole thing—using and selling. Four months later, she was arrested after a DEA undercover investigation. She agreed to plead guilty in exchange for her testimony but she’s still going to serve time. She should have walked away when she showed up in Pine Gulch and discovered her new romance wasn’t all he pretended to be online.”

  He loved his sister. She could hear it weaving through the frustration. “Sounds like she got in over her head.”

  “I guess. He didn’t pull her into the drug operation until she had been here a month, though I have a feeling he got her using right away. It wouldn’t be the first time. By then, she claimed she used all her savings to get established here and didn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know why she didn’t just call me. I would have helped her. I would have come in and busted any heads necessary and gotten her the hell ou
t of here.”

  Hope didn’t know his sister at all but from her short acquaintance with Rafe, she already knew he wasn’t the kind of man a woman wanted to disappoint. His sister probably knew Rafe would come in swinging and might end up hurt.

  “She called you to help with Joey, didn’t she?”

  “I guess.”

  They had reached the entrance to the Christmas village. He crossed the path to head back to the entrance and shoved the post hole digger into the ground at the next spot with more force than absolutely necessary. She was grateful she had given him a physical task—or he had taken it over, anyway—to work off some of that frustration.

  “What kills me most is that Cami knew better. Knows better. We lived it, you know? Our mom threw her life away on drugs and alcohol. When she wasn’t stoned, she was sleeping off her last binge or out looking to score her next one. We were in and out of foster care or couch surfing with relatives through our whole childhood.”

  “Oh, Rafe. I’m so sorry.” She thought of her own childhood. It might have been ramshackle and even dangerous in some people’s eyes, but until her parents died, her family life had always been filled with laughter, with fun, with love. Her parents had always cared passionately about their family, their faith and the people they served.

  She couldn’t imagine what sort of uncertainty and pain he must have known, in contrast.

  He looked embarrassed, as if he regretted saying anything. “I can’t understand how Cami could live through what we did, knowing the toll it took on us firsthand, yet still be out there making some of the same mistakes.”

  She tried to picture him as a little boy Joey’s age, trapped in dark circumstances beyond his control while he tried to be protective of his sister. Many young men would have taken the easier route, into that world of drugs and crime and despair. Instead, he had joined the navy and become someone good and honorable, a man who would give up his career to take care of his family.

  “My dad used to tell us that everybody has demons,” she said softly. “You can’t judge a person by the path they’ve traveled, only the direction they’re heading now.”

  “What would your dad say about the two of us, who don’t quite know what direction we’re heading right now?”

  She smiled a little. Her father would have liked Rafe. She suddenly knew it without a doubt. “He probably would have said we’ll figure things out in our own way, that perhaps we’re only waiting to find the right door and that when we do, we’ll know just which one we need to open.”

  She shrugged. “But then, some would say he should have left a few doors closed in his life or picked a different one.”

  “Why would they say that?” His voice sounded interested but his gaze was focused on the post hole digger.

  She pictured her father the last time she saw him, quite obviously dead on that jungle path while soldiers shoved her and her sisters into the helicopter. Hope fell silent as she waged an internal debate about whether to tell him.

  It wasn’t as if she lived her entire life around the events of that Christmas day but they had certainly served as a pivotal moment of her life. It had shaped everything that came after, had really shaped the woman she had become, and she suddenly wanted him to know.

  He had shared dark, difficult aspects of his life with her and she had a sudden, inexplicable need to do the same—though it was something she rarely discussed, even with close friends.

  “When I was a girl, we lived in a remote area of Colombia for a few months while my parents opened a medical clinic there—until one day my family was kidnapped by leftist rebels, hoping to score a large ransom. The only problem was, my parents really weren’t associated with any big umbrella organization. There was no one to pay the ransom. We were held for three weeks, until we were eventually rescued by the US military. My dad died during the rescue and my mom died two months later of a fast-moving cancer that could have been prevented if we had lived in a place with halfway decent medical care instead of out in the middle of nowhere without even a satellite phone to call for help.”

  He had paused digging to focus on her as she spoke and listened with an unreadable expression. Tension seemed to vibrate off him like the fragile wisps of condensation coming off the warmer dirt they overturned.

  “I’m sorry, Hope. So sorry.”

  Her gaze flashed to his at the low, intense note in his voice. He was genuinely upset by what she said, she realized. Instantly, she regretted saying anything. She shouldn’t have brought it up—she probably wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been exhausted.

  “No. I’m sorry. That sounded bitter, didn’t it? I’m not bitter. My parents genuinely wanted to help people. My mother used to quote Mother Teresa all the time, that a life not lived for others is not a life. My parents lived their convictions, which is both rare and admirable in this world.”

  “That doesn’t comfort a lost thirteen-year-old girl, does it?”

  She narrowed her gaze. “How did you know I was thirteen?”

  He turned back to his work and made another hole. “I don’t know. I think the other day you mentioned coming here when you were that age. I guess I did the math.”

  “Well, you’re right. I was thirteen. Fae was fifteen and CeCe was eleven. We were lucky. Relatively speaking, I guess. After our dad died and our mom was diagnosed and put on hospice, we came here to live with Mary and Claude.”

  Despite the difficulty of the memories, she still had to smile. “Let me tell you, that was some serious culture shock. We went from living all over the world and speaking a dozen languages and dialects to a cattle ranch in small-town Idaho.”

  “Did you have a tough time fitting in?”

  She shrugged. “You can’t grow up the way we did without developing some chameleon-like tendencies. We did okay. Celeste and Faith thrived with a little more structure and permanence. I guess I was the odd one out, who wanted to see what was over the next mountain range.”

  “And what did you find?”

  She told him a little about the places she had lived, about some of the amazingly courageous women she had met in Morocco and the earnest, hardworking people she had been privileged to know while in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before she knew it, they had once more worked their way back to the main parking lot.

  “Looks like that’s it,” Rafe said.

  She looked around. “Wow. I was so busy talking your leg off, I didn’t realize how close we were to the end.”

  “You sure you don’t need me to dig another hole while I’m in the groove?”

  “No. Which I’m sure is a relief to your poor arms. Thank you! I can’t tell you how much time you saved. See what a few muscles can get you.”

  “I always figured they’d come in handy some day.”

  She smiled. Not only was she fiercely drawn to Rafe on a physical level but she was discovering she genuinely liked him. He was a good listener, he seemed to respect her opinion and he had rare flashes of wry humor that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  “You are proving to be invaluable, sailor. Who would have guessed the day your nephew threw a snowball through my window would turn out to be such a lucky break for me?”

  He gazed at her for a long moment and then cleared his throat. “Where does this go?”

  “We store it in the equipment shed. I’ll show you.”

  She led the way to the small shed and opened the door. The place was small, dim and smelled like motor oil. “We usually store it there by the snowblower.”

  He carried the post hole digger in and set it in the corner. When he turned back around, she realized how very little room there was inside the shed. They stood only a few inches apart and she was suddenly fiercely aware of him, the strength of him and the overwhelming maleness. Instinctively, she took a step back and stumbled against a small workbench.


  “Whoa.” He reached out to catch her before she could fall and somehow in the process of trying to correct her balance, she ended up caught in his arms—whether by accident or design, she couldn’t tell. Not that she was able to give it much rational thought when this was exactly where she wanted to be.

  “Careful,” he murmured, which seemed to be a particularly appropriate warning.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  She gazed at him, trying not to think about how warm he was, how comforting that strong chest felt against her.

  His hazel eyes glowed from a shaft of light glowing inside the dim storage shed from the open door. Like a jungle cat, she thought. Her blood began to pulse, thick and sweet, and her insides began to buzz with awareness, with hunger, with anticipation.

  He didn’t seem in any hurry to let her go. They stood inside the doorway of the storage shed wrapped together for several seconds—or maybe minutes or hours. She couldn’t be sure. Finally his gaze dipped to her mouth and he murmured something she didn’t quite catch—a curse or a prayer, she wasn’t sure which—and then he pulled her closer and lowered his mouth to hers.

  He tasted delicious and his mouth was warm and determined. She caught her breath. After the first burst of heady shock—wow, the man could kiss—her arms slipped around his neck and she gave herself up to the moment and threw her whole heart and soul into returning the kiss.

  Chapter Nine

  Who knew the doorway to heaven could be found inside a dingy little storage shed behind the St. Nicholas Lodge?

  The moment Hope returned his unwise kiss, heat and hunger crashed over like a thirty-foot swell. She was soft, curvy, warm—and tasted heady and sweet, like some sort of thick, forbidden cinnamon and almond pastry he wanted to gobble up in one bite.

  On some deep level, he knew this was a mistake but he couldn’t seem to help himself. As they had worked together the past hour, he had been desperately aware of her, the lithe curves and the sun-warmed skin and her sweet little mouth that hadn’t stopped moving. She was lush and lovely and he was having a very hard time resisting her.