The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She wouldn’t put it past him. The man seemed to want to give her plenty of advice on child rearing. Judging by past comments, he apparently put her abilities as a mother somewhere between incompetent and negligible and seemed to think she let her boys run wild and free through the countryside with no supervision.

  And now he probably thought she was just as inept at driving. She pulled into her garage and stepped out of her driver’s seat to walk back outside, already squaring her shoulders for another confrontation.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked coolly when he rolled down his window.

  “I just wanted to make sure you made it home safely. I’ll send one of my guys over with the tractor to plow the driveway in case you need to get out soon.”

  She blinked at him as hard, wind-whipped snowflakes stung her cheeks. Her first reaction was astonishment and a quick spurt of gratitude, both that he was concerned at her welfare enough to follow her home and that he would offer to help her plow her road.

  One less chore to do, right? she thought. Especially since digging out the driveway wasn’t among her favorites.

  At the same time, she didn’t want him to think she needed to be looked after like some kind of charity case.

  “I have a tractor with a front plow,” she answered. “I can take care of it. I would have done it earlier but it wasn’t snowing when I left for Idaho Falls.”

  She regretted her words the moment she uttered them. She didn’t owe Carson McRaven any explanations.”

  “I’ll send someone,” he answered. “Stay warm.”

  Before she could protest, he hit the button to automatically wind up his window, put his big pickup in gear and drove away.

  She watched him go for a moment as the wind howled through the bare tops of the cottonwoods and lodgepole pine along the river. Her neighbor was nothing if not confounding. She couldn’t quite peg him into a neat compartment. On the one hand, he was arrogant and supercilious and seemed to think her family’s entire focus in life was to annoy him as much as humanly possible.

  On the other, he had been kind to her boys the day before and he had certainly helped her just now when he really could have looked the other way.

  She shivered as the wind cut through her parka and turned back to the garage. She had far more critical things to occupy her mind with right now than obsessing—again—about her new neighbor.

  Jolie chattered away as Jenna carried her into the house. Only about one word in three was recognizable and none of them seemed to require a response, but her daughter never seemed to mind carrying on a conversation by herself.

  She was a complete joy and far more easygoing than any of the boys had been. She didn’t complain when Jenna took her straight from her car seat to her high chair and set some dry cereal and a sippy cup of milk on the tray while she went out to cart the groceries inside from the van.

  Just as she was carrying the last armload in, the phone rang. She thought about ignoring it, but with three boys in school, she couldn’t take the risk it might be one of their teachers or, heaven forbid, the school principal.

  “Phone, Mama. Phone.”

  “I know, honey. I’ll get it.”

  She quickly set down the bags on the last clear counter space in the kitchen and lunged for the cordless handset before the answering machine could pick up.

  “Sorry. Hello,” she said breathlessly.

  “Hello, my dear.”

  Jenna smiled at the instantly recognizable voice on the other end of the line. Viviana Cruz was one of her favorite people on earth. She and her second husband had a ranch a little farther up the creek and raised beautiful Murray Gray cattle.

  “Viviana! How are you?”

  “Bien, gracias. And you? How do you do? Busy, busy, I would guess.”

  “You would be right, as usual, Viv. I’m running a little late, but I promise, all will be ready in time.”

  “I do not doubt this. Not for un momentito. The food will be delicious, I have no worries.”

  At least one of them was confident, Jenna thought as nerves fluttered in her stomach. This job was important to her, not only professionally but personally. Viviana had taken a big risk hiring her to cater the holiday event she was hosting for the local cattle growers’ association, of which she served as president. This was the biggest job Jenna had undertaken since she started her catering business six months earlier. Before this, she had mostly done small parties, but this involved ranchers and business owners from this entire region of southeastern Idaho.

  Viv had told her there would be people coming from the Jackson Hole area, as well. She planned to have her business cards out where everyone could see and made a mental note to also stick the magnetic banner on her van that read Cold Creek Cuisine.

  “Thanks, Viv. I hope so.”

  “I was checking to see if you are needing any help.”

  Unfortunately, the answer to that was an unequivocal yes but she couldn’t admit defeat yet. She could do this. She had planned everything carefully and much of the food was already prepped. Her sister-in-law and niece were coming over in a couple of hours to help her with last-minute things, so she should be all right.

  “I think I’ll be okay. Thanks for offering, though.”

  “You are bringing your children tonight, yes?”

  Oh, heavens, what a nightmare that would be. “No. Not this time, Viv. My niece, Erin, is coming out to the house to tend to them while Terri helps me serve your guests.”

  “I so love those little darlings of yours.”

  She smiled as she put away the groceries, the handset tucked into her shoulder. Viv was one of the most genuine people Jenna knew. She was enormously blessed to have such wonderful neighbors. After the tractor accident that critically injured Joe, all the neighbors along the Cold Creek had rallied around her. Viv’s husband Guillermo and the Daltons, who owned the biggest spread in the area, had all rushed to help her out.

  While she had been numbly running between the ranch and the trauma center in Idaho Falls for those awful weeks Joe was in a coma, they had stepped in to care for her children, to bring in the fall alfalfa crop, to round up the Wagon Wheel cattle from the summer range.

  She could never repay any of them.

  “They adore you, too,” she said now to Viv. “But I think your party will go a little more smoothly without my boys there to get into trouble.”

  “If you change your mind, you bring them. Christmas is for the children, no?”

  Those words continued to echo in her mind as she said goodbye to Viviana a few moments later and hung up, then turned her attention to Jolie who was yawning in her high chair ready for her nap.

  Her children certainly hadn’t enjoyed the best of Christmases the past two years, but she refused to let them down this year. After tonight, she intended to relax and spend every moment of the holidays enjoying her time with them.

  Perfect. It all had to be perfect. Was that such an unreasonable wish?

  Her children deserved it. They had suffered so much pain and loss. Their last happy Christmas seemed like forever ago.

  Joe had died the day after Christmas two years earlier, and they had known it was coming days earlier. No death of a man in his early thirties could be easy for his family to endure, but her husband’s had been particularly tough. He had lingered in a coma for two months after the tractor accident, fighting off complication after complication.

  Finally, just when she thought perhaps they had turned a corner and he was starting to improve, when she was certain his eyelids were fluttering in response to a squeeze of her hands or a particular tone of her voice, a virulent infection devastated his system. His battered body just couldn’t fight anymore.

  The next Christmas would have been hard enough for the boys, so close to the anniversary of their beloved father’s death, but they had been forced to spend Christmas with Jenna’s brother. Jolie, born five months after her father’s death, had picked up a respiratory illness and had been i
n pediatric intensive care through the holidays, consuming Jenna with worry all over again. Then Pat, Joe’s mother, suffered a severe stroke the week before Christmas, so Jenna had been running ragged between both of them.

  This year would be different. Everyone was relatively healthy, even if Pat did still struggle with rehabilitation in the assisted-living center in Idaho Falls. Jenna’s fledgling catering business was taking off and the sale of the Wagon Wheel had covered most of the huge pile of debt Joe had left behind.

  She refused to allow anything to mess up this Christmas. Not a blizzard, not a big catering job she felt ill-equipped to handle, not sliding her car into a ditch.

  Not even an arrogant neighbor with stunning blue eyes.

  “You know you don’t have to go to this shindig. I doubt anybody’s expectin’ you to. This was one of those, what do you call it, courtesy invites.”

  Carson made a face at his foreman, Neil Parker, as the two of them checked over his three pregnant mares, who were due to deliver in only a few months.

  So far all was going well. This particular foal’s sire was a champion cutting horse from the world-famous Dalton horse operation just up the road, and Carson had high hopes the foal would follow in his daddy’s magnificent footsteps.

  “I know that,” he answered Neil. “If the local stock growers’ association could have figured out a polite way not to invite me, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I doubt it’s personal. You just represent change and a different way of lookin’ at things, something that worries the old-timers around here. New West versus Old West.”

  Carson knew that. He knew his purchase of the vast acreage that used to be known as the Wagon Wheel had thrust him onto a hotly debated battleground. All across the West, old-guard ranchers were finding themselves saddled with land that was no longer profitable and practices that had become archaic and unwieldy.

  Many of their children weren’t interested in ranching and the lifestyle that came with it. At the same time, ranchers fought development and the idea of splitting the land they had poured their blood and sweat into tract subdivisions.

  As feed costs went up and real-estate values plummeted, many were caught in a no-win situation.

  He knew old-timers resented when new people moved in, especially those who had the capital to enact sweeping, costly changes in ranching practices in an effort to increase yield. It was even worse in his situation since he wasn’t a permanent resident of his ranch and only came here a couple of times a month for a few days at a time.

  He couldn’t avoid the snide comments in town when he came to Pine Gulch. And he knew Neil suffered worse, though his foreman was careful not to share those details with him.

  Neil and his wife Melina had been with Carson for a decade, first as caretakers of the central California ranch he purchased several years ago and then at the small Montana ranch he still owned.

  Carson loved ranching. He loved being out on his horses, loved the wildness and the raw beauty here, loved the risk and the rewards.

  It wasn’t some big secret why that might be. That year he spent on his grandparents’ ranch a few miles away from here had been the happiest, most secure of his life. He wasn’t trying to recapture that, only to replicate it somewhere else if he could. And though Raven’s Nest was only a small segment of his vast empire, this was where he found the most peace.

  He wanted to make it a success and he figured a little proactive public relations couldn’t hurt the situation in town. Life would be easier all the way around if Neil didn’t have to play politics with obstinate locals.

  “I’m not some Hollywood rancher, only looking for a status symbol. We’re making something out of Raven’s Nest and I need to get that point across. That’s the whole reason I’m going to Viviana Cruz’s party. You and I have been running Raven’s Nest for ten months now and people still won’t accept that we’re serious about what we’re doing here.”

  He thought of the coolness in Jenna Wheeler’s eyes when he had pulled her van out of the snow a few hours earlier and the surprise she had showed when he had done the neighborly thing and told her he would make sure her driveway was shoveled.

  He didn’t know why her negative opinion of him bugged him so much. Plenty of people hated his guts. It was a normal side effect of both his position and his personality. He hadn’t made McRaven Enterprises so successful by being weak and accommodating.

  Jenna probably figured she had reason to resent him. He was radically changing something her husband’s family had built over several generations.

  He thought of what Hayden Wheeler had said the afternoon before. He’s the dude who stole our ranch. Had the boy’s mother been feeding him that kind of garbage? He didn’t like thinking she would be the sort to come off as some kind of martyr. She had listed her ranch for sale and he had paid more than a fair price for it. End of story. It was a business deal, pure and simple.

  Hell, he’d even made concessions, like granting her the right-of-way to use the Raven’s Nest bridge and access road to the point where her driveway forked off it. Otherwise, she would have had to build a new road and another bridge across the creek, something costly and complicated.

  He sighed and pushed the frustration away. What did it matter if she didn’t like him? He certainly wasn’t trying to win any popularity contests with Jenna.

  It would be nice, though, if Neil didn’t have to fight through the negative perceptions of everybody else in town every time his foreman needed to do business with anyone in the Teton Valley.

  “I’m only going to go for a little while tonight,” he said to Neil. “I’ll shake a few hands, stroke a few egos and be home in time to make sure everything’s ready for the guests coming in on Sunday.”

  “Hate to break it to you, boss, but showing up to one Christmas party with the cattlemen’s association probably won’t do much to change anyone’s mind. Folks around here are set in their ways, afraid of anything that’s different.”

  “What’s to be afraid of? We’re only trying to find more sustainable ways of doing business.”

  “You don’t have to sell me, boss. I’m on board. I know what you’re doing here and I’m all for it. Our overhead is about half of a typical ranch of the same size and the land is already healthier after less than a year. It’s working. But what you’re doing is fairly radical. You can’t argue that. A lot of people think you’re crazy to go without hormones, to calve in the summer, to move your cattle to a new grazing spot every couple of days instead of weeks. That kind of thinking isn’t going to make you the most popular guy at the cattle growers’ association.”

  “It can’t hurt to let people see I don’t intend to come out only on the weekends and hide out here at the ranch. I’m not trying to convert anybody, I just want folks to see I’m willing to step out and try to be part of the community.”

  “A noble effort, I guess.”

  “You don’t mind if I tag along with you and Melina, then?”

  “I suppose that would be okay. You want her to find you a date? There’s some real nice-lookin’ girls around here who’d probably love to hit the town with a guy who has a private jet and one of them penthouses in San Francisco.”

  Carson narrowed his eyes at his foreman, whose sun-weathered features only grinned back at him. “Thanks, but no,” Carson muttered. “I don’t need help in the dating department.”

  “You change your mind, you let me know.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. I’m not interested in a social life, just in a little public relations.”

  Chapter Three

  Two hours later, he reminded himself of the conversation with his foreman as he listened to the Pine Gulch mayor ramble on about every single civic event planned for the coming year, from the Founders’ Day parade to the Memorial Day breakfast to the annual tradition of decorating the town park for the holidays.

  Public relations, he reminded himself. That was the only reason for
his presence. If that meant expiring from boredom, it was a small price to pay.

  “This is a nice town, as you’ll find when you’ve been here a little longer,” Mayor Wilson assured him. “A nice town full of real nice people. Why, I don’t guess there’s a more neighborly town in all of Idaho. You could have done a lot worse if you’d settled somewhere else.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” he murmured to the other man, wondering when he could politely leave.

  At least the mayor was willing to talk to him. He supposed he ought to be grateful for that. While he wasn’t encountering outright hostility from people at the party, he had seen little of that neighborliness Mayor Wilson claimed. Most were polite to him but guarded, which was about what he expected.

  The server walked past with more of those divine spinach rolls. He grabbed one as she passed by, hoping she wasn’t keeping track of his consumption since he knew he’d had more than his share.

  At least the food was good. Better than good, actually. He had come in with fairly low culinary expectations. A stock growers’ holiday party in Pine Gulch, Idaho, wasn’t exactly high on his list of places to find haute cuisine.

  But the menu was imaginative and every dish prepared exactly right. He paid a Cordon Bleu–trained personal chef to fill his refrigerator and freezer here and in San Francisco and he thought the food at this party was every bit as good as anything Jean-Marc prepared.

  None of it was fancy but everything he had tried so far exploded with taste, from the mini crab cakes with wild mushrooms to the caramel tart he’d tasted to the spinach rolls he couldn’t get enough of.

  He could only hope the personal chef he hired from Jackson Hole for the guests who were coming to Raven’s Nest in a few days was half as good as this caterer.

  The house party was an important one for McRaven Enterprises and he wanted everything to be exactly right, especially since he had a feeling this was his one and only chance to convince Frederick Hertzog and his son, Dierk, to sell their cellular phone manufacturing business to McRaven Enterprises.