Cowboys Under The Mistletoe: Five Christmas Christian Romance Novellas

by Kristen Ethridge

  But Jamie’s voice had spoken. For no other reason than she wanted to speak.

  Even more shocking was that it had spoken of its’ own accord to a man. The only man Jamie ever spoke to was Sarah’s father, and that had taken well over a year. Sarah tried re-aligning her equilibrium, but she couldn’t. She felt as though her jaw had dropped so low it was brushing Luke Skytrotter’s mane. Too many thoughts tried to process in her mind at the same time.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Jamie Murdoch. I’m Grant McCray.” He tugged on the reins and Master Y hesitated a half-step as Chewie caught up. Then, the cowboy put out his hand.

  Sarah felt the sting of tears in her eyes as slowly, gently, Jamie let go of the reins with her right hand and extended it.

  Grant’s hand covered Jamie’s small fingers like a baseball mitt as they shook in formal greeting. “It’s good to meet you. Chewie likes you, too. Y’all make a good team.”

  The morning sun found a crack in the puffy December clouds and pushed through. Sarah caught herself staring at the bright streaks of light.

  Was this the moment that her daughter needed to push through her own barriers and find her own unique path?

  Sarah settled back in the saddle and watched, not daring to hope for what the world had told her would be impossible.

  Chapter Two

  Grant still didn’t know the name of the woman riding behind him. He’d squeaked a few words out of the little girl, but her mother hadn’t uttered so much as a syllable during the ride down the beach. He wasn’t sure if she was self-absorbed, aloof, preoccupied, bored…or what. But one thing seemed certain.

  She was something.

  Whoever she was.

  Grant pulled at the reins and came to a stop, waiting for both of his clients to catch up. “Would you like to keep riding down to the lighthouse, or turn around and head back to the stables?”

  A sparkle twinkled in Jamie’s deep brown eyes. It reminded Grant of the small, golden lights that lit up plants and trees all across Port Provident this time of year. Clearly, the idea of the lighthouse intrigued her.

  Grant hoped her mother took notice. He hoped the blonde woman would say yes.

  Maybe if they were able to stop at the lighthouse, they could walk around and he could find out the woman’s name. He couldn’t explain why that was important to him, but for some reason, he needed to know.

  He chalked it up to the connection he felt with the shy little girl. Once you bonded with someone over a horse, it was a life-long bond. He hadn’t been running Beachcomber Stables long, but he’d been riding all his life.

  Horses were special. And people who felt an instant kinship with the gentle beasts were special, as well.

  But while Jamie pressed all those buttons in that area of his heart where his deepest instincts took refuge, nothing about her mother tripped any of the same switches in Grant. And it wasn’t just because of her uncomfortable posture on Luke, although she clearly wasn’t a natural with horses.

  “There’s a lighthouse—and people can just go see it?”

  Grant nodded. “Down at the tip of Provident Island. They call the area Point Provident. It used to be a very active area for ships coming up to the port, back in the island’s Victorian heyday.”

  He pointed to the edge of the horizon where the sand met the sky at the far end of the beach.

  Jamie turned her head. “I told you about it yesterday, Mama. When we got here. I saw it online.”

  Her mother shook her head slightly. “Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten. I guess we could go see it. How much farther would we need to ride, Mr. Um…”

  She stuttered over some non-descript syllables.

  “It’s another ten minutes or so.” He adjusted his hat where it wrapped the curve of his forehead. “And you can just call me Grant. I don’t think I caught your name, though.”

  “Sarah,” she tossed off. “Sarah Murdoch. Here. Wait just a second.” She opened the purse that she’d slipped diagonally across her chest and dug through a pocket. Then, with a smile that could have lit up the main Christmas tree on Gulfview Boulevard, she handed him a small rectangle of white paper.

  A business card.

  In the left corner of the card was a photo of Sarah herself, blonde hair bouncing in oversized curls past her shoulders. It looked like an advertisement for a beauty pageant. But as his eyes scanned the card, he caught the tagline.

  “A peach of a Realtor for all your metro Atlanta home needs.”

  Her smile didn’t dim. “That’s me. If you’ve ever got friends or family in Atlanta—or really, anywhere in North Georgia—please tell them to give me a call. I’m always available to help.”

  Grant raised an eyebrow. He should have known that it would be something related to her business that would cause her to focus and kick-start her personality into overdrive.

  “I can’t say that I’ve even been to Atlanta, but if I ever hear of anyone going there, I’ll keep it in mind.” He tipped the card slightly, then tucked it away in his back pocket.

  Sarah continued talking. Something about the simple, polite introduction he’d extended had opened up a flood of information on Georgia, houses, and real estate in general.

  “I assume you live in a beach house here?” she asked.

  Grant gave Master Y a light squeeze with his legs and leaned forward. The horse easily picked up the signal and began guiding the small group toward the tip of the island.

  “Not really,” he said with a shrug. “I have a place that’s a little further back.”

  She gestured toward the shoreline beside them. “Well, I guess if you’ve seen this all your life, it becomes kind of commonplace."

  The morning sunlight shimmered as it coated the top of the waves about halfway out. “Well, I haven’t really lived here all that long, but no, I don’t think you could ever call scenery like this common.”

  Sarah started to speak, then paused. “I guess not.”

  A moment passed with only the noise of the December breeze and the low train-like sounds as the waves crested then flattened as they met the sand.

  “I could sell this view without even trying. That white one with the green trim right over there is our rental for the holidays. There are some beautiful places to live in and around Atlanta, but it’s always a dream to have a property that just sells itself.”

  Grant nodded. “It seems that way. I’ve noticed there are a ton of Realtors in this town.”

  He tugged briefly at the reins, bringing Master Y in line with Luke, then got the horses to match pace with Chewie so that the three were now walking across in a line, instead of single-file.

  “So…um…you said you hadn’t lived here long?”

  Now that the ice had been broken, it seemed like Sarah wanted to make small talk. Grant was used to that on these rides down the beach, but he usually tried to steer the conversation to restaurant recommendations and glimpses into the island’s history.

  Well, if he was honest, the C-Bar-M Ranch was part of the island’s history. In fact, the Collingers and the McCrays were part of Texas history. But too much had happened in the last year or so for him to be able to be at peace with talking about it all as though the stories and the people who had been a part of them were relegated to the ancient past.

  He couldn’t talk about Mom or Dad or Gramps or any of them without remembering what he’d lost and how he’d split with his siblings over their colliding visions of the future.

  “I have family from here and I inherited some property a while back,” Grant said, feeling comfortably vague with his answer. But he wasn’t going to be comfortable with the spotlight staying on him for long. “How about you? Are you from Atlanta? Have you always been in real estate?”

  Below the edge of her helmet, part of her blonde ponytail picked up in the breeze. “Well, I went to the University of Georgia. I wanted to be a cheerleader for the Bulldogs. Dated a football player. Married him. Divorced him. Needed a job. Taught myself how to hustle.
”

  “And then you had Jamie?” he asked. He didn’t want to be nosy, but the quiet girl with the pretty braids had connected with him, even with only a handful of words.

  Sarah shook her head and laughed softly. The bright sound weaved into the sunny morning like the notes belonged there. “Well, we are often mistaken for twins…but no. Jamie is originally from Haiti. I first met her when I worked at an orphanage on a humanitarian trip with some people from Atlanta after the big earthquake there. When I returned home, I couldn’t get her out of my head, and I spent the next three years trying to adopt her. We’ve been a family for another three years now.”

  Grant looked down at his boots, swinging in the stirrups. Maybe he’d summed up the brash southern belle all wrong.

  As the shoreline curved slightly to the right, the lighthouse came into view. Jamie pointed and the smile Grant had been waiting to see crossed her face. Her teeth shone as white as the clouds high above them. The upward shift of the corners of her lips transformed her face with curves and an unmistakable streak of joy.

  “That’s a great story, Sarah,” he said as he watched Jamie’s face.

  “No,” she said, and Grant found his eyes tracking to Sarah’s features instead. “She’s a great girl and it’s a great life.”

  “Whoa.” Grant brought his horse to a halt, then put out his hand to signal the same. Chewie and Luke stopped nearby. “Let me help y’all get down.”

  The lighthouse stood on a high rocky outcropping above them. Sarah could see a road dead-end into a small parking lot area on the far side and some stairs that led from their spot on the beach up to the red-and-white striped tower.

  “Whoa.” Jamie’s whisper echoed Grant’s command, but instead of speaking to the horse, her words were for the lighthouse.

  “A lighthouse has stood here since the late 1800s,” Grant said as he helped Jamie off the back of the buff-colored horse. “Remarkably, this one withstood the Great Storm of 1910 and only needed minor repair after it. A good thing too, since close to fifty people took shelter in it during the storm.”

  Grant reached up and placed one hand on either side of Sarah’s waist and tugged gently, initiating her slide off the horse. The feel of his palms curved around the top of her hip crest felt strong. It had been a long time since any man had pulled her toward him. She knew this moment had nothing to do with any of the usual reasons a man brought a woman close, but just for a split second, her mind told her that she could let this moment count if she wanted to.

  “Ridiculous,” she said under her breath. Her feet landed on the soft sand.

  “Not actually. Being made of metal made it one of the better choices for people on the island who could get there. Many of the wood-framed homes on the island were turned into toothpicks as the power of the storm surge pushed them off their foundations.”

  Oh my gosh.

  He’d heard her. And he thought she was mocking a natural disaster—not realizing she was only mocking herself.

  Sarah closed her eyes and tilted her head upward, feeling the December sun on her face. She searched her mind for something to say. She really wanted to laugh it off.

  The only problem was…it wasn’t funny.

  Nothing about the moment was funny. Especially not when she realized just how much a cowboy helping her down from a horse set off her hormones and butterflies.

  She needed to get a life.

  Well, she had a life…in Atlanta. And it was, as she’d just told Grant, a good life where she was making a name for herself in her field. In Atlanta, things like this didn’t happen. She didn’t have time to spend on frivolous moments like horseback riding. She crissed and crossed one of America’s largest cities daily to ensure that her goals and dreams stayed on track.

  Her eyes opened slowly and Sarah found herself looking right at Grant’s face. A small hint of five o’clock shadow had begun to appear, hours early. It dusted the straight planes of his cheeks and wrapped the chiseled angle of his jaw.

  She could tell Grant had noticed her stare.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Sarah tilted her head, still studying the face in front of her. For the first time, it hit her that she’d been juggling all the balls of her hopes and dreams in the air for so long that maybe she’d forgotten to dream new dreams.

  Maybe she’d dreamed so much with her head—and her checkbook—that she no longer remembered what it felt like to dream with her heart.

  “No, not at all. I just misspoke. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”

  Actually, she misspoke then, too. She knew exactly what she was thinking.

  What Sarah wasn’t entirely certain about was what she was feeling.

  Grant plucked Jamie off the back of Chewie like lifting a feather from the ground. It was effortless. What took far more effort for Grant was trying to keep his mind off the little girl’s mother.

  He’d left behind everything when he left Blue Creek, looking for a place where he could just keep everything the way he needed it to be. He just wanted a place where he could be with his horses and live in the simple manner to which he felt he’d been called.

  But…that didn’t mean he was immune to less simple observations.

  Like wondering more about Sarah Murdoch.

  He thought he had her pegged back at the stable. Glued to her phone, distracted, willing to let her kid go out on a horse ride with a stranger while she stayed behind doing the so-called important things.

  But then she opened up about how she came to be Jamie’s mother, and Grant realized he couldn’t judge Sarah’s book by the cover she’d originally shown.

  Nor could he forget the way the sunlight hit the lightest highlights in the blonde ponytail that trailed just above the middle of the indentation between her shoulder blades.

  “Are you ready to see the lighthouse, Jamie?” He looked down at the little girl as she took off her helmet. Talking to her about what they were about to do took Grant’s mind off the girl’s mom. He needed to stay focused. His job was a pretty casual one, but nonetheless, it was still a job—and one he took great pride in.

  Jamie nodded back at him. She didn’t use any words, but she gave a hint of a smile, and that was good enough.

  “So, should we just go up the stairs?” Sarah pointed at the concrete steps that led to Point Provident.

  “Yeah, it’s a little bit of a hike, but it’s worth it,” Grant said.

  “I hear descriptions like that a lot in overpriced house listings,” Sarah replied, and this time, the hint of a smile was hers. “Are you sure you’re being accurate?”

  “I feel like you’re teasing me a bit, Madam Realtor. But I promise that I’m giving a true and accurate representation of my personal experience with the lighthouse at Point Provident.”

  Now her laugh was real. “Touché, Cowboy.”

  Something about the way she called him “cowboy” rang in his ears. He couldn’t tell if she meant the title as a compliment or an epithet. Either way, he was proud of his legacy. He’d chosen to continue this life, even when his brothers and his sister were back in the Texas Hill Country, spinning all sorts of new ideas to tear apart their family ranch in the name of “modernizing the operation.”

  Grant knew he wasn’t a modern guy.

  He was a fixture from another era.

  Much like the lighthouse. She’d stood for more than one hundred years and had performed her duties admirably. That’s what Grant wanted to be. Constant. Unchanging. Rooted to something most people couldn’t even see anymore.

  Sarah took her daughter’s hand and steadied her as they climbed the steps together. At the top, Grant stepped out of their path, then turned around to look.

  Jamie’s eyes grew wide as she tilted her head back to look all the way up to the tip-top of the lighthouse. Grant could tell she loved it instantly, just as he had the first time he’d seen it when he was a kid while on a visit to his gramps at C-Bar-M Ranch. Gramps was gone and C-Bar-M belonged to Grant now
, but the wonder for this most magical spot on Provident Island remained.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” he asked.

  She nodded and said something in the smallest of whispers. Sarah squeezed her daughter’s hand. “Sweetie, speak up. We can’t hear you.”

  Jamie shifted her gaze down to her feet. “I like it. It’s big.”

  Powered by instinct, Grant dropped to a squatting position in front of Jamie. She seemed to trust him, but maybe if he got down at eye-level with her, she’d open up a little more.

  “If you want to see inside sometime, I could make a phone call and get you a tour. You can see for a long, long way when you get to the top.”

  “Could I see Haiti?”

  The squeak in her voice made Grant want to hug her, but he kept his arms respectfully down at his sides.

  “I don’t know, Jamie, but we could definitely try.”

  Chapter Three

  “And then she gave him a hug, Ellie. A hug.”

  Sarah couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice as she sat in an Adirondack chair on the deck of the beach house, recapping the day’s events with her sister. The stars twinkled in the clear December sky. All the fluffy clouds that had brought a crisp breeze to the island had moved offshore with the close of the day.

  What hadn’t moved on was Sarah. Every time she thought about Jamie reaching her arms out to Grant and then hugging him tightly…she couldn’t let go of the feelings that swirled inside her.

  Ellie shook her head in disbelief, then took a sip of the hot cocoa in her mug.

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  The corner of Ellie’s mouth twitched. “Nothing? Really?”

  “Not a word. He just returned the hug for as long as she was comfortable. Really, it was the perfect response. Any word or movement would have taken her out of the moment. It was just like he knew exactly what to do.”