Christmas Cowboy Kisses

by Carolyn Davidson / Carol Arens / Lauri Robinson

  “We will. I’m sure of it.”

  She wasn’t really sure, but she wished it with all her heart. The children had been through so much this last year.

  Laira Lynne’s cousin and her husband had both been taken by fevers within a week of each other. They’d become ill the day after Christmas and passed before the new year.

  When Laira Lynne heard the news, it had taken all of seven seconds to decide to leave her hectic life in New York behind and come to Snow Apple Woods and raise her nieces. In the end, family ties were everything.

  “Auntie?” A blast of cold air blew inside her coat when Lynne parted it to stick her head out. “There’s a lantern on in the stable.”

  “I reckon I left it burning after I fed Old Mule.” That had been careless of her. She must have been distracted getting the girls ready for the pageant rehearsal. “Stay close, ladies, we’ll just stop for a moment and put it out.”

  The outside latch was not anchored in place. The barn door rattled in the wind. She must have been more preoccupied than she realized.

  She stepped inside the stable and closed the door behind her. The girls scrambled from her clothing like a bunch of chicks popping out from under a hen.

  A man knelt, not twenty feet away, rubbing the leg of a huge black horse. Old Mule nipped the collar of the man’s shirt and brayed.

  Ten little arms suddenly grabbed her about the waist and thighs, hugging tight.

  The man seemed as surprised to see them as they were to see him. His clothes were covered in dust, and so was his horse. Clearly, he was a traveler...a very handsome traveler.

  His eyes were the same deep green as a Christmas tree, his cheekbones high and manly. His teeth were straight, but his smile was attractively crooked. Black hair, clipped short, fell tousled about his face.

  Logically, there was only one person he could be.

  “Is that Satan’s spawn?” Belle asked, her voice full of accusation.

  “Of course not! There’s no such thing.” Lara Lynne positioned herself in front of the girls in case the man was not who she thought he was...or in case he was.

  “Mr. Bolt said he was coming,” Ruthie said, peeking about Laira Lynn’s skirt.

  “To send us all out into the cold where Santa can’t find us,” Belle declared from where she had once again taken refuge under Laira Lynne’s skirt.

  The man stood. She had to look up at him; he was that tall. He stepped forward with his hand extended.

  “I’m Rayne Lantree, ma’am.”

  The only polite thing to do was to accept his greeting, so she set her hand in his, palm to palm. His hand was big, callused and blessedly warm. She hadn’t noticed how chilled she had gotten on the walk home until his heated flesh wrapped around hers.

  Given that she was shaking hands with the devil, she was surprised to find that she didn’t really want to let go.

  “My horse came up lame,” he said. “Yours was the first place I came to. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Naturally, he would have a voice that sounded like music when he wasn’t even singing.

  She snatched her hand away because she had let him hold it overlong as it was.

  “I’m Laira Lynne Rowan and these are my nieces, Lynne, Ruthie, Belle, Jane and Abby.”

  “A pleasure, ma’am...girls.” He smiled and it was hard, all of a sudden, to hold who he was against him. She couldn’t recall ever seeing such a becoming smile. “I’ve been told you might have a room to let.”

  “You heard wrong.” Ruthie cast him the evil eye.

  “You heard right,” Laira Lynne corrected. No matter who he was, the money he would pay in board would be a blessing, especially at this time of year.

  She had been praying to find a way to provide the girls with a very special Christmas feast. Apparently, the answer had come in the form of the town’s archenemy.

  Without warning, the wind whipped a slat of wood off the barn door and sent it flying inside.

  Rayne Lantree dashed forward and caught it a second before it would have hit both Jane and Abby.

  The lantern tipped over, but the flame went out before it hit the straw. Icy wind filled the stable, racing about and screeching in corners.

  Three of the children began to cry.

  “Looks like things are getting worse outside.” Rayne Lantree’s voice was even more seductive in the dark than it had been by lantern light. “I’ll help you get the girls inside, then I’ll hammer the door back in place.”

  He scooped up the twins in one arm and Belle in the other. Bent into the wind, he crossed the yard with long strides.

  Laira Lynne snatched the other girls’ hands and hurried after him. It felt as if she was wearing ice instead of a coat.

  Once inside, she lit a lantern.

  Mr. Lantree set the children on the floor, then crossed the parlor. He stooped before the hearth and urged the dying coals back to life, then added wood until there was a nice blaze going.

  With a nod, he hurried out the front door. A few moments later she heard a hammer pounding wood.

  Satan’s spawn or not, the man deserved a hot drink when he came back inside.

  * * *

  As small as it was, the stable was snug. A good thing, too; the temperature was dropping like a stone into a deep well. He was grateful that Harvard was out of the elements.

  The hundred-yard dash from the stable to the house had been so cold it stiffened his toes under the boot leather.

  God protect anyone caught out in this misery. Coming up the front-porch stairs, he noticed smoke coming from the upstairs chimneys. He watched it blow across the starlit sky, flat and swift in the wind.

  He knocked on the front door. It opened in an instant. Miss Rowan must have been watching for him. For some reason that made him feel good.

  Since, apparently, even the children of Snow Apple Woods considered him the devil’s spawn, she might have locked him out and left him to shiver the night away in the stable.

  “You look frozen through, Mr. Lantree. Come and have a seat by the fire.”

  She indicated a pair of chairs flanking the hearth. On a small table between them, two cups of tea steamed. The scent of peppermint filled the parlor.

  He crossed the room and sat down. Damn if he hadn’t landed in a little bit of paradise. The cold leached from his bones and his muscles relaxed. He closed his eyes at the bliss.

  “Have you really come to turn us out of our homes?”

  Miss Rowan’s voice was clear and sweet. The fabric of her skirt whispered as she settled into her chair. Did she sing? he wondered.

  “If you have, you are going to meet with a good deal of resistance. Snow Apple Woods has been home to some folks for all their lives.”

  To call Miss Rowan beautiful did her an injustice. Even if a rock smacked him between the eyes, he wouldn’t be able to quit staring at her. He knew her story, just as he knew the stories of everyone in this dot of a town.

  She had come from New York, left behind her business of planning social events just when it had begun to flourish, in order to raise her late cousin’s children. She had parents, a brother and two sisters in New York. He could only imagine what they thought of her burying herself in Snow Apple Woods.

  Yes, he knew the stories of the folks living here. In his opinion, they would be better off taking the bank drafts he had brought with him and starting over somewhere else.

  Why they would view him as a messenger of doom rather than hope was beyond him.

  There was a long awkward silence, filled only by the fire snapping and the wind battering the walls. Through it, he gazed into blue eyes that were more than a pretty color. The good heart beating in—he couldn’t help but notice—her lovely chest, shone out of them.

  He judged that she was so
meone who would care for, what she judged to be, the well-being of the children more than a prosperous future. She’d already given up financial security for them.

  This would be a problem for him. If she felt the children would be better off staying in their home, all the good sense in the world would not make her take his grandfather’s money.

  “The railroad is coming, Miss Rowan. It will bring prosperity to towns all over the county.”

  “And to your grandfather.”

  “Especially to my grandfather.”

  She snatched the pins from her hair and shook it free. Golden-red waves tumbled over her shoulders and down her back. He would rather spend the evening looking at those tresses than discussing unpleasant business.

  “Then, naturally, to you when you inherit.” She arched a delicately etched brow at him.

  That was true. He didn’t have great wealth of his own right now, but he would and he wasn’t sorry about it. Under his care, the Lantree Ranch would become the finest in the state.

  “Look, Miss Rowan, I didn’t come here to cause trouble. My grandfather is selling this land to the railroad, but he has offered you folks a fair deal. Take the money and move to one of the towns that will prosper because of it. It’s only logical.”

  “Christmas is in seven days. The Christmas pageant in six. That is the very day you and your grandfather will evict us.”

  She stood up. Firelight stroked licks of heat on her shapely bosom. It shadowed the nip of her small waist and glowed against the swell of sweetly rounded hips covered by the plaid pleats of her skirt.

  “You are welcome to stay in our home, Mr. Lantree. But you should understand that no one in town is going to accept your grandfather’s offer.”

  “It’s not an offer so much as an ultimatum.” What was wrong with the folks here? There were better, more affluent towns only a day’s ride away. “The town lease was up last month. The sheriff will be here on the twenty-fourth whether you all take the money or not.”

  “It ought to be an interesting day,” she said, then spun about and went up the stairs.

  She sang softly, going up, her hips swaying gently as she mounted. Her voice was even nicer than he had imagined.

  “‘God rest ye merry gentleman, let nothing you dismay...’”

  The rest of the carol faded as she turned down a hallway.

  Chapter Three

  So far today, Rayne had had a door slammed in his face, a broom swatted at his backside and a plate of cookies shoved into his hands.

  Snow Apple Woods consisted of one main street, five shops on one side and five on the other. A quaint-looking white church flanked the north end of the road with a large, bare-limbed apple tree in front of it.

  No doubt, for this pint-sized town, the church was the hub of social activity.

  Twenty-five homes dotted a circle around the only street. A hundred and one souls lived in them. Forty adults and sixty-one children.

  He knew the facts, who was married to whom and who ran each of the struggling businesses. His grandfather had kept records of his tenants and their stores. It had only seemed good business for Rayne to know who they were before he came.

  Rayne bit into one of the cookies Mrs. Blue had shoved at him before she had shut the door in his face. It didn’t taste poisoned. If he lasted the walk back to Miss Rowan’s house he’d give the rest of the treats to the little girls. Maybe they’d quit looking at him as if he had sprouted horns.

  Fortunately, the wind had died down, but the air remained blistering cold.

  For all the success he’d had trying to make folks see good sense, he might as well have stayed snug and warm in his room at Miss Rowan’s.

  For whatever reason, the people of Snow Apple Woods were set against leaving, from the oldest to the youngest.

  He’d been certain that when they realized how much money they had been offered to move along peacefully they would have been happy to go.

  On his fruitless outing he had made one discovery. Tonight, there was to be a rehearsal for some sort of Christmas celebration. With folks gathered together maybe they’d see things more clearly.

  Rayne approached Miss Rowan’s stable but didn’t go inside because he heard the chatter of young voices.

  “We need to give something very special to Auntie for Christmas.” If he remembered the voices correctly from breakfast this morning, it was Ruthie speaking.

  “What about Mama’s brooch?” This was Lynne, the oldest, no doubt about it.

  There was a very long silence.

  Maybe he shouldn’t stand here eavesdropping, but he needed to tend his horse and he didn’t want to just barge in on the girls and frighten them.

  “Let’s make a house that looks like ours out of paste and paper,” said Belle, the cute little imp who would have put salt in his morning coffee if Miss Rowan hadn’t caught her midcrime. “We can paint Mama and Papa standing in the window beside the Christmas tree and Auntie playing the piano. That way, when the devil throws us out in the cold, we can remember how Christmas used to be.”

  “Hush, Belle. Auntie told us not to say unkind things about Mr. Lantree,” Lynne scolded her younger sister. “He was raised by his coldhearted grandfather and they say he never even got a Christmas tree.”

  “That must be why he’s mean,” Ruthie said. “Maybe he can’t help it.”

  “I reckon that changes things for tonight,” he heard Belle mutter.

  “What do you mean?” This from Lynne.

  “The pepper in his pillow. I won’t be able to do it.”

  “Santa won’t like that, Bellie,” one of the twins said.

  “We’ll get coal,” said an identical voice.

  “Mr. Lantree must get coal all the time,” Ruthie observed. “We ought to do our best to be kind, just like Auntie says.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” he murmured.

  They had nearly been right about the coal, but the truth was, growing up, he had gotten worse than coal. He’d gotten nothing.

  The Christmas that he had been seven years old, the stocking he had hung with his own little hands, full of hope and expectation, had been empty on Christmas morning. All of a sudden he remembered the disappointment so clearly that it hurt.

  “There’s no such thing as Santa,” he had been stiffly informed by his grandfather, then sent to his room to study sums. He’d listened to the children of the ranch hands playing in the snow outside his window while he added boring numbers.

  The next year, he had awoken on Christmas morning to find a toy locomotive, carved from wood, outside his bedroom door. It had his initials engraved on the bottom.

  He’d proudly showed it to his grandfather as proof that Santa had, indeed, come.

  “Don’t believe in fairy tales, boy.” His grandfather had plucked the train from his hands while he’d tried his hardest to hold on to it. “You’ll only be hurt by them. It had to be one of the hands who left it there.”

  He never saw the train again. Year after year, he watched other children aglow over what Santa had brought, but he knew the truth. Christmas, with all its pretty ribbons and bows, was just another day.

  He left the stable without going inside. Setting the cookies on the kitchen table, he walked down the hall to his downstairs room.

  The old pain of his grandfather’s hard lesson was eased some when he heard Laira Lynne singing “Joy to the World.” The clear, sweet tones of her voice filtered through the walls of his room.

  He reckoned she was going about some chore trying to keep “holiday joy” in her heart as she did so.

  Maybe there would be joy for him tonight when the people of Snow Apple Woods agreed to vacate on schedule.

  * * *

  It was late. The children had been asleep for an hour when Laira
Lynne finally sat down on her cousin’s chair beside the fireplace. She took a slow, easy breath and watched steam curl from the cup of tea on the table beside her. Being a mother was infinitely more work than being a social-event organizer and yet vastly more satisfying.

  She reached her stocking-covered toes toward the flames, grateful for the warmth.

  The dropping temperature had to have everyone worried. A few more degrees and the cold might do damage to the apple trees that surrounded the town.

  How fitting that Mr. Lantree, the man who intended to destroy Snow Apple Woods, blew in at the same time as the cold snap that threatened the apple grove...the very apple grove that gave the town its name and its most prosperous product.

  Canned apples, candied apples, apple butter, apple cider and fresh, sweet eating apples had brought visitors to Snow Apple Woods for many years.

  The front door opened and Rayne Lantree strode inside.

  She reached for her knitting basket but grabbed a fistful of air.

  Drat! The man was too attractive for her peace of mind. She had to look down so that she didn’t embarrass herself by openly staring at the well-shaped curve of his mouth.

  “Good evening, Miss Rowan.”

  She had no choice now but to look at him and return his greeting with a smile.

  To attest to the miserable weather, frost glistened in his dark hair. It dusted the shoulders of his coat.

  He turned toward the back hallway, walking to his room. The fire in his hearth would be stone-cold. It might be an hour or more before he warmed up.

  Since she had been teaching the girls about kindness and tolerance, and he presented the perfect teaching subject, she had no choice but to follow her own lesson.

  “Won’t you sit awhile?” If she kept her eyes on the hat she was knitting for Belle, she might not be so disconcerted by the fascinating half lift of his smile.

  “I’d be obliged, ma’am. It’s right cold outside. Hope you don’t mind that I left the stove on in the stable for the animals.”

  She dropped a stitch. One of the knitting needles poked her finger. There wasn’t a blessed thing she could do to prevent hearing his voice. It was deep, rich and so smooth it might be mistaken for mulled wine.