Christmas at Cade Ranch

by Karen Rock

“Ooooohhhh, sensitive much?”

  “Jewel, put your arm down.” James waited until his sibling lowered her hand. “Anyway, there’s no logical reason why Maggie Cade would have run off with the youngest Loveland son since he had no prospects.”

  “Love,” Sofia murmured, her voice wistful as a heartbreak.

  She’d loved his brother once. What would it feel like to have someone like Sofia love him? She’d impressed James today when she’d come to the Cade board meeting despite being unsure of herself. That took guts—and he admired courage in anyone. Respected her for it. Cared...? Did he care for her?

  His breath lodged in the base of his throat. He shoved the impossible thought aside, and his heart, the only part of him that seemed to be capable of movement now, beat with a heavy thud that sounded in his ear.

  Didn’t he need to know, with one hundred percent faith, that she hadn’t stolen the drugs before he developed feelings for Sofia?

  His eyes drifted over her again and his heart twanged as hard as a banjo string. Sofia said loving someone and believing in them wasn’t the same thing. Was she right?

  Sofia cleared her throat. “Maybe she loved Everett.”

  Jared nodded. “Could be. Women do crazy things when they’re in love.”

  “You should know,” Jewel teased.

  Justin shrugged. “He never sticks around long enough to find out.”

  “So that’s the Cade-Loveland feud?” Sofia asked.

  “In a nutshell,” Joy said. “When the Lovelands found out the Cades had hung their boy, they captured the Cade boys and brought them to the sheriff.”

  “That ended it...?”

  “Nah.” A clanking of boot spurs sounded as Justin uncrossed his ankles and straightened. “See, the sheriff was also a Cade and a really heavy sleeper as it turns out. He didn’t hear a thing when his cousins broke out of jail.”

  “Imagine.” Jewel chuckled.

  “And he wasn’t too interested in hunting down the escapees who were hiding out in the area, harassing the Lovelands’ cattle and stopping deliveries to the ranch.”

  “They became outlaws?” Sofia queried.

  “Peacekeepers,” James clarified, suddenly feeling on the defensive. “The Lovelands never did return Cora’s Tear, which makes that entire family a bunch of thieves.”

  Sofia tilted her head. “So it never turned up?”

  “No. They claim they never had it, but they won’t let us search their property for it.”

  “But if they had the priceless jewel, wouldn’t they have sold it to help their ranch?” Sofia asked, her tone light, reasonable.

  The group quieted. His siblings looked at one another. Then Jewel shrugged. “It’s a famous piece. It’s not like they could sell it easy... But who knows with them. Plus, they had a suspicious business bump shortly thereafter.”

  “And that was just the beginning of the dispute,” Jared added. “They wouldn’t give us Cora’s Tear or let us on their land to find it, so we stopped letting them cross into ours. Ever since, they’ve had to drive their herds miles out of their way north, making them lose cattle and causing their ranch to struggle all these years.”

  “They brought that on themselves,” Jewel grumped from behind another tissue.

  Justin whistled. “Stubborn, sneaky—”

  “What if they paid you?” Sofia eyed them.

  The chatter died down, and James blinked at her.

  “What if you charged them money like rent? This could be another source of revenue and you’d earn back the money you say they owe you for Cora’s Tear.”

  “Only if we charged them hundreds of thousands a year.” Justin popped a toothpick in his mouth.

  “What?”

  “That brooch would be worth about three to four million dollars now,” Jewel said in hushed tones.

  Sofia pursed her lips. “Well, I don’t see how the Lovelands could have it, then. If they’re in foreclosure, they’d use it.”

  “And not worry about going to jail?” James asked, impressed by her rational ideas. Sofia was intelligent. If drugs hadn’t hijacked her life, how far would she have gone toward realizing her dreams? He imagined very far, and regret seized him for what might have been for bright, clever Sofia.

  “Sometimes you have bigger things to worry about—like whether or not you’ll eat, have a place to sleep,” Sofia murmured, and he wondered again about her fear of going to the Carbondale police to report her wallet. Had she committed crimes? A common occurrence, he knew from Jesse, when addicts desperately sought their next fix. His concern deepened. He made a mental note to ask her tonight on the way to her NA meeting.

  “Sofia’s right.” Joy stared directly at each of them, her back straight. It’d been a long time since he’d seen her so interested...so involved in a meeting...not since Jesse. “This feud’s gone on long enough. Let’s allow them to come on the property. It’s the neighborly thing to do.”

  “Like that time they dammed up the river and we nearly lost our cattle?” James demanded. Ma’s enthusiasm was great, but he wasn’t about to forget decades’ worth of bad Loveland behavior.

  “They were desperate,” Sofia said quietly, almost to herself.

  “Or the times they trespassed and let their cattle impregnate ours,” Jewel said, as forcefully as she could now that her voice had nearly disappeared from her coughing.

  “When you don’t have any place to turn, sometimes you go the wrong way.” Sofia’s lips turned down at the corners.

  “Doing the right thing isn’t a choice,” James insisted, though it was hard to take this line with Sofia when, more and more, he found himself wanting to simply reassure her that everything would be okay. That he’d make sure of it. For her and Javi.

  “Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, either.” Sofia’s eyes narrowed and her long eyelashes obscured their expression.

  “Maybe we should vote.” Joy tucked both sides of her hair behind her ears, then raised her hand. “All those in favor of allowing the Lovelands access to the river through our property when our herd is in its summer pasture, raise your hand.”

  After a moment, Jared lifted his hand and said, “On the condition that some of the additional funds go into updating our saddles. They’re older than our ranch.”

  “Anyone else?” His mother checked.

  Sofia’s hand rose.

  “Tie,” Joy declared, looking far too pleased to finally have another voting member on her side. Usually she and Jared, who typically voted together, lost to James and Justin and Jewel. “According to the bylaws—”

  “We’ll table it and take another vote next week.” James rubbed the back of his tense neck. “Except it isn’t really a tie since Sofia’s not a voting member of the board.”

  “She’s Javi’s trustee,” Joy insisted. “That won’t change because of your legal challenge.”

  “As Sofia pointed out, she’s leaving in a few weeks.” James bit the inside of his cheek to keep the worry from showing on his face. His mother had begun to emerge from her depression, and he didn’t want to dampen the moment.

  “But I’m here now.” Sofia’s arched brow and squinty left eye seemed like a declaration of war. “In fact, I’d like to move that we vote on Jared’s saddle replacement request again, whether or not we grant the Lovelands water access.”

  This time, Justin joined his mother, Jared and Sofia in voting to add a new saddle to this month’s expenditures.

  What was the saying, he wondered, as the meeting adjourned and they headed out into the cold.

  All’s fair in love and war.

  Not that love had anything to do with it.

  Did it?

  CHAPTER TEN

  “THAT ONE!”

  Sofia stopped in the calf-high snow a
few days later and followed Javi’s point to a mammoth fir tree. The cold morning air in this remote forest at Mount Sopris’s base had her shivering a bit and she rubbed her mitten-covered hands together. How long had they been hiking? An hour? Two? The tips of her ears ached, for goodness’ sake. As for her toes, they’d lost feeling a long time ago.

  James halted as well and the hacksaw he carried swung beside his knee. Wearing brown boots, dark denim jeans and a plaid jacket that brought out the rich brown of his eyes and his rugged features, he looked like a handsome outdoorsman. Tough, proud and unbroken, as though his spine, his limbs, his square jaw had been forged from the very bedrock of these mountains. She couldn’t entirely blame the high altitude for her breathlessness whenever he glanced her way. In fact, she’d even struggled a bit to focus on the task at hand: finding Javi his very first Christmas tree.

  She still couldn’t get over that it had been James’s suggestion. He’d been so thoughtful with Javi this past week. More often than she liked, she caught herself wishing he would let down his guard with her a bit. With the missing pills still a source of contention between them, though, she doubted it would ever happen. And that might be for the best. She spent too much time dwelling on Jesse’s older brother who, even if he wasn’t so controlling, was off-limits. She couldn’t betray Jesse’s memory with his brother...

  “It’s too big,” she called, eyeing the tree.

  Though it was pretty. Blue-green, snowy, tier-on-tier boughs fanned out from a slender top to a full graceful bottom that swept the white snowdrifts. Last night, a storm had howled down off the mountains and dumped over a foot of snow on Carbondale.

  Today there was little evidence of the blizzard. The sun shone bright in an azure-blue sky and cloud wisps curled on the horizon like an afterthought. A cardinal settled on one of the balsams in the glade, followed by two more. Scarlet against silver-gray-blue-white. It felt like she’d stepped right into a holiday card. Even the air, pine-scented and fresh-scrubbed, smelled like Christmas.

  “Twelve feet,” James speculated, his voice a deep rumble that vibrated in the frigid air between them. “Manageable.”

  “I can help, Uncle James.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she spied James’s one-sided dimple dent his cheek in an indulgent smile. Of course Javi would offer to help. Yet she wished sometimes that he didn’t feel like he needed to prove himself all the time. That he didn’t have to be extra good, go the extra mile to make up for all the events in his life that had taught him to believe he didn’t matter.

  Though he had the Cades now, who clearly thought the world of him, especially James. He spent every free moment he had with her son, teaching him how to ride a horse, instructing him on ranch work, the kind of cowboy skills she’d once dreamed of Javi learning back when she and Jesse had still been together.

  “It’s a deal.” James advanced on the tree, his head cocked as he assessed.

  “How will we carry it?” Sofia wondered out loud as she watched Javi flop backward and begin scissoring his arms and legs to create a snow angel.

  “I brought a tarp.” James angled his chin to his shoulder, indicating the bulging backpack he carried.

  “A tarp that carries trees?” she couldn’t help but tease. For a moment, the tension between them eased.

  His dark eyes danced a little. “It’s not a magic carpet.”

  Javi leaped to his feet, spread his arms wide and began zooming around the small clearing. He belted a lyric she recognized from Aladdin, one of the animated movies she’d taken him to see at their public library in Albuquerque. “Come on, Mama! Uncle James!”

  His trill sent the cardinals winging back into deep woods, and her stiff cheeks creaked into a smile. Oh. Why not? This was Javi’s first real Christmas and she’d make the most of it. Who knew what their situation would be like next year?

  She raced after her child, arms flung wide open, singing the next line in a shaky soprano. To her surprise, James tramped up, swung Javi up off his feet and held him aloft, airplane style. The two turned in a dizzying circle that got faster and faster until James took one step too far to the left, overcorrected to his right and stumbled into Sofia.

  They all went down in the icy powder, shrieking with laughter. Javi raced away screeching, and somehow James’s face ended up just inches from hers. Their merriment subsided, then transformed into something more serious as some unidentifiable emotion crackled between them. Her heart thundered.

  “Stop making googly eyes.” Javi pounded on James’s shoulder, breaking them out of their brief trance. “Google eyes. Google eyes!”

  “Javi, stop.” Instead of listening to her, he raced away, screeching.

  Sofia pushed to her knees. Her arm, however, sank elbow-deep into a depression. When she looked up, James loomed over her, hand extended. A thrill shot up her arm when their fingers touched, an electric shock that traveled through the wool of her mittens. Her cheeks grew warm when his steady tug brought her back on her feet and suddenly toe to toe with him, their faces so close the tips of their noses brushed. She felt his breath on her eyelashes.

  “Sorry,” she said, breathless. She might have stumbled if his arm hadn’t snaked out and caught her, firm, around the waist.

  “I’m not,” he murmured, his lips almost a breath away from hers. He touched her cheek and his dark eyes burned with a tender passion she’d never seen before. Something unfurled inside the scraped interior of her heart.

  “Googly eyes! Googly eyes!” Javi returned, chanting and laughing.

  Google eyes, indeed, she thought, breaking away from the man who’d just made the world drop out from under her. Lord. Had he almost kissed her?

  “What do we do now?” Javi asked, his words accompanied by a plume of white air. Over his shoulder, Sofia watched a cluster of leafless young birches bend, whiplike, in a gust off the summit.

  “Well. There is a proper way to do this,” James intoned.

  Sofia tried and failed to stop her eye roll. Please. Could they not, just once, do something spontaneous? Where was the Aladdin singer from a moment ago? The tender man who’d melted her? He was complex and full of contradictions... If they made a live-action film of Shrek, prickly, stubborn, secretly softhearted James would be perfect for the lead. Her mouth hitched up on one side.

  Javi stopped running and planted himself in front of James. The kid practically looked ready to salute.

  “We’ve got to sing ‘Tannenbaum’ first,” James said and her mouth dropped open.

  “That’s my rule,” she confessed.

  “You have rules?” He arched a brow, a wry twist to his lips. “Looks like we’re more alike than I thought.”

  “Looks like,” she murmured. Seeing James so relaxed and cheerful attracted her to him in ways she could never have imagined when they’d first met. And after that almost kiss...

  “What’s a tannenbaum?” Javi’s brown eyes, a slightly darker shade than James’s, sparkled and popped.

  “Another word for Christmas tree,” James answered. “You’ve never sung that Christmas carol?”

  Javi scrunched his face at her. “Did I, Mama?”

  “Sort of. Remember?” She hummed the tune to “O Christmas Tree.”

  James’s eyes met hers over Javi’s head and something about the warm, appreciative way that he studied her made her knees dip.

  “Uh-uh.” Javi buried his face in the tree. “This smells good.”

  “When your daddy was little, your age...” James began.

  “I’m not little,” Javi protested, emerging.

  James nodded, eyes serious, mouth twitching. “No. But your daddy was. Anyway, our father used to have all of us hold hands, make a circle around the tree, then sing.”

  “Grandma, too?”

  “Yes. And your grandfather. He couldn’t sing a
lick, but he sang that song with us every year. He even sang some of it in German like his father taught him.”

  The sad expression on his face moved her. He’d never talked about his father, but it looked like he’d had a good relationship. One that he missed.

  Did she miss her father?

  In moments like this, she had to admit that she did just a bit.

  “Mama doesn’t have a daddy,” Javi offered.

  “It’s hard not having a dad. I don’t have mine anymore.”

  “Me, neither.” Javi wrapped his arms around James’s leg and stared up at him, a worshipful, enraptured look on his face that made her heart strain in her chest. Oh, how she wished she could have given him a father...

  “We should make a club! The No Daddy Club.”

  Sofia adjusted Javi’s slipping knit cap. “That sounds a little sad, Javi.”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” James said. “We can do things to honor our fathers so they always stay with us.” He tapped his chest. “Right here.”

  Javi pressed his hand to his heart, looking concerned. “He can’t fit. Is he heavy?”

  “No, honey. Daddy went up. Remember? He’s light now. Like a cloud.”

  Javi squinted up at the streaks of white overhead. “So daddies can fly?”

  “Absolutely,” James affirmed. His definiteness got her thinking about the mother who’d passed before she could know her. What would her mother think of her life’s choices?

  She hoped, when it came to Javi at least, that she’d approve.

  “This one’s for Daddy.” Javi yanked James’s hand and nearly pulled him off his feet. James just had time to grab her hand and the three of them galloped around the tree, a human chain, then skidded to a stop, breathlessly laughing.

  “Uncle James, hit it!”

  “O Tannenbaum.” The deep clarity of James’s bass singing voice, melodic and actually quite beautiful, filled the open-aired space.

  “O Christmas tree,” she joined in, crooning through smiling lips. Hand in hand, they sang the carol.

  “O Christmas tree, you bring me lots of presents,” Javi belted with his trademark lyric substituting.