The Christmas Ranch (The Cowboys of Cold Creek)

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “You basically ordered me to,” he answered.

  She made a face before returning her features to that cool mask he couldn’t read. Was she happy to see them? He didn’t know. She seemed to have walled up some central part of herself since that earthshaking kiss the day before and the awkward way it had ended, with her sister’s interruption.

  “Hey, Joey.” She beamed down at his nephew with a much more genuine smile that made his chest suddenly ache.

  Yeah. They shouldn’t have come.

  “Hi, Hope. Uncle Rafe said we should bring you a hostess gift, so I made this.” He thrust the handprint turkey he had made that morning.

  “I love it! Thanks. That one is going on the fridge, for sure. Come in. You don’t have to stand out in the cold.”

  They walked into the house. He had caught delicious smells while standing on the porch, but once inside, Rafe was just about bowled over with sensory overload from multiple delicious things cooking. Potatoes and turkey and stuffing and pie, all mixed together in one luscious package.

  Through it all, he could still pick up Hope’s scent, though, that subtly exotic cinnamon and almond scent of her.

  “Where’s Barrett?” Joey asked as soon as he handed over his coat.

  “He and his sister are down the hall with a few of the neighbor kids, engaged in a vicious Mario Kart competition in the den. I believe there’s always room for one more. Third door on the right.”

  “Yay! Thanks!” He hurried away from them, leaving Rafe and Hope alone in the foyer.

  “You brought goodies,” she said, gesturing to the casserole dish he held.

  “Er. Yeah. I believe we’ve already firmly established I’m not much of a cook but I’ve been known to make a pretty good guac from one of my grandmother’s recipes. I brought chips, too.”

  “Wow. Thank you. Those will go fast. Everybody’s in the kitchen. Come on back.”

  He followed her toward those delectable scents and found the open kitchen and family room more crowded than he expected. To his relief, he wasn’t going to be the only male at the Star N family Thanksgiving. Two other men were in the room.

  An older woman, plump and comfortable, looked him up and down from her spot at the long kitchen table where it looked as if she was snapping beans. “So this is your navy SEAL.”

  “He’s not mine,” Hope said, her voice tight. “But yes. This is Rafe Santiago. Rafe, this is my aunt Mary and these are a few of our neighbors, Chase Brannon—who has a ranch just up the road—and Justin and Ashley Hartford. Yeah. That Justin Hartford.”

  He stared for just a moment at the familiar face of the man holding out his hand before he recovered enough to shake it. He didn’t get starstruck, but every single one of Hartford’s films was in his top ten list of favorite films. He knew the man had left Hollywood more than a decade earlier and disappeared from public view. Now he knew where he’d gone.

  “And you know my sisters already.”

  He nodded warily at the sisters, not sure of what his reception would be now that everyone in the family knew he had been involved in that ill-fated rescue.

  The youngest sister—the quiet one who wrote stories about reindeer and worked as a children’s librarian, he remembered—rose from the table and approached him. To his great surprise, she reached up and kissed him on the cheek.

  He was still reeling from that unexpected sweetness when she pounded him lightly on the chest. “You should have told us.”

  He squirmed. “Yeah. Hope has already given me the lecture.”

  “Told you what?” Ashley Hartford, blond and pretty, asked him.

  “It’s a very long story.” Faith stood at the stove stirring something he couldn’t see from here while the big, burly rancher handed her ingredients. “Let’s just say our family owes him a huge debt that all the Thanksgiving dinners in forever could never repay.”

  That was so far from the truth they weren’t in the same time zone, but this didn’t seem the time to argue about it.

  “So what brings you to Pine Gulch?” Justin asked. “Are you visiting or are you new in town?”

  “Another long story,” he said, trying not to think how weird it was to be making small talk with a man whose movies he had watched too many times to count. “Visiting, I guess you’d say. I’m only here until Christmas. I’ve got a...family situation in the area.”

  “Well, if you have to be stuck somewhere for a while, Pine Gulch isn’t a bad spot,” Hartford said with a smile.

  “True enough,” Rafe answered, surprised to realize he meant the words.

  When he first came to town, he had felt a little claustrophopic with the mountains looming big in every direction, as if he didn’t quite have enough room to breathe or a ready escape route in case of trouble, as ridiculous as that seemed. With each passing day, he was coming to appreciate the wild beauty of this corner of the country and the inherent kindness of the people.

  Now that he was apparently becoming a more familiar face around town, neighbors had started to wave to him when he drove past, parents in the car pool lane at school stopped to chat and one of the checkers at the grocery store had even special ordered a certain kind of protein drink for him, after he couldn’t find it the other day.

  He would be sorry to leave—something he never would have expected three weeks earlier when he rolled into town.

  “Can I do anything to help in here?” he asked.

  Faith shook her head. She still hadn’t smiled at him and he wondered if she would—not that he was narcissistic about it. The woman had just lost her husband. She had plenty of things on her plate that had nothing to do with his sudden reappearance in their lives.

  “I think everything is just about ready,” she said in answer to him. “In fact, now that the gravy is done, I think it’s safe to call in the kids.”

  The meal wasn’t the awkward experience he might have expected. The food was delicious and beyond plentiful and the company quite convivial. All the children—Faith’s and the Hartfords’s—were included at the main table. Joey seemed to fit right in and he only had to remind him once, in a subtle, private way, not to talk with his mouth full.

  The neighbors were obviously good friends—he got the impression Ashley Hartford was particularly close friends to Faith and Celeste and the big rancher Brannon seemed protective and solicitous of all the Nichols women.

  Listening to the conversation, it was obvious Hope and her sisters loved each other and their aunt and all of them doted on Faith’s children.

  After dinner, everyone helped clean up, even the kids. He had some vague expectation that he and Joey would take off as soon as the dishes were done, as he planned to make a visit to Cami at the jail before visiting hours ended, but his nephew jumped right back into playing video games with the other children in the den and he didn’t have the heart to drag him away yet.

  The adults moved into the family room, where Chase Brannon had turned on a football game.

  “Oh, look,” Celeste exclaimed, gazing out the window. “It’s starting to snow a little again.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed it stays that way,” Hope said darkly. “The little part, I mean.”

  “Don’t say that!” Justin said with a laugh. “After that dry autumn we had, we need all the precipitation we can find.”

  “You can have your precipitation, cowboy, as much as you want. The day after tomorrow,” Hope said.

  “A big storm on opening day is bad for business,” Faith explained to Rafe, still without smiling at him. “A few inches, like we had overnight, is just perfect but people don’t like to brave nasty weather just to watch some little twinkling lights come on.”

  “One year we had two feet of snow on Thanksgiving night,” Mary said.

  “Keep your fingers crossed we get a few picturesque i
nches and that’s all,” Hope said. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to run down to the barn.”

  “You promised you would take the afternoon off,” Faith said.

  “I know, but I left a mess down there. I was oiling and polishing the reindeer sleigh and checking all the bells and I’m afraid I let the time get away from me. I just need to put all the cleaning supplies away and hang all the harnesses back up. It will only take a minute.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Celeste asked.

  “It could, but I don’t want to risk one of the barn cats knocking anything over and making a bigger mess. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She rose and though he knew it was likely a mistake, Rafe rose, as well. She hadn’t given him more than that polite smile all afternoon and he wanted to get everything out in the open between them if possible. This might be his only chance to clear the air.

  “Need a hand?” he asked.

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t be silly,” her aunt Mary said. “With two people, the job will take half as long. Plus, he can make sure you don’t get distracted by a hundred other tasks you find to do once you walk out that door. I’ll tell you one thing, missy, we’re not waiting on you all night to break into those pies.”

  He could tell she still wanted to refuse his help and was clearly reluctant to have him come with her. The thought stung, though he knew he deserved it.

  After an awkward moment, she shrugged. “Sure. I can always use help with the heavy lifting.”

  In the foyer, she handed him his coat and he helped her into hers and they walked out into the crisp November night. A light snow was falling and even though he judged it was only about four-thirty in the afternoon, the cloud cover made it seem later and darker.

  “Thank you for a wonderful dinner,” he said, as they headed down the path toward the St. Nicholas Lodge. “I’m not sure Joey has ever enjoyed himself so much.”

  “I didn’t do much,” she admitted, “but I’ll be sure to pass along your thanks to Mary and Faith. You said Joey enjoyed himself. What about you?”

  “Everyone was...more kind than I expected.” Or deserved, he thought, but didn’t add. He also didn’t mention that by everyone, he meant present company excepted, since she wouldn’t even look at him.

  He didn’t like the distance between them but didn’t have the first idea how to bridge it. “What will you need my help with tomorrow?” he finally asked as they neared the reindeer barn. “Joey and I can be out first thing.”

  “I was going to talk to you about that, actually. I’m glad you brought it up.”

  “Oh?”

  “Joey has worked so hard this week. Throw in the work you did that you won’t let me pay you for and we are more than square for the broken window on my truck. I could have replaced it three or four times over for the in-kind work you have done.”

  This wasn’t about the window and it hadn’t been since almost the first day.

  “I’m just saying, you’ve done more than enough. You can stop now. You don’t have to come out tomorrow and Joey can consider his debt more than paid after all his hard work—not to mention yours.”

  “We’ll be here tomorrow,” he said firmly. “If you don’t need me after that, okay, I can accept that. But do you really think I’m willing to put all this work into something and not stick around to see the payoff?”

  She sighed. “Fine. Thank you. I do still have many things to do before dusk tomorrow and I’m sure we will encounter some crisis or other that will benefit from your carpentry or mechanical skills.”

  He didn’t feel like he had much of either one but he had learned quickly while he had been helping out this week—everything from repairing the motor on a couple of the little animatronic scenes in the Christmas village to figuring out the electrical load capabilities of the wiring inside the lodge and how many strings of Christmas lights it could safely support.

  As they neared the barn next to the reindeer enclosure, Hope lifted her face to the cold air, heedless of the snowflakes that landed on her cheeks and tangled in her eyelashes. His chest ached with some indefinable emotion as he watched her. Regret? Longing? He wasn’t sure.

  “This storm has me nervous,” she finally said, taking the last few steps to the barn. “The weather forecasters are saying we’re supposed to get several inches. It could be a disaster.”

  “Or it could put everybody into even more of a holiday mood. You never know.”

  She opened the door and flipped on a light switch. Most of the reindeer were outside, preferring the cold weather, he supposed, though they could come in and out of the barn through the open door on one side.

  The place smelled of leather, oil and hay—a combination he found more appealing than he might have expected.

  A small fancy red sleigh that looked like it could only hold two or three people was parked in one concrete stall.

  “Wow. I haven’t seen this before. That’s impressive.”

  “It’s been in the other barn closer to the house. We just brought it down this morning. Uncle Claude loved this. He babied it all year long. It’s kind of silly to go to all this work to polish it up, since we only use it a few times during the season for special events.”

  “Why?”

  “The reindeer aren’t that crazy about being hitched up together so we don’t do it very often—mostly for photo ops. We park it in front of the lodge some afternoons and hitch one or two of the reindeer to it. Kids love to have their picture taken in it since it looks like they’re driving Santa’s sleigh.”

  “I can see that.”

  They spent a few minutes picking up the cleaning supplies she had left out and storing them in a cabinet in what she called the tack room, then they hung up the leather harnesses adorned with bells that jangled as they hung them up.

  “Thanks,” she said. “See. I didn’t need your help. What did that take? All of five minutes?”

  He shrugged. “I would rather be here with you than inside talking to people I don’t really know.”

  Even if everyone inside the house had been lifelong friends, he would still rather be out here with her in the quiet peace of this barn, while snow fluttered down outside and the sun began its slide behind the mountains.

  “Are you going to the jail to see your sister today?”

  So much for quiet peace. He sighed at the uncomfortable topic. “Yeah. I figured we would stop by after we leave here. The jail is open for special visiting hours on Thanksgiving. I promised her I would bring Joey, even though I don’t think it’s an environment he needs to spend much time in, you know?”

  “I get that.”

  “This whole thing is such a mess. Frankly, I have no idea how Joey is coping.”

  “He seems to be doing okay. He’s a hard worker and he’s obviously a smart kid. He has been nothing but polite to me while he’s been working around here for me. Once the two of you get back to San Diego and settle into a routine, he’ll be fine. You’ll both get through this.”

  He still wasn’t convinced of that. The idea of returning to San Diego held much less appeal than it had a week ago, even though his buddy with the private security firm had called him twice this week, wondering if Rafe could start right after Christmas.

  “Thanks. I appreciate the vote of confidence. Every day I feel like I’m discovering another part of raising a kid that hits me completely unprepared.”

  “You’re doing fine, Rafe. Better than fine. Joey seems happy and healthy. He’s a very lucky boy to have you.”

  Her words seemed to seep into his heart and he wanted to keep them there. “Do you mind calling me about twenty times a day to remind me of that?” he joked. “That should just about be enough.”

  She smiled, the first genuine one she had given him all day. She looked so be
autiful there in the rustic old barn, with her wild, pretty hair and the delicate touches of makeup. He felt a little tug in his chest, remembering that earthshaking kiss of the day before.

  He knew he had no right to kiss her again but the emotions welling up in his chest basically made it impossible for him to do anything else.

  The moment his lips touched hers, everything inside him seemed to sigh with joy. He didn’t understand this emotional pull between them. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced, rich and fierce and real. Maybe it had something to do with the past they shared or maybe it was simply because of her, this amazing woman who had come to mean so much to him. He didn’t know. He only knew that kissing her was the best kind of magic and he never wanted to give it up.

  * * *

  On some deep level, Hope knew she should push him away. How could he kiss her again, as if nothing had changed between them, when everything was different now?

  This wasn’t, she amended. The sweetness and peace she found in his arms was somehow the same, despite everything else between them. How could that be? She wasn’t sure, she only knew she wanted to hold on to it as tightly as she could manage.

  She had a wild wish that they could stay right here, sheltered together in this warm barn while the snowflakes twirled outside and the wind began to moan a little in the rafters.

  Oh, how she wished everything could be different between them, that they had met each other at a different time, a different place and without all the ghosts of the past haunting them.

  “Hope,” he murmured against her mouth. Just her name, and her heart seemed to tumble in her chest.

  She was in love with him.

  The realization washed over her with stunning clarity.

  She loved Rafe Santiago. Rescuer, navy SEAL, reluctant guardian.

  Oh. What was she going to do? Not open herself up for more emotional devastation, that was certain.

  “Stop. Rafe. Stop. Please.”

  He groaned low in his throat and rested his forehead against hers.