by Debra Holt
The Sheriff’s Christmas Angels
Debra Holt
The Sheriff’s Christmas Angels
Copyright © 2017 Debra Holt
Kindle Edition
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-947636-36-1
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Dedication
The Sheriff’s Christmas Angels is my first holiday romance. I wanted to revisit McKenna Springs for this heartwarming story. All the ingredients are here… two hearts searching for their counterpart, an adorable child wishing for a mother, a lost puppy in need of her forever family, and all believing in the power of love and wishes made to a Christmas angel.
I am dedicating this book to my family who taught me about the joys and the miracles of the Christmas season based in love and unending faith and hope. And especially to my grandmother, Sallie Mae Hannum, who taught me about the magic of wishes made to Christmas angels. I believed with a simple child-like faith then and to this day, there is an angel placed first on our Christmas tree before any other decorations. And quite a few wishes go along with her placement.
The story I wrote also highlights another belief that was instilled in me by my grandmother. That is the belief that people come into our lives often when we never expect them, but when we need them the most. We might not realize their purpose at the time, but they are often answers to our prayers and needs. Such is the case for the Drayton family in this book and for Emma, and even little Angel. All their lives intersecting by chance, but bringing such love and joy where most needed.
My Christmas wish for each of you this season is that you may find the peace and joy of the holiday and hold it in your heart all year long. And may you know the true treasure of Christmas angels in your own life.
Happy Holidays,
Debra
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
The Texas Lawmen Series
About the Author
Prologue
“Charlie needs a mother and you need a wife. It’s high time you realized that.”
Cole Drayton slammed the milk carton back on the shelf and shut the refrigerator door none too gently. He let out an exasperated grunt in reply while trying to temper the words that wanted to fly from his mouth. They were words that would probably get his mother headed after him with a bar of lye soap in her hand.
He took a couple sips of the coffee to let his thoughts simmer down. He wished he had just kept going past the turnoff to the house and gone on to the diner in town instead of coming into his kitchen a few minutes ago for another cup of coffee. That was when he had found his mother already seated at his breakfast nook… lying in wait for him. A deep breath drawn inward gave him patience to maintain an even tone with her.
“I had a wife. It didn’t work out all that well, if you recall. We keep having this conversation and the outcome is always the same. I realize you mean well, Mother. But this is my life… mine and my daughter’s and—”
“And you want to keep your head buried in the sand. Look around you, Cole. You work from sunup to sundown. You weren’t busy enough helping your dad run the cattle operation while he farmed our place, you had to step in and fill Riley’s shoes as acting sheriff of this county when he got hurt in that car wreck a few months back. Your child is either with a daycare worker or me. And I’m getting older by the day and can’t do all the things with a child that a younger woman can. Not to mention this house needs a thorough cleaning more than once in a blue moon. It might as well be a hotel with all the lack of personal touches and the—”
“Running a ranch and being a sheriff, interim or not, doesn’t leave a lot of time for interior decorating. This house suits us just fine the way it is. Are you telling me that you don’t want to keep Charlie any longer? I’ll find someone to come in and take care of her if you need a break.”
“And where will you find a reliable person to do that between here and Frost Creek? It’s easy to say the words, but the reality of doing it is another story and next to impossible. There’re mighty slim pickins’ between the farmers and ranchers’ wives and the old maids. Most able-bodied, younger women are career-minded and drive into Austin or San Antonio to work or have gone off to college.”
“Exactly true with finding a wife… even if I ever wanted one of those again. Which I do not. Or do you have one of those old maids you mentioned in mind for the job?”
“It would be a heck of a job, too… putting up with the likes of your hardheadedness. She’d need the patience of Job and the hide of an Arkansas mule.” Mae Drayton’s voice softened as she gazed at the tall man leaning against the cabinet across from her. “Son, you’re working yourself too hard trying to escape something that isn’t there any longer. Pamela’s leaving you like she did shouldn’t color how you see all other women. Charlie needs a woman’s touch here and especially as she grows older. I’m not saying put an ad in the newspaper, but just open your mind to thinking about it and become more amenable. In the meantime, I’ll keep my eyes open for someone, too, who could come in here and help with Charlie and the house. And if I find someone, promise me that you’ll keep an open mind and give it a good try. Promise?”
That brought a pair of gray eyes straight to hers along with the scowl lines in his forehead. “No, Mother. You keep your eyes to yourself and do not go looking for more trouble for me. It’s time you left to pick up Charlie, and time I got back to work.”
He set the coffee cup into the sink and straightened, grabbing his hat off the back of the chair. Sliding it on his head, he moved to the backdoor, and then paused.
He gave her one more level look. “If you want to really help me out, find a good computer-literate person to get that mound of paperwork off my desk. The cattle accounts are behind going in the books by a couple of months or more since I don’t have the time or patience to deal with it all when I do get home. That’s something you can do with my blessing. As for the other… I mean it, Mother. Leave my personal life alone. I’m doing just fine on my own.” The closing of the door behind him put a period at the end of the discussion.
She rose and moved to the window to watch her son’s retreating back as he crossed to his white SUV with the markings of Chisos
County Sheriff on its side. Just like his father. Cole was in a “mood” and needed some space. She knew him well enough to know he would head down the flat highway, let the window down, and turn up the radio that only ever played old rock ’n roll songs from the fifties. That had been his grandfather’s doing in teaching him to listen to the oldies stations from the time he could walk good enough to go off with him in the older man’s red and black truck… the same one he had restored and sat in the garage now. Her son needed some shaking up from the normal routine… heck, he needed just some shaking period!
Her mind was already working on a plan. She wasn’t certain what the plan would look like, but she had to do something. Her heart ached for Cole and little Charlie. The house was too quiet and too empty… even when they were both in it. Her son was moving through life but not living it. She had to do something and time was not going to slow down. She had to believe that somehow, someway an answer to her prayers would be sent. She just had to keep believing there was a miracle out there somewhere.
Chapter One
In the space of less than an hour, the sunshine had disappeared as the dark midnight blue of the first “blue norther” barreled down from Canada across the mid-section of the country. Temperatures dropped almost thirty degrees in less than an hour over this portion of the edge of the hill country of Texas. The wind had whipped around and increased to a blustery forty miles per hour, with gusts adding another ten or so miles on to that number. Brown tumbleweeds raced and bounced over the fields and across the roadway ahead of her.
The wind threatened to push the battered green pickup off the blacktop. Emma Cramer increased her grip on the steering wheel, her hands already cramped. Now and then she released long enough to wipe a sweaty palm along her jeans’ leg. The heater worked sporadically but was useless for the most part. With very little funds left in her pocket, there would not be any repairs to be had anytime soon. She would just have to add an extra layer of clothing or two, at her next fuel stop. Being resourceful. That was what her mother had called it.
Growing up, if there were awards to be given out for the “most resourceful”… her family would win it hands down. At least that was how it felt to be in a household of too many debts and never enough money. If there was anything to be counted on, it was the fact that tomorrow could, and often would, be worse than the day before. She had grown up waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it invariably always had. Her eyes gravitated to the falling fuel gauge. She had to stop soon.
Reaching over, she turned the radio up a bit. There was too much darkness around her, in the graying skies and the thoughts in her head. She had hit on the oldies-but-goodies station a little while back and that had been a bright spot. While her mother had waited on tables, it was usually these oldies that the juke box played in the country truck stops, and Emma had found herself taking a liking to the upbeat music. That was one holdover from her childhood that hadn’t been a dismal memory. At the moment, they were playing a tune by the Beach Boys… something about a little deuce coupe. She tried to hum along with it to bring her mind to another place, but it didn’t last long. Not even the music could get her mood to lighten.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. She had been brought up with that southern platitude ingrained in her DNA. If that was the case, she was the strongest person to escape from Harlan County. At age eighteen, she had been handed her high school diploma, stepped off the stage, and then went to the cemetery the next day to bury her mother.
Grace Cramer had survived two husbands, one an alcoholic and the other a paroled abuser, had buried one child and raised another. She had worked every odd job she could find to keep a roof over their heads after she had left her second husband in the dead of night when Emma was nine. But all those years of hard life caught up with her when Emma had begun high school. By the time her senior year came along, her mother didn’t have any more strength left in her when colon cancer hit and moved quickly to take her.
At age eighteen, standing beside the cheap coffin that held her mother’s remains, she had vowed that somehow the future was going to be different… no matter what she had to do or how long it took. She would find the better life her mother always told her was just around the corner. All Emma had to do was believe. Well, ten years later, she had little else but her belief, and it was getting harder each day to hold on to it.
As the sky darkened ahead, so did Emma’s thoughts as they returned to memories of her life years ago. The trailer she and her mother lived in wasn’t theirs. The furniture was patched and wouldn’t even pay a junkman the gas it would take to pick it up for disposal. Emma had packed a few personal items into two cardboard boxes and gave the rest to neighbors in the trailer park or to the local Goodwill store. She put the silver chain with the small cross on it around her neck. That had been her mother’s only jewelry… an heirloom from her own grandmother and mother.
It and the old, worn photograph of the guardian angel, hovering over two small children while a storm raged outside her wide-spread wings, were the items her mother had made certain to hold on to during each move. Emma had often studied the angel in the photo as a child. She wondered if there were real angels and how did she find one? Silly musings of a child. The photo and necklace were the two items she carried with her now. The sum total of Emma’s life and her family fit in the back seat of the old truck. Then she had left the cemetery and Frost Creek in her rearview mirror. That was then… and this was now.
Here she was, on her way back… a sort of pilgrimage to her past as she moved toward a future she had fought hard to achieve. Besides the cross, the bible, and the newer, yet still used pickup she had purchased a couple years before, she had a piece of paper that proved she had graduated from the community college in Corpus Christi, with a degree in office management and computer systems. It had taken her longer than most students since she had to hold down two jobs, one in a church nursery school three days a week and one at the discount store’s graveyard shift, four evenings. Between making money for school and going to classes, there had been no time for anything else. And before she had saved enough money to get in the door of the school to begin with, she had worked three years as a beautician and a waitress.
After graduation, she had been placed in a job in the business office at the local hospital. It was a job and it paid. But there was still an empty restlessness inside her and so she had saved what she could to make the trip to Dallas to interview for two jobs that would finally pay enough for her to realize the benefit of having that degree. Her phone interviews for each had been successful and earned her the callbacks that set her out on the road toward the future she dreamed of having for so long. Maybe she was on the road to finding where she belonged and could actually put down solid roots for the first time in her life. It was both lonely and scary… to have come from nowhere and not be sure of where she was headed. That was okay with her. She knew what she had left behind so whatever lay ahead had to be better.
The flash of a red light from the dashboard brought her attention in a heartbeat. Are you serious? Her heart plummeted in her chest. “This can’t happen… not now.”
Simultaneously, her brain hopped from what she had left in her bank account to where she was in relation to her destination. Not for the first time, she derided herself for making the out-of-her-way detour to her old hometown. She should have stuck with the safest, straight shot major highway, instead of being on a two-lane back country road. She doubted she would even reach Frost Creek, much less Dallas. Her eyes began searching the distance ahead for some sign of a service station or hint of civilization.
Rolling plains and hills stretched to the horizon in all directions, here and there the alternating rows of idle farmland broke the scenery along with patches of treed land and taller grassland pastures. Emma fought down the growing sense of unease at her situation. Keep calm and think it through.
“Please let me find a gas station and not be stranded on the side of the road,�
�� she begged aloud in the silence of truck.
She had gotten used to having her own voice as her companion in most cases. It was moments such as this that she felt the sudden wish for someone tangible to reach out to for help… for some degree of comfort knowing one wasn’t totally alone. But there wasn’t anyone but herself in that truck. Not even the Elvis tune playing on the radio could turn things around. His soulful voice just made it worse. She punched the button and silence was a deafening roar.
At that moment, her gaze lit on a tall sign and as she neared, she saw it was attached to the roof of a small, older building that was a convenience store with two fuel pumps standing out front. She doubted there would be a garage or mechanic to be found there, but at least it was a starting point.
Emma pulled the truck in front of the first pump and shut off the engine, silently praying she would be able to start it again once she fueled up. She stepped out of the truck, immediately grabbing the front of her denim jacket and hastily buttoning it against the strong wind with its chilly bite. Making a mental note to retrieve her wool cap from the bag in the back of the truck to keep her ears warmer, she hurried past the only other vehicle visible, a newer model SUV, parked next to the building.
A bell jangled over the door as she stepped through it. A gray-headed man, probably in his seventies, sat on a stool behind the counter to her right with a newspaper spread open on the counter in front of him. He looked up with a smile on his weathered face and nodded.
“Mighty windy out there… mind you don’t blow away. You’ll end up in New Mexico if you do.”
She gave a return smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Moving closer to the counter, she withdrew her wallet from her pocket, sliding a twenty over the counter. “I need some gas. And I need to know where I might find the closest garage or mechanic? I’ve got a warning light that came on about five miles back and need to get it checked.”