A Cowboy's Christmas Promise

by Maggie McGinnis

—

  “I can’t believe we’re having s’mores for lunch!” Gracie grinned as she held her marshmallow stick out to Daniel. He loved that all he could see in her face was happiness. After assuring Cole that he could handle three females on his own, they’d set out from the stable, riding at a leisurely pace on a trail that skated one of the ridgelines that surrounded Whisper Creek.

  Hayley and Twinkle had taken the lead, with the girls close behind and Daniel in the rear. As if he’d ordered up a perfect day to help lure Hayley out to Montana, the sky was the bluest of blues, the snow sparkled and crunched beneath the horses’ hooves, and the sun was warm enough that Gracie and Bryn never once complained that they were cold.

  Hayley pushed Bryn’s marshmallow onto a stick and turned her toward the fire Daniel had built at the edge of a meadow about a mile away from the main lodge. “In my defense, I also packed fruit.”

  Daniel shook his head and smiled as he watched his girls in their new rubber boots, holding sticks over a fire in the middle of a January day. Gracie’s eyes went wide as she picked up her flaming marshmallow. “I think mine’s done!”

  Hayley laughed. “I would say so.” She helped her put a s’more together, then sat back, relaxed. “You know, I thought Montana was just about the most beautiful place on Earth in the summertime, but I never expected winter to be this gorgeous. I can’t get over how…white the snow is.”

  Daniel cocked his head. “It’s not white in Boston?”

  “Well, yes, but only for about ten minutes, and then something either steps on it, rolls dirt over it, or pees on it.”

  He laughed. “You make it sound so quaint.”

  “I just can’t believe how far you can see out here, and how few humans you can see out here.”

  “And those are both good things?”

  She looked at him and winked. “Those are both excellent things.” She helped Bryn put crackers and chocolate around her marshmallow. “And side benefit, in winter, the bears are sleeping.”

  “Told ya you’d like it out here at Christmastime.”

  Daniel watched as Hayley helped the girls put marshmallows on their sticks and got more crackers ready. The horses snuffled in the snow nearby, looking for long-hidden blades of grass, the sun was sending long rays of slanting warmth through the trees, and he was here with his two girls and a woman who was maybe, just maybe, falling in love with Montana.

  Whether she might ever fall in love with him, though, was a long long shot question.

  Bryn popped up from Hayley’s lap. “Can we go make snow angels?”

  “Good idea!” Hayley looked at Daniel as she got up. “Coming?”

  “I’ll watch, thanks.”

  Hayley eyed him, challenge in her expression. “I’m hardly dressed for making snow angels, either. Come on, doc.”

  Gracie laughed. “You don’t have to be dressed for it, silly. Just lie down and flap your arms and legs!”

  Daniel shook his head. “I’m good. I’ll watch the horses.”

  As the girls each took one of Hayley’s hands, she looked back at him. “You may regret that decision. Just sayin’.”

  The girls dragged her out into the meadow, and as the three of them lay down in the snow, Daniel smiled and shook his head. He watched them make a circle of lopsided angels, and listening to the three of them giggle, he realized there were things Hayley did, seemingly without thinking, that endeared her to Gracie and Bryn like no one else—since Katie.

  He watched her, covered in snow and probably wishing she’d packed something waterproof, as she goofed around with the girls, and it struck him that her actions were completely, utterly genuine. Sure, they’d all be wet and cold and high on sugar an hour from now, but this would be a day his daughters would remember for a long time.

  As he bent to start packing up their supplies, he suddenly realized the laughing had stopped, and he looked up to see whether something was wrong. As he did, a giant snowball smacked him in the forehead.

  Through the ice crystals dripping down his eyelashes, he could see Hayley’s wide eyes, her mittens covering her mouth.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, but couldn’t stop smiling. “I have miserable aim!”

  “That looked like pretty good aim to me, Scampini.” He took a playfully menacing step toward her.

  “Seriously! I was going for your feet!” She backed up.

  “Right.” He took two more steps forward, matched evenly by her backward progress. He held her eyes, but then hers suddenly shifted and she blurted out a laugh as two snowballs hit him from behind.

  “Gotcha, Daddy!” Bryn called, then lobbed another snowball his way, catching him on the chest as he turned around. “We’re a team! Girls against boys!”

  Gracie zinged one toward his shoulder and it landed squarely on target. “Score!”

  Daniel reached down to scoop up some snow, then turned back toward where Hayley had been backing up, only to find her just three feet away now, a huge smile on her face. How had she stepped that close without him hearing?

  “Relax, doc.” She grinned innocently. “I’m completely unarmed.”

  “Daddy, look!” Bryn called. Daniel glanced toward her for a millisecond, but it was enough, and before he could even take a breath, Hayley took a giant step closer and popped her hand under his own snowball, making it fly directly into his face.

  Gracie and Bryn dissolved in giggles as Hayley laughed and stepped backward quickly, but then she tripped and fell into the snow. “Help, girls! I’m down! Get him!”

  Daniel reached down for more snow, sending snowballs at both girls’ legs as they approached Hayley. They squealed and ran the other way, ducking behind a bush to make more snowballs. He stepped closer to Hayley and put out a hand to help her up.

  “Really?” Her eyes were suspicious. “You’re going to help me after I just whitewashed you?”

  “You call that a whitewash?”

  “Totally.”

  “Maybe in Boston. In Montana, this is a whitewash.” He bent and scooped snow fast and furiously toward her face, making her screech with laughter as she batted it away.

  “You are going to regret this!” She shouted through the hail of snow, throwing as much back as she could.

  “Really? What are you going to do?” He stopped, hands full of snow, daring her to answer.

  “I”—she coughed—“I don’t know yet. But you’re going to be sorry.”

  And before he could register her eyes shifting from left to right, his face was once again full of snow, and Gracie and Bryn leaped past him to help Hayley up, even though they were giggling so hard they could barely stay on their own feet.

  “Score!” the three of them shouted as they ran into the meadow together, leaving him cold, wet, and laughing harder than he had in a long, long time.

  After another hour of running around the field lobbing snowballs at each other, all four of them were thoroughly tired and shivery. The sun had started its quick descent when Daniel finally, reluctantly looked at his watch. Dammit. Evelyn was at the house right now making dinner for them, and they needed to get back to the stable and get the horses put away if they were going to make it in time.

  “You need to get back?” Hayley came up beside him as he started putting their stuff into the saddlebags. The girls were making more snow angels out in the meadow, and the trees were casting long shadows, giving the sunlight a golden glow.

  “We’re scheduled for dinner with Evelyn.” He made a face.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Me, too. This has been a really fun afternoon. The girls will be talking about it for weeks.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” She helped gather the last of the food. Did he detect a note of sadness in her voice?

  “I’d invite you to join us—”

  “No-o. Oh, no. Definitely no.”

  “Did you want to think about that?” He chuckled at her adamant tone.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve already done you enough da
mage in the Evelyn department.”

  “True.”

  She whacked him playfully on the arm. “And there’s where you should say something comforting, not agree with me. So…is she scheduled to go back to Denver at some point?”

  “New Year’s Day.”

  “Ugh. She’s not coming to Kyla’s New Year’s Eve party, is she?”

  He sighed. “I don’t think she’d dare at this point. Honestly, I wish I could conjure up a blizzard that would send her home early.”

  “Could we work on that? Know anyone in weather?”

  He laughed. “I wish.” He looked at the serene blue sky. “But believe it or not, they’re watching a possible storm for tomorrow. Could get interesting.”

  “Can they pause it for a day or two so you have time to get her on a plane first?”

  “Again, I wish.” He looked at his watch again, then turned toward the meadow and signaled the girls with a long whistle. He looked back at Hayley to find her smiling and looking at his lips.

  “I still want you to teach me how to whistle, you know. Reading it in a book just isn’t the same.”

  Gazing at her lush lips, teaching her to whistle was the last thing on his mind. Pulling her down into the snow and kissing her, however, was front and center. He cleared his throat, ripping his eyes from her mouth.

  “I will totally teach you how to whistle, but I have to admit looking at your lips right now, whistling is the furthest thing from my mind.” He laughed as her cheeks flushed a dark pink. “You’re blushing, Scampini.”

  “Ha. Scampinis do not blush.”

  “Y’know, for such an Italian, you look awfully Irish.”

  Her patented invisible shades suddenly clouded her eyes. “Well…I might be. That’s something I’ll never know.”

  Before he could answer, she was moving toward the girls, gathering them up to hoist them onto the horses. She motioned him to take the lead this time, and she waited for the girls to get started before she nudged Twinkle. Once they were moving down the trail, he looked back, but her face was thoughtful, unreadable.

  He knew her mom had died, but he realized he’d never heard her speak of her father, and as he looked back once more, he wondered if she even knew who he was. Good God. Combined with a stepfather who’d shot off at dawn with her sisters in the backseat, it was no wonder the woman had commitment issues.

  Was there a man in her life who’d ever stuck around?

  —

  Two hours later, after a dinner of dishes too fancy for the girls to stomach, Daniel sent them upstairs to play while he gathered plates and brought them into the kitchen. Dinner had started out fine, but after twenty minutes of hearing the girls gush about how much fun they’d had with Hayley all day, Evelyn had started to look like she wished she’d stayed at the hotel.

  As he set dishes on the counter, Evelyn was at the sink, staring out the window. She turned to him, and he could see that her eyes were watery. “Who is this Hayley person?”

  “She’s a friend, Evelyn.”

  “Is she the one who was here the other night? Because that looked a little more…friendly than someone who’s just a friend. And I have to tell you, this house is still filled with pictures of Katie, and yet you’re…entertaining another woman here after your children are asleep. I can’t imagine what she would think. It’s disrespectful to her memory.”

  “She’s not here, Evelyn.” His voice was heavy. “She hasn’t been here for two long years now.”

  “Well, what about the girls? What message is this sending them? That their mother is replaceable?”

  He looked at her, formulating an answer. She was trying so, so hard to draw him out, make him defensive, make him angry—and she was so damn good at it.

  “I would never do anything to disrespect Katie. I loved her more than life itself. You know that.”

  “I’m not sure how to believe you, after what I saw the other night.”

  Daniel looked up at the ceiling as it vibrated above them, the girls having put on their latest favorite Disney soundtrack. They started singing at the top of their lungs, and he drew a relieved breath that this time they couldn’t hear anything from downstairs.

  “Evelyn, I really don’t want to discuss it with you.”

  She huffed visibly, staring out the window again. Then she seemed to grow steel in her spine and frost in her voice as she dried her hands. “I was going to wait until later in the week for this, but it appears that there’s no good reason to delay. I have some papers for you to look over.”

  She stepped toward the table and pulled a manila envelope from her gigantic purse. “My attorneys have drafted a custody proposal. I know we don’t necessarily agree yet on where the girls should live, but I’ve tried to be generous, as you’ll see. The one thing I imagine we do agree on is that we don’t want this to go to court.”

  She took a breath, pausing like she was planning her next statement for maximum impact. “Katie wanted the girls to grow up in Denver. She wanted them to attend her school, play in her neighborhood, go to her church. She wanted them to have me and Patrick in their lives, Daniel. I’m just trying to honor her wishes. We’re willing to pay for Southwick, and to have them with us. I don’t think we can be any more generous than that. I’m sure you can see that.”

  Her voice wavered. “I don’t want this to go to court, either. It would be a terrible testament to our inability to come to an agreement here. Let’s just keep this between us, and it doesn’t have to get contentious. I’d hate for the girls to be called to the stand.”

  Daniel stared at the envelope in her hand, taking a small measure of enjoyment out of the fact that it shook a little bit as he crossed his arms and refused to take it from her.

  “Katie would have wanted her children to be raised by their father, Evelyn.”

  “Not like this.” She waved her hands around the messy room.

  “Yes, like this. Whether we are here, or in Anchorage, or Timbuktu, Katie would have wanted Gracie and Bryn to be with me.”

  “But you’re never here, Daniel. You’re constantly getting called out, so they’re shuttling between your mother and God knows who else all the time. How can you say that’s best for them?” She shook her head. “I am just trying to help you here. Can’t you see that?”

  Daniel was silent for a long moment, seething, trying to control his temper. “I am busy, but I am by no means never here. They spend one night a week at their grandmother’s house, and other than that, when they’re not at school, they’re with me. If I have an emergency and can’t take them with me, Kyla and Decker love having them at Whisper Creek.”

  “They spend half their lives in barns.”

  “Yes, Evelyn, sometimes in barns. They love barns. They love animals. They love coming with me to care for the animals.”

  As he spoke, he had the sneaking suspicion that anything he said right now was being catalogued, only to come back to haunt him later. He stared at her icy eyes until she finally broke his gaze, and then he reached out for the envelope.

  “Let me see that.” He took the envelope and stalked into his office, where he dropped it into his industrial shredder without ever opening it.

  “What—what are you doing?” Evelyn appeared in the doorway. “You didn’t even look at our proposal.”

  The pages made a satisfying sound as they crumpled into nothingness inside the shredder, but the sight of Evelyn’s face was even more satisfying as her mouth gaped open.

  “I don’t need to. I am not entering into any custody agreement with you, Evelyn, especially one hand-engineered by your team of high-priced attorneys, outside the confines of the court system.”

  “Fine. I was trying to be civil and keep this between us, but I can see that I’ll just need to have my firm deal directly with your attorney. I didn’t want this to go to court, but you’re forcing the issue.”

  “This will never go to court.” He spoke slowly, corralling his anger. “And if you’re crazy enough to keep
pursuing this, my children will never go to court. I won’t let it happen.”

  She raised her eyebrows haughtily. “You won’t have a choice.”

  Daniel picked up her jacket and opened the door, motioning her out. “There’s where you’re wrong, Evelyn. I have a lot of choices. And one of them is to ask you to leave right now.”

  “You’re making a big mistake, you know. If you refuse to deal civilly with me and Patrick, it’s going to be your fault if we have to escalate this to the next level.”

  “Wrong. I didn’t start this fight. You had as much access to Bryn and Gracie as you wanted, but that ends now.”

  For the first time in his memory, Evelyn actually looked scared.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that until you come to your senses and end this ridiculous custody suit, you are no longer welcome in my home.”

  “But…you don’t mean this. You’re just upset. I have plans with the girls tomorrow!”

  He shook his head firmly, mouth pressed into a tight line.

  “You don’t anymore.”

  Chapter 29

  “Are you busy?” Daniel’s rushed voice came over Hayley’s phone the next morning, sending warm zings through her midsection.

  “I was channeling my inner Cinderella. First I mopped, then I dusted—and then I mopped again, because I guess the dusting part is supposed to come first.”

  “You really aren’t domestic at all, are you?”

  “Proudly, no. I leave a check on the table every Tuesday morning, and when I get home, the cleaning fairies have come through, leaving the scent of spearmint in their wake.”

  “Aha. And then you pick up takeout for dinner.”

  “Exactly.” She settled on one of the great room couches in the lodge, tucking her feet under her. Snow was starting to fall outside the French doors but Decker had lit a fire, and the room was warm and cozy as she tucked her phone to her ear. “So, what’s up?”

  “Any chance you’re free today?”

  “I can be. Why?” Her stomach jumped as she thought about the possibility of spending the afternoon with him doing—whatever the afternoon might hold.

  “I really hate to ask you this, but is there any chance you’d want to hang with the girls for a couple of hours? I just got an emergency call. Something spooked a herd, and they headed into an area they shouldn’t have. Apparently they’re all banged-up and freaked out, and I need to go help get them stitched up and settled.”