Page 2 of The Cowboy's Christmas
He ruffled the hair on her neck in a quick affectionate movement, then got into the driver’s seat and lifted a hand to his brothers after starting the truck. They returned the gesture before turning together and heading in the opposite direction down the sidewalk toward their own vehicles.
Quinn released a breath that came out longer and harder than expected.
This meeting had been a helluva lot more difficult than he’d anticipated. So, the big question, now that they’d parted ways, was did he really want to do it again any time soon?
Because the same nagging thought kept chasing after him. What did he know about being part of a family?
*
Savannah Dunn foldeda small unicorn emblazoned T-shirt and set it on the top of her overfilled laundry basket, one corner of her mouth lifting as the unicorn’s googly eyes bounced into a cross-eyed expression. Two months into being temporary guardian of her four-year old twin nieces and she was still marveling at how cute kid clothes were. And how easily stained. She lifted the shirt for a closer inspection. Yes, the adventure with the blue Kool-Aid was going to live on. Such was life.
Since Sophie and Jessa had come to live with her two months ago while her sister and brother-in-law were deployed overseas, she’d had a crash course in cute, as well as several sessions of convincing herself that no means no even if bottom lips were quivering. Four-year-olds could be brutal negotiators. She’d also spent an inordinate amount of time perusing kid sites on the internet, making lists as she debated about how much stuff was enough and how much was too much as the holiday season approached. It seemed that every time she opened a shopping site, she saw something else that the girls would enjoy, and even though her sister, Sara, had told her not to go overboard, she was tempted—shopping-wise, anyway. Nothing was going to make up for the girls being away from their parents during the holidays, but she was going to see to it that they had a lot of good things to remember.
Shewas going to try to have good things to remember. It was time.
She wouldn’t be able to throw herself into Christmas as she had before her husband, Matt, had died during the holidays two years ago, but she could start working her way back, and if it turned out to be too painful, she told herself that she didn’t have to do it again next year. This year was, of course, nonnegotiable, what with excited little girls and all, so her plan was to focus on Christmas morning magic and forego most of the traditional Christmas trappings.
The girls were too young to know about Christmas traditions, and they certainly didn’t know about the magic that was a Marietta Christmas, so Savannah would be able to keep things low-key. Surely the girls would be happy decorating the small artificial tree that had come with the ranch. They were small, the tree was small. It was all a matter of scale, right? What could be better than a little tree and lots of presents?
If this worked out, she’d invite Sara and Rand, who would be out of the military by then, to stay on the ranch for the holidays. Perhaps by that time she’d be able to go to Marietta and take part in the Christmas activities, see the decorations Matt had helped put up when he’d worked on the city maintenance crew while she’d waitressed at the Main Street Diner. They’d had to work outside jobs to keep their ranch dreams alive, which was common for people starting out, as they had been.
Now the ranch was paid off, but Matt was gone. So was the dream. Savannah carried on, because she couldn’t imagine not, but it wasn’t the same.
Savannah swallowed against her tightening throat before hoisting the laundry basket in both hands and heading down the hall to her bedroom, stopping in her tracks after passing the open kitchen door, then reversing her steps.
“What are you doing?” she asked her uncle Deke who sat on the bench beneath the coat hooks, pulling on his insulated boots. The cattle were on high pasture for the next two weeks unless the coming storm dropped too much snow, which the forecast said it wouldn’t, and the horses had been fed. There was no reason for him to go outside unless the phone call that had come in a few minutes ago hadn’t been a neighbor as she’d thought.
Deke kept his attention on the insulated boot he’d been about to shove his foot into, a sure sign he was in one of his stubborn moods—or that he foresaw an argument and had already steeled himself against it. “Dooley called from the equipment place. I’m going to town.”
Her uncle was a big man, with a neat gray beard, short iron-colored hair and thick black eyebrows over his sharp eyes, which should have made him look ferocious. Maybe he did, to other people.
He dropped his foot to the floor with a dull thud, then stood and reached for his coat. He was already wearing his heavy wool vest and had a worn silk wild rag, once bright pink, but now a dusty rose, wrapped around his neck. Cowboys weren’t afraid of pink, he’d once told her, and he was living proof of that.
“Don’t.”
He shoved an arm into the heavy canvas coat. “We’re going to need the tractor to plow, and it’s no good to us without the ram.” The ram was the hydraulic mechanism that controlled the tractor’s frontend loader, which, yes, was essential for plowing if snow fell and drifts formed.
If.
“Go tomorrow.”
“There’s a chance that we’ll be snowed in by tomorrow,” he said, pulling his lined leather gloves out of his coat pocket.
Savannah’s stomach tightened despite her efforts to tamp down her anxiety. Some things had gotten better since Matt’s death, and some hadn’t. Watching people she loved, like her uncle, drive into a storm—as Matt had, never to return—hadn’t gotten better.
“And there’s a chance we won’t,” she said persuasively. “I’ve been watching the radar. The storm is shifting east. There’s supposed to be a lot of wind and not much snow.”
“And that’s better how?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her. Their driveway crossed several fields and tended to drift shut, thanks to the ferocious north winds that scoured the open country, using every fencepost and blade of grass as an excuse to drop snow.
“According to the forecast there won’t be much snow to drift,” she repeated. “It says less than an inch of accumulation.”
Deke pointed to the window, where snow was blowing sideways. “It’s Montana. No such thing as predictable weather.”
Hard to argue with that in either a geographic or meteorological sense. Unpredictable weather was the name of the game.
“Deke…” Her stomach was even tighter than before, to the point that she felt borderline nauseous, but she maintained an even tone. It wasn’t his fault that she had an overblown fear of people disappearing into storms. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“What if we have an emergency?” Deke lifted his chin toward the kitchen wall, where her nieces, his great-nieces, were napping in the bedroom on the other side. “What if we need to get out?”
