Page 1 of Christmas with the Cowboy
Chapter One
“Hey, Lex…” ReedKeller glanced at his fourteen-year-old daughter as he drove under the massive log arch marking the entrance to his family ranch—the ranch he’d left at the age of nineteen for the good of all involved. “You’re okay with this. Right?”
Lex sent him a look edged with teenage irony. “If I said no?”
“We’d talk.”
“Again?”
“Right.” They had talked this thing to death—he and Lex’s mom, Candice, and her husband, Gregg Lawrence.
They topped a small hill and the Keller property spread before them. Not the largest ranch in the area, but one of the most picturesque, nestled up against the foothills of the Absaroka Range.
“I’m good,” Lex said softly, a touch of awe in her voice. “I love this place.”
Reed’s throat tightened as he took in the familiar view. He loved this place, too, just as he loved his dad, but staying on the ranch hadn’t been an option until now. Too many fireworks between the two of them.
When he’d left, he’d assumed that one of his siblings would stay on to help run the place. Instead, all three had left the ranch for other careers, with their parents’ blessing, leaving the folks with only two hired hands and summer day help.
Daniel and Audrey Keller had told their kids more than once that they’d expected them to go their own ways—they’d raised them to be independent—but Reed always suspected that they’d secretly hoped that at least one of their children would return home. Well, one of them had, and it was not the one they’d been expecting. With the former ranch manager, Jim Myers, having retired in August, and the other long-time hand, Henry Still Smoking, about to do the same, somebody needed to come home. Circumstances decreed that he be the one.
“Pretty isolated here,” Reed pointed out.
Lex cocked an eyebrow at him; a trick he was pretty certain she’d practiced in the mirror. “It isn’t like I’m here forever, and I can talk to my friends. Plus, I have three weeks of online classes before Christmas break to help take the fun out of the day.” She smiled as the dots in the field ahead of them began to assume the shapes of horses. “Grandma said I can do all the horse stuff I want after I finish my schoolwork for the day.”
“The snow might slow you down.”
“What snow?”
Indeed, the fields were still yellowy green, and although there was a snowline, it was high in the mountains behind the ranch.
“It’s coming.” But he hoped it held off for a while so Lex could get some riding in. He didn’t want her to die of boredom between now and the end of February when he and her mom would decide whether she would return to school in Bozeman or continue distance learning on the ranch. It all depended on how well Gregg responded to the cancer treatments he was about to begin. Doing horse stuff would give his daughter something positive to focus on.
“I was hoping for a white Thanksgiving,” she said, her gaze fixed on the snow-free pastures they were driving past. “So that Gregg and I could ski before he had to leave.”
“Next year.”
She smiled at him, a hint of sadness touching the corners of her mouth, and he reached out to rub her shoulder. Thanksgiving was gone, and Christmas was coming up. Her first holiday without her mom and stepdad. A sucky way to spend Christmas, compounded by concerns about Gregg’s health, and it was up to him to make things as good as they could be.
“I’m okay,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “This is the way things are and, yeah.”
“And yeah,” Reed agreed.
She ran her fingers through her short dark hair. “But you know, ifyouneed to talk…”
Reed shot her a look, meeting her eyes before pulling his gaze back to the long, graveled drive. If he was so transparent that his kid was offering moral support, then he needed to suck it up.
Yes, he was anticipating friction between him and his dad, but that was a matter of habit. There’d always been friction, although logically, there shouldn’t be any now, because Reed was doing what his dad had always wanted him to do—slowing down, traveling the straight and narrow, focusing on a stable future instead of the next big adventure.
In other words, he was no longer acting like his dad had acted back in the day before marrying Reed’s mother, Audrey. And both he and his dad would be on good behavior with Lex living on the ranch. He’d finally figured out that most of their issues stemmed from conditioning. Just as a horse learned to respond automatically to certain signals, so had Reed and his dad. In other words, they automatically butted heads first, asked questions later.
“I’m good,” he said, because Lex seemed to be waiting for a response.
“Mom said that I shouldn’t worry if you and Grandpa yell at each other.”
“We’re not going to yell.” But it was probably a good thing that Candice had dropped the warning, just in case there was an explosion or two as he and his dad found their footing.
He and Candice had made a colossal mistake when they’d married fifteen years ago, months shy of Reed’s twentieth birthday, but in the years after their divorce and her remarriage, they’d developed a bond centered around Lex, the product of their short union, and in the process, they’d become friends.
