The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle

Chapter Two

She was impossibly stuck.

Jenna revved the engine one more time and tried to rock her van out of the deep snowbank just outside the turnoff for the Wagon Wheel. Carson McRaven might call it Raven’s Nest now but to her this would always be the Wagon Wheel, named after three generations of Wheelers who had worked this corner of eastern Idaho in the western shadow of the Grand Tetons.

She glared at the clock on her dashboard and then at the snow still falling hard outside the van windows. Of all the miserable, rotten, lousy times to be stuck. She had a van full of food and an extremely short window of time in which to prepare it.

She thought she had everything so carefully orchestrated in order to have all the last-minute details ready for the party she was catering that evening. The moment the boys climbed onto the school bus, she had loaded Jolie into her van and driven to Idaho Falls, where the grocery selection was more extensive—and fresher—than anything she could find here in Pine Gulch.

She had budgeted a little over two hours, figuring that would give her time to drive there, shop and then drive home.

Naturally, it started snowing the minute she left Idaho Falls and hadn’t let up the entire forty-five-minute drive since then. At least four inches had fallen, laying a slick layer of white over everything.

As frustrating as she found the snow to drive in, it did set the perfect scene for Christmas. The evergreen trees on the mountainside looked as if they had been drizzled with Royal Icing and Cold Creek matched its name by burbling through patches of ice.

She only wished she had time to enjoy it all. Then again, if she had taken a few extra minutes to slow down and pay attention to her driving instead of her extensive to-do list, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. Instead, she had been driving just a hair too fast when she headed over the bridge just before the driveway split, one route going toward Carson McRaven’s new, huge log house and the other heading toward home.

Just as she made the turn, her van tires slid and she hadn’t been able to pull out of the skid in time before landing in the drift.

She knew better than this. That was the most aggravating thing about the whole situation. She had been driving these Idaho winter roads since she was fourteen years old. She knew the importance of picking a driving speed appropriate for conditions, knew that this section could be slick, knew she had to stay focused on the road—not on the baby field-green salad she still had to make or the tricky vodka blush sauce she still hadn’t perfected for the penne.

But she had just been in such a big darn hurry to make everything just right for this party. It was her biggest event yet, and the one she hoped would make her the go-to person for catering in this area.

None of which would happen if she didn’t manage to extricate herself from this blasted snowdrift.

She shoved the van into Reverse again. If she could just get a little traction, the front-wheel drive on her van might be able to do the job. But try as she might, shifting between Reverse and Drive to try rocking out of the snow, the wheels just spun, kicking up snow and mud and gravel behind her.

Blast it all. She wanted to cry at the delay but she just didn’t have the time.

She looked in the rearview mirror to the backseat, where Jolie was babbling quietly to herself in her car seat and playing with her favorite stuffed dog, bouncing him on her lap then twirling him in dizzying circles.

“Well, bug, it looks like we’re walking home. We’ll go get your daddy’s big, bad pickup truck with the four-wheel drive and come back for the food.”

No big deal, she assured herself. She only had to walk a quarter mile from here down the driveway to the house. If she hurried, she could make it in ten minutes and be back here in fifteen.

She pulled Jolie out of her car seat. Her daughter beamed at her. “Walk, Mommy?”

“Looks like.”

She settled her daughter on her hip, grateful she had at least had the foresight to wear her boots that morning, even though it hadn’t been snowing when she left home.

She had just crossed her slide tracks and started up her long driveway that followed the river when she heard a pickup truck coming down the hill from Raven’s Nest.

She only had time to whisper a prayer that it would be Neil or Melina Parker, McRaven’s ranch foreman and his wife who served as caretaker when Carson wasn’t there, before the pickup pulled up next to her.

Apparently nobody was listening to her prayers today. She sighed as Carson rolled down the passenger-side window.

“You look like you could use a hand.”

Her pulse did that stupid little jumpy thing at his deep voice and she could feel her face heat up. She could only hope he didn’t notice, probably too busy thinking what an idiot she was for driving into a snowbank like that.

“I was just planning to walk to my house for my pickup. I’ve got groceries in the back I need to take care of quickly.”

“Put your baby back in the van, where it’s warm and out of the snow. I should have a tow rope in the pickup truck somewhere. I’ll have you out in a second.”

She wanted to balk at his commanding tone and tell him to go to Hades but for the first time in her life she understood the old saying about pride being a luxury she simply couldn’t afford right now.

She should just be grateful for his help, she reminded herself, even if she found it both humiliating and annoying to be obligated to him once more.

“I’m sorry to trouble you. That’s two days in a row now that you’ve had to come to our rescue.”

He made a kind of rueful grimace that plainly told her he wasn’t any more thrilled than she was about the situation, while he fished around behind the seat of the pickup and pulled out a thick braided red tow rope. “Here we go.”

Before she quite knew how it happened, he was crouched in the snow, attaching the tow to her rear bumper. McRaven probably had more money in loose change than she would see in any lifetime but he didn’t seem to have any qualms about dirtying his hands a little. It was an unexpected facet of a man who she was beginning to believe just may be more complicated than she might have guessed. He hitched the other end of the tow around his own pickup’s bumper, then came to her window again.

“Okay, now start it up and just steer out when you feel your van pull free of the snowbank. You should be on your way in a minute or two.”

She nodded and waited while he climbed back into the truck. Over her shoulder, she watched him engage the four-wheel drive of his truck. He appeared to barely ease forward but just that tiny extra bit of help was enough to accomplish what ten minutes of spinning her tires in the ice and snow hadn’t been able to do.

Another life lesson for her, maybe? she wondered ruefully. Accepting a little help in the short-term might be humiliating but could save much heartache and struggle.

She didn’t have time to wax philosophical this morning, not when her to-do list felt longer than her driveway and just as slickly treacherous.

“Thank you,” she said through her open window when Carson returned to her vehicle to unhook the tow rope.

“No problem. You’re going to want to take things slow until that access road gets plowed. I slid about four times coming down the hill from my place.”

“I know. I was just in too big of a hurry and wasn’t paying attention to how fast I was going. I’ll be sure to concentrate better now. Thanks again.”

He studied her for a moment, then she saw his blue eyes shift to Jolie in the backseat, who beamed at him and waved.

“Hi, mister,” she chirped, which was what she called every adult male of her acquaintance, from her Uncle Paul to the pastor at church to the bagger at the grocery store.

“Hi,” he said, his voice a little more gruff than usual, then he stepped back and waved her on.

With her wipers on high, Jenna slowly put the van in gear and inched through the swirling snow that seemed to have increased dramatically in just the few moments since Carson arrived. She was so busy paying attention to the road—and trying to keep from sliding into the icy Cold Creek that paralleled her driveway—that she didn’t notice the headlights behind her until she was nearly home.

What was Carson doing? She frowned as his pickup continued to tail her along the winding drive. Maybe something had fallen out of her van when she was stopped and he was returning it. Or maybe he decided she needed more of a lecture on her winter driving skills, or lack thereof.

She wouldn’t put it past him. The man seemed to want to give her plenty of advice on child rearing. Judging by past comments, he apparently put her abilities as a mother somewhere between incompetent and negligible and seemed to think she let her boys run wild and free through the countryside with no supervision.

And now he probably thought she was just as inept at driving. She pulled into her garage and stepped out of her driver’s seat to walk back outside, already squaring her shoulders for another confrontation.

“Is something wrong?” she asked coolly when he rolled down his window.

“I just wanted to make sure you made it home safely. I’ll send one of my guys over with the tractor to plow the driveway in case you need to get out soon.”

She blinked at him as hard, wind-whipped snowflakes stung her cheeks. Her first reaction was astonishment and a quick spurt of gratitude, both that he was concerned at her welfare enough to follow her home and that he would offer to help her plow her road.

One less chore to do, right? she thought. Especially since digging out the driveway wasn’t among her favorites.

At the same time, she didn’t want him to think she needed to be looked after like some kind of charity case.

“I have a tractor with a front plow,” she answered. “I can take care of it. I would have done it earlier but it wasn’t snowing when I left for Idaho Falls.”

She regretted her words the moment she uttered them. She didn’t owe Carson McRaven any explanations.”

“I’ll send someone,” he answered. “Stay warm.”

Before she could protest, he hit the button to automatically wind up his window, put his big pickup in gear and drove away.

She watched him go for a moment as the wind howled through the bare tops of the cottonwoods and lodgepole pine along the river. Her neighbor was nothing if not confounding. She couldn’t quite peg him into a neat compartment. On the one hand, he was arrogant and supercilious and seemed to think her family’s entire focus in life was to annoy him as much as humanly possible.

On the other, he had been kind to her boys the day before and he had certainly helped her just now when he really could have looked the other way.

She shivered as the wind cut through her parka and turned back to the garage. She had far more critical things to occupy her mind with right now than obsessing—again—about her new neighbor.

Jolie chattered away as Jenna carried her into the house. Only about one word in three was recognizable and none of them seemed to require a response, but her daughter never seemed to mind carrying on a conversation by herself.

She was a complete joy and far more easygoing than any of the boys had been. She didn’t complain when Jenna took her straight from her car seat to her high chair and set some dry cereal and a sippy cup of milk on the tray while she went out to cart the groceries inside from the van.

Just as she was carrying the last armload in, the phone rang. She thought about ignoring it, but with three boys in school, she couldn’t take the risk it might be one of their teachers or, heaven forbid, the school principal.

“Phone, Mama. Phone.”

“I know, honey. I’ll get it.”

She quickly set down the bags on the last clear counter space in the kitchen and lunged for the cordless handset before the answering machine could pick up.

“Sorry. Hello,” she said breathlessly.

“Hello, my dear.”

Jenna smiled at the instantly recognizable voice on the other end of the line. Viviana Cruz was one of her favorite people on earth. She and her second husband had a ranch a little farther up the creek and raised beautiful Murray Gray cattle.

“Viviana! How are you?”

“Bien, gracias. And you? How do you do? Busy, busy, I would guess.”

“You would be right, as usual, Viv. I’m running a little late, but I promise, all will be ready in time.”

“I do not doubt this. Not for un momentito. The food will be delicious, I have no worries.”

At least one of them was confident, Jenna thought as nerves fluttered in her stomach. This job was important to her, not only professionally but personally. Viviana had taken a big risk hiring her to cater the holiday event she was hosting for the local cattle growers’ association, of which she served as president. This was the biggest job Jenna had undertaken since she started her catering business six months earlier. Before this, she had mostly done small parties, but this involved ranchers and business owners from this entire region of southeastern Idaho.

Viv had told her there would be people coming from the Jackson Hole area, as well. She planned to have her business cards out where everyone could see and made a mental note to also stick the magnetic banner on her van that read Cold Creek Cuisine.

“Thanks, Viv. I hope so.”

“I was checking to see if you are needing any help.”

Unfortunately, the answer to that was an unequivocal yes but she couldn’t admit defeat yet. She could do this. She had planned everything carefully and much of the food was already prepped. Her sister-in-law and niece were coming over in a couple of hours to help her with last-minute things, so she should be all right.

“I think I’ll be okay. Thanks for offering, though.”

“You are bringing your children tonight, yes?”

Oh, heavens, what a nightmare that would be. “No. Not this time, Viv. My niece, Erin, is coming out to the house to tend to them while Terri helps me serve your guests.”

“I so love those little darlings of yours.”

She smiled as she put away the groceries, the handset tucked into her shoulder. Viv was one of the most genuine people Jenna knew. She was enormously blessed to have such wonderful neighbors. After the tractor accident that critically injured Joe, all the neighbors along the Cold Creek had rallied around her. Viv’s husband Guillermo and the Daltons, who owned the biggest spread in the area, had all rushed to help her out.

While she had been numbly running between the ranch and the trauma center in Idaho Falls for those awful weeks Joe was in a coma, they had stepped in to care for her children, to bring in the fall alfalfa crop, to round up the Wagon Wheel cattle from the summer range.

She could never repay any of them.

“They adore you, too,” she said now to Viv. “But I think your party will go a little more smoothly without my boys there to get into trouble.”

“If you change your mind, you bring them. Christmas is for the children, no?”

Those words continued to echo in her mind as she said goodbye to Viviana a few moments later and hung up, then turned her attention to Jolie who was yawning in her high chair ready for her nap.

Her children certainly hadn’t enjoyed the best of Christmases the past two years, but she refused to let them down this year. After tonight, she intended to relax and spend every moment of the holidays enjoying her time with them.

Perfect. It all had to be perfect. Was that such an unreasonable wish?

Her children deserved it. They had suffered so much pain and loss. Their last happy Christmas seemed like forever ago.

Joe had died the day after Christmas two years earlier, and they had known it was coming days earlier. No death of a man in his early thirties could be easy for his family to endure, but her husband’s had been particularly tough. He had lingered in a coma for two months after the tractor accident, fighting off complication after complication.

Finally, just when she thought perhaps they had turned a corner and he was starting to improve, when she was certain his eyelids were fluttering in response to a squeeze of her hands or a particular tone of her voice, a virulent infection devastated his system. His battered body just couldn’t fight anymore.

The next Christmas would have been hard enough for the boys, so close to the anniversary of their beloved father’s death, but they had been forced to spend Christmas with Jenna’s brother. Jolie, born five months after her father’s death, had picked up a respiratory illness and had been in pediatric intensive care through the holidays, consuming Jenna with worry all over again. Then Pat, Joe’s mother, suffered a severe stroke the week before Christmas, so Jenna had been running ragged between both of them.

This year would be different. Everyone was relatively healthy, even if Pat did still struggle with rehabilitation in the assisted-living center in Idaho Falls. Jenna’s fledgling catering business was taking off and the sale of the Wagon Wheel had covered most of the huge pile of debt Joe had left behind.

She refused to allow anything to mess up this Christmas. Not a blizzard, not a big catering job she felt ill-equipped to handle, not sliding her car into a ditch.

Not even an arrogant neighbor with stunning blue eyes.

“You know you don’t have to go to this shindig. I doubt anybody’s expectin’ you to. This was one of those, what do you call it, courtesy invites.”

Carson made a face at his foreman, Neil Parker, as the two of them checked over his three pregnant mares, who were due to deliver in only a few months.

So far all was going well. This particular foal’s sire was a champion cutting horse from the world-famous Dalton horse operation just up the road, and Carson had high hopes the foal would follow in his daddy’s magnificent footsteps.

“I know that,” he answered Neil. “If the local stock growers’ association could have figured out a polite way not to invite me, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I doubt it’s personal. You just represent change and a different way of lookin’ at things, something that worries the oldtimers around here. New West versus Old West.”

Carson knew that. He knew his purchase of the vast acreage that used to be known as the Wagon Wheel had thrust him onto a hotly debated battleground. All across the West, old-guard ranchers were finding themselves saddled with land that was no longer profitable and practices that had become archaic and unwieldy.

Many of their children weren’t interested in ranching and the lifestyle that came with it. At the same time, ranchers fought development and the idea of splitting the land they had poured their blood and sweat into tract subdivisions.

As feed costs went up and real-estate values plummeted, many were caught in a no-win situation.

He knew old-timers resented when new people moved in, especially those who had the capital to enact sweeping, costly changes in ranching practices in an effort to increase yield. It was even worse in his situation since he wasn’t a permanent resident of his ranch and only came here a couple of times a month for a few days at a time.

He couldn’t avoid the snide comments in town when he came to Pine Gulch. And he knew Neil suffered worse, though his foreman was careful not to share those details with him.

Neil and his wife Melina had been with Carson for a decade, first as caretakers of the central California ranch he purchased several years ago and then at the small Montana ranch he still owned.

Carson loved ranching. He loved being out on his horses, loved the wildness and the raw beauty here, loved the risk and the rewards.

It wasn’t some big secret why that might be. That year he spent on his grandparents’ ranch a few miles away from here had been the happiest, most secure of his life. He wasn’t trying to recapture that, only to replicate it somewhere else if he could. And though Raven’s Nest was only a small segment of his vast empire, this was where he found the most peace.

He wanted to make it a success and he figured a little proactive public relations couldn’t hurt the situation in town. Life would be easier all the way around if Neil didn’t have to play politics with obstinate locals.

“I’m not some Hollywood rancher, only looking for a status symbol. We’re making something out of Raven’s Nest and I need to get that point across. That’s the whole reason I’m going to Viviana Cruz’s party. You and I have been running Raven’s Nest for ten months now and people still won’t accept that we’re serious about what we’re doing here.”

He thought of the coolness in Jenna Wheeler’s eyes when he had pulled her van out of the snow a few hours earlier and the surprise she had showed when he had done the neighborly thing and told her he would make sure her driveway was shoveled.

He didn’t know why her negative opinion of him bugged him so much. Plenty of people hated his guts. It was a normal side effect of both his position and his personality. He hadn’t made McRaven Enterprises so successful by being weak and accommodating.

Jenna probably figured she had reason to resent him. He was radically changing something her husband’s family had built over several generations.

He thought of what Hayden Wheeler had said the afternoon before. He’s the dude who stole our ranch. Had the boy’s mother been feeding him that kind of garbage? He didn’t like thinking she would be the sort to come off as some kind of martyr. She had listed her ranch for sale and he had paid more than a fair price for it. End of story. It was a business deal, pure and simple.

Hell, he’d even made concessions, like granting her the right-of-way to use the Raven’s Nest bridge and access road to the point where her driveway forked off it. Otherwise, she would have had to build a new road and another bridge across the creek, something costly and complicated.

He sighed and pushed the frustration away. What did it matter if she didn’t like him? He certainly wasn’t trying to win any popularity contests with Jenna.

It would be nice, though, if Neil didn’t have to fight through the negative perceptions of everybody else in town every time his foreman needed to do business with anyone in the Teton Valley.

“I’m only going to go for a little while tonight,” he said to Neil. “I’ll shake a few hands, stroke a few egos and be home in time to make sure everything’s ready for the guests coming in on Sunday.”

“Hate to break it to you, boss, but showing up to one Christmas party with the cattlemen’s association probably won’t do much to change anyone’s mind. Folks around here are set in their ways, afraid of anything that’s different.”