The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle

“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.”