The Cowgirl's Christmas Wish Read online

  The Cowgirl’s Christmas Wish

  A Canadays of Montana Romance

  Barbara Ankrum

  The Cowgirl’s Christmas Wish

  Copyright © 2016 Barbara Ankrum

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-945879-41-8

  For the latest news from Tule Publishing, sign up for our mailing list here!

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The Canadays of Montana

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To my parents, who always loved Christmas.

  “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

  ~Roald Dahl~

  Chapter One

  “Tell him how you feel. What are you waiting for?” Eve Canaday’s stepsister, Olivia, tucked a string of twinkly, white lights around the trunk of one of the bare white trees inside the Graff Hotel ballroom then handed the strand up to Eve, who was standing on a ladder above her. “I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  Eve sighed, wrapping the strand of lights around the thin, white branches. “The worst is he laughs and pats me on the head like I’m hilarious. Until he realizes I mean it and he runs for the nearest exit.”

  Olivia chuckled, her blonde hair glimmering in the winking lights. “Pats you on the head? First of all, he’s only what? Six years older than you? So, that’s nothing. And second, lots of men are commitment-phobes until they meet the right woman.”

  “That’s just it. He doesn’t think of me as a woman. To him, I’m just a friend. A buddy.” Eve clapped a hand on her chest. “I am not a buddy, Livvy. I have breasts. Not that he’s noticed.”

  She laughed. “Um... I’ve seen him looking at you. I think he definitely has noticed.”

  “Really?” Eve sighed. “Then he’s just not interested.”

  “Maybe you’re just afraid to find out if he really is or if he isn’t.”

  “What? Me? I am not.” Because if she’d neglected to stand on her head to get him to take her seriously, well, there was only so far she was willing to go in this standoff. Shouldn’t he meet her at least halfway?

  “I’m just sayin’...” Olivia said as she untangled a knot of lights.

  Eve shook her head. “No. That’s the wrong approach with him. He’s complicated. And skittish.”

  “Maybe you’re both just afraid to mess up a good friendship. But clearly, it’s fish or cut bait time for you, Evie,” her sister said. “If you’re unhappy with how it’s going, change it.”

  Eve sighed and sat back on the ladder, wondering if Olivia was right. She scanned the activity in the ballroom she’d been hired to stage for the Marietta Christmas Ball. The room was beginning to look like the Christmas fantasy she’d envisioned—a forest, all magically lit for Christmas. Staged with bare, white trees awaiting twinkling white lights and traditional, towering green spruce, already beribboned and hung with sparkling ornaments and snow. Boxes stacked along the walls held the remainder of the decorations and a handful of Eve’s team of stagers was busy unpacking them. There were ladders and bubble wrap scattered across the floor and, despite the Christmas music being piped into the ballroom, almost everyone wore earbuds and was in their own musical world as they worked. The ball was three short days away.

  And she would be going alone.

  Pathetic.

  “You make that sound so easy. Just because your Jake thinks the sun rises and sets on you.” Eve handed back the end of the strand to connect the plug to the next.

  Jake Lassen, Olivia’s gorgeous helicopter pilot fiancé, had come looking for Olivia after ten years in the military and would stop at nothing to make her his. Her other sister, Kate, had settled with bull-rider Finn Scott and his twins, a match no one saw coming, but one that was solid as a rock now.

  “You and Kate cannot be my standard bearers for relationships. Because you’re both anomalies and, frankly, that’s just depressing and a lot to live up to.”

  “Nobody expects you to live up to anything,” Olivia said, handing up another string of lights. “And let’s face it, I’m no exception to any rule. You know how my first marriage ended.”

  Olivia’s first husband had been her mentor/trainer on the way to the Olympic equestrian team, but her dreams had been cut short by a bad accident. Her marriage hadn’t survived the accident either, but one door opened when another one closed, as the saying went. And Jake had walked right in.

  “You know,” Olivia went on, “Jake’s and my relationship was far from a cakewalk. But one thing I did learn—I was usually flat out wrong when I tried to guess what he was thinking. So now, I ask. So, don’t be a goose. Look around you, Eve.” She gestured at the ballroom. “This is amazing. You are amazing and any guy would be lucky to have you. If he can’t see that, well...”

  Eve’s phone pinged with a text and she looked down at it. “Speak of the devil. I guess he’s finally out of his surgery. I promised him a ride to the airport today. He’s leaving for Roatan. Dive tour.”

  “Tell him I think his timing sucks.” Olivia held the ladder for Eve as she climbed down.

  With a sigh, she answered, “I agree. Thanks for coming over to help.”

  “Sure.” Olivia hugged her. “I can’t wait to see the finished product. It’s going to be incredible when you’re done. As always. And I can’t wait to see what you do for our wedding.”

  Eve hugged her. “Thanks. Me, too. And thanks for the advice. I’ll think about what you said. Really, I will.”

  “And then you’ll do the exact opposite.”

  Eve shrugged with a grin. “Possibly.”

  She laughed. “See you later at Lane’s End? Mom’s cooking lasagna tonight.”

  “I should be back in time. It would take more than Ben Tyler to make me miss her lasagna. See you then.”

  Ben Tyler couldn’t help but smile at Eve from the passenger seat of her car. She’d been chatting away for a few minutes about nothing in particular and for some weird reason, he got the sense she was nervous today. Nervous around him. She was so darned cute when she got chatty like this. Because she had a way of making him laugh over nothing and he couldn’t remember another woman ever doing that before.

  You should just tell her the truth.

  “So I called them back”—Eve went on—“this company I ordered from, and told them that no matter how many fake eggs they sent me to fill those horrid baskets they’d ‘inadvertently’ substituted, they would still look like a herd of geese had accidentally chosen my party for a nesting spot. Seriously.”

  He chuckled. “Gaggle.”

  “Huh?”

  “A gaggle of geese.”

  “Oh. Right. I should have told them that. But t
hey did refund me.”

  “Atta girl.” Ben stretched his leg as far as he could under the dash, just then noticing the dark clouds lurking on the western horizon. In the next instant, he heard Eve’s sudden intake of breath, saw the swoop of something flashing in front of the car and then—

  “Hang on!” Eve cried.

  Ben braced himself as the wheels of Eve’s SUV veered suddenly across the icy mountain pass highway toward a snowy ditch on the side of the road. The antlered streak of brown that had vaulted in front of the car, disappeared like a shadow... along with any chance of him making his flight.

  Time slowed instantly to a crawl. The camera of his vision took in every small instant of the skid like an old fashioned flip book.

  Tick. He swung a look at Eve, fighting the icy road for control. The look on her face made him—tick—reach a protective hand out to her and realize—tick—he didn’t give a flying damn about his flight!

  Bam!

  The snowbank exploded against the front end of her car accompanied by the crunch of metal and a sucker punch to the face from the airbag.

  And everything went quiet, except for the rhythmic creak of the engine in the muffled depths of the snowbank.

  Stunned, he muttered a curse and coughed as the airbag deflated. He waved away the powdery white stuff floating in the air. Still seeing stars, he winced, running his tongue along a fresh cut in his lip. His chest lurched as he flicked a look at Eve, who, like him, was pitched forward against her shoulder harness, still shaking off the impact.

  He touched her shoulder and she flinched in surprise. “Eve, you hurt?”

  She looked dazed, trying to catch her breath as she rubbed a fist against her chest. A reddish scrape had already begun swelling near her right eye.

  She touched her cheek gingerly. “No. I don’t think so. Nothing broken but my pride. And apparently, my car.” Her eyes turned suspiciously glassy and she blinked away tears.

  Already the abrasion on her cheek had started to bruise. Still stuck in his seatbelt, he had the weirdest impulse to pull her against him and make everything all right. His fault, for agreeing to let her to drive him to the airport on these roads today. Why hadn’t he just called a cab?

  “That was no deer. I could have sworn it was a—” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Ben... you’re bleeding!”

  Swiping at his chin, his fingers encountered moisture and came back bloody. “That’s the last time I feel anything less than pure compassion for anyone in my ER who’s been coldcocked by one of these air bags.”

  She turned a mortified look his way. “We’ll never make it to the airport now. Oh, Ben—your trip...”

  He reached over and shut off the engine. “That thing could be sitting in our laps right now if you hadn’t swerved to avoid hitting it.”

  “That thing being a—?”

  “Reindeer.” Ben pointed to a stand of Ponderosa pines a few dozen feet off the side of the road in the gloaming light of the oncoming storm. The unscathed culprit stood under the trees, wearing a glittery green and red halter, decorated with jingle bells, like an escapee from Santa’s Christmas barn. Calmly, it chewed on the bare branches of some underlying shrubs and occasionally deigned to glance in their direction, making his harness jingle.

  “Ohh-hh,” Eve muttered, narrowing a look at the animal. “Will you just look at him, standing there, all cheery and Christmassy?” Her window made a grinding sound as she rolled it down. “Hey! Thank you!” she shouted over the virgin drifts of snow on the side of the road. “No really, go on and eat. Don’t mind us. We had nothing better to do today than sit in a snowbank!”

  He grinned, then winced at his split lip. “Ow. Don’t make me laugh.”

  She flicked an apologetic grin back at him. “I’m so sorry, Ben. I’ve screwed everything up for you. Do you think they’ll hold the boat for you in Roatan if you’re late?”

  The boat, presumably taking him on a “dive tour,” sounded like a lot more fun than what he’d really been about to do in Central America. Digging himself deeper in the lie he’d already told Eve about this trip was something he’d hoped to avoid, but he was already in this far. And now seemed like the absolute wrong time to confess.

  So, he said, “My connections were pretty tight and unchangeable. Flights into the country are so limited, once I miss my flights, it’ll be impossible to catch up with them. They’re scheduled to leave tomorrow morning for ten days. They won’t wait for me.” That much was true.

  He sighed, already dreading the phone call he’d have to make to Dr. Camran in Honduras when they got back to town. If he could even reach him.

  She looked stricken. “We’re only twenty-five minutes or so from Marietta. I’ll call one of my sisters. Maybe there’s time for one of them to come and—”

  But the bars on his cell phone were nonexistent. “No service. We’re in a dead zone here in the mountain pass. I drive this way all the time to the hospital up in Bozeman. It’s dead or spotty at best here for two miles or more. And weather is moving in fast.”

  Indeed, the gunmetal sky had grown darker.

  “Well,” she said, staring at the miscreant reindeer, “if Santa’s anywhere nearby, we could use a Christmas miracle because this car is not getting anyone anywhere. Not even back to Marietta.” She sighed. “I mean, please, who gets run off the road by Rudolph?”

  Me. Ben zipped up his heavy parka over the scuba geek tee Jake had given him that read, “The deeper you go, the better it feels.” Appropriate on some future trip to paradise, but he’d worn it for the sake of the lie he’d told everyone. Not even Jake knew what he was up to.

  This whole fiasco was on him, really. If he hadn’t cut things so close. A last minute emergency surgery had pared his schedule down to the bone and now the whole trip was blown because of a freaking reindeer.

  Perfect.

  Eve wrestled to get her door open, past the snow wedged underneath. She managed a six-inch crack. “Ugh. I am such an idiot, wrecking my car the one time I—” She stopped short and a blush crept up her cheeks, as if she’d admitted more than she’d meant to.

  “It’s my fault, not yours,” he said. “I should’ve given myself more time. I have travel insurance. I’ll rebook it for another time.”

  “I know, but,” she said, with a wistful sigh, “warm beaches... tropical drinks... coral reefs versus”—she gestured out the freezing window—“five degrees below zero and snow in the forecast.” She sighed. “On the bright side, at least there’s Christmas in Marietta.”

  He glanced off at the drifting snow. Exactly. “Yeah.” Even as he watched, the four-legged fulcrum of all this trouble trotted off, unconcerned, into the forest. In his best Michael Corleone voice, he muttered, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

  She tilted an amused look at him. “I don’t think Christmas in Marietta was what Mario Puzzo had in mind when he wrote that line.”

  “What? You mean the Whoville of Montana? The North Pole of the lower forty-eight?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Oh, I would. There’s no escaping holiday cheer in that place. No dodging city blocks of happy Christmas lights, or red and green displays in every shop window, or apparently, even reindeer running wild.”

  “Hmm. I definitely heard a bah-humbug in there,” she said, fingering her injured cheek.

  “I’d make an effort to deny it,” he said, shoving his own door partway open against the snowbank, “but this might not be the best time.”

  Acknowledging his point with a nod, she shivered as frigid air poured through her open window and she tugged her gloves out of her coat pockets. “So, to clarify, the holiday-ish timing of your trip wasn’t—”

  “Coincidental?” he finished. “Nope.”

  She tipped her head. “Huh.”

  He gave up on his door and slammed it shut again. The snowbank they’d buried the front end in collapsed on the hood and a chunk of snow slid down the windshield with a splat.

/>   Outside, big, fat flakes began to settle against the glass, slowly at first, then furiously. It began pouring in her open window.

  “Oh, look. It’s snowing,” she said, catching flakes in her bare hand. “I suppose they’ll find us in the spring when the snow melts. Maybe Rudolph will guide them with his nose-so-bright to our tragically buried car.”

  “Or”—Ben forced the mechanism on his seat belt and caught himself with a hand on the dashboard—“we could climb out your open window and flag down someone for help.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “that would be a happier ending.”

  But it took almost another half-hour before another vehicle braved the pass in the storm. It was a semi, heading toward Marietta and the driver radioed a tow truck for them and let them wait in his heated truck cabin. By then, both were chilled to the bone.

  When they finally made it back to town, the sun was on its way down. The tow truck driver—a sweet local named Nolan Weeks—asked them where they wanted to be dropped before he took her car to the repair shop. Ben told him to go to the hospital.

  “I left my car parked there,” he said to Eve. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “Why don’t you come out to Lane’s End? Stay for dinner. Shake this off. I hear they’re doing a lasagna thing tonight. They were expecting me anyway and they’d love to have you.”

  He and Eve had become good friends a year ago, after meeting at her father’s birthday party, an event his old friend Jake Lassen had dragged him to and his friendship with Eve had bloomed after that night.

  He wasn’t exactly sure why it had never gone farther. Why they’d never slept together. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it. He definitely had. Like the rest of the Canaday sisters, Eve was so pretty, sometimes, he found himself just staring at her when she wasn’t looking. But he supposed it was because she wasn’t the sort of girl one messed with without serious intentions. She was the kind of girl one married.

  That was... someone would marry her, but it wouldn’t be him. He was already in a committed relationship with medicine. That was as much of a promise as he could manage.