Her Montana Christmas

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“Will you go there?” It hadn’t occurred to him until that very moment that she might, and he suddenly realized that all his plans would crumble without her.

As was her custom, she mulled over her answer for a moment, but then she shook her head. “No, I won’t go there.”

Ethan didn’t try to hide his relief. He let it beam out of him. “I am selfishly glad. I don’t think I could pull off this centennial Christmas without your help, and I wouldn’t want to try.”

She smiled then, genuinely smiled. He clasped his hands behind his back, the sudden need to reach out and pull her against him shaking him to his toes. Instead, he offered to walk her to her car. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, after all, though he was having some trouble with the gentlemanly thing at the moment.

As she drove away into the night, he prayed for guidance. And self-control. It had been a very long time since he’d felt anything like what Robin Frazier stirred in him.

For a moment, long-dormant memory swamped him. Suddenly he was back in Los Angeles, standing on the curb in broad daylight, Theresa beside him. He heard the squeal of tires and the sharp, rapid staccato of gunshots. He felt himself flinch and throw up his arms, dropping to his knees as dust and bits of concrete stung his skin, and then as abruptly as it had begun, it was over, except that almost at once the iron-rich smell of blood rose into his nostrils, coating the back of his throat. He opened his eyes to find Theresa on her back with her dark hair spread across the sidewalk, her arms flung haphazardly across her slender body, a neat hole in her forehead and another in her neck, her dark eyes wide but unseeing, as he tried in his panic to keep her from leaving him. Some part of him had known from the first glimpse that she was already gone, but he’d had to try.

He hadn’t tried to hold a woman since then, and he never meant to.

“Ah, Lord,” he whispered, “don’t let me go back there. Give me courage, wisdom and guidance, the strength to realize all that You plan for me and to walk away from anything that is not Your will. Anything and anyone.”

No matter how compelling.

Chapter Four (#ulink_9a68abc9-315a-5e6a-abc6-9215c2e5e415)

Somehow, when Robin was with Ethan, she felt strangely disconnected from the pitfalls that surrounded her. She knew intellectually that any relationship around Jasper Gulch was potentially problematic for her. As soon as her deceptions were discovered, people were bound to choose sides, and most would undoubtedly side against her and with the Shaws. Still, Ethan’s very presence tended to make her awareness of that fact fade into the background. That was part of what made him so dangerous.

As soon as they parted company, however, her thoughts would begin to seethe with very reasonable doubts and fears. She would quite naturally recall that her position in Jasper Gulch was tenuous at best, even with Ethan himself, perhaps especially with Ethan. No minister would look kindly at a woman who had come into a community under false pretenses and perpetuated the lie for months on end. That being the case, she wondered again if she should go on seeing Ethan. He seemed to addle her thought processes and blunt some of her emotions while exciting others.

Recalling that Ethan had told her to pray about things before she made a decision, Robin prayed that night, asking for clarity and wisdom. Exhausted, she fell asleep, assuming that God had essentially told her to leave Jasper Gulch, the Shaws and Ethan Johnson behind. Yet, when she woke in the morning, she found that she had just enough time to dress before the young pastor arrived to pick her up—and no time to arrange for anyone else to accompany him on his mission. Then Mamie showed up at her door with a pair of sturdy work gloves, snowshoes, a small handsaw and a plate of hot, melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls about three inches thick to combat the cold air that she let in with her.

What else could Robin do but hurriedly dress and wolf down cinnamon rolls while coffee percolated and Mamie made the bed? Ethan showed up while Mamie and Robin were demolishing the third of four monster cinnamon rolls and happily helped himself to the last one.

“Just think,” he quipped, “I’m keeping you both from the sin of gluttony, and at detriment to my own soul, too, as I came here from breakfast at Great Gulch Grub.”

They all laughed, then Robin confessed, “You might have kept Mamie from the sin of gluttony, but not me. I’ve already eaten way too much.”

“That makes two of us, then,” he said, mopping the icing from the plate with his finger. “Guess we’d better get out there and work it off.”

She finished her coffee, enjoying the bite of the black brew juxtaposed against the sweetness of Mamie’s cinnamon rolls, then rinsed the cup, gathered her things and went out into the cold, leaving Mamie to lock up behind them. God, Robin supposed, didn’t mean for her to leave Jasper Gulch right away after all. Otherwise, would He have allowed her this feeling of sweet, joyous anticipation after her long night of doubts?

They drove out to the McGuire’s Double M Ranch in Ethan’s old car because it had all-wheel drive, which he said had come in quite handy, given that some of his congregation lived as far as forty miles outside town. He played music through his smartphone connection along the way, and Robin found herself singing along with some of her favorite praise songs and hymns.

He smiled at her from time to time and once said, “You’re more accomplished than you let on.”

She shook her head. “No, not really. I don’t have much range or resonance. I really can only sing in groups.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“I suppose.”

As they drew near the new sprawling house with its blue metal roof and deep porches, Jack and Olivia came out to meet them. Both wore nothing more than their shirtsleeves, though Olivia had pulled the cuffs of her sweater down over her hands. The twenty-eight-degree weather didn’t seem to faze them a bit. Guess that came from being natives to the area. When Robin and Ethan got out of the car, Jack leaned a shoulder against the porch support and looked up at the sky, a uniform shade of pale gray today.

“Mornin’, Ethan, Robin. Good day for you. Temperature ought to top out above freezing.”

Bundled up like a polar bear, Robin smiled wanly. She supposed thirty-three was, technically, above freezing.

“You’re going to have to go upslope, though, to find some of the firs,” Olivia pointed out. “We have snowshoes if you need them.”

“We came prepared,” Ethan assured her.

Olivia waved at the ATV parked in front of the house. Every one of the ranchers in the area seemed to have the all-terrain vehicles, and old-timer Rusty Zidek, who was well into his nineties, sometimes used one to get around town even now. Except for the color, this one reminded Robin of Rusty’s. Bright yellow and designed for two people to ride side by side with a flatbed behind, it resembled a small, stripped-down version of an early Jeep. A tiny wagon had been attached for good measure.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to go with you?” Olivia asked. “This is a big place, you could get lost out here.”

“It’s all planned out, hon,” Jack assured her. “Ethan and I have gone over it in detail. He’s got GPS, an aerial map in case of weak signal and detailed instructions. They’ll be fine. Besides, they’re just going up as far as Gazebo, where they’ll eat lunch, and then on to Whistler. They should be back here by two.” He looked to Ethan then and said, “If you’re not here by half past, I come looking for you.”

Ethan nodded and answered, “Understood.”

Olivia, meanwhile, was smiling at Robin. “Gazebo,” she said, as if that had some special meaning. “I see. Well, then, don’t let us keep you.”

Ethan started transferring their gear, which included an odd sort of cooler, to the flatbed of the ATV. They climbed in, buckled up and were off. The thing proved to be a surprisingly loud form of transportation. Robin was thankful that Mamie had insisted she take a knit headband to wear under the hood of her coat, and not just because the cold wind would have sliced off her ears. And to think that it was only the sixth day of December.

Winters in Albuquerque and Santa Fe could be cold, but the lows there approximated the averages here, and with three hundred–plus days of sunshine and low humidity year-round, Robin had barely noticed the change of seasons back in New Mexico. Here the seasons were distinct, the precipitation and humidity overwhelming for a desert rat such as herself and winter seemed to be gray more often than not. And the storms! Last month’s freak winter storm and the resulting power outage had frightened Robin. If not for Mamie and her backup generator, Robin wasn’t sure what she’d have done. Even then, warm bathwater had been scarce.

Now here she was setting off into what amounted to wilderness with none other than the pastor at her side, and unless she was mistaken, he didn’t have any more experience at this kind of thing than she did. They were well out of sight of the house when he stopped the ATV at a splintered wood post and consulted both the GPS and the aerial map that he took out of his coat pocket and unfolded across the interior of the small vehicle. It felt amazingly warm once they stopped moving. He showed her exactly where they were on the map, and she felt better, knowing that he was on top of things.

“What’s the deal about Gazebo?” she asked as he refolded the map.

“I don’t think it’s a real gazebo,” Ethan said, “just a kind of shelter that Jack’s parents put up to protect a picnic table in a spot where they could look down on the valley and their home. Jack suggested it as a good place for us to have lunch.”

“I see. I didn’t think about lunch.”

“I did,” Ethan told her with a subtle smile.

Did he ever. Another fifteen minutes took them up the mountain on the west side of the valley high enough for them to find the kind of evergreen growth they needed. Robin had brought photos with her, so they were able to identify the cedar, pine and fir they wanted. Much of it they were able to cut with simple pruning shears, but the larger boughs required the saws.

They needed the snowshoes only once, when they went after a particular pine. Most of the trees were too tall for them to reach the branches, but the trees were smaller at the higher elevations, where the snow tended to pile up and stay around. It was up near Gazebo where they spotted the accessible pine, and they had to hike up to get it. They practically denuded the poor thing, taking two trips to get the fragrant boughs down.

“Why don’t I go up with the net and bring down the last load alone while you set the table for lunch,” he proposed.

“Great,” she agreed. “I know I pigged out at breakfast, but I’m so hungry now I think I could eat a bear.”

He laughed, and no wonder, for that was just about what he’d packed. She peeked into the strange, foil-lined “cooler” and found containers of hot vegetable soup, toasty melted-cheese sandwiches, warm ham-and-pea salad, fat rolls stuffed with sausages, a hash-brown potato casserole and thick slabs of brownie cake covered with melted chocolate and broken walnuts. She left it all in the steamy warmer and instead raided the box he’d brought along for a flannel-lined vinyl tablecloth, matching checked cloth napkins, dinnerware, flatware and cups for the coffee he’d included. She warmed herself with that until he returned, gazing at the valley below and the homey two-story ranch house in the distance where Mick McGuire and his new family lived.

Sheltered by the trees and the roof, the gazebo felt, if not warm, at least survivable, especially with the warm coffee inside her and the bounty of Ethan’s picnic at her elbow. Ethan arrived a few moments later, tugged off his gloves and straddled the wood bench beside her.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So different from Los Angeles.”

“And New Mexico.”

“God must take real pleasure in His creation, just the variety and bounty of it,” Ethan said. “No place I’ve ever been makes me want to worship more than Montana, though.”

“That’s a lovely way of putting it.”

“It’s a lovely feeling.” He looked her straight in the eye when he said that.

All the world seemed to pause in that moment. She felt his words to her bones. She let them settle into her. She thought of all the sermons she’d every heard, all the words of wisdom she’d ever read, but none of them had ever moved her or touched her as deeply as Ethan’s simple declaration.

He loved it here. He had been called here to this place, to serve his Lord and these people. She envied him that calling, that belonging. She admired him for it.

He turned his bare hands palms up and asked, “Will you pray with me before we eat?”

She set aside her mug, tugged off her gloves and placed her hands in his, her head bowed and her heart aquiver.

* * *

They enjoyed a sumptuous meal.

“As sumptuous as Great Gulch Grub can make it,” Ethan told Robin with a chuckle.

“It was good of you to think of lunch.”

“Men always think of their stomachs,” he said with a wink. He had to stop that. For some reason he felt compelled to flirt with her. It was immature and foolish and had to stop.

She looked down shyly, scraping a fingertip across the checked vinyl of the tablecloth. “I’m surprised they put in a real tablecloth and napkins.”

“Oh, no, that was me,” he said without thinking, and her blue eyes zipped up in surprise. “Uh, Jack mentioned that the tabletop was rough planking, and I didn’t want to take a chance on paper napkins blowing away,” he finished lamely, letting the words dwindle into silence, only to have her beam at him.

“That was very sweet of you.”

“It’s just a tablecloth and napkins,” he said, ridiculously pleased.

They packed up and set off to Whistler, a notch in the rock where the wind was said to make high-pitched noises from time to time, in search of holly. Sure enough, just as Jack had said, they found several basketball-size clumps growing out of crevices in the sheer rock face. All were too far up to easily reach, however. Ethan thought a moment and came up with a plan.

“You could sit on my shoulder,” he proposed, “and use those long-handled pruning shears to cut the holly at the base.”

She touched her eyebrow. “And if I drop the shears on your head?”

“I’ll try not to drop you, too.”

She rolled her eyes, even as she reached for the shears with one hand. Ethan went down on one knee, and she climbed up, settling her weight onto his right shoulder.

“Ready?” he asked, wrapping both arms around her knees.

“I guess.”

“Up we go, then.” He stood. She weighed...just what she should. If he hadn’t needed to hold his head at a somewhat awkward angle, he could have carried her for some distance like this. As it was, he only had to walk a few steps to the rock face. She reached above her and, with some effort, clipped off the first clump, which fell right down into his face.

“Sorry!”

He spit specks of dirt out of his mouth, eyes blinking rapidly. “My fault. From now on, I’ll look down.”

“Can you move sideways a couple feet?”

Stepping over the big clump of holly, he moved to his left. This time, she used the shears to flick the clump behind them.

“Good job.”

“Think I have a future as a holly harvester?” she joked, stretching to get another big ball.

He assisted by lifting her slightly, heaving her up by the knees. “I think you have a future as anything God ordains.”

“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” she quipped, managing the third clump. “One more.”

She wound up basically standing in his hands, against the rock wall, to reach the final ball of holly. After it fell, she dropped the shears well away from him. “You can let me down now.”

“If you insist,” he told her playfully, backing up a step so she could bend her knees and resume her place on his shoulder.

His arms were shaking a bit by the time she was safely seated again, but he was feeling quite powerful and manly—and glad that he’d been working out regularly with the weights in his basement. Showing off a bit, he reached up to grasp her about the waist and twirl her to face him, almost dropping her in the process. Instantly, he clamped his arms around her and felt her body slam into his, knocking the breath from both of them. When his vision cleared, they were standing wrapped in each other’s arms, her face turned up to his. It took a supreme act of will, bolstered by a silent prayer, to drop his arms and step back.