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“Jolie and I made your favorite snickerdoodles this afternoon, didn’t we, ladybug?” she smiled at the little girl, who beamed back in the middle of pulling the ornaments off the tree. “They’re for the party tomorrow but when you feel better, you can go into the kitchen and get one.”
Cookies were apparently the magic remedy. Who knew? The boy’s sniffles dried up and after only twenty seconds more, he slid off his mother’s lap.
“I feel a lot better now,” he announced. “Can I have a cookie now?”
“Yes. Grab one each for your brothers.”
He flashed his mother a smile and raced from the room at top speed, leaving Carson alone with the two equally terrifying Wheeler females.
“Thank you again for bringing him home. It’s a long walk up the driveway for a kid with an owie.”
“I guess I was lucky to be there at the right time,” he said.
“He fell off a fence, you said?”
He hesitated, not sure quite how to answer her. She knew his feelings about the boys trespassing on his property and he was suddenly reluctant to dredge all that up. On the other hand, she needed to know what they had been up to.
“The split-rail fence just past where our access roads fork.”
“On the Raven’s Nest side,” she surmised correctly.
“Yeah.”
“What was he doing on a fence?” She looked as if she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to hear his answer.
“Tightrope walking, apparently.”
She let out a long, frustrated sigh. “I have warned them and warned them to stay off your property. I hate that they’ve put me in this position again.”
“What position would that be?”
“Having to apologize to you once more.”
Again that sliver of disdain flickered in her eyes and he did his best not to bristle, though he was aware his voice was harder than he would have normally used.
“I certainly don’t want to tell you how to be a parent, but you have to do something to get the point across a little more forcefully to them. A working ranch is a dangerous place for three young boys, ma’am.”
Her expression turned even more glacial. “I believe I’m aware of just how dangerous a ranch can be, Mr. McRaven. Probably better than you.”
He remembered too late just why she had been forced to sell her ranch to him. Her husband had been killed in a tragic accident on the ranch two years earlier, leaving behind bills and obligations Jenna Wheeler had been unable to take care of without selling the land that had been in her husband’s family for generations.
He regretted his tactlessness but his point was still valid. “Then you, more than anybody, should stress those dangers to your boys. There are a hundred ways they could get hurt, as today’s accident only reinforced.”
“Thank you for your concern,” she said with that tight, dismissive voice that seemed so discordant in contrast to her soft feminine features. “I’ll be sure to tell them once again to stay away from Raven’s Nest.”
“Do that.”
He shoved on his Stetson, knowing he sounded like a firstclass jerk, but he didn’t know how else to get the message across to her or her boys except with bluntness. “I know neither of us wants any of your boys to be seriously hurt. But I have to tell you, I refuse to be held responsible if they are, especially when you’ve been warned again and again about their trespassing habits.”
“Warning duly noted, Mr. McRaven.”
He sighed in frustration. He successfully negotiated corporate deals all the time, had built McRaven Enterprises into an international force to be reckoned with in only a dozen years. So why couldn’t he seem to have any interaction with this woman that didn’t end with him feeling he was a cross between Simon Legree and Lord Voldemort?
He needed to have his people make her another offer for this land and the house, he decided. As far as he was concerned, the only way to solve their particular quandary would be for her to sell him this section and move her little family somewhere she could be someone else’s problem.
She closed the door behind Carson McRaven, wondering how it was possible for a man to be so very physically attractive—with that dark, wavy hair and eyes of such a deep blue she couldn’t help staring every time she saw them—yet have all the personality appeal of a wolverine with a sore snout.
The sale of the ranch had mostly been carried out through third parties. Jenna had known he was some kind of a Bay Area financial wizard and she had met him briefly when he had come to inspect the Wagon Wheel, as it all used to be called. Sure, he had been brisk and businesslike. But she had admired his plans to experiment with more environmentally sound ranching practices and he had seemed decent enough in that short meeting.
Of course, that was before her boys apparently decided to make it their personal mission to be as mischievous as possible—and to do it on Carson McRaven’s property.
She couldn’t blame him for being frustrated. She was at her wit’s end trying to keep them on their side of the property line. But she resented his unspoken implication that her boys were feral banshees allowed to run wild through the mountains.
“Mom, do I still have to do chores?” Kip asked in a plaintive kind of voice. “Hayden says I do.”
“I think this once, maybe Hayden can take out the garbage for you, if we ask him nicely.”
“My head still hurts.”
She pulled him toward her and gave him another kiss, just for good measure. “I don’t think it’s broken. Bruised a little, maybe, but you’ve got a pretty tough nut.”
“It was scary when I fell.”
“You shouldn’t have been up on Mr. McRaven’s fence, right? I don’t want you boys up there again. Next time you might hurt yourself even worse. What if you fell inside the pasture when one of those bulls of his were close by?”
“But I’m really good at it. I like being good at something. Hayden’s good at riding the ponies and Drew is good at math and stuff. But I can’t do anything.”
“You’re only six years old, bud. You’ll figure out what you’re good at soon enough.”
“Mom!” Hayden called out. “Can we eat these tart thingies in here?”
“No,” she answered as she picked up Jolie and headed back toward the kitchen. “They’re for the party tomorrow.”
“Everything you make is for some party or a reception or something stupid like that. Why can’t we eat any of it?” Hayden complained.
“You can have another snickerdoodle after you feed the horses. I made plenty of those.”
“I wanted a tart,” her oldest muttered.
Naturally. If she had told him the snickerdoodles were offlimits, that would have been the only thing he wanted. She loved him dearly but this sudden contrariness of his sometimes drove her crazy. Hayden was only ten and she already felt like she was battling all the teen stuff her friends had warned her to expect.
Maybe there was a lesson in that for her, she thought after she had shooed Hayden and Drew out the door to take care of their chores in the barn and returned to preparing for her last holiday party of the season.
Carson McRaven was definitely off-limits to her. Beyond the fact that she disliked him personally, he was a multimillionaire tech investor with a reputation for finding products the world didn’t realize it couldn’t do without, while she was an overtired widow with a struggling catering business and more obligations than she could begin to handle.
She wasn’t genuinely interested in any man. In the first place, when on earth would she have the time for one? Between helping the boys with homework, taking care of Jolie, the upkeep on their remaining twenty acres, taking care of her mother-in-law and starting up a struggling catering business, she had nothing left.
In the second, her heart still ached for Joe and probably always would. After two years alone, she still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes and turned over, trying to snuggle into his warmth, only to find a cold void where he used to be. Just like the one inside her heart.
She pushed away the echo of pain out of long practice as she rolled more cookie-dough balls in the cinnamon sugar mix, then set them on the cookie sheet.
Yes, every time she saw Carson McRaven, her heart seemed to race a bit faster and her stomach trembled. She didn’t like her reaction but it was a little easier to comprehend when she told herself it was only because he represented the unattainable.
She almost believed it, too.
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.
