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“Faith,” he began, but suddenly she didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
“We’d better get the beautiful girl in your trailer unloaded before the kids get home.”
She opened her door and jumped out before he could answer her. Yes, sometimes she was like her son, Barrett, who would rather hide out in his room all day and miss dinner than be scolded for something he’d done. She didn’t like to face bad things. It was a normal reaction, she told herself. Hadn’t she already had to face enough bad things in her life?
After a moment, Chase climbed out after her and came around to unhook the back of the trailer. The striking black-and-white paint yearling whinnied as he led her out into the patchy snow.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Faith said, struck all over again by the horse’s elegant lines.
“Yeah,” Chase said. Again with the monosyllables. She sighed.
“Thanks for letting me keep her here for a couple of weeks. Louisa will be so shocked on Christmas morning.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
He guided the horse into the pasture, where his own favorite horse, Tor, immediately trotted over as Faith closed the gate behind them. As soon as Chase unhooked the young horse from her lead line, she raced to the other side of the pasture, mane and tail flying out behind her.
She was fast. That was the truth. Grateful for her own cowboy hat that shielded her face from the worst of the frost-tipped snowflakes, Faith watched the horse race to the other corner of the pasture and back, obviously overflowing with energy after the stress of a day at the auction and then a trailer ride with strangers.
“Do you think she’s too much horse for Lou?” she asked while Chase patted Tor beside her.
He looked at the paint and then down at Faith. “She comes from prime barrel racing stock. That’s what Lou wants to do. For twelve, she’s a strong rider. Yeah, the horse is only green broke but Seth Dalton can train a horse to do just about anything but recite its ABCs.”
“I guess that’s true. It was nice of him to agree to take her, with his crazy training schedule.”
“He’s a good friend.”
“He is,” she agreed. “Though I know he only agreed to do it as a favor to you.”
“Maybe it was a favor to you,” he commented as he pulled a bale of hay over and opened it inside the pasture for the horses.
“Maybe,” she answered. All three Dalton brothers had been wonderful neighbors and good friends to her. They and others in the close-knit ranching community in Cold Creek Canyon and around Pine Gulch had stepped up in a hundred different ways over the last two and a half years since Travis died.
She would have been lost without any of them, but especially without Chase.
That vague unease slithered through her again. What was wrong between them? And how could she fix it?
She didn’t have the first clue.
* * *
What was a guy supposed to do?
Ever since Beck McKinley cornered him at the diner to talk about taking Faith to the stockgrowers’ holiday party, Chase hadn’t been able to think straight. He felt like the other guy had grabbed his face and dunked it in an ice-cold water trough, then kicked him in the gut for good measure.
For a full ten seconds, he had stared at Beck as a host of emotions galloped through him faster than a pack of wild horses spooked by a thunderstorm.
Beckett McKinley wanted to date Faith. Chase’s Faith.
“She’s great. That’s all,” Beck had said into the suddenly tense silence. “It’s been more than two years since Travis died, right? I just thought maybe she’d be ready to start getting out there.”
Chase had thought for a minute his whole face had turned numb, especially his tongue. It made it tough for him to get any words out at all—or maybe that was the ice-cold coating around his brain.
“Why are you asking me?” he had finally managed to say.
If possible, Beck had looked even more uncomfortable. “The two of you are always together. Here at the auction, at the feed store, at the diner in town. I know you’re neighbors and you’ve been friends for a long time. But if there’s something more than that, I don’t want to be an ass and step on toes. You don’t have to tell me what happens to bulls who wander into somebody else’s pen.”
It was all he could do not to haul off and deck the guy for the implied comparison that Faith was just some lonely heifer, waiting for some smooth-talking bull to wander by.
Instead, he had managed to grip his hands into fists, all while one thought kept echoing through his head.
Not again.
He thought he was giving her time to grieve, to make room in her heart for someone else besides Travis Dustin, the man she had loved since she was a traumatized girl trying to carve out a new home for her and her sisters.
Chase had been too slow once before. He had been a steady friend and confidant from the beginning. He figured he had all the time in the world as he waited for her to heal and to settle into life in Pine Gulch. She had been so young, barely sixteen. He wasn’t much older, not yet nineteen, and had been busy with his own struggles. Even then, he had been running his family’s ranch on his own while his father lay dying.
For six months, he offered friendship to Faith, fully expecting that one day when both of them were in a better place, he could start moving things to a different level.
And then Travis Dustin came home for the summer to help out Claude and Mary, the distant relatives who had raised him his last few years of high school.
Chase’s father was in his last few agonizing weeks of life from lung cancer that summer. While he was busy coping with that and accepting his new responsibilities on the ranch, Travis had wasted no time sweeping in and stealing Faith’s heart. By the time Chase woke up and realized what was happening, it was too late. His two closest friends were in love with each other and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
He could have fought for her, he supposed, but it was clear from the beginning that Travis made her happy. After everything she and her sisters had been through, she deserved to find a little peace.
Instead, he had managed to put his feelings away and maintain his friendship with both of them. He had even tried to move on himself and date other women, with disastrous consequences.
Beck McKinley was a good guy. A solid rancher, a devoted father, a pillar of the community. Any woman would probably be very lucky to have him, as long as she could get past those hellion boys of his.
Maybe McKinley was exactly the kind of guy she wanted. The thought gnawed at him, but he took some small solace in remembering that she hadn’t seemed all that enthusiastic at the idea of going out with him.
Didn’t matter. He knew damn well it was only a matter of time before she found someone she did want to go out with. If not Beck, some other smooth-talking cowboy would sweep in.
He hadn’t fought for her last time. Instead, he had stood by like a damn statue and watched her fall in love with his best friend.
He wouldn’t go through that again. It was time he made a move—but what if he made the wrong one and ruined everything between them?
He felt like a man given a choice between a hangman’s noose and a firing squad. He was damned either way.
He was still trying to figure out what to do when she shifted from watching the young horse dance around the pasture in the cold December air. Faith gazed up at the overcast sky, still dribbling out the occasional stray snowflake.
“I probably should get back. The kids will be out of school soon and I’m sure you have plenty of things of your own to do. You don’t have to walk me back,” she said when he started to head in that direction behind her. “Stay and unhitch the horse trailer if you need to.”
“It can keep. I’ll walk you back up to your truck. I’ve got to plug in my phone anyway.”
A couple of his ranch dogs came out from the barn to say hello as they walked the short distance to his house. He reached down and petted them both, in total sympathy. He felt like a ranch dog to her: a constant, steady companion with a few useful skills that came in handy once in a while.
Would she ever be able to see him as anything more?
“Thanks again, Chase,” Faith said when they reached her own pickup truck—the one she had insisted on driving over that morning, even though he told her he could easily pick her up and drop her back off at the Star N.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“Seriously, I was out of my depth. Horses aren’t exactly my area of expertise. Who knows, I might have brought home a nag. As always, I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He could feel tension clutch at his shoulders again. “Not true,” he said, his voice more abrupt than he intended. “You didn’t need me. Not really. You’d already done your research and knew what you wanted in a barrel racer. You just needed somebody to back you up.”
She smiled as they reached her pickup truck and a pale shaft of sunlight somehow managed to pierce the cloud cover and land right on her delicate features, so soft and lovely it made his heart hurt.
“I’m so lucky that somebody is always you,” she said.
He let out a breath, fighting the urge to pull her into his arms. He didn’t have that right—nor could he let things go on as they were.
“About the stockgrowers’ party,” he began.
If he hadn’t been looking, he might have missed the leap of something that looked suspiciously like fear in her green eyes before she shifted her gaze away from him.
“Really, it doesn’t bother me to skip it this year if you want to make other plans.”
“I don’t want to skip it,” he growled. “I want to go. With you. On a date.”
He intended to stress the last word, to make it plain this wouldn’t be two buddies just hanging out together, like they always did. As a result, the word took on unnatural proportions and he nearly snapped it out until it arced between them like an arrow twanged from a crossbow.
Eyes wide, she gazed at him for a long moment, clearly startled by his vehemence. After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. That’s settled, then. We can figure out the details later.”
Nothing was settled. He needed to tell her date was the operative word here, that he didn’t want to take her to the party as her neighbor and friend who gave her random advice on a barrel racing horse for her daughter or helped her with the hay season.
He wanted the right to hold her—to dance with her and flirt and whisper soft, sexy words in her ear.
How the hell could he tell her that, after all this time, when he had so carefully cultivated a safe, casual relationship that was the exact opposite of what he really wanted? Before he could figure that out, an SUV he didn’t recognize drove up the lane toward his house.
“Were you expecting company?” she asked.
“Don’t think so.” He frowned as the car pulled up beside them—and his frown intensified when the passenger door opened and a girl jumped out, then raced toward him. “Daddy!”
Chapter Two (#uf480523b-9005-5beb-8b45-ecb82ef46912)
He stared at his eleven-year-old daughter, dressed to the nines in an outfit more suited to a photo shoot for a children’s clothing store than for a working cattle ranch.
“Adaline! What are you doing here? I didn’t expect to see you until next weekend.”
“I know, Dad! Isn’t it great? We get extra time together—maybe even two whole weeks! Mom pulled me out of school until after Christmas. Isn’t that awesome? My teachers are going to email me all my homework so I don’t miss too much—not that they ever do anything the last few weeks before Christmas vacation anyway but waste time showing movies and doing busywork and stuff.”
That sounded like a direct quote from her mother, who had little respect for the educational system, even the expensive private school she insisted on sending their daughter to.
As if on cue, his ex-wife climbed out of the driver’s side of what must be a new vehicle, judging by the temporary license plates in the window.
She looked uncharacteristically disordered, with her sweater askew and her hair a little messy in back where she must have been leaning against the headrest as she drove.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” she said. “We took a chance. I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon. Why didn’t you answer?”
“My phone ran out of juice and I forgot to take the charger to the auction with us. What’s going on?”
He knew it had to be something dramatic for her to bring Addie all this way on an unscheduled midweek visit.
Cindy frowned. “My mother had a stroke early this morning and she’s in the hospital in Idaho Falls.”
“Oh, no! I hadn’t heard. I’m so sorry.”
He had tried very hard to earn the approval of his in-laws but the president of the Pine Gulch bank and his wife had been very slow to warm up to him. He didn’t know if they had disliked him because Cindy had been pregnant when they married or because they didn’t think a cattle rancher with cow manure on his boots was good enough for their precious only child.
They had reached a peace accord of sorts after Addie came along. Still, he almost thought his and Cindy’s divorce had been a relief to them—and he had no doubt they had been thrilled at her second marriage to an eminently successful oral surgeon in Boise.
“The doctors say it appears to be a mini stroke. They suspect it’s not the first one so they want to keep her for observation for a few days. My dad said I didn’t have to come down but it seemed like the right thing to do,” Cindy said. “Considering I was coming this way anyway, I didn’t think you would mind having extra visitation with Addie, especially since she won’t be here over the holidays.”
He was aware of a familiar pang in his chest, probably no different from what most part-time divorced fathers felt at not being able to live with their children all the time. Holidays were the worst.
“Sure. Extra time is always great.”
Cindy turned to Faith with that hard look she always wore when she saw the two of them together. His ex-wife had never said anything but he suspected she had long guessed the feelings he had tried to bury after Faith and Travis got married.
“We’re interrupting,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Not at all,” Faith assured her. “Please don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry about your mother.”
“Thanks,” Cindy said, her voice cool. “We spent an hour at the hospital before we came out here and she seems in good spirits. Doctors just want to keep her for observation to see if they can figure out what’s going on. Dad is kind of a mess right now, which is why I thought it would be a good idea for me to stay with him, at least for the first few days.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“Thanks for taking Addie. Sorry to drop her off without calling first. I did try.”
“It’s no problem at all. I’m thrilled to have her.”
The sad truth was, they got along and seemed to parent together better now that they were divorced than during the difficult five years of their marriage, though things still weren’t perfect.
“I packed enough for a week. To be honest, I don’t know what I grabbed, since I was kind of a mess this morning. Keith was worried about me driving alone but he had three surgeries scheduled today and couldn’t come with me. His patients needed him.”
“He’s a busy man,” Chase said. What else could he say? It would have been terribly hypocritical to lambast another man in the husband department when Chase had been so very lousy at it.
“I should get back to the hospital. Thanks, Chase. You’re a lifesaver.”
“No problem.”
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Faith said.
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
Cindy opened the hatchback of the SUV and pulled out Addie’s familiar pink suitcase. He hated the tangible reminder that his daughter had to live out of a suitcase half her life.
