LITMIR.BIZ

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      Monday, December 16

      Havre, Montana

      TAKE GOOD CARE OF HER.

      Those were Will’s words on the phone. Well, of course he would do as Will asked. That’s what a brother did, and Jared Stone took his family duties seriously. Maybe a little too seriously, some would say. But there was nothing wrong with that, Jared figured, working his way through the crowd in a train station filled with holiday travelers and the people who waited to greet them. A man took care of his own.

      Jared saw a lot of people with shopping bags filled with gifts, tired mothers holding on to toddlers, grandmothers kissing squalling babies and a few businessmen trying to avoid walking into groups of families huddled together to say hello or goodbye.

      There were skiers, too. There were always skiers heading somewhere in Montana. Jared took a second to admire a long-legged blonde carrying skis and wearing tight black leggings and a sheepskin jacket, but he kept moving through the crowd as he headed toward the board that would list the arrival times of the trains. Sure enough, the train named the Empire Builder from Chicago had just arrived.

      Her name is Melanie Briggs. And she’s special. Jared wished he’d asked Will for more details, but Aunt Bitty picked up the phone and started talking about cookies and presents and how much Fluffy liked spending Christmas on the ranch. Will wasn’t able to add much about his mysterious guest, but everyone at the ranch assumed that Will had finally found a woman. A special woman. He’d said so himself, hadn’t he?

      The 318 on Monday. As Jared looked around the lobby he wished his younger brother had provided a better description of his guest. There had been something about a red jacket, but then Mom had taken the receiver from Bitty and asked Will if he preferred sage green or sea foam on the guest-room walls. Then Uncle Joe got on the kitchen extension and asked if the future houseguest played bridge.

      I’ll fill you in when I see you. Then Will’s cell phone broke up and the connection was lost seconds later. Jared would have asked why the woman was making a three-day train trip instead of flying to Great Falls, which was what Will would do tomorrow to get home for Christmas.

      He also would have asked how Will met her. And why he’d invited her to spend Christmas at the ranch, but Will was famous for inviting people to visit Graystone. His brother, always the adventurer, collected friends wherever he traveled. But he’d never invited one lone woman—one designated for special treatment—home until now.

      So the next afternoon, after trying three times to call his brother and getting only Will’s voice mail, Jared drove the hundred and sixty miles north to Havre, a good-size town just south of the Canadian border, to meet a stranger. A stranger his younger brother called “special.” He’d practically had to hogtie his mother to the kitchen table to keep her from making the trip, but he’d needed to take the truck and he didn’t think either woman would be comfortable riding for three hours in the back section of the king cab.

      “I’ll have dinner ready then,” Jenna Stone declared, with a sideways glance at Aunt Bitty, who was busy plugging her radio into a receptacle above the counter. “I wouldn’t have minded getting out of the house for a while, though.”

      “No,” he’d said, figuring the next suggestion would be for Jenn to meet the train by herself, and with the way the sky

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