LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I was checking to see if you are needing any help.”

      Unfortunately, the answer to that was an unequivocal yes but she couldn’t admit defeat yet. She could do this. She had planned everything carefully and much of the food was already prepped. Her sister-in-law and niece were coming over in a couple of hours to help her with last-minute things, so she should be all right.

      “I think I’ll be okay. Thanks for offering, though.”

      “You are bringing your children tonight, yes?”

      Oh, heavens, what a nightmare that would be. “No. Not this time, Viv. My niece, Erin, is coming out to the house to tend to them while Terri helps me serve your guests.”

      “I so love those little darlings of yours.”

      She smiled as she put away the groceries, the handset tucked into her shoulder. Viv was one of the most genuine people Jenna knew. She was enormously blessed to have such wonderful neighbors. After the tractor accident that critically injured Joe, all the neighbors along the Cold Creek had rallied around her. Viv’s husband Guillermo and the Daltons, who owned the biggest spread in the area, had all rushed to help her out.

      While she had been numbly running between the ranch and the trauma center in Idaho Falls for those awful weeks Joe was in a coma, they had stepped in to care for her children, to bring in the fall alfalfa crop, to round up the Wagon Wheel cattle from the summer range.

      She could never repay any of them.

      “They adore you, too,” she said now to Viv. “But I think your party will go a little more smoothly without my boys there to get into trouble.”

      “If you change your mind, you bring them. Christmas is for the children, no?”

      Those words continued to echo in her mind as she said goodbye to Viviana a few moments later and hung up, then turned her attention to Jolie who was yawning in her high chair ready for her nap.

      Her children certainly hadn’t enjoyed the best of Christmases the past two years, but she refused to let them down this year. After tonight, she intended to relax and spend every moment of the holidays enjoying her time with them.

      Perfect. It all had to be perfect. Was that such an unreasonable wish?

      Her children deserved it. They had suffered so much pain and loss. Their last happy Christmas seemed like forever ago.

      Joe had died the day after Christmas two years earlier, and they had known it was coming days earlier. No death of a man in his early thirties could be easy for his family to endure, but her husband’s had been particularly tough. He had lingered in a coma for two months after the tractor accident, fighting off complication after complication.

      Finally, just when she thought perhaps they had turned a corner and he was starting to improve, when she was certain his eyelids were fluttering in response to a squeeze of her hands or a particular tone of her voice, a virulent infection devastated his system. His battered body just couldn’t fight anymore.

      The next Christmas would have been hard enough for the boys, so close to the anniversary of their beloved father’s death, but they had been forced to spend Christmas with Jenna’s brother. Jolie, born five months after her father’s death, had picked up a respiratory illness and had been in pediatric intensive care through the holidays, consuming Jenna with worry all over again. Then Pat, Joe’s mother, suffered a severe stroke the week before Christmas, so Jenna had been running ragged between both of them.

      This year would be different. Everyone was relatively healthy, even if Pat did still struggle with rehabilitation in the assisted-living center in Idaho Falls. Jenna’s fledgling catering business was taking off and the sale of the Wagon Wheel had covered most of the huge pile of debt Joe had left behind.

      She refused to allow anything to mess up this Christmas. Not a blizzard, not a big catering job she felt ill-equipped to handle, not sliding her car into a ditch.

      Not even an arrogant neighbor with stunning blue eyes.

      “You know you don’t have to go to this shindig. I doubt anybody’s expectin’ you to. This was one of those, what do you call it, courtesy invites.”

      Carson made a face at his foreman, Neil Parker, as the two of them checked over his three pregnant mares, who were due to deliver in only a few months.

      So far all was going well. This particular foal’s sire was a champion cutting horse from the world-famous Dalton horse operation just up the road, and Carson had high hopes the foal would follow in his daddy’s magnificent footsteps.

      “I know that,” he answered Neil. “If the local stock growers’ association could have figured out a polite way not to invite me, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

      “I doubt it’s personal. You just represent change and a different way of lookin’ at things, something that worries the oldtimers around here. New West versus Old West.”

      Carson knew that. He knew his purchase of the vast acreage that used to be known as the Wagon Wheel had thrust him onto a hotly debated battleground. All across the West, old-guard ranchers were finding themselves saddled with land that was no longer profitable and practices that had become archaic and unwieldy.

      Many of their children weren’t interested in ranching and the lifestyle that came with it. At the same time, ranchers fought development and the idea of splitting the land they had poured their blood and sweat into tract subdivisions.

      As feed costs went up and real-estate values plummeted, many were caught in a no-win situation.

      He knew old-timers resented when new people moved in, especially those who had the capital to enact sweeping, costly changes in ranching practices in an effort to increase yield. It was even worse in his situation since he wasn’t a permanent resident of his ranch and only came here a couple of times a month for a few days at a time.

      He couldn’t avoid the snide comments in town when he came to Pine Gulch. And he knew Neil suffered worse, though his foreman was careful not to share those details with him.

      Neil and his wife Melina had been with Carson for a decade, first as caretakers of the central California ranch he purchased several years ago and then at the small Montana ranch he still owned.

      Carson loved ranching. He loved being out on his horses, loved the wildness and the raw beauty here, loved the risk and the rewards.

      It wasn’t some big secret why that might be. That year he spent on his grandparents’ ranch a few miles away from here had been the happiest, most secure of his life. He wasn’t trying to recapture that, only to replicate it somewhere else if he could. And though Raven’s Nest was only a small segment of his vast empire, this was where he found the most peace.

      He wanted to make it a success and he figured a little proactive public relations couldn’t hurt the situation in town. Life would be easier all the way around if Neil didn’t have to play politics with obstinate locals.

      “I’m not some Hollywood rancher, only looking for a status symbol. We’re making something out of Raven’s Nest and I need to get that point across. That’s the whole reason I’m going to Viviana Cruz’s party. You and I have been running Raven’s Nest for ten months now and people still won’t accept that we’re serious about what we’re doing here.”

      He thought of the coolness in Jenna Wheeler’s eyes when he had pulled her van out of the snow a few hours earlier and the surprise she had showed when he had done the neighborly thing and told her he would make sure her driveway was shoveled.

      He didn’t know why her negative opinion of him bugged him so much. Plenty of people hated his guts. It was a normal side effect of both his position and his personality. He hadn’t made McRaven Enterprises so successful by being weak and accommodating.

      Jenna probably figured she had reason to resent him. He was radically changing something her husband’s family had built over several

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