The Rancher's Christmas Song. RaeAnne Thayne

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      In the half hour since they arrived at the community center with their father, they had spilled a water pitcher, knocked down a life-size cardboard Santa and broken three ornaments on the big Christmas tree in the corner.

      Now they were racing around on the stage where tonight’s featured act was set to perform within the next half hour.

      She would have to do something. As organizer and general show-runner of this fund-raising event for the school’s underfinanced music program, it was her responsibility to make sure everyone had a good time. People’s wallets tended to open a little wider when they were happy, comfortable and well fed. A gang of half-pint miscreants had the potential to ruin the evening for everyone.

      She had tried to talk to them. As usual, the twins had offered her their angelic, gap-toothed smiles and had promised to behave, then moments later she saw them converge with four other boys to start playing this impromptu game of tag on the stage.

      In order to tame these particular wild beasts, she was going to have to talk to someone in authority. She gave a last-ditch, desperate look around. As she had suspected, neither their uncle nor their great uncle was in sight. That left only one person who might have any chance of corralling these two little dynamos.

      Their father.

      Ella’s stomach quivered. She did not enjoy talking to Beck McKinley and avoided it as much as possible.

      The man made her so ridiculously nervous. He always treated her with careful politeness, but she could never read the expression on his features. Every time she spoke with him—which was more often than she liked, considering his ranch was next door to her father’s—she always felt like she came out of the encounter sounding like a babbling fool.

      Okay, yes. She was attracted to him, and had been since she moved back to Pine Gulch. What woman wouldn’t be? Big, tough, gorgeous, with a slow smile that could charm even the most hardened heart.

      She didn’t want to be so drawn to him, especially when he hadn’t once shown a glimmer of interest in return. He made her feel like she was an awkward teenager back in private school in Boston, holding up the wall at her first coed dance.

      She wasn’t. She was a twenty-seven-year-old professional in charge of generating funds for a cause she cared about. Sexy or not, Beck had to corral his sons before they ruined the entire evening.

      Time to just suck it up and take care of business. She was a grown-up and could handle talking to anyone, even big, tough, stern-faced ranchers who made her feel like she didn’t belong in Pine Gulch.

      It wasn’t hard to find Beck McKinley. He towered about four inches taller than the crowd of ranchers he stood among.

      She sucked in a steadying breath and made her way toward the group, trying to figure out a polite way to tell him his sons were causing trouble again.

      She wasn’t completely surprised to find her father was part of the group around Beck. They were not only copresidents of the local cattle growers association this year, but her father also idolized the man. As far as Curt Baker was concerned, Beck McKinley was all three wise men rolled into one. Her father still relied heavily on Beck for help—more so in the last few years, as his Parkinson’s disease grew more pronounced and his limitations more frustrating.

      At least her father was sitting down, leaning slightly forward with his trembling hands crossed in front of him atop the cane she had insisted he bring.

      He barely looked at her, too engrossed in the conversation about cattle prices and feed shortages.

      She waited until the conversation lagged before stepping into the group. She was unwilling to call out the rancher over his troublemaking twins in front of all the others.

      “Beckett. May I have a brief word?”

      His eyebrows rose and he blinked in surprise a few times. “Sure. Excuse me, gentlemen.”

      Aware of curious gazes following them, Ella led Beck a short distance from his peers.

      “Is there a problem?” he asked.

      She pointed toward the pack of wild boys on the stage, who were chasing each other between the curtains. “Your sons are at it again.”

      His gaze followed her gesture and he grimaced. “I see half a dozen boys up there. Last I checked, only two of those are mine.”

      “Colter and Trevor are the ringleaders. You know they are. They’re always the ones who come up with the mischief and convince the others to go along.”

      “They’re natural leaders. Are you suggesting I try to put the brakes on that?”

      His boys were adorable, she had to admit, but they were the bane of her existence as the music teacher at Pine Gulch Elementary School. They couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time and were constantly talking to each other as well as the rest of the students in their class.

      “You could try to channel it into more positive ways.”

      This wasn’t the first time she had made this suggestion to him and she was fairly certain she wasn’t the only educator to have done so. Trevor and Colter had been causing problems at Pine Gulch Elementary School since kindergarten.

      “They’re boys. They’ve got energy. It comes with the package.”

      She completely agreed. That was one of the reasons she incorporated movement in her music lessons with all of her students this age. All children—but especially boys, she had noticed—couldn’t sit still for long hours at a time and it was cruel to expect it of them.

      She was a trained educator and understood that, but she also expected that excess energy to be contained when necessary and redirected into proper behavior.

      “Our performers will be taking the stage soon. Please, can you do something with the boys? I can just picture them accidentally ripping down the curtains or messing with the lights before we can even begin.”

      Beck glanced at his boys, then back down at her. His strong jaw tightened, and in his eyes, she saw a flash of something she couldn’t read.

      She didn’t need to interpret it. She was fairly certain she knew what he thought of her. Like her father, Beck thought she was a soft, useless city girl.

      Both of them were wrong about her, but nothing she did seemed to convince them otherwise. As far as her father was concerned, she belonged in Boston or New York, where she could attend the symphony, the ballet, art gallery openings.

      Since the moment she’d arrived here with her suitcases a little more than a year ago, Curt had been trying relentlessly to convince her to go back to Boston with her mother and stepfather and the cultured life they had.

      Beck seemed to share her father’s views. He never seemed to want to give her the time of day and always seemed in a big hurry to escape her presence.

      Whatever his true opinion, he always treated her with stiff courtesy. She would give him that. Beck McKinley was never rude to anybody—probably one of the reasons all the other ranchers seemed to cluster around the man in public. Everybody seemed to respect his opinion and want to know what he had to say about things.

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