A Stone Creek Christmas. Linda Lael Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ with you and Butterpie?”

      A smile tugged at one corner of Tanner’s mouth. “Stone Creek,” he said. “If there are any stoners around here, I haven’t made their acquaintance yet.”

      Not that he’d really made anybody’s acquaintance. He hadn’t been in town more than a few days. He knew the real estate agent who’d sold him Starcross, and Brad O’Ballivan, because he’d built a palace for him once, outside Nashville, which was how he’d gotten talked into the animal-shelter contract.

      Brad O’Ballivan. He’d thought the hotshot country-and-western music star would never settle down. Now he was over-the-top in love with his bride, Meg, and wanted all his friends married off, too. He probably figured if he could fall that hard for a woman out here in Noplace, U.S.A., Tanner might, too.

      “Dad, please,” Sophie said, sniffling now. Somehow his daughter’s brave attempt to suck it up got to Tanner even more than the crying had. “Get me out of here. If I can’t come to Stone Creek, maybe I could stay with Aunt Tessa again, like I did last summer…”

      Tanner took off his hat, moved along the breezeway to the barn doorway, shut off the lights. “You know your aunt is going through a rough time right now,” he said quietly. A rough time? Tessa and her no-account husband, Paul Barker, were getting a divorce. Among other things, Barker had gotten another woman pregnant—a real blow to Tess, who’d wanted a child ever since she’d hit puberty—and now she was fighting to hold on to her home. She’d bought that horse farm with her own money, having been a successful TV actress in her teens, and poured everything she had into it—including the contents of her investment portfolio. Against Tanner’s advice, she hadn’t insisted on a prenup.

      We’re in love, she’d told him, starry-eyed with happiness.

      Paul Barker hadn’t had the proverbial pot to piss in, of course. And within a month of the wedding he’d been a signer on every account Tess had. As the marriage deteriorated, so did Tess’s wealth.

      Cold rage jangled along Tanner’s nerves, followed the fault line in his soul. At Kat’s suggestion, he’d set up a special trust fund for Tess, way back, and it was a damn good thing he had. To this day, she didn’t know the money existed—he and Kat hadn’t wanted Barker to tap in to it—and when she did find out, her fierce Quinn pride would probably force her to refuse it.

      At least if she lost the horse farm to Barker and his dream team of lawyers—more like nightmare team—she’d have the means to start over. The question was, would she have the heart to make a new beginning?

      “Dad?” Sophie asked. “Are you still there?”

      “I’m here,” Tanner said, looking around at the nightshrouded landscape surrounding him. There must have been a foot of snow on the ground already, with more coming down. Hell, November wasn’t even over yet.

      “Couldn’t I at least come home for Christmas?”

      “Soph, we don’t have a home, remember?”

      She was sniffling again. “Sure we do,” she said very softly. “Home is where you and Butterpie are.”

      Tanner’s eyes stung all of a sudden. He told himself it was the bitterly cold weather. When he’d finally agreed to take the job, he’d thought, Arizona. Cacti. Sweeping desert vistas. Eighty-degree winters.

      But Stone Creek was in northern Arizona, near Flagstaff, a place of timber and red rock—and the occasional blizzard.

      It wasn’t like him to overlook that kind of geographical detail, but he had. He’d signed on the dotted line because the money was good and because Brad was a good friend.

      “How about if I come back there? We’ll spend Christmas in New York—skate at Rockefeller Center, see the Rockettes—”

      Sophie loved New York. She planned to attend college there, and then medical school, and eventually set up a practice as a neurosurgeon. No small-time goals for his kid, but then, the doctor gene had come from Kat, not him. Kat. As beautiful as a model and as smart as they come, she’d been a surgeon, specializing in pediatric cardiology. She’d given all that up, swearing it was only temporary, to have Sophie. To travel the world with her footloose husband…

      “But then I wouldn’t get to see Butterpie,” Sophie protested. A raw giggle escaped her. “I don’t think they’d let her stay at the Waldorf with us, even if we paid a pet deposit.”

      Tanner pictured the pony nibbling on the ubiquitous mongo flower arrangement in the hotel’s sedate lobby, with its Cole Porter piano, dropping a few road apples on the venerable old carpets. And he grinned. “Probably not.”

      “Don’t you want me with you, Dad?” Sophie spoke in a small voice. “Is that it? My friend Cleta says her mom won’t let her come home for Christmas because she’s got a new boyfriend and she doesn’t want a kid throwing a wet blanket on the action.”

      Cleta. Who named a poor, defenseless kid Cleta?

      And what kind of person put “action” before their own child, especially at Christmas?

      Tanner closed his eyes, walking toward the dark house he didn’t know his way around in yet, since he’d spent the first couple of nights at Brad’s, waiting for the power to be turned on and the phones hooked up. Guilt stabbed through his middle. “I love you more than anything or anybody else in the world,” he said gruffly, and he meant it. Practically everything he did was geared to provide for Sophie, to protect her from the nameless, faceless forces who hated him. “Trust me, there’s no action going on around here.”

      “I’m going to run away, then,” she said resolutely.

      “Good luck,” Tanner replied after sucking in a deep breath. “That school is hermetically sealed, kiddo. You know that as well as I do.”

      “What are you so afraid of?”

      Losing you. The kid had no way of knowing how big, and how dangerous, the world was. She’d been just seven years old when Kat was killed, and barely remembered the long flight home from northern Africa, private bodyguards occupying the seats around them, the sealed coffin, the media blitz.

      “U.S. Contractor Targeted by Insurgent Group,” one headline had read. “Wife of American Businessman Killed in Possible Revenge Shooting.”

      “I’m not afraid of anything,” Tanner lied.

      “It’s because of what happened to Mom,” Sophie insisted. “That’s what Aunt Tessa says.”

      “Aunt Tessa ought to mind her own business.”

      “If you don’t come and get me, I’m breaking out of here. And there’s no telling where I’ll go.”

      Tanner had reached the old-fashioned wraparound porch. The place had a certain charm, though it needed a lot of fixing up. He could picture Sophie there all too easily, running back and forth to the barn, riding a yellow bus to school, wearing jeans instead of uniforms. Tacking up posters on her bedroom walls and holding sleepovers with ordinary friends instead of junior celebrities and other mini-jet-setters.

      “Don’t try it, Soph,” he said, fumbling with the knob, shouldering open the heavy СКАЧАТЬ