The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ with him feeling he was a cross between Simon Legree and Lord Voldemort?

      He needed to have his people make her another offer for this land and the house, he decided. As far as he was concerned, the only way to solve their particular quandary would be for her to sell him this section and move her little family somewhere she could be someone else’s problem.

      She closed the door behind Carson McRaven, wondering how it was possible for a man to be so very physically attractive—with that dark, wavy hair and eyes of such a deep blue she couldn’t help staring every time she saw them—yet have all the personality appeal of a wolverine with a sore snout.

      The sale of the ranch had mostly been carried out through third parties. Jenna had known he was some kind of a Bay Area financial wizard and she had met him briefly when he had come to inspect the Wagon Wheel, as it all used to be called. Sure, he had been brisk and businesslike. But she had admired his plans to experiment with more environmentally sound ranching practices and he had seemed decent enough in that short meeting.

      Of course, that was before her boys apparently decided to make it their personal mission to be as mischievous as possible—and to do it on Carson McRaven’s property.

      She couldn’t blame him for being frustrated. She was at her wit’s end trying to keep them on their side of the property line. But she resented his unspoken implication that her boys were feral banshees allowed to run wild through the mountains.

      “Mom, do I still have to do chores?” Kip asked in a plaintive kind of voice. “Hayden says I do.”

      “I think this once, maybe Hayden can take out the garbage for you, if we ask him nicely.”

      “My head still hurts.”

      She pulled him toward her and gave him another kiss, just for good measure. “I don’t think it’s broken. Bruised a little, maybe, but you’ve got a pretty tough nut.”

      “It was scary when I fell.”

      “You shouldn’t have been up on Mr. McRaven’s fence, right? I don’t want you boys up there again. Next time you might hurt yourself even worse. What if you fell inside the pasture when one of those bulls of his were close by?”

      “But I’m really good at it. I like being good at something. Hayden’s good at riding the ponies and Drew is good at math and stuff. But I can’t do anything.”

      “You’re only six years old, bud. You’ll figure out what you’re good at soon enough.”

      “Mom!” Hayden called out. “Can we eat these tart thingies in here?”

      “No,” she answered as she picked up Jolie and headed back toward the kitchen. “They’re for the party tomorrow.”

      “Everything you make is for some party or a reception or something stupid like that. Why can’t we eat any of it?” Hayden complained.

      “You can have another snickerdoodle after you feed the horses. I made plenty of those.”

      “I wanted a tart,” her oldest muttered.

      Naturally. If she had told him the snickerdoodles were offlimits, that would have been the only thing he wanted. She loved him dearly but this sudden contrariness of his sometimes drove her crazy. Hayden was only ten and she already felt like she was battling all the teen stuff her friends had warned her to expect.

      Maybe there was a lesson in that for her, she thought after she had shooed Hayden and Drew out the door to take care of their chores in the barn and returned to preparing for her last holiday party of the season.

      Carson McRaven was definitely off-limits to her. Beyond the fact that she disliked him personally, he was a multimillionaire tech investor with a reputation for finding products the world didn’t realize it couldn’t do without, while she was an overtired widow with a struggling catering business and more obligations than she could begin to handle.

      She wasn’t genuinely interested in any man. In the first place, when on earth would she have the time for one? Between helping the boys with homework, taking care of Jolie, the upkeep on their remaining twenty acres, taking care of her mother-in-law and starting up a struggling catering business, she had nothing left.

      In the second, her heart still ached for Joe and probably always would. After two years alone, she still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes and turned over, trying to snuggle into his warmth, only to find a cold void where he used to be. Just like the one inside her heart.

      She pushed away the echo of pain out of long practice as she rolled more cookie-dough balls in the cinnamon sugar mix, then set them on the cookie sheet.

      Yes, every time she saw Carson McRaven, her heart seemed to race a bit faster and her stomach trembled. She didn’t like her reaction but it was a little easier to comprehend when she told herself it was only because he represented the unattainable.

      She almost believed it, too.

       Chapter Two

      She was impossibly stuck.

      Jenna revved the engine one more time and tried to rock her van out of the deep snowbank just outside the turnoff for the Wagon Wheel. Carson McRaven might call it Raven’s Nest now but to her this would always be the Wagon Wheel, named after three generations of Wheelers who had worked this corner of eastern Idaho in the western shadow of the Grand Tetons.

      She glared at the clock on her dashboard and then at the snow still falling hard outside the van windows. Of all the miserable, rotten, lousy times to be stuck. She had a van full of food and an extremely short window of time in which to prepare it.

      She thought she had everything so carefully orchestrated in order to have all the last-minute details ready for the party she was catering that evening. The moment the boys climbed onto the school bus, she had loaded Jolie into her van and driven to Idaho Falls, where the grocery selection was more extensive—and fresher—than anything she could find here in Pine Gulch.

      She had budgeted a little over two hours, figuring that would give her time to drive there, shop and then drive home.

      Naturally, it started snowing the minute she left Idaho Falls and hadn’t let up the entire forty-five-minute drive since then. At least four inches had fallen, laying a slick layer of white over everything.

      As frustrating as she found the snow to drive in, it did set the perfect scene for Christmas. The evergreen trees on the mountainside looked as if they had been drizzled with Royal Icing and Cold Creek matched its name by burbling through patches of ice.

      She only wished she had time to enjoy it all. Then again, if she had taken a few extra minutes to slow down and pay attention to her driving instead of her extensive to-do list, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. Instead, she had been driving just a hair too fast when she headed over the bridge just before the driveway split, one route going toward Carson McRaven’s new, huge log house and the other heading toward home.

      Just as she made the turn, her van tires slid and she hadn’t been able to pull out of the skid in time before landing in the drift.

      She knew better than this. That was the most aggravating thing about the whole situation. She had been driving these Idaho winter roads since she was fourteen years old. She СКАЧАТЬ