A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

She was pretty good at identifying a soft touch. They were the kind of people who came in handy in desperate situations. People who wanted to wrap you in a blanket, give you a piece of pie and say some encouraging words so that they could go on with their day feeling like they were decent human beings.

She had a feeling this man did not care whether or not he was a decent human being.

She recognized that in him, because it was the same thing in her.

You couldn’t care much about whether or not you were decent when you mostly just wanted to be alive.

“I just want to sleep here,” she said, holding her hand out. “That’s all.”

“You don’t have anywhere else to sleep?”

“Yeah, actually, I have a mansion up on the hill. But I like a little impromptu camping. Bonus points if it’s on someone else’s land, because it adds to the spirit of adventure. I love being woken up in the middle of the night by large, angry ranchers.”

“It’s not really the middle of the night. It’s almost five in the morning.”

She groaned. “Close enough to the middle of the night in my world.”

“This is usually about the time I get up every day.”

“Don’t brag to the less fortunate,” she said. “I’m liable to get jealous of such decadent living.”

“Are you a runaway?”

She laughed. “Right. Because somebody would care if I left.” He kept on staring at her. “I’m twenty-six.”

He nodded slowly, as if now he understood. “Running from someone?”

“Nope,” she said.

Not that she’d never run from someone, but she’d given up counting on men to take care of her. That only ended one way. It all bumped along nicely for a while, and then inevitably it exploded and she was left with less than she had before. Always.

It was why she’d been resolutely without a man for about three years.

“Then why are you sleeping out here?”

“I’m new to town,” she said, keeping her tone casual, as if they’d met on a bustling street in the bright light of day and not like this.

And she was new in town. That much was true.

“My truck broke down and it cost a crap load to fix.” And ultimately she’d had to let the thing go and give it up for dead, after giving up all the money she had to get this far. “While I was waiting for the prognosis, I was stranded for a few days longer than I anticipated. Had to stay in a hotel for some extra time.” And then she’d ended up hitchhiking into Gold Valley after her truck’s inglorious death on a stretch of lonely highway. “Anyway. I ran out of money. I’m hoping to get a job in town, but I haven’t managed it yet. Even when I do get a job I’m not going to get paid for a few weeks.”

“You couldn’t camp?”

“As much as I would love to sleep out under the stars beneath this threadbare blanket, that’s a hard pass. I mean, obviously I would have if I had to.”

“Homeless shelters?”

She snorted. “I’m not homeless.”

With a hard bump of her heart against her breastbone, it hit her that...she was lying. This cabin was the only place she had to sleep. She had nowhere to go back to. Nowhere she was heading to.

That was the definition of homeless, and she was it.

She never figured rock bottom would look like a damp wooden floor. But hell, it seemed to be.

She had managed to stay a few steps ahead of that since she had been turfed from the last foster home she’d been in eight years ago. But now... Of course, it was the move back home that had done it.

Home.

Gold Valley was home.

A home that she couldn’t remember, but it was the place her father was from, the place her mother had been born. The place she had been born. She had decided that it was time to come back. Time to try and... Find where she came from. She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to be stuck in this endless loop. Dead-end jobs, crappy apartments. Nothing but barely making ends meet forever.

She supposed that was life for some people. For a lot of people.

But she’d hit the end of it. She’d had her birth certificate in a folder with all her legal documents—all gifted to her by the great state of Oregon on her eighteenth birthday when she’d been turfed out into the real world—and it had simply been sitting there.

Her every connection printed on a black-and-white document, as flat and dead as the paper itself.

Annie Tate was listed as her mother. And under father, a name McKenna had never even heard before. Henry Dalon.

Searches for him had turned up nothing promising.

While working as a waitress, McKenna had ended up having a conversation with a customer about a website that allowed free searches for public records. And McKenna had gone searching. She’d started with her father’s name, and then switched tactics.

She’d searched her own, and discovered not the printed, digitized version of her birth certificate but a scanned version of the original. Where handwritten down in the bottom corner, and smudged, was a name that looked a lot more like Henry Dalton.

Apparently, she’d learned after calling the records office, misspellings on records were common enough. Especially when no one had requested the documents, or done any checking on them. Seeing as Annie Tate had surrendered her parenting rights when McKenna was two, it didn’t shock her that her mother had never done her due diligence making sure everything on McKenna’s birth certificate looked right.

From there, McKenna had printed off the certificate and folded it up in her backpack, a piece to the puzzle of her life she was actively trying to put together.

She’d started searching for him after that.

Annie Tate, with her common first and last name, was impossible to track down, and anyway, McKenna already knew she didn’t want to know her.

There were a few Henry Daltons, but one in particular that was in the right geographical location to be a likely candidate. Henry “Hank” Dalton.

He’d had been all over her searches. A famous rodeo rider with three sons. Three sons who were McKenna’s half brothers, most likely.

Caleb, Jacob and Gabe.

Brothers. Family.

In Gold Valley.

But she had to figure it all out. She had to get the scope of things. The lay of the land.

She watched as the man took his phone out of his pocket, and the screen lit up.

“Come with me,” he said.

Panic fluttered around in her breast like a caged bird. “Are you calling the police?”

“No,” he said, his thumb swiping over the screen a few times. “I’m taking you to my brother’s house.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s food there,” he said simply.

She scrambled to her feet, her stomach growling. She realized that she had only eaten a couple of times in the past three days. And trail mix and granola bars could only get you so far. They weren’t...food food.

“Why do you want to feed me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But you’re harmless.”

She huffed. “I’m not harmless.”

“Really?”

“I have a pocket knife. I can cut you up.”

“Right. Anyway. Harmless. And probably hungry.”

“And you care?” This offer of food and his lack of...calling the cops on her had all her defenses up. People weren’t just...nice.

It made her feel compelled to push. To push him away. To push him to get down to what his deal actually was.

She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust anyone.

But there was always some part of her...some small part that glowed bright sometimes and made her ache.

Hope.

Yeah. Well, for all the good hope had done her. She was filthy and cold and had no money. She’d do better to expect him to turn out to be a creep than a nice person who was actually offering to feed her for nothing.

He stared back at her, his features completely shadowed still. “No. Not really.”

It was the lack of niceness that made her hackles lower, just a bit.

There was something about that honesty that struck her. People were never honest. At least, they weren’t kind and honest. There were people who were cruel, who spent no small amount of time lecturing her about how her circumstances were her own fault.

And maybe they were.

Sure, she’d been sent out to live on her own at eighteen with a garbage bag full of her belongings, but there were plenty of people who didn’t have advantages in life who probably did better than she did.

But people like this... Who could openly admit they didn’t actually care, but offered help, anyway...

There were no people like this. She had no idea what kind of anomaly she was staring down right now.

“Do you want food?” he asked, sounding irritated and impatient now.

“Yes,” she said, scrambling to a standing position. She looked at her blanket, and her backpack.

“Grab those,” he said.

Right. Because of course he was willing to bait her out of the cabin with food, but it wasn’t like he was going to let her stay here. She felt pressure behind her eyes, but she knew she wouldn’t cry. She had quit doing that a long time ago. There was no point.

“Okay,” she said, taking hold of the blanket and her bag and holding them both close.

The man took a step forward, holding out his hand, and that was when her lantern caught his face.

He was...

He was beautiful.

His dark hair was a little bit shaggy, and he had a light beard that might be intentional, or might just be because he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His nose was straight, his lips firm looking, set into a flat line. His shoulders were broad, and so was his chest, his waist lean, the tight T-shirt suggesting that he was also...well, fully and completely built.

She hadn’t made any assumptions about his looks when he had first come in, mostly because he had shocked her, waking her from a dead sleep. And then... He had sounded a bit like a curmudgeon, so she had assumed that he was an older man. But now she thought he couldn’t be much older than thirty.

“Let me take those,” he said, taking the bag and blanket from her.

She started to protest, but he had taken them before she could get the words out. It made her feel naked. He had her things. Everything she owned in the entire world. Except the lantern. She bent down and picked it up, clutching it to her chest. She would hold that.

He didn’t offer to take it from her. He turned, without a word, and walked out of the cabin, clearly just expecting her to follow.

There was an offer of food, so of course she was.

She scrambled after him. It was still dark outside, and it was cold. She had a jacket, but it was in her bag, and currently Mr. Tall, Dark and Cranky was holding it. So she figured the best thing to do would be to follow along.

The place he led her to was a small cabin, but he didn’t go to the front door; instead, he went to an old truck. “We’re going to drive to my brother’s house. It’s on the property. But I don’t really want to walk.”

She didn’t, either. In fact, she had a feeling that he didn’t mind one way or another, but had sensed that maybe she didn’t. Knew that she was cold.

Right. He doesn’t care. Don’t go applying warm and fuzzy motives to him.

She climbed cautiously into his truck, closing the door behind her. “A gentle reminder,” she said when he started the engine. “I do have a knife.”

“Yeah,” he responded, starting the engine and putting the truck in Reverse. “Me, too.”

“Why do you have a knife?”

“For all I knew you had a gun.”

She sputtered. “If I had a gun and you had a knife it wouldn’t help you.”

“It’s just a good thing it didn’t get to that.”

“Well. See that it doesn’t.”

“I know,” he said, his tone dry. “You’ll cut me.”

They didn’t speak for the short drive down the bumpy, pothole-filled dirt road. McKenna folded her hands in her lap and stared down at her fingers. There was dirt under her nails.

You’re homeless. It’s been days since you’ve had a shower.

It was amazing how you could push all of those things to the side, but the minute you had to interact with another person—a beautiful person—it all came rushing back.

“Where are we going?” Suddenly, she was full of panic.

“To my brother’s house,” he repeated. He had said that already.

“And he’s going to be there?”

“Yes,” he responded.

“Oh,” she said, looking back out the window.

So, someone else was going to see her like this. She didn’t really care. Her entire life had been a series of inglorious situations. It was just that this was the worst.

She’d done a pretty good job of letting shame roll off for most of her life. She’d been the poor kid. Had never had cool clothes. Had never been able to have friends over. Had been shuffled around homes, some good, some bad. She’d built up some tough armor over the years.

But this was a new low, and apparently...apparently shame still existed inside of her.

They pulled up to the house and her heart sank into her stomach. She hadn’t fully realized where she was. She had hitchhiked to the edge of town, and she had fully intended on camping out in the woods. She had happened upon a collection of cabins on the edge of the woods, and then had circled around, and found a dilapidated, abandoned one deeper in. She had realized she was camping out in a place people stayed in for money, but she hadn’t realized people also lived there.

Or that it was quite so fancy.

Her companion got out of the truck and headed toward the broad front steps that led to the porch. She just sat there. She took a breath, and opened the door. There was no point being timid. No point feeling like crap. She knew what she was.

And that was: more than her current situation.

It didn’t matter what these people thought of her.

It mattered if they turned out to be psychotic killers, though. But she really did have a pocket knife.

And okay, she knew that wasn’t the deadliest of weapons. But she had sat outside a self-defense class one time and had heard the woman talking about how the element of surprise was generally on your side when you were a woman. It was about the only thing on your side, so you had to use it. They didn’t expect you to fight back.

McKenna Tate had been fighting back for her entire life. She wouldn’t stop now.

And she supposed that right there was the point of that hope inside her chest she often resented. It had brought her this far. Made her feel determined. It was what kept shame and hopelessness from taking over.

As long as she never let it get out of hand, it was what kept her going.

She walked slowly up the front steps and stood next to the man. She came up to the top of his shoulder. Just barely. He was so tall. And yeah, now that she was a little bit more awake, and it was a little bit lighter out, she could see... Definitely as beautiful as she had first thought. If not more so.

She turned her face back to the door in front of her.

Her new friend knocked, and they waited.

The man that answered the door was nearly as tall as the man at her side, and just as good-looking. Though in a different way. He had that easy manner about him, a charm that the other man did not have.

She didn’t trust charm.

“Hi,” she said. “I was told there would be breakfast.”

The new man looked at the other man, and then back at her. “Wyatt Dodge,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“McKenna Tate,” she responded, grasping it with her own.

Of all the ways she had envisioned being caught by the owners of the property, she hadn’t imagined this.

And then she realized that she still didn’t know the name of the man who had found her in the cabin. The beautiful one. The one who looked like he might not remember what a joke was, much less have a whole store of them like Wyatt Dodge probably did.

She looked at him, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t offer a name.

“Come on in,” Wyatt said, still eyeing his brother speculatively.

She took him up on his invitation.

The inside of the house was even more beautiful than the outside. Rustic, but incredibly comfortable. Cozy. She suddenly became aware of how cold her nose and cheeks had been when they began to warm up.

She looked to the left of the entryway and saw that there was a fire in a rock fireplace. She wanted to go sit in front of it. She wanted to press her face against it.

But then, she also smelled food. Bacon.

She’d had many a disagreement with the man upstairs over quite a few of the circumstances in her life, but right about now she was feeling much friendlier to him. She sent up a prayer of thanks.

If anything could surprise the divine, McKenna Tate being thankful might do it.

“My wife, Lindy, is in the kitchen,” Wyatt said.

“Not cooking,” a voice rang out from the next room. “Just waiting for the bacon to be done.”

He gestured that direction and McKenna followed the directive, walking into the beautiful kitchen, to see an equally beautiful blonde woman sitting at a small breakfast table. Her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her manner elegant even though she was wearing sweats.

“I’m cooking, technically,” Wyatt said. “It’s part of the agreement.”

“Agreement?” McKenna asked.

“Yes, I agreed to marry him and move from my winery to his ranch. But only if he cooked me breakfast at least four days a week. The other three days I get a pastry from the coffee place in town.”

McKenna’s stomach tightened. Jealousy. She was as familiar with that as she was with hunger, and right now she felt nearly overtaken by both.

Not because she wanted the man cooking the bacon, specifically. Just that it would be nice to have an arrangement like that in general. Someone who cared. Someone who would vow to cook bacon four days a week just so you would marry him.

She couldn’t imagine someone caring like that.

“What are you doing on my property, McKenna Tate?” Wyatt asked, turning toward the stove and getting bacon and some scrambled eggs out of a pan, putting them on a plate and setting them down on the table. She eyed them hungrily.

“Have a seat,” he said.

She hesitantly did as he said, sitting next to his lovely wife, and feeling every inch the bedraggled urchin that she was. “Eat.”

Her man said that.

Not that he was her man, just that he was the one that had woken her up, and she still didn’t know his name. And on principle, she wasn’t going to ask.

Still, she obeyed.

“Coffee?” Lindy asked.

“Yes, please,” she said, trying her best to eat slow, and feeling like she was going to end up failing the moment the salty, savory bacon touched her tongue. She was ravenous. She hadn’t let herself realize just how much.

“What were you doing?” Lindy asked, her voice soft.

“I just needed a place to sleep. I’m new to Gold Valley... I decided to move here,” she said. She wasn’t going to get into the whole thing about looking for her family. Not that she believed they were going to have some tearful reunion. She wasn’t that stupid. Life didn’t work that way.

Her mother, who had given birth to her, had walked away without a backward glance. A father who’d probably never even met her, maybe didn’t even know about her? Why would he want anything to do with her?

The very thought of it, of putting herself in front of him and risking a rejection, made her feel...

It didn’t matter. From what she had found out about the Daltons, they were well-off. Famous rodeo riders and owners of a massive plot of land just on the outskirts of town.

Surely they would be able to spare a little seed money to keep her off the streets. And they’d probably be happy to fling some money at her to get rid of her, anyway.

She didn’t need a family. She’d been just fine without one all this time.

What she needed was something a lot more practical than that. A shovel to dig herself out of the hole she was in.

Money would make for a decent shovel.

She cleared her throat. “I decided to move here, but I had kind of a series of less than fortunate happenings and I ran out of money before I could get a job. So, I didn’t have anywhere to stay.” She wouldn’t have jumped into the Gold Valley situation had she not lost the apartment she’d been in before in Portland. But the landlord had decided she wanted it for her adult son, and McKenna had been unceremoniously booted. Also, she hadn’t gotten her security deposit back. Which wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t like she had created a mildew stain in the bathroom. That was because the roof leaked.

“It was a desperate-times-desperate-measures kind of thing,” she said. “And... Thank you. For not calling the police. And for feeding me bacon. Which seems a little bit above and beyond, all things considered.”

“You don’t have a job yet?” Lindy asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

“What kind of jobs do you normally do?” Lindy asked.

“Aerospace engineering,” McKenna replied, taking another bite of crisp bacon. “But when I can’t find work in that field, waitressing is my fallback.”

“Sadly, we’re fresh out of aerospace engineering jobs,” Lindy said.

“Good,” McKenna said. “Because I was lying about that.”

“I had a feeling,” Lindy responded. “Not because I don’t think you could be an aerospace engineer, just because we’re nowhere near NASA.”

“I’ve done all kinds of things. I’ve been a waitress, hotel maid. You name the manual labor job that doesn’t require much lifting over fifty pounds and I’ve probably done it.”

“Basic cooking?” Lindy asked.

She shrugged. “Diner stuff.”

“Cleaning.”

“Like I said. Housekeeping.”

“I think we could find a job for you right here,” Lindy said.

McKenna frowned. “No offense. But... I’m a stranger who was caught sleeping illegally on your property. Why exactly would you want to give me a job?”

“Because sometimes life is hard and it isn’t fair,” Lindy said, her determined blue eyes meeting McKenna’s. “I’m well aware of that. And sometimes circumstances spin out of your control. It has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good person. So, you tell me, McKenna. Are you going to steal from us?”

McKenna lifted a shoulder. “Probably not.”

“Probably not,” Wyatt repeated.

“I don’t know. Am I gravely injured? Did a family member of mine come down with a terrible illness and the only way I can get back to them is to steal money from you?” It was moot. She didn’t have any family that knew her. Or that she knew. Just family she was looking for.

“I appreciate the honesty,” Lindy said dryly. “But barring extraordinary circumstances, are you going to steal from me?”

McKenna shook her head. She was a lot of things, and definitely a little bit opportunistic. But she wasn’t an out-and-out thief. “No.”

“Well, then, I don’t see why we can’t give you a job. We can always fire you if you’re terrible at it.” She looked over at her husband when she said that part.

“Fine with me,” Wyatt said. “We were going to have to hire someone else, anyway.”

She blinked. “I...”

“We also have a place for you to stay. One that isn’t that horrible cabin in the middle of the woods that doesn’t have anything but spiderwebs in it for warmth.”

“Oh... You can’t do that.”

“Sure we can,” Lindy said. “We have a bunch of extra room.”

Throughout the entire exchange, her man stood there mute. A solid, silent presence that fairly radiated with disapproval.

“It’s fine with me,” Wyatt said. “But I don’t have time to train anyone right now.”

He shot a meaningful look over at her man. The look that he got back was not friendly at all.

“I’m going to go get dressed,” Wyatt said.