Her Mistletoe Cowboy

So there really was a ranch out here. Maybe this was actually all on the level after all, which meant that Garrett White Eagle actually was Garrett White Eagle, just as he claimed to be.

Kim’s relief at spotting the ranch—civilization at last—was rather short-lived when she took a closer look at the actual structure she was driving toward.

Garrett turned around just then, as he had been doing every couple of minutes to make sure that she was still following him.

“Something wrong?” Garrett asked, pulling up on Wicked’s reins.

Even though he was leading the way and going so slowly he was afraid Wicked would fall asleep in midstep, the woman didn’t exactly fill him with confidence about her navigational skills.

He saw the stunned expression on Kim’s face. Her mouth had all but dropped open.

Now what?

When her eyes shifted toward him, he saw the confusion in them.

“Where’s the main house?” she asked, then said, “That’s the cook’s quarters, right?”

Garrett inclined his head, as if in agreement. “Uh-huh. The cook’s quarters, the main ranch hand’s quarters, Jackson’s quarters—along with his wife, Debi—and, oh yes, my quarters, too.”

“All of you live there?” she asked, as if the concept hadn’t quite sunk in.

“Uh-huh.” His eyes never left her face.

Kim’s eyes widened as her driving definitely slowed down to almost a crawl. It was as if her little car had gone on automatic pilot and was now driving itself.

She chewed on her lower lip before asking, “That’s the main house?” If she was trying to hide the appalled note in her voice, she was failing.

He had to admit, after having talked to her for a couple of minutes, her reaction didn’t come as much of a surprise.

Garrett laughed. “Let me guess, you were expecting South Fork.”

Her eyebrows knitted together, as she struggled to hide her disappointment over the building she saw. “South Fork?” she echoed. “What’s that?”

“Something obviously before your time,” he told her. Then, not wanting to seem old in her eyes, he added, “Before mine, too. Except that I like watching old, classic TV programs. To answer your question, South Fork was this big, sprawling fictional ranch just outside of Dallas that belonged to this really rich family whose members were always arguing and at each other’s throats all the time. But I’ve got to admit, the ranch house they had was a thing of beauty,” he told her. “This might not be South Fork,” he allowed, “but it’s all ours.”

There was no missing the pride in his voice.

To each his own, Kim thought, stifling the urge to shrug at his response. If that ranch house up ahead had been hers, she would have done whatever she needed to in order to make it look better in a hurry—and then she would have sold it as fast as she could before the buyer could think twice about the wisdom of getting stuck with a rundown house and a ranch that wasn’t producing much of anything except work.

As if reading her mind, Garrett leaned down from his horse and promised, “It’ll grow on you.”

She wasn’t going to be here long enough for that to happen, but for now, she kept that fact to herself.

Before she’d left, she had told Stan that she would write the best article she could on the Healing Ranch, but after seeing the place, she estimated it shouldn’t take her more than a day to whip up her article. Two if she deliberately stalled and didn’t get started for the first day.

And since she wanted to get out of Prairie Gulch as fast as she could, she would get started as fast as she could.

Kim prided herself on knowing how to put someone at ease so that they would confide in her.

Looking at the house as she drew closer, she promised herself to “make nice” with the people out here, get her story—or rather Stan’s story since he was the one who was so keen on it, not her—and then get back home. If she were particularly diligent, she’d be back in time to hand Stan her copy and then go shopping at Barneys, the New York–based department store that had found a second home in San Francisco and had become one of her treasured stomping grounds of choice.

With that in mind, Kim turned up her smile several watts and told her guide in the sweetest voice possible, “I think it’s charming.”

Garrett laughed, not taken in for a second, although he had to admit she was the prettiest liar he’d ever had to deal with.

“No, you don’t,” he contradicted. “But that’s okay, it’s not supposed to be ‘charming.’ It’s supposed to be functional. And it is. This is where the ‘bad’ boys get sent in order to be turned into human beings, something that my brother, Jackson, does, time and again, very, very well.”

“And you? What do you do?” she asked. She’d stopped driving for a moment and was taking in the ranch in its entirety.

Did it get any less run-down from close up? She certainly hoped so. She was planning on taking a few photographs to go with her article and right now, she didn’t see a good angle to use for her shots of the ranch house’s exterior.

“Anything I have to,” Garrett said in response, his voice dropping by an octave or so. Enough to get her attention and have her wondering things that wouldn’t be finding their way into the article.

“Define ‘anything,’” she requested in a mildly intrigued voice.

“Just what it sounds like,” he replied, looking at her and punctuating his answer with a wink that seemed to flutter directly down into her stomach, causing just the slightest mini–tidal wave to take place there.

Kim paused to take in a discreet breath before continuing. The breath was to help steady her unexpected reaction to this dusty cowboy who fancied himself a ladies’ man.

“I’ll pin you down for details later,” she told him. “Right now, I’d like to meet your brother before I go into town to see about my hotel reservation.” She glanced at her watch before continuing to drive toward the ranch house. “I’m already running late,” she realized. “How long will they hold a room at the hotel?”

Garrett had to struggle to keep the laugh from surfacing. The hotel wasn’t exactly beating off patrons with a stick.

“As long as it takes,” he finally replied. The corners of his mouth curved despite his best efforts to keep a straight, if not dour face.

She wondered if everyone in this quaint little dust bowl of a town talked in circles. Just what was he telling her about her hotel room? “I don’t think I understand.”

“We don’t exactly have a lot of tourists coming through Forever,” he told her. “There’s no danger of losing your room to someone else, not unless a twister suddenly comes through, taking down every building except for the hotel. That happens, then you might have to be concerned about losing your room to someone else if they get there first. But until then, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You’re in the driver’s seat, trust me.”

That didn’t make any sense to her. “If that’s the case, how does the hotel stay in business?”

“Good question,” he acknowledged. Kim struggled not to feel resentful, as if she was being patronized. “The hotel belongs to this construction company that sees it as getting some sort of a toehold in the region,” he went on to explain. “The owner’s not in it for the money,” he confided. “The way matters had turned out, the general contractor wound up owning the building—and she’d married Finn Murphy, so her stake in building up the town has definitely gone up.”

“That doesn’t seem possible,” Kim told him, certain that Garrett was making this all up, trying to pull the wool over the outsider’s eyes with this tall tale. Who wasn’t in it for the money? If not that, then they were in it for the prestige, the way her parents were. And this was definitely not a place someone came in order to build up their reputation.

Just how naive did this man think she was?

Did she come across as naive? Kim caught herself suddenly wondering.

That was not the image she was going for. Smart, sassy, capable, those were the buzz words she was after, not naive.

“A lot of things in Forever and the places around it don’t really seem possible,” Garrett informed her. “Forever isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill kind of place.”

“Oh, God, just like Brigadoon,” Kim murmured under her breath before she could think better of it and stop herself.

Garrett had overheard her despite the fact that she had meant the comment only for herself, but the reference went right over his head.

“Like what?” he asked, looking at her quizzically.

A strapping he-man like Garrett White Eagle undoubtedly thought all musicals were products of stupid, self-involved minds. She wasn’t about to give him ammunition to use against her. This job was going to be hard enough as it was. She wanted to be taken seriously—even by this cowboy.

“Never mind,” Kim said dismissively. “It’s not a real place, anyway.”

Garrett had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but he felt it wasn’t really polite to tell her that. So, at least for now, he just let Kim’s remark slide.

“Well, Forever’s real, all right,” he assured her. “It’s just different.”

She took a deep breath, more than a little relieved to be able to distance herself from the subject. “I’m beginning to see that,” she replied.

She drove the rest of the short distance to the ranch house and got out of her car. Garrett dismounted almost parallel to her vehicle and let the palomino’s reins drop to the ground in front of him.

Walking away from Wicked, he stepped onto the front porch.

Kim looked at his horse uncertainly. She fully expected to be trampled any second if the horse got it into his head that she was standing in his way, blocking his access to something.

“Aren’t you going to tie him up?” she asked, shifting closer to Garrett.

She was banking on him protecting her if the horse suddenly went rogue—or whatever it was called when horses charged at people for no reason.

“Wicked’s not into bondage,” Garrett told her with a grin.

The cowboy was making fun of her because she was clearly out of her element, she thought. Since she needed his help—at least for the moment—she did her best not to act offended.

Instead, she told herself to try harder to get on this cowboy’s good side. The faster she got this story down, the faster she’d be back in San Francisco, mistress of her own fate—with her rent paid.

“No, I mean won’t your horse take off if you don’t tie his reins to something?” she pointed out.

“Not unless you plan to scare him,” Garrett said with a laugh. And then he answered her question more seriously. “Wicked’s trained to stay wherever I put down his reins. He knows not to run off,” he told her. “That comes in handy when we’re out on the range and there’s nothing to tie him to.”

Kim glanced from the horse to his rider. She wouldn’t have known how to begin to train an animal for something like that—which was why, among other reasons, she’d never gotten a pet.

“That’s pretty clever,” she said honestly.

“Wicked’s pretty clever,” Garrett corrected, giving the animal he had trained the credit he felt the stallion deserved.

While he regarded animals to be smarter than a lot of people realized, he was aware that, like people, some animals were smarter than others. In his estimation, Wicked was exceedingly smart.

“Be right back,” Garrett told her, going inside the house.

“Okay,” Kim said cheerfully. The man was modest. Getting on his good side with flattery was going to be harder than she thought, but she was determined to do it. If she could get him to open up, she was confident that all the details she needed for this article would just come pouring out of him and the story would wind up writing itself.

Twenty-four hours and she was going to be out of here, she promised herself.

Thirty-six at the most.

Life with two overachieving parents and two overachieving sisters had taught her to hedge her bets—up to a point. Although, from what she could see, there wasn’t anything to write about here that could possibly keep her for even as long as a whole day, could it? she wondered. The brothers had a ranch, they worked with so-called troubled kids and they had some horses around. End of story. The challenge would be to flesh all that out to even a minimum length of words.

Kim frowned to herself. She doubted that anyone would want to read what she’d just outlined in her head. There had to be some kind of an angle she could use to at least make this article somewhat interesting instead of the snooze-fest it was shaping up to be.

“Jackson’s not here,” Garrett told her as he came out of the house a couple of minutes after he’d gone in. “He’s probably at the corral, still working with the boys.”

“Okay.” Turning around on her heel, she left the porch and headed toward her vehicle again.

Instead of following her, Garrett remained where he was—on the porch—and watched her. When he saw her opening the door on the driver’s side, he asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting into the car.”

“Why?”

Maybe she’d misjudged the man’s mental acuity. He certainly hadn’t struck her as being slow, but what other explanation could there be for his not understanding what she was telling him?

“So I can drive to the corral.” He wasn’t picking up his horse’s reins. Why? “You are going to lead the way on your horse, right?”

Instead of taking Wicked’s reins, he came around to her side of the vehicle.

“You don’t need the car,” he told her, shutting the door for her. “We’ll walk.”

“Walk?” Kim echoed in surprise, as if she was unable to fully grasp the concept.

“Walk,” he repeated gently, taking her hand in his and fully intending to coax her along if he had to. “It’s what people do when they put one foot in front of the other.” He grinned. “You’d be amazed at how much ground you can cover that way.”

Kim was hardly listening to him. Instead, she looked around the immediate surrounding area. She didn’t see anything beside the ranch house.

“Just how far away is the corral?” she asked.

Amusement highlighted his eyes, but he managed to keep a straight face as he replied, “Close enough not to have to take a canteen with us.”

The straight face didn’t fool her for a second. This time, she called him on it. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he told her innocently, then added, “I might, however, be teasing you a little.” In the next breath, he apologized. “Sorry, I don’t get to have much fun. Working with Jackson and a bunch of boys can get pretty serious at times and I don’t get into town much.”

She sincerely doubted that. She might not know much about ranches and towns in the middle of nowhere, but she felt she was pretty good when it came to judging people, and Garrett White Eagle did not strike her as a man who was resigned to living some sort of a monastic life. He looked, instead, like a man who knew how to have a good time.

He also struck her as someone who knew how to read people and work an angle.

This ranch, it suddenly occurred to her now that she wasn’t distracted, cursing at defunct Wi-Fi signals and guidance systems that refused to guide, could be a perfect source of income. Parents were known to become desperate when it came to trying to save an offspring who was on the road to self-destruction. One that would bring them everlasting shame, not to mention huge lawyer fees and who knew what all else if those kids really got going. And then one day, they hear about this supposedly altruistic place that promises to heal their wayward liability, turn him into a pillar of society for what they were probably told would be a “reasonable” sum of money.

Who wouldn’t be sucked into taking a chance on that? Especially when rehabs were notorious for their rate of turning out repeat violators.

An article like that could almost write itself, she thought as she all but trotted next to Garrett, doing her best to keep up.

But why bother when Garrett could practically write it for her? Or, at the very least, give her the lead she wanted to go with.

“Just how much can you and your brother pad the bills for these boys without arousing the parents’ suspicions?” she asked, almost sounding breathless as the question came out of her mouth.

Garrett stopped dead in his tracks just shy of the corral. Had he just heard what he thought he just heard? Because, if he had, the last thing he needed or wanted was for Jackson to get wind of this writer’s current mind-set.

He needed to change her mind, fast—or, barring that, he needed to send her on her way.

Also fast.

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