Lone Star Christmas

The Cowboy’s Christmas Reunion

A Lone Star Legacy romance

Determined to restore the historic buildings in Clear Water, Texas, Jackie Bergmann needs permission from the property’s new owner—her ex-boyfriend. And though Max Delgado agrees to give her access, he has one request: that she help him care for his orphaned brothers. But when she starts to fall for Max again, can she convince him not to sell his family’s ranch...and stay home for Christmas and forever?

A seventh-generation Texan, JOLENE NAVARRO fills her life with family, faith and life’s beautiful messiness. She knows that as much as the world changes, people stay the same: vow-keepers and heartbreakers. Jolene married a vow-keeper who shows her holding hands never gets old. When not writing, Jolene teaches art to inner-city teens and hangs out with her own four almost-grown kids. Find Jolene on Facebook or her blog, jolenenavarrowriter.com.

Also By Jolene Navarro

Lone Star Legacy

Texas Daddy

The Texan’s Twins

Lone Star Christmas

Lone Star Holiday

Lone Star Hero

A Texas Christmas Wish

The Soldier’s Surprise Family

Love Inspired Historical

Lone Star Bride

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Lone Star Christmas

Jolene Navarro

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08640-0

LONE STAR CHRISTMAS

© 2018 Jolene Navarro

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

“Why am I here?”

“Every small town needs a good-looking cowboy.” Jackie grinned. “Plus, you’re famous to boot. I’m sure the tourists would love to meet a real bull rider.”

Max’s jaw tightened. “Yeah, that was my father’s thought, too.” The man had ignored him until he started making a name in the PBR circuit. All of a sudden, Max was good for business.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m going. Tomas needs to rest, and we still have a bunch of stuff to do at the ranch.” He turned to leave.

“Max.” She caught up with him before he made it outside. “I was just teasing. I didn’t mean to upset you. Most people don’t mind being called good-looking.”

He saw concern in her eyes. Riding bulls was so much easier than dealing with life.

He feared she saw the weakness in him.

The truth of who he was.

Dear Reader,

Life can take us to places we never planned or imagined. And at times we are unable to get what we think we want, but God has us. He is always there, waiting to heal all hurts.

Jackie and Max’s story is a romance, but it is also about relationships with parents, sisters and brothers. Family helps shape who we are—the good, the bad and the painful.

And sometimes the hardest part in life is accepting forgiveness for yourself.

I hope you enjoyed the time with Max and Jackie along with all their siblings. Nikki and Adrian’s story is in Texas Daddy, and you can find Danica and Reid in The Texan’s Twins.

I have enjoyed these trips to Clear Water, Texas. Thank you for coming along.

I love chatting with readers. You can find me on Facebook at Jolene Navarro, Author, or drop me a note at Jolene Navarro c/o Love Inspired Books, 195 Broadway, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10007.

Blessings,

Jolene

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart;

and lean not unto thine own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge him,

and he shall direct thy paths.

—Proverbs 3:5–6

In memory of my mother-in-law, Francisca Guerrero Navarro. Te amo con todo mi corazón.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dear Reader

Bible Verse

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Extract

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Bitter winds whipped through the valley and down the back of Max Delgado’s neck. Twenty years had passed since his last visit to the ranch. The Delgado Ranch, his family’s homestead since the early 1800s. He carried the name of the first Delgado in Texas: Maximiliano Francisco Puentes Delgado. Always sounded a bit pretentious to him.

Looking over the fence to the vast landscape, he tried to pull up memories of his childhood, but being here didn’t help. He had been told he’d spent most of his early years here with his mother. There was probably a reason they were so elusive, or maybe he just didn’t have a good memory. He tended to live in the moment. It was easy, and he liked easy.

His focus went back to the broken gate. November was never this cold in the Texas Hill Country. The way his life had been going the last few months, though, he probably shouldn’t be surprised.

Right on cue, the rotten wood crumbled in his gloved hand, the old hardware now useless. The corral was in worse shape than Max had first thought. He’d need a truckload of panels before he put any bulls in this pen. He had hauled a couple practice bulls along with his favorite horses.

They were getting restless and needed to be unloaded. He glanced back at the neglected pens and arena. Either his uncle had lied about the condition of the ranch, or the man he’d hired had been cashing the checks without doing the work.

His father’s voice jumped through his head, calling him useless and lazy. Dropping to his haunches, he planted his elbows above his knees and lowered his head. The memories he tried ignoring bombarded his brain. All those years spent trying to prove himself to a father who didn’t care, trying to gain approval from a man who had written him off when he was ten. A man who was now dead. Any chance of mending that relationship was gone.

In the past when these thoughts started crowding in, he’d have leaped on a bull or driven until he found a crowd that would help him drown the feelings he didn’t want to deal with.

But that was getting old. A few months ago, he’d tried something new. He’d sought out Pastor Wayne, the cowboy preacher who followed the rodeo circuit. So now he prayed. He prayed for wisdom and patience.

“I’m hungry.” One of his new responsibilities interrupted the prayer.

“Me, too, and I’m cold. Can we go inside?”

Even though Tomas and Isaac were a year apart at six and five, he wasn’t sure who was who. What he did know was that his half brothers had started grumbling about an hour ago. All three of them. He shot a glance at the teen. Ethan had asked to come along on the road trip. Ethan’s mother, the second wife, had headed back to Chicago and didn’t seem to care that her son wanted to spend the holidays with three brothers he had just met at his father’s funeral. Right now, the only thing that made them family was a last name. On impulse Max had thought this trip would give them a chance to connect before the little ones went to live with their aunt and Ethan returned to school.

“Max!” they cried out at the same time.

With a heavy sigh, he made sure to smile at them. It wasn’t their fault, and it wouldn’t be right to get mad at them. He’d seen the boys once, when they were too small to remember him. Now they had lost both parents and were stuck with brothers they didn’t know, other than what they had been told.

He rubbed one of them on the head. “There are some protein bars in the truck.”

“We ate them.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “The whole box?”

His littlest brothers nodded in unison. That couldn’t be good for their stomachs.

“Um...then get the chips. There’s beef jerky, too.”

“Ethan ate all those.” They stood, arms crossed, mirror images of each other. The sixteen-year-old was leaning against the barn, still staring at his phone. The kid hadn’t looked up once all day. Actually, Max couldn’t remember seeing his eyes. Even during the funeral, he’d had his gaze glued to the small screen in his hand.

Max pinched the bridge of his nose. So far, nothing had gone right on this trip. The temperature had to have dropped twenty degrees since they left Dallas this morning.

Standing, he arched his back until he heard the popping. He winced at the pain in his shoulder. Who was he kidding? Nothing had been right for the last two months since he was stomped on by Texas Fire. He’d wanted to be the cowboy who finally stayed on that bull for a full eight seconds. He’d done it, too, but at the cost of a healthy body. One broken collarbone and one fractured eye socket were added to his already long list of wrecked body parts.

“My phone’s about to die.” Ethan looked up for the first time. “I need to charge it. It’s like we dropped off the earth.”

Max wasn’t sure why the teen had even asked to join them, or why he’d agreed to it. He sighed. The kid’s mother was back in Chicago. Unfortunately, Max had plenty of memories of her. She had been his first stepmother, not that she had been any kind of mother. She had sent him away to live with his mother’s father. Apparently, she had no problem sending her own son away, either.

They might all have the same father, but in no way had they been part of the same household.

He hoped to not only be a better big brother but to give them a sense of family. He wanted to be a brother they could count on, even when they didn’t live in the same house.

Injecting positive energy into his voice, Max smiled. “We have a couple of weeks to spend together and get some brotherly bonding. But if you want to go home, Ethan, I’m sure we can find a way to get you to the airport.”

“Nah. I’m good.”

Max stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at the two little ones. He could do this until their aunt was able to get them. He had only met Vanessa once, at the rehearsal party for his father’s third marriage. She had been yelling at her sister, his father’s latest bride-to-be. Wanting to stop the fiasco, she had refused to go to the wedding. Yeah, that had been a lovely moment.

She would be taking the boys as soon as she wrapped up her end-of-year work schedule. The will had listed them both as guardians. The boys were stuck with two people who were strangers to them.

He looked at Ethan again. In the new semester, the coltish kid would return to his boarding school.

In less than a month he’d be on his own again, healed up and ready to ride in the finals. He could do this. “What about the cooler? Anything left in there?”

They shook their heads again. The matching pairs of big brown eyes just about did him in. He wanted to get these pens fixed, but he didn’t have the supplies he needed anyway.

“Come on, boys. We’ll turn the stock out in the larger pasture, then explore the living quarters. The main brick house was built by my...our grandfather in the ’70s, you know.” After unloading the bulls from the trailer, they climbed back into his truck. “Our great-great-grandfather built the old ranch house over a hundred years ago. We’ve owned the land for almost two hundred years. When Texas was still part of Mexico.”

Ethan didn’t look impressed. Time and years didn’t have much meaning to Isaac and Tomas. But for him? He hadn’t expected this stirring of coming home.

The old path to the main house was hard to find. There wasn’t any evidence that the place had had a caretaker. The weeds on the road looked as if they had grown unchecked for well over a year.

He pulled up to the house and started unloading.

“Max! Look! Someone’s coming,” one of the boys hollered.

Sure enough, a cloud of dust was heading their way. Maybe if they pretended they weren’t here, whoever it was would leave. There wasn’t a single person in Clear Water Max wanted to see.

“Who do you think it is? Uncle Rigo said this is where our family comes from.”

The other boy nodded. “He said there were lots of stupid people, too.”

Great. No telling what his uncle had said to them. “That’s not a nice word, guys. And Uncle Rigo is a bit grumpy, so I wouldn’t listen too much to what he says.”

Ethan leaned against one of the house’s columns. He slipped his phone into his loose jeans, his dark hair falling over his face. “Maybe they brought food.”

Max checked his watch. It was after two o’clock. Less than one day and he was already starving them. “Once this person leaves, we’ll drive to Uvalde and find something to eat and get supplies.”

A silver Tahoe pulled up to the front porch.

He glanced inside the vehicle. That couldn’t be right. His pulse did an uptick. The one person he wanted to avoid the most had just arrived at his door. What was she doing here? He narrowed his eyes. Maybe it was her twin, Danica, and not Jackie Bergmann.

Why was she just sitting there? He tilted his head. It looked like she was talking to someone. With a nod, she got out and stood next to the SUV, a huge smile on her face...a very forced smile.

One thing was certain. It was Jackie.

The summer they had met on the rodeo circuit she had been a pretty girl, and now she was a gorgeous woman. He had hoped his teenage memories had inflated her beauty, but they hadn’t. He had been Romeo to her Juliet. His stupid self had written endless poems and songs for her. Yeah, he’d been a major loser.

From that summer on, Jackie had become the standard to which he’d compared all the other women in his life. Her laugh, her quick wit, her gentleness—even her faith. To his irritation, the others had always come up short. He hated how much he had loved her. Not fun when it hadn’t been returned. He seemed destined to chase after people who didn’t want him.

“Hi, Max. What a good-looking family you have there. Welcome back to Clear Water.” She didn’t move, just stared at the two little ones standing next to him. “My. Those boys look just like you.”

The one closest to him took his hand. He was the friendlier one, the one who did most of the talking. “Everyone says we’re mini-Maxes. When we get our black cowboy hats, we’ll be just like him. He’s going to teach us how to ride bulls. He says—”

Max put a hand on the small shoulder. If he didn’t cut him off now, he’d never stop talking. “Hey, Danica.”

Okay, calling her by her sister’s name was low, but he couldn’t let her know how much she disturbed him. “What brings you out to the ranch?” He really hoped his voice sounded casual, as though seeing her again didn’t uproot his foundation.

Her eyes went a little wide, then her smile relaxed. “I’m Jackie. You used to be able to tell us apart. Of course, that was a long time ago. Now it looks like you got your own twins. Congratulations on the family.”

“They’re not twins,” he started to explain.

“He can’t tell us apart, either.” One of the boys giggled.

The other just watched the exchange. That had to be Tomas. He seemed to be six going on sixty.

“These are my brothers. Isaac and Tomas. That’s Ethan.”

“I’m five. Tomas is six. Ethan is sixteen.” Isaac offered up the information with a giant smile.

“Your brothers?” Her big green eyes blinked a few times.

“Yeah, it’s what happens when your father marries someone the same age as you.”

“Oh. Um, I’m sorry.” She looked behind her. “In town, I heard you were here with your wife and kids.”

“We’ve been here a couple of hours, and the town gave me a family? How did they even know we were here?”

“Welcome to Smalltown, USA. And having a Delgado back on the ranch is big news.”

“Well, you can let them know there’s no wife. Just a band of brothers.” Had she driven all the way into enemy territory to see if he was married? “How about you?”

“No brothers.” The grin showed off the dimple on her right cheek. Just as quickly the smile faded, and she looked down.

That infectious grin took him back to when he was seventeen, to the time when his one goal was to get her to smile just like that. He had lived to make her laugh.

They weren’t teens anymore. What was she doing out here? She had made it clear the last time they had talked that a Delgado and a Bergmann could never be together. “Are you the town’s welcoming committee, or did they send you to warn us to leave, before the good townsfolk arrive with pitchforks and torches?”

Both boys looked up at him. Tomas had a deeper scowl than usual. “They don’t like us?”

Max closed his eyes, wishing he had kept his mouth shut.

Jackie walked around her car and stopped at the bottom step of the house. “No. You’re welcome here. Your brother was just trying to be funny. It’s been a long time, and the ranch has been...” She twisted her mouth as her gaze swept the fences that needed repair, the overgrown pastures and the weed-covered yard.

“Neglected?” He didn’t know why he was embarrassed by the condition of the ranch. Moving behind his brothers, he rubbed their heads. “We were just about to go in and inspect our living quarters. It’s a bit cold out here.”

“I hear you’re at the top of the ranks as a Professional Bull Rider. You hit the PBR as soon as you turned eighteen.”

Had she been following him? He liked the thought of that. She’d been in his thoughts just about every day since she walked away from him. No reason for her to know that.

He turned to the heavy oak door. The old key had to be jiggled a bit to fit in the knob. An odd sensation of coming home settled deep in his bones.

He shook it off. This was not home. The only reason he was here was to get the place ready to put on the market. And to get his body back into shape for the PBR finals.

Jackie’s boots hit the porch. “They said the cold front would be arriving tomorrow.” He could feel her right behind him. Her voice did the same strange thing to him as it used to. She continued on like it was not a big deal that they were standing so close after all these years. “Looks like they got it wrong.”

It had taken years to bury thoughts of her. Now he couldn’t think of anything else. “Yeah, they do that sometimes.”

“The reason I came out was to talk to you about the original town plot on the edge of the ranch. It borders our ranch. The church and school are well over one hundred years old. There might be some other buildings even older. Our mothers had been working to restore them and give them back to the town as a historical site. After they...after the accident it was forgotten. I’ve been trying to revitalize their dream. Your father hasn’t returned any of my emails, phone calls or letters. So, when I heard you were out here, I wanted to make sure I got to talk to you.”

He waited, but it seemed she had finally stopped talking. Was she nervous?

“My father was down in the Caribbean for the last month. There was a boating accident. He was killed along with his wife.” He nodded to the identical-looking brothers, who were now playing on the old porch swing. “Their mother.”

Her mouth fell open. “Oh, Max. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s actually been a little over a month. No one even knew they were missing at first. Anyway, that’s why he didn’t get back to you.”

“You have custody of the boys now?”

“Shared custody. An aunt on their mother’s side will be taking them. She has a job to finish overseas, then she’ll come pick them up for Christmas. Ethan is hanging with us for the holidays, then he heads back home to Chicago.” He made the mistake of looking at her.

Sadness clouded her eyes as the afternoon sun glistened off the moisture that hovered on her lashes. When they had met as teens, they discovered they were both motherless, something they had in common.

But the true shock came when her father found them at the dance together. Angry, he told them that Max’s mother had killed hers. The two women had been killed in the same accident here on the ranch.

After dropping that piece of news, he took Jackie away. But Max didn’t want to think about their parents now, or the summer he thought he had fallen in love.

Max shoved the door open and stepped into his grandfather’s home. Neglect had a smell. It was old and musty.

“This is where we’re staying?” Ethan didn’t look enthusiastic about the old ranch house.

Max started pulling back heavy drapes. He opened the windows. “It just needs to be aired out.” He sneezed as particles filled his nose.

“Look at this!” One of the boys, Isaac maybe, tried to climb onto an old Spanish saddle that sat behind the leather sofa.

“This is so cool!” A stuffed quail was inside a glass lamp, and cowhides and antlers decorated the room. The more energetic one—the one Max thought was Isaac—ran around the large living room touching the dust-covered furniture and fixtures. The river-rock fireplace opening was taller than the boys. The dining room could be seen on the other side.