A Small Town Thanksgiving

The way Miguel saw it, it was a matter of definition. “There is serious and then there is inflexible.” Miguel patted his son’s face. “Do not miss out on being young, Miguel. You only get one chance at it.”

He was who he was and for the most part, he’d made his peace with that. He was too old to change now, Mike thought. “You seem to be doing just fine for both of us, Dad.”

Miguel shook his head. It was obvious by his expression that he was trying to understand just where he had gone wrong, where he had failed his first-born. All his other children were outgoing and had a zest for life, even Eli, while Miguel Jr. seemed to work hard at avoiding it, foregoing any personal dealings outside the family—sometimes even inside the family. That was no way to live, the older man thought sadly.

But it wasn’t a problem that could be solved quickly, or even soon. And he had something more pressing that needed tending to.

“We can discuss this at some other time,” Miguel told his son. “Right now I need you to go and pick the young lady up at the airport.”

The closest airport to Forever was over fifty miles away. A trip of that nature would take a huge chunk out of his day.

“When?” Mike asked, preparing to beg off whatever date his father gave him.

“Leaving in the next twenty minutes would be nice.” Miguel watched his son’s jaw drop in amazement. “I know how you like to give yourself enough time in case something comes up like a traffic jam outside of Laredo.”

“Today?” Mike asked in disbelief. “You want me to pick her up today?”

Miguel nodded. “Her plane lands in a little less than two hours.”

“And you’re just telling me this now?” Mike asked in disbelief.

“I thought it was better that way. It gives you less time to be angry about it. You know how you get,” he pointed out sadly to his son.

“Dad, I can’t just drop everything and—”

“You have nothing to drop,” Miguel told him calmly. “I have already checked.”

Mike didn’t like being thought of as predictable. “What if I had plans you didn’t know about?” he challenged.

“When have you ever had plans no one knew about?” his father countered.

“I could,” Mike maintained stubbornly.

“Do you?” Miguel asked, his eyes meeting his son’s.

With reluctance and no small measure of annoyance, Mike replied, “No, I don’t.”

“Good, then I would hurry if I were you.”

“How am I supposed to find this literary genius?” he wanted to know.

It was more a matter of the young woman finding his son, Miguel thought. After he’d seen her picture, thanks to Olivia’s computer, he saw great potential—not just for his ancestor’s journals, but for his present-day son, as well.

“I told her you would hold up a sign with her name on it and I described you to her.”

Mike stared at his father. “You knew I was going to pick her up?” He’d just agreed to it this moment. He could have just as easily said no and refused, Mike thought.

“Of course,” Miguel replied complacently. “I am your father. I know everything. I told her to look for a tall, dark, handsome man with a deep scowl on his face. Of course, if you have the sign with her name on it, it would not really confuse the young woman if you were, perhaps, smiling,” his father concluded hopefully.

“Maybe not, but it might confuse me,” Mike quipped. And then he sighed. “What’s her name so I can write it on the sign?”

“Her name is Samantha Monroe,” his father told him. Reaching behind the sofa, Miguel pulled out a large white poster board he’d prepared earlier. Both the woman’s name as well as his own was on it. And beneath that was the name of their ranch.

The lettering was rather distinctive and very eye-catching. That did not look like his father’s handiwork, Mike couldn’t help thinking.

“You did this?” Mike asked rather skeptically.

Miguel laughed softly under his breath even as he shook his head. “I would like to take the credit for it, but it was Tina, Olivia’s sister, who is the artistic one.”

“Tina,” Mike repeated. “Olivia’s sister,” he added for good measure. “Did everybody in town know about this woman coming but me?”

“Not everybody,” his father replied evasively. “Just those who would not be upset by the news.”

“In other words, everyone but me,” Mike repeated.

He blew out a breath, annoyed because he knew he was on the losing end of a disagreement that he had been destined to lose before he was ever born. Mike freely acknowledged that he was different from his brothers and his sister in that by no stretch of the imagination could he be described as being sociable, ready to call any stranger “friend” after an exchange of only a few words. Pressing his lips together, he kept his comment to himself. Instead, he reached for the sign and muttered, “I’ll see you later.”

His father followed him to the door. “Thank you, Miguel.”

Mike made no answer. He didn’t trust himself to say anything at all. Instead, he merely nodded in response and kept on walking.

* * *

PACKING WAS EASY when you had very little to pack, and possessions had never been a big factor in Samantha Monroe’s life.

So, picking up and physically being ready to travel was no problem.

Acclimating was more difficult.

Sam had butterflies in her stomach. The same butterflies that showed up each and every time she began a new project. There was that fear that she wasn’t up to the job and the fear of having to travel alone to unfamiliar places.

Before she had undertaken this career, she had never seen the outside of her little suburban Maryland town. She’d had twenty-five years of moving along the same streets, nodding at the same neighbors and being completely devoid of any desire to see anything beyond those boundaries.

Those were hard things to give up.

But she had to.

With Danny gone, a bank account amounting to seventeen dollars and twelve cents and bills to pay, Sam knew she had no other choice. She had no way to take care of herself if she remained inert.

Danny had been the very light of her life, but he hadn’t exactly been the kind who believed in saving for a rainy day. He believed in spending every dime as long as the sun was shining.

Which was exactly what happened when he went on that February skiing trip with his two best friends. Promising to be “back before you know it,” he went off for a carefree weekend of fun.

He hadn’t counted on an encounter with a tanker truck whose cross-country driver had pushed himself too hard and had fallen asleep behind the wheel. The truck careened out of control and despite Danny’s frantic attempts to get the car out of harm’s way, there had been a collision. It ultimately turned out not to be as serious as it could have been—but just serious enough for one fatality—Danny’s.

His two friends and the sleeping driver survived the crash.

And so, a little more than eighteen months after becoming a bride, she had become a widow. A widow with bills and no way to pay them. There were no parents for her to fall back on or turn to, no parents around at all. Her father had never been in the picture, vanishing months before she was born, and her mother had worked endless hours to provide for the two of them. When she wasn’t working, her mother was searching for “Mr. Right,” someone to take them away from the brink of poverty where they had always existed.

However, when her mother finally found that man, he only took her away. And Sam was left behind. By then, she had turned eighteen and was officially on her own, the way she had been, unofficially, for most of her life.

But she wasn’t alone, not really. Danny had lived across the street and had been part of her life since she’d had her first memory.

Before even that.

They were friends, and then sweethearts and then lovers who were destined to get married. When they did, Sam was truly ready for a happily-ever-after life—as much as any life could be happily-ever-after.

But fate had other ideas and fate always won out in the end. So, at twenty-seven, she found herself very much alone and determined to hold her head up high. The latter entailed providing for herself. All she needed was the way how.

Sam loved biographies and had always had the ability to put words together eloquently on a page. She eventually combined her passion and talent to become a ghostwriter. A much sought-after ghostwriter because she also had the ability to mimic any voice, sound like any person who hired her to do the heavy lifting and tell the story of their life.

In addition, she had an aptitude for knowing what interested readers and a neat, clean style that delivered what had been promised while leaving the so-called autobiographer’s ego intact.

Her chosen career necessitated travel, which in turn required a certain independence she was only now growing accustomed to. Eventually, she hoped to be comfortable with flying to parts unknown at a moment’s notice.

Right now, Sam thought as she deplaned amid a flock of passengers, she needed to find her new employer, for while the publishing house paid her salary, the person whose autobiography she would be fashioning was her boss. It was something she didn’t ever forget and that one small trick was responsible for her working as steadily as she had been these past two years.

Joan, the main publisher’s assistant at Tatum House, had told her to be on the lookout for her driver. The man had been described as tall, dark and handsome. He was also said to be scowling, although about what Joan hadn’t a clue. The person who had called her hadn’t covered that detail.

So there she was, walking in slow motion and taking in both sides of the area as best she could. The person, Joan had promised, would be holding a sign with her name on it.

So there was hope.

Bingo, Sam thought as she zeroed in on a man who fit the description she’d been given to a T.

And he was holding a large sign with her name written on it.

Doctor Livingston, I presume, she thought to herself as she began to forge a path toward the man who hadn’t made eye contact with her yet.

Chapter Two

“Excuse me, are you Miguel Rodriguez?”

The melodic voice cut through the layers of tangled thoughts going through Mike’s mind. When he turned to look at the source of the voice, his mind was still struggling to focus, fighting its way out of a fantasy-filled zone. He was imagining the woman he’d been sent to meet, picturing a matronly lady right down to a pair of sensible shoes and a tailored, unflattering suit.

Instead, the woman addressing him looked like what he would have conjured up after encountering a genie in a bottle. The petite young blonde standing before him would have constituted his first wish—and quite possibly just about every wish that he’d ever had.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” he replied, the inside of his mouth unaccountably turning bone-dry. So much so that it felt as if any second now, he would start exhaling dust. “How did you know?” he heard himself asking.

She smiled up at him, causing his heart to momentarily stop before it suddenly started beating double time, all within the scope of approximately fifteen seconds. Her sky-blue eyes teasingly captured his as she pointed to the rectangular piece of cardboard he’d forgotten he was holding in his hands.

“That kind of gave me a clue,” she told him. “You’re holding up my name,” she explained when he made no effort to acknowledge what she’d just said

Mike blinked, slowly coming to. “I am? Oh, yeah, I am.”

The next moment, as his own words—as well as Samantha Monroe’s—sank in, he suddenly felt like a contestant for—and most likely the winner of—the crown of Jackass of the Decade.

Possibly of the century.

A massive wave of embarrassment washed over him.

He had no idea what had just come over him. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen a beautiful woman before. His own sister, Alma, though he wouldn’t have readily admitted it to her, was an extremely attractive young woman, as were the women that his brothers, Eli, Gabe and Rafe, had married.

But something about this woman, about the laughter in her eyes, her straight golden hair and her sexy figure sent an earthquake rippling through him. The sum total of those assets could have made a dead man sit up and beg.

“Well, since I found you, I think you can put the sign down now,” Sam gently prompted.

“Yeah,” Mike agreed, still stumbling over his tongue. That part of his anatomy seemed to have inexplicably grown in weight and girth.

“Funny,” Sam went on to observe, “I pictured someone a bit older when I spoke to you on the phone the other day.” There was amusement in her eyes as she told him, “You certainly don’t look like the patriarch of such a large family.”

“No, I d— Wait, what?” he asked, confusion running rampant through the fog that encircled his brain.

“I said I pictured someone older when I spoke to you the other day,” Sam repeated.

She was fairly certain that there had to be some sort of a mistake. No matter which way you sliced it, the tall, handsome cowboy standing before her was not well into his fifth decade. She doubted if he was finished with his second one. Or, at the very most, had just gotten a toehold of his third.

But she was not about to shower this man with questions. She was giving him leeway to surrender any sort of an explanation. She had no intentions of crowding him or rushing him to clarify. To be honest, she found his verbal stumbling rather sweet and definitely flattering.

It had been a long time since anyone had looked at her as if she was an attractive female. Just because she earned a living as a ghostwriter did not mean that she was supposed to be invisible to the naked eye. Her last three clients had been women and while she could capture their perspective even better than she could that of a male client, she did like the almost involuntary appreciative look in this man’s eyes.

For the most part, the women she’d worked with had acted as if she didn’t really exist, but she supposed it was because they would have preferred that people think they had written their own autobiographies rather than that they’d had help in wording them. She amounted to their dirty little secret and as such had to be as close to nonexistent as possible.

“You didn’t talk to me.”

“I spoke to Miguel Rodriguez,” Sam pointed out, her cadence deliberately slow and easy, giving the man every opportunity to interrupt and set the record straight whenever he wanted. “And you did say that that was your name.”

“It is,” Mike agreed. “That’s the name written on my birth certificate.” But then he hastened to clarify the point. “But I’m Junior to my father’s Senior.”

She smiled. It wasn’t as if she’d never encountered that before. “Is that what you’d like me to call you?” she asked. “Junior?”

He didn’t look like a Junior anything. Tall, with wide shoulders, rather appealing small waist and hips, with wavy, thick black hair that made her fingers unexpectedly itchy, he was definitely in a class all his own.

“Mike,” he told her, his voice striking a note of command. “Call me Mike.”

“Mike,” she repeated, her smile once again mesmerizing him and all but freezing his brain, making it impossible for him to form a coherent thought. “I like that.”

“Yeah, me, too.” The words fell flat and were incredibly lame.

What was going on with him? Mike silently demanded of himself. He’d never sounded like a blithering idiot before, not even in the presence of a drop-dead knockout like that starlet that Ray was so crazy about.

Why was this particular woman numbing his brain and completely negating his ability to think in near complete sentences?

“And what do I call you?” he asked, wanting to say at least one semi-intelligent thing in her presence. “Ms. Monroe, or—”

“Sam,” she told him, cutting off any further speculation on the cowboy’s part. “Everyone just calls me Sam.”

“Sam” was way too masculine-sounding a name for someone who was the absolute antithesis of masculinity, he couldn’t help thinking. But she obviously seemed to like the name and for no other reason than to go along with whatever the woman wanted, Mike nodded and repeated the name.

“Sam.”

Then, remembering that he was supposed to be a walking, talking, functioning adult, Mike forced himself to follow up the single word, and say something more.

“Let’s get your baggage.”

It came out more like a gruff order, but Mike preferred that to sounding like some mesmerized half-wit incapable of stringing four words together into a discernible whole.

“This is it,” Sam informed him, indicating the two pieces of luggage she had with her. The larger piece was most obviously a suitcase on wheels, the kind that easily fit into overhead compartments on planes; the other case was much smaller and in all likelihood contained her laptop inside. A wide, fringed dark brown hobo purse hung off her shoulder.

“You don’t have anything else coming down the chute onto the carousel?” he asked, surprised.

Sam shook her head, her straight chin-length golden hair swaying to and fro as if to reinforce her denial. “No, I travel light.”

Mike took that to mean that the rest of her things were being shipped out—which only bore out what he’d complained about to his father: that the woman was going to be moving in indefinitely.

And while Sam was admittedly a great deal prettier than Ray, the brother who was still living at home, Mike had to admit that he still didn’t really like the idea of having a stranger moving into their ranch house for an indefinite period of time. Indefinite sounded too much like “forever”—the eternity, not the town.

“The rest of your things being shipped out?” he asked her, an accusing note in his voice.

“There is no ‘rest of my things,’” she told him, then added, “This is it,” indicating her meager belongings with a quick sweep of her hand.

Mike stared at the suitcase. “How much can you fit in there?”

“Enough,” she replied with a smile that was both tranquilizing and yet seemed to be able to get an unsuspecting heart racing at the same time.

It certainly did his.

The next moment, Mike cleared his throat and said, “Then I guess if we have everything, we’d better get going.”

“I guess so,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. She didn’t want this man to think that she was laughing at him or having fun at his expense.

But she did flash a smile in his direction.

Without a word, Mike took possession of her suitcase from her and claimed the black faux-leather briefcase with his other hand.

Mike took exactly two steps before he abruptly stopped walking and turned around to look at her. Not expecting the sudden halt, Sam managed to just barely catch herself just in time to keep from plowing straight into him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked him, doing her best to appear unaffected by this whole venture. Her tall, handsome driver had no way of knowing how many knots currently resided in her stomach and she was going to keep it that way.

“Do you know what you’re getting into?” Mike asked.

Until he’d just said the words out loud, it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask. But this Sam woman appeared delicate to him. Moreover, she looked like someone who was accustomed to having all the amenities that places like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and cities of that size had to offer a woman like her.

Forever didn’t even have a hotel and there was just one movie theater in town, known simply as The Theater, and it ran second-run movies. And while they weren’t exactly backward here in Forever, they certainly weren’t considered cutting-edge, either. Not by a really long shot.

A “crime spree” here meant that Donnie Taylor and his younger brother, Will, carved their initials on the sides of two barns, or spray-painted those initials on the sides of someone’s garage.

There was nothing modern or even noteworthy about a town like Forever. And most of the people who lived here liked it that way.

“Yes, I’m going to be reading and organizing some journals and diaries written by one of your ancestors. Your father said that this woman had been carried off by some Native Americans and spent a year with them before managing to escape. I’m assuming that she couldn’t write anything down in a journal while it was happening, but once she was able to return home, she put everything down on paper as best she could, doing it in such a way as to make it seem that it was happening as she wrote.” She looked up at the cowboy’s tanned face. “Did I get that right?”

The wide shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug. “I don’t know, I didn’t look at the books.”

Maybe it was his imagination, but Sam seemed both surprised and a bit confused by his answer. “Oh, but how could you help not looking through the books?” she asked him. Had she stumbled across something like that herself, she knew she wouldn’t have closed her eyes until she’d read all—or at least most of it—herself.

But then, she had always been hungry for family connections, something she’d never really had outside of her mother.

The next moment, realizing that her question might have sounded somewhat condescending or judgmental, Sam quickly withdrew it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that,” she apologized.

He shrugged off both her apology and the question that had come before it. “That’s not what I’m referring to,” Mike told the young blonde.

“Then what are you referring to?” she asked him pleasantly, giving every indication that she wanted to hear him out no matter what he had to say.

“I just wanted to make sure that you knew what this place was like. Forever, I mean,” he clarified in case she wasn’t following him. He was still tripping over his own tongue, he thought in disgust. “We don’t have a hotel,” he began.

Sam nodded. “I gathered that,” she replied. “Your father very generously invited me to stay at the ranch while I worked. But then you’re probably aware of that,” she realized, thinking out loud.

“Yeah, I am,” he told her, then went back to listing the town’s shortcomings. He honestly didn’t know if he was trying to chase her away with the facts, or telling her this so that she was forewarned as to what to expect now, while she was still fresh and hot on the idea of pursuing this restoration project. “There are no fancy restaurants here.”

“I didn’t come here to eat, I came to work,” she pointed out simply.

Mike found himself being reeled in by the woman’s smile, despite his best efforts not to be. He wondered if she even knew how magnetic that smile of hers was. The next moment, a mocking voice in his head asked, How could she not?

“All we’ve got is a diner,” Mike told her, continuing to list what he assumed a stranger would see as Forever’s shortcomings.

“That sounds more than adequate for anything I might want,” Sam assured him.

Since he’d mentioned Miss Joan’s—how could anyone spending more than ten minutes in Forever be oblivious to Miss Joan’s?—he felt it only right to give a little equal time to the only place in town that served alcohol.

“There’s a saloon if you feel the need to unwind,” he heard himself telling her. He slanted a glance in her direction to see if this piece of information would be welcomed, or barely registered. It turned out to be the latter.

“Good to know,” she murmured. “Although I probably won’t be visiting it,” Sam speculated. “I’ll be too busy with the journals.” She looked up at him again, waiting. “Anything else?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s no nightlife here.”

She didn’t know what he was getting at. She could only make an educated guess that he thought she was something she wasn’t. That she required entertainment and special treatment, like she was “high maintenance.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth—and Sam was proud of that fact.