The Rancher's Christmas Promise

She managed not to bare her teeth at him and continued on her way. She didn’t stop as she waved at Michael’s wife, Bernice, who’d been filling in for the secretary they couldn’t afford to hire, even though she hopped up and scurried after her long enough to push a stack of pink message slips into the outer pocket of Greer’s briefcase.

“Thanks, Bunny.”

Greer left the civic plaza for the short walk to the courthouse. It was handy that the buildings were located within a few blocks of each other. It meant that she could leave her car in the capable hands of her dad for the day. Carter Templeton was retired with too much time on his hands and he’d offered to look at it. He might have spent most of his life in an office as an insurance broker, but there wasn’t much that Carter couldn’t fix when he wanted to. Which was a good thing for Greer, because she was presently pretty broke.

She was pretty broke almost all of the time.

It was something she’d expected when she’d taken the job with the public defender’s office. And money had gotten even tighter when she’d thrown in with her two sisters to buy the fixer-upper Victorian—in which she was the only one still living. She couldn’t very well start complaining about it now, though.

The irony was that both Maddie and Ali could now put whatever money they wanted into the house since they’d both married men who could afford to indulge their every little wish.

Now it was just Greer who was holding up the works.

She’d already remodeled her bedroom and bathroom when they’d first moved in. The rest of the house was in a terrible state of disrepair, though. But if she couldn’t afford her fair third of the cost, then the work had to wait until she could.

She sidestepped a woman pushing a baby stroller on the sidewalk and jogged up the steps to the courthouse. There were thirty-two of them, in sets of eight. When she’d first started out, running up the steps had left her breathless. Six years later, she barely noticed them.

Inside, she joined the line at security and slid her bare arms into her navy blue blazer. Once through, she jogged up two more full flights of gleaming marble stairs to the third floor.

She slipped into Judge Waters’s courtroom with two minutes to spare and was standing at the defendant’s table with her files stacked in front of her before the judge entered, wearing his typically dour expression.

He looked over his half glasses. “Oh, goody.” His voice was humorless as he took his seat behind the bench. “All of my favorite people are here. Actually on time for once.” He poured himself a glass of water and shook out several antacid tablets from the economy-sized bottle sitting beside the water. “All right. As y’all ought to know by now, we’ll break at noon and not a minute before. So don’t bother asking. If you’re not lucky enough to be out of the court’s hair by noon, we’ll resume at half past one and not one minute after.”

He eyed the line of defendants waiting to be arraigned. They sat shoulder to shoulder, crammed into the hardwood bench adjacent to the defendant’s table where Greer stood. After this group, there was another waiting, just as large.

Judge Waters shoved the tablets into his mouth. “Let’s get started,” he said around his crunching.

All in all, it was a pretty normal morning.

* * *

Normal ended at exactly twelve fifty-five.

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