The Holiday Gift
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RaeAnne Thayne
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Chapter One
Something was wrong, but Faith Dustin didn’t have the first idea what.
She glanced at Chase Brannon again, behind the wheel of his pickup truck. Sunglasses shielded his eyes but his strong jaw was still flexed, his shoulders tense.
Since they had left the Idaho Falls livestock auction forty-five minutes earlier, heading back to Cold Creek Canyon, the big rancher hadn’t smiled once and had answered most of her questions in monosyllables, his mind clearly a million miles away.
Faith frowned. He wasn’t acting at all like himself. They were frequent travel companions, visiting various livestock auctions around the region at least once or twice a month for the last few years. They had even gone on a few buying trips to Denver together, an eight-hour drive from their little corner of eastern Idaho. He was her oldest friend—and had been since she and her sisters came to live with their aunt and uncle nearly two decades ago.
In many ways, she and Chase were really a team and comingled their ranch operations, since his ranch, Brannon Ridge, bordered the Star N on two sides.
Usually when they traveled, they never ran out of things to talk about. Her kids and their current dramas, real or imagined; his daughter, Addie, who lived with her mother in Boise; Faith’s sisters and their growing families. Their ranches, the community, the price of beef, their future plans. It was all grist for their conversational mill. She valued his opinion—often she would run ideas past him—and she wanted to think he rated hers as highly.
The drive to Idaho Falls earlier that morning had seemed just like usual, filled with conversation and their usual banter. Everything had seemed normal during the auction. He had stayed right by her side, a quiet, steady support, while she engaged in—and eventually won—a fierce bidding war for a beautiful paint filly with excellent barrel racing bloodlines.
That horse, intended as a Christmas gift for her twelve-year-old daughter, Louisa, was the whole reason they had gone to the auction. Yes, she’d been a little carried away by winning the auction so that she’d hugged him hard and kissed him smack on the lips, but surely that wasn’t what was bothering him. She’d kissed and hugged him tons of times.
Okay, maybe she had been careful not to be so casual with her affection for him the last six or seven months, for reasons she didn’t want to explore, but she couldn’t imagine he would go all cold and cranky over something as simple as a little kiss.
No. His mood had shifted after that, but all her subtle efforts to wiggle out what was wrong had been for nothing.
His mood certainly matched the afternoon. Faith glanced out at the uniformly gray sky and the few random, hard-edged snowflakes clicking against the windshield. The weather wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t horrible either. The snowflakes weren’t sticking to the road yet, anyway, though she expected they would see at least a few inches on the ground by morning.
Even the familiar festive streets of Pine Gulch—wreaths hanging on the streetlamps and each downtown business decorated with lights and window dressings—didn’t seem to lift his dark mood.
When he hit the edge of town and turned into Cold Creek Canyon toward home, she decided to try one last time to figure out what might be bothering him.
“Did something happen at the auction?”
He glanced away from the road briefly, the expression in his silver-blue eyes shielded by the amber lenses of his sunglasses. “Why would you think that?”
She studied his dearly familiar profile, struck by his full mouth and his tanned, chiseled features—covered now with just a hint of dark afternoon shadow. Funny, how she saw him just about every single day but was sometimes taken by surprise all over again by how great-looking he was.
With his dark, wavy hair covered by the black Stetson he wore, that slow, sexy smile, and his broad shoulders and slim hips, he looked rugged and dangerous and completely male. It was no wonder the waitresses at the café next to the auction house always fought each other to serve their table.
She shifted her attention away from such ridiculous things and back to the conversation. “I don’t know. Maybe because that’s the longest sentence you’ve given me since we left Idaho Falls. You’ve replied to everything else with either a grunt or a monosyllable.”
Beneath that afternoon shadow, a muscle clenched in his jaw. “That doesn’t mean anything happened. Maybe I’m just not in a chatty mood.”
She certainly had days like that. Heaven knew she’d had her share of blue days over the last two and a half years. Through every one of them, Chase had been her rock.
“Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Are you sure that’s all? Was it something Beckett McKinley said? I saw him corner you at lunch.”
He glanced over at her briefly and again she wished she could see the expression behind his sunglasses. “He wanted to know how I like the new baler I bought this year and he also wanted my opinion on a…personal matter. I told him I liked the baler fine but told him the other thing wasn’t any of my damn business.”
She blinked at both his clipped tone and the language. Chase didn’t swear very often. When he did, there was usually a good reason.
“Now you’ve got my curiosity going. What kind of personal matter would Beck want your opinion about? The only thing I can think the man needs is a nanny for those hellion boys of his.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, just watched the road and those snowflakes spitting against windshield. When he finally spoke, his voice was clipped. “It was about you.”
She stared. “Me?”
Chase’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “He wants to ask you out, specifically to go as his date to the stockgrowers association’s Christmas party on Friday.”
If he had just told her Beck wanted her to dress up like a Christmas angel and jump from his barn roof, she wouldn’t have been more surprised—and likely would have been far less panicky.
“I… He…what?”
“Beck wants to take you to the Christmas party this weekend. I understand there’s going to be dancing and a full dinner this year.”
Beck McKinley. The idea of dating the man took her by complete surprise. Yes, he was a great guy, with a prosperous ranch on the other side of Pine Gulch. She considered him a good friend but she had never once thought of him in romantic terms.
The unexpected paradigm shift wasn’t the only thing bothering her about what Chase had just said.
“Hold on. If he wanted to take me to the party, why wouldn’t Beck just ask me himself instead of feeling like he has to go through you first?”
That muscle flexed in his jaw again. “You’ll have to ask him that.”
The things he wasn’t saying in this conversation would fill a radio broadcast. She frowned as Chase pulled into the drive leading to his ranch. “You told him I’m already going with you, didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. “No,” he finally said. “I didn’t.”
Unease twanged through her, the same vague sense that had haunted her at stray moments for several months. Something was off between her and Chase and, for the life of her, she couldn’t put a finger on it.
“Oh. Did you already make plans?” She forced a cheerful smile. “We’ve gone together the last few years so I just sort of assumed we would go together again this year but I guess we should have talked about it. If you already have something going, don’t worry about me. Seriously. I don’t mind going by myself. I’ll have plenty of other friends there I can sit with. Or I could always skip it and stay home with the kids. Jenna McRaven does a fantastic job with the food and I always enjoy the company of other grown-ups, but if you’ve got a hot date lined up, I’m perfectly fine.”
As she said the words, she tasted the lie in them. Was this weird ache in her stomach because she had been looking forward to the evening out—or because she didn’t like the idea of him with a hot date?
“I don’t have a date, hot or otherwise,” he growled as he pulled the pickup and trailer to a stop next to a small paddock near the barn of the Brannon Ridge Ranch.
She eased back in the bench seat, a curious relief seeping through her. “Good. That’s that. We can go together, just like always. It will be a fun night out for us.”
Though she knew him well enough to know something was still on his mind, he said nothing as he pulled off his sunglasses and hooked them on the rearview mirror. What did his silence mean? Didn’t he want to go with her?
“Faith,” he began, but suddenly she didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
“We’d better get the beautiful girl in your trailer unloaded before the kids get home.”
She opened her door and jumped out before he could answer her. Yes, sometimes she was like her son, Barrett, who would rather hide out in his room all day and miss dinner than be scolded for something he’d done. She didn’t like to face bad things. It was a normal reaction, she told herself. Hadn’t she already had to face enough bad things in her life?
After a moment, Chase climbed out after her and came around to unhook the back of the trailer. The striking black-and-white paint yearling whinnied as he led her out into the patchy snow.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Faith said, struck all over again by the horse’s elegant lines.
“Yeah,” Chase said. Again with the monosyllables. She sighed.
“Thanks for letting me keep her here for a couple of weeks. Louisa will be so shocked on Christmas morning.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
He guided the horse into the pasture, where his own favorite horse, Tor, immediately trotted over as Faith closed the gate behind them. As soon as Chase unhooked the young horse from her lead line, she raced to the other side of the pasture, mane and tail flying out behind her.
She was fast. That was the truth. Grateful for her own cowboy hat that shielded her face from the worst of the frost-tipped snowflakes, Faith watched the horse race to the other corner of the pasture and back, obviously overflowing with energy after the stress of a day at the auction and then a trailer ride with strangers.
“Do you think she’s too much horse for Lou?” she asked while Chase patted Tor beside her.
He looked at the paint and then down at Faith. “She comes from prime barrel racing stock. That’s what Lou wants to do. For twelve, she’s a strong rider. Yeah, the horse is only green broke but Seth Dalton can train a horse to do just about anything but recite its ABCs.”
“I guess that’s true. It was nice of him to agree to take her, with his crazy training schedule.”
“He’s a good friend.”
“He is,” she agreed. “Though I know he only agreed to do it as a favor to you.”
“Maybe it was a favor to you,” he commented as he pulled a bale of hay over and opened it inside the pasture for the horses.
“Maybe,” she answered. All three Dalton brothers had been wonderful neighbors and good friends to her. They and others in the close-knit ranching community in Cold Creek Canyon and around Pine Gulch had stepped up in a hundred different ways over the last two and a half years since Travis died.
She would have been lost without any of them, but especially without Chase.
That vague unease slithered through her again. What was wrong between them? And how could she fix it?
She didn’t have the first clue.
* * *
What was a guy supposed to do?
Ever since Beck McKinley cornered him at the diner to talk about taking Faith to the stockgrowers’ holiday party, Chase hadn’t been able to think straight. He felt like the other guy had grabbed his face and dunked it in an ice-cold water trough, then kicked him in the gut for good measure.
For a full ten seconds, he had stared at Beck as a host of emotions galloped through him faster than a pack of wild horses spooked by a thunderstorm.
Beckett McKinley wanted to date Faith. Chase’s Faith.
“She’s great. That’s all,” Beck had said into the suddenly tense silence. “It’s been more than two years since Travis died, right? I just thought maybe she’d be ready to start getting out there.”
Chase had thought for a minute his whole face had turned numb, especially his tongue. It made it tough for him to get any words out at all—or maybe that was the ice-cold coating around his brain.
“Why are you asking me?” he had finally managed to say.
If possible, Beck had looked even more uncomfortable. “The two of you are always together. Here at the auction, at the feed store, at the diner in town. I know you’re neighbors and you’ve been friends for a long time. But if there’s something more than that, I don’t want to be an ass and step on toes. You don’t have to tell me what happens to bulls who wander into somebody else’s pen.”
It was all he could do not to haul off and deck the guy for the implied comparison that Faith was just some lonely heifer, waiting for some smooth-talking bull to wander by.
Instead, he had managed to grip his hands into fists, all while one thought kept echoing through his head.
Not again.
He thought he was giving her time to grieve, to make room in her heart for someone else besides Travis Dustin, the man she had loved since she was a traumatized girl trying to carve out a new home for her and her sisters.
Chase had been too slow once before. He had been a steady friend and confidant from the beginning. He figured he had all the time in the world as he waited for her to heal and to settle into life in Pine Gulch. She had been so young, barely sixteen. He wasn’t much older, not yet nineteen, and had been busy with his own struggles. Even then, he had been running his family’s ranch on his own while his father lay dying.
For six months, he offered friendship to Faith, fully expecting that one day when both of them were in a better place, he could start moving things to a different level.
And then Travis Dustin came home for the summer to help out Claude and Mary, the distant relatives who had raised him his last few years of high school.
Chase’s father was in his last few agonizing weeks of life from lung cancer that summer. While he was busy coping with that and accepting his new responsibilities on the ranch, Travis had wasted no time sweeping in and stealing Faith’s heart. By the time Chase woke up and realized what was happening, it was too late. His two closest friends were in love with each other and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
He could have fought for her, he supposed, but it was clear from the beginning that Travis made her happy. After everything she and her sisters had been through, she deserved to find a little peace.
Instead, he had managed to put his feelings away and maintain his friendship with both of them. He had even tried to move on himself and date other women, with disastrous consequences.
Beck McKinley was a good guy. A solid rancher, a devoted father, a pillar of the community. Any woman would probably be very lucky to have him, as long as she could get past those hellion boys of his.
Maybe McKinley was exactly the kind of guy she wanted. The thought gnawed at him, but he took some small solace in remembering that she hadn’t seemed all that enthusiastic at the idea of going out with him.
Didn’t matter. He knew damn well it was only a matter of time before she found someone she did want to go out with. If not Beck, some other smooth-talking cowboy would sweep in.
He hadn’t fought for her last time. Instead, he had stood by like a damn statue and watched her fall in love with his best friend.
He wouldn’t go through that again. It was time he made a move—but what if he made the wrong one and ruined everything between them?
He felt like a man given a choice between a hangman’s noose and a firing squad. He was damned either way.
He was still trying to figure out what to do when she shifted from watching the young horse dance around the pasture in the cold December air. Faith gazed up at the overcast sky, still dribbling out the occasional stray snowflake.
“I probably should get back. The kids will be out of school soon and I’m sure you have plenty of things of your own to do. You don’t have to walk me back,” she said when he started to head in that direction behind her. “Stay and unhitch the horse trailer if you need to.”
“It can keep. I’ll walk you back up to your truck. I’ve got to plug in my phone anyway.”
A couple of his ranch dogs came out from the barn to say hello as they walked the short distance to his house. He reached down and petted them both, in total sympathy. He felt like a ranch dog to her: a constant, steady companion with a few useful skills that came in handy once in a while.
Would she ever be able to see him as anything more?
“Thanks again, Chase,” Faith said when they reached her own pickup truck—the one she had insisted on driving over that morning, even though he told her he could easily pick her up and drop her back off at the Star N.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“Seriously, I was out of my depth. Horses aren’t exactly my area of expertise. Who knows, I might have brought home a nag. As always, I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He could feel tension clutch at his shoulders again. “Not true,” he said, his voice more abrupt than he intended. “You didn’t need me. Not really. You’d already done your research and knew what you wanted in a barrel racer. You just needed somebody to back you up.”
She smiled as they reached her pickup truck and a pale shaft of sunlight somehow managed to pierce the cloud cover and land right on her delicate features, so soft and lovely it made his heart hurt.
“I’m so lucky that somebody is always you,” she said.
He let out a breath, fighting the urge to pull her into his arms. He didn’t have that right—nor could he let things go on as they were.
“About the stockgrowers’ party,” he began.
If he hadn’t been looking, he might have missed the leap of something that looked suspiciously like fear in her green eyes before she shifted her gaze away from him.
“Really, it doesn’t bother me to skip it this year if you want to make other plans.”
“I don’t want to skip it,” he growled. “I want to go. With you. On a date.”
He intended to stress the last word, to make it plain this wouldn’t be two buddies just hanging out together, like they always did. As a result, the word took on unnatural proportions and he nearly snapped it out until it arced between them like an arrow twanged from a crossbow.
Eyes wide, she gazed at him for a long moment, clearly startled by his vehemence. After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. That’s settled, then. We can figure out the details later.”
Nothing was settled. He needed to tell her date was the operative word here, that he didn’t want to take her to the party as her neighbor and friend who gave her random advice on a barrel racing horse for her daughter or helped her with the hay season.
He wanted the right to hold her—to dance with her and flirt and whisper soft, sexy words in her ear.
How the hell could he tell her that, after all this time, when he had so carefully cultivated a safe, casual relationship that was the exact opposite of what he really wanted? Before he could figure that out, an SUV he didn’t recognize drove up the lane toward his house.
“Were you expecting company?” she asked.
“Don’t think so.” He frowned as the car pulled up beside them—and his frown intensified when the passenger door opened and a girl jumped out, then raced toward him. “Daddy!”
