Christmas Cowboy: Will of Steel / Winter Roses. Diana Palmer
the pasture. He’d bought quite a few Angus cattle with his own uncle, and they were at the ranch that Jillian had shared with her uncle John. She was pensive as she strolled beside him, absently stripping a dead branch of leaves, thinking about the fate of Uncle John’s prize beef if she didn’t marry Ted sometime soon.
“Deep thoughts?” he asked, hands in the pockets of his jeans under his shepherd’s coat.
She frowned. She was wearing her buckskin jacket. One of the pieces of fringe caught on a limb and she had to stop to disentangle it. “I was thinking about that resort,” she confessed.
“Here. Let me.” He stopped and removed the branch from the fringe. “Do you know why these jackets always had fringe?”
She looked up at him, aware of his height and strength so close to her. He smelled of tobacco and coffee and fir trees. “Not really.”
He smiled. “When the old-timers needed something to tie up a sack with, they just pulled off a piece of fringe and used that. Also, the fringe collects water and drips it away from the body.”
“My goodness!”
“My grandmother was full of stories like that. Her grandfather was a fur trapper. He lived in the Canadian wilderness. He was French. He married a Blackfoot woman.”
She smiled, surprised. “But you always talk about your Cheyenne heritage.”
“That’s because my other grandmother was Cheyenne. I have interesting bloodlines.”
Her eyes sketched his high-cheekboned face, his black eyes and hair and olive complexion. “They combined to make a very handsome man.”
“Me?” he asked, surprised.
She grinned. “And not a conceited bone in your body, either, Ted.”
He smiled down at her. “Not much to be conceited about.”
“Modest, too.”
He shrugged. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “You have beautiful skin.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Thank you.”
“You get that from your mother,” he said gently. “I remember her very well. I was only a boy when she died, but she was well-known locally. She was the best cook in two counties. She was always the first to sit with anyone sick, or to take food when there was a funeral.”
“I only know about her through my uncle,” she replied. “My uncle loved her. She was his only sister, much older than he was. She and my father had me unexpectedly, late in life.”
Which, he thought, had been something of a tragedy.
“And then they both died of the flu, when I was barely crawling,” she sighed. “I never knew either of them.” She looked up. “You did at least know your parents, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “My mother died of a stroke in her early thirties,” he said. “My father was overseas, working for an oil corporation as a roughneck, when there was a bombing at the installation and he died. My grandmother took me in, and my uncle moved in to help support us.”
“Neither of us had much of a childhood,” she said. “Not that our relatives didn’t do all they could for us,” she added quickly. “They loved us. Lots of orphaned kids have it a lot worse.”
“Yes, they do,” he agreed solemnly. “That’s why we have organizations that provide for orphaned kids.”
“If I ever get rich,” she commented, “I’m going to donate to those.”
He grinned. “I already do. To a couple, at least.”
She leaned back against a tree and closed her eyes, drinking in the sights and sounds and smells of the woods. “I love winter. I know it isn’t a popular season,” she added. “It’s cold and there’s a lot of snow. But I enjoy it. I can smell the smoke from fireplaces and woodstoves. If I close my eyes, it reminds me of campfires. Uncle John used to take me camping with him when I was little, to hunt deer.”
“Which you never shot.”
She opened her eyes and made a face. “I’m not shooting Bambi.”
“Bull.”
“People shouldn’t shoot animals.”
“That attitude back in colonial times would have seen you starve to death,” he pointed out. “It’s not like those old-timers could go to a grocery store and buy meat and vegetables. They had to hunt and garden or die.”
She frowned. “I didn’t think about that.”
“In fact,” he added, “people who refused to work were turned out of the forts into the wilderness. Some stole food from the Indians and were killed for it. Others starved or froze to death. It was a hard life.”
“Why did they do it?” she wondered aloud. “Why leave their families and their homes and get on rickety old ships and go to a country they’d never even seen?”
“A lot of them did it to escape debtor’s prison,” he said. “They had debts they couldn’t pay. A few years over here working as an indentured servant and they could be free and have money to buy their own land. Or the people they worked for might give them an acre or two, if they were generous.”
“What about when the weather took their crops and they had nothing to eat? ”
“There are strings of graves over the eastern seaboard of pilgrims who starved,” he replied. “A sad end to a hopeful beginning. This is a hostile land when it’s stripped of supermarkets and shopping centers.”
A silence fell between them, during which he stared at the small rapids in the stream nearby. “That freezes over in winter,” he said. “It looks pretty.”
“I’d like to see it then.”
He turned. “I’ll bring you over here.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
His black eyes looked long and deep into hers across the distance, until she felt as if something snapped inside her. She caught her breath and forced her eyes away.
Ted didn’t say anything. He just smiled. And started walking again.
She loved it that he didn’t pressure her into a more physical relationship. It gave her a breathing space that she desperately needed.
He took her to a play in Billings the following weekend, a modern parody of an old play about two murderous old women and their assorted crazy relatives.
She laughed until her sides ached. Later, as they were driving home, she realized that it had been a long time since she’d been so amused by anything.
“I’m so glad I never had relatives like that,” she ventured.
He laughed. “Me, too. The murderous cousin with the spooky face was a real pain, wasn’t he?”
“His associate was even crazier.”
She sat back against the seat, her eyes closed, still smiling. “It was a great play. Thanks for asking me.”
“I was at a loose end,” he commented. “We have busy weekends and slow weekends. This was a very slow one, nothing my officers couldn’t handle on their own.”
That was a reminder, and not a very pleasant one, of what he did for a living. She frowned in the darkness of the cab, broken only by the blue light of the instrument panel. “Ted, haven’t you ever thought about doing something else for a living?”
“Like what?” he asked. “Teaching chemistry to high school students?”
He made a joke of it, but she didn’t laugh. “You’re not likely to be killed doing that.”
“I guess you don’t keep up with current events,” he remarked