Snowed in at the Ranch. Cara Colter

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      To my daughter, Cassidy:

      Love you forever.

      CHAPTER ONE

      TY Halliday was beyond exhaustion. The driving mix of sleet and snow had soaked through his oilskin slicker hours ago. Icy water was sluicing off the back of his hat’s brim, inside his upturned collar and straight down his spine.

      The horse stumbled, as exhausted as his rider, dark setting in too fast.

      But beneath all the discomfort, Ty allowed himself satisfaction. He’d found the entire herd. The three cows that shuffled along in front of him were the last of them.

      It had been sixteen hours, roughly, since he’d found the broken fence, the cougar tracks. He counted himself lucky most of the herd had petered out and allowed themselves to be herded home, long before these three.

      Tracks in fresh snow told the story of the herd splitting in a dozen different directions, the cougar locking in on these three, finally giving up and prowling away down Halliday Creek. These cows, in a panic, had kept on going, almost to the summer range, way up the mountain.

      Below him, Ty could see the lights of his house winking against the growing darkness. It made him impatient for hot food, a stiff drink, a scalding shower and his bed.

      But the horse, Ben, was young and had already demonstrated great heart, had given everything he had, and so Ty did not push him, but let the young gelding set his own pace down a trail that was slick with new snow.

      Finally, finally, the cows were back with the herd, the pasture fences secured, Ben fed and watered. Ty followed a path from the barn, worn deep by a hundred years of Halliday boots, to where the “new” house sat on the top of a knoll of land, in the shadow of the mountain behind it.

      The house was called new because it shared the property with the “old” homestead place, which his father had built for his first wife twenty-five years before Ty had been born.

      Ty swayed on his back porch, his hand going to the doorknob.

      Where it froze.

      What had he heard?

      Silence.

      He cocked his head, listening hard, but heard only the lonely whistle of a December wind under the rafters of the house.

      Ty felt he was suffering the delusions of a man who had pushed himself to his limit, and then a mile or two beyond it.

      But he was frowning now, thinking of the lights inside his house that had winked him home. He lived alone. He was pretty damned sure that he had not left any lights on when he’d left way before dawn this morning.

      The sound came again, and he took a startled step back, nearly tumbling down his back-porch steps.

      The sound was definitely coming from inside his house. It was an almost shockingly happy sound. His tired mind grappled with it. He hadn’t had a television for years. He didn’t own a computer. Had he left the radio on?

      No. He had not turned on anything this morning, some distress note in the faraway bawl of a cow letting him know something had been amiss. He had scrambled out of bed and out of the house in total darkness and in a hurry.

      There was only one thing that made a sound like the one he had just heard.

      And there was absolutely no chance it was coming from inside his house.

      No, it was exhaustion. An auditory hallucination. Ears straining, picking up noises that did not exist.

      Just as Ty was about to dismiss the sound he thought he had heard as a figment of an exhausted