Christmas at Home (Spikes & Spurs #5) - Carolyn Brown Page 0,4

scraggly mutt raced in ahead of him. Ada hadn’t mentioned a dog and he hadn’t seen the animal before, but there he was, ugly as sin, shaking snow all over the kitchen floor.

* * *

Sage was an early riser, so sleeping until eight o’clock had given her a stinging headache. She grabbed her forehead and snuggled back into the covers, but the pain didn’t go away. She needed a handful of aspirin and a cup of strong black coffee. She seldom won a fight with Grand when they were playing on an even field. A blasted headache would give her grandmother a real advantage. She jerked on a Christmas sweatshirt printed with Tweety Bird all tangled up in a strand of lights on the front and pulled on a pair of gray sweat bottoms. She finished off the outfit with fluffy red socks from her dresser drawer.

Grand hadn’t even stopped long enough to get a fire going. That could wait. Coffee came before warmth. Sage passed the fireplace and went straight to the kitchen. She filled the electric coffee maker, added a filter and two scoops of coffee, and flipped the switch.

“Well, shit!” she exclaimed.

Old habits sure died hard. If the lights wouldn’t work, neither would the electric coffeepot. And that left out the washing machine, the clothes dryer, and the electric churn to make butter, too.

The fact that the electricity was out wasn’t anything new in Palo Duro Canyon. If the wind blew too hard, and it did real often in the winter, the electricity went out. Grand said that if someone sneezed too loud up in Silverton or in Claude it went out, so no electricity in a blizzard was no big surprise. That’s why they heated the house as much as possible with the fireplace and cooked with propane.

Sage opened a cabinet door and removed the old Pyrex percolator, filled it with water, put a filter in the basket, added coffee, and set it on the back burner of the stove. She wasn’t as good as Grand about knowing just how long it needed to perk, but it would be coffee in a few minutes even if it might taste like mud from the cow lot.

She found the aspirin bottle to the left of the sink and swallowed four with half a glass of orange juice. While the coffee perked, she chose several good-sized logs from beside the fireplace and got a big fire going.

“Bless Grand’s heart for bringing in wood to dry,” she said.

She sat down in one of the two rocking chairs pulled up to the fireplace and warmed her hands by the heat. And a sudden pang of guilt twisted its way around her heart. Grand was out doing chores in this godforsaken weather and she was lollygagging around getting warm. She dug her cell phone out of her coat pocket and punched in the speed dial for her grandmother to see what she could do to help and a message popped up immediately saying there was no service available.

Of course there was no service. Damn storm!

At least Grand would come inside to a good fire to warm her cold feet by and a pot of coffee all perked and ready. Poor old girl would be miserable cold and she hadn’t even had one cup of coffee yet. It was going to be a long morning for sure.

At seventy she had no business out in weather like this without any help. If Sage knew exactly where she was in the process, she would suit up and go help. But those pesky hogs wouldn’t tell her they’d already been fed and neither would the chickens, and starting an argument with Grand already pissed because Sage had wasted chicken scratch or hog feed wasn’t the smartest thing.

The living room soon warmed and the smell of coffee filled the house. Maybe she should whip up some pancakes for breakfast. Grand loved them and that would sweeten her up to see Sage’s point of view. She had just set the mixing bowl on the cabinet when the back door swung open.

“It’s about time you came in from the cold,” she said as she turned.

Her hand flew up to her pounding heart and she backed up against the cabinet.

The abominable snowman pushed his way into the house behind something that was either the ugliest dog on the face of the earth or an alien from a faraway planet. The huge thing set a galvanized bucket of milk on the

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