The Cowboy Who Saved Christmas - Jodi Thomas Page 0,32

I should have read that.”

His buddy added, “There were no pictures, Joey.”

The sound of the bartender racking a shotgun silenced the room. “Closing time. One more drink and I’m turning off the lights.”

The gang turned their attention to the bar. Marcie had never seen the bartender fire the shotgun, but Wayne had slapped a few drunks senseless with the stock.

The bald guy gave her a wicked look before he joined his buddies.

Brand slid his half-empty beer across the table and stood. “Get your guitar. I’m taking you home.”

Marcie managed to force a smile, proving she wasn’t afraid. “Brandon, that won’t be necessary. I live across the street in the trailer park. I can walk home.”

“It’s not a suggestion, it’s a favor, and I told you, I’m not picking you up. That trailer park isn’t safe to walk through in daylight, much less after midnight.”

She looked up, and for once she could see his coffee-brown eyes. He looked worried, almost as if he cared. “I’m not your problem.” Marcie laced her fingers without making any move to follow his orders. “I’m no one’s problem. I didn’t think you even liked me, so why act like you care now?”

She’d slept with some truck driver a few months after Boone went to jail. He had bragged that she’d told him all kinds of things about what Wild Boone did in bed, and then claimed she’d said the driver was better than crazy Boone. He must have known she wouldn’t say anything. If she had, no one would believe her.

She looked up at Brand Rodgers. He seemed to have turned into a six-foot-four tree wearing a Stetson. Silent. Waiting beside the table.

“Oh, all right,” she said, as if they’d been arguing. “I’ll let you drive me home.”

The Mistletoe Promise

SHARLA LOVELACE

To all the women back then who made eye contact and wore pants. You made this possible.

Chapter 1

1904 (present day)

Josephine

I would prefer to be dragged behind my horse. Through manure. And then run over by what was left of our meager cattle herd.

“Repeatedly,” I added through my teeth as I told all this to the only woman who would understand. “This party is—” I shook my head, making the stupid curls I hated bounce around my shoulders. “The most mortifyingly horrendous thing I’ve ever stooped to do.”

Lila, a slight, elderly woman with sharp eyes and a quick mind that had kept me in line since I was a baby, pinned back a rebellious lock of my hair that refused to be manipulated. I felt its pain.

“The most horrendous?” she asked, lifting a gray eyebrow as her gaze darted to mine. “I highly doubt that.”

“Then you’d be wrong,” I said.

“Josephine.”

“Lila,” I retorted.

“You will be fine,” she said, walking away from me to carefully unwrap something from yellowed paper. I hadn’t noticed it lying on my cedar chest when she came in.

“I will be the laughing stock of the community,” I said. “Henry Bancroft’s society-scoffing, failure of a rancher, failure of a daughter. Still scandalously unmarried—”

“Interesting that you listed that last,” Lila muttered.

“—who never steps a foot on Mason Ranch property,” I continued, closing my eyes. “Ever. Now shows up begging with her tail between her legs.”

“Honestly, Josie,” Lila said, looking up from her unwrapping, her brow furrowed in disapproval. “I realize you’re more comfortable on a horse than in a dress, but have some couth.”

I stood there in my underthings in front of the wood-framed, full-length mirror that once belonged to my mother. Where Lila used to dress her for galas probably much like the one across the bridge tonight, because my mother’s family came from some of the original money that settled in Houston, Texas. Marrying my father and taking on the cattle-ranching lifestyle on the outskirts may have changed some things, but she would have loved this party. From what I understood anyway.

She died the night I was born.

“All my couth disappeared, Lila,” I said, gazing into my own dark eyes.

“Nonsense,” she said.

“When the storm wiped out Galveston and cut us off,” I said. “When the herd got sick, when buyers stopped buying, and the Masons took part of our land, and then Daddy—” I shut my eyes tight against the burn.

“Listen to me, young lady,” Lila said, coming back up behind me, something draped over her arm. Her pale-blue eyes glittered with something between love and a desire to put me over her knee. “Your daddy was the most honorable man I’ve ever known. And he raised you to be the same. He