to make a decent snowman.”
“Hey, perfect, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” Dixie gathered up a handful of snow and threw it at him.
He stepped to the side to avoid getting hit and slipped and fell on his back.
“Are you all right?” Dixie dropped down on her knees beside him.
“Can’t…,” he sputtered, then managed to get out one more word, “breathe.”
Without any forewarning, she pinched his nose shut, opened his mouth, and began trying to resuscitate him. When she blew into his mouth, he coughed and sat up.
“It worked!” Her eyes widened out as big as silver dollars. “I saw that done on television, and thought it was crazy, but it really works.”
He sat up, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her onto his lap. “Need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” He pulled her lips to his in a steamy, hot kiss that came close to melting what snow was left in the yard.
Sally crawled up in his lap right along with her mother and touched his face with her snow-covered mitten.
“I guess we shouldn’t make out in front of the baby,” he whispered.
“I thought that I was reviving you, not making out,” she teased.
“I might need more to keep from dying. That was a nasty fall and you caused it when you threw snow at me.” He raised an eyebrow.
She gave him a peck on the cheek and stood up. “I wouldn’t let you die,” she joked.
“What about when we get done with supper. If I feel faint, will you make sure I don’t die?” He reached up and took her hand in his.
“Oh, hush.” She moved Sally to a bare place on the ground. “You weren’t ever going to die. You’re just a big flirt. Do you tease all the girls like this?”
“I saw a bright light beckoning me to leave this world.” He let go of her hand and stood up with Sally in his arms.
“That was the moon, silly cowboy,” she told him. “This baby girl’s little nose is red. Let’s get our snowman done so we can take the pictures and go inside. Hey, speaking of pictures, I sent Claire one of our tree and she loved it.”
“Well, I’m not surprised.” Landon packed together a nice-sized snowball. “It is the prettiest tree in the whole state,” he said as he finished making their tiny little snowman. “And we’re about to have the cutest midget Frosty in Texas too.”
“Our tree really doesn’t look bad when we consider what it looked like at first,” she told him as she tied the scarf around the snowman’s neck.
Sally clapped her little mitten-covered hands together and hugged the snowman. Then she kissed him on the button nose, took a step back, and said, “My Fossy.”
“That’s right, baby girl,” Landon agreed with her. “That is your Frosty, and now we need some pictures of you with him.”
“Lan-Lan.” Sally stretched her arms up toward Landon.
“Guess you’d better let me take the picture since she wants you to be in it,” Dixie said. “This way when I tell her that you were the one that helped make this Christmas special, she’ll have a face to go with your name.”
Landon dropped down, set Sally on a knee, and pasted on a smile, but he didn’t feel the happiness he had before. He didn’t want to be nothing more than a picture in a book that Sally could look at through the years ahead. He wanted to be part of her life like he was right at that moment—for the rest of her life.
Chapter Five
Landon had wrestled with his feelings all night, sleeping sporadically and waking to question his decision to move back to the other side of Texas. Sure, he had family there, but he’d made a family right there in Sunset in the past few months, and Levi had offered him both the cabin to live in and a job if he wanted to stay on at the Longhorn Canyon. His old nanny, who had passed away years before his mother, would tell him to follow his heart.
Finally, at daybreak, he got up from his bunk. He was still trying to figure out which road to take when the door opened and a blast of cold air seemed to blow Levi Dawson, the ranch foreman, into the bunkhouse. Levi removed his coat and hung it on a nail inside the door, then made his way into the kitchen.
The ranch foreman was just over six feet tall, had light brown hair that he