Seeing Amy with the horse told Ty exactly who she was.

Ty talked her through the sequence a few more times. Her face was absolutely glowing as she began to understand that the horse was responding to her slightest move.

“Everyone and everything is responding to us all the time at some level. Sometimes it’s so subtle we don’t know what we’ve told them.”

For instance her kiss had told him she was hungry. But her eyes were saying she wasn’t ready.

“Okay, lower your hand and move your eyes to his shoulder.”

The horse skidded to a halt. He turned in, his eyes riveted on her.

“Scratch his ears. And his forehead. Say something to him.”

“Ben, I think I’m in love with you.”

Her voice was husky and sweet, and it seemed to Ty a man could die to hear such words coming from her.

His next instructions, intended for the horse, were instructions he needed to heed himself.

“Now, turn and walk away.”

Not that he could. Not while they were snowed in here together. But there were many ways to walk away.

And he should know, because he’d done most of them at one time or another.

“I don’t want to walk away,” she said, stroking Ben’s nose with soft reverence. “I want to stay like this forever.”

Yup, she was the kind of girl who could turn a man’s thought to forever.

Dear Reader,

I hate to choose a favourite story, because it’s something like choosing a favourite child. Having said that, the hero of this story grabbed me from the moment he sauntered into my imagination and levelled me a look from under the brim of his hat! I am totally in love with him. Ty Halliday is quiet, strong, sexy, calm and a cowboy. Can you imagine being snowed in with him?

That’s exactly what happens to my heroine, Amy, a soft-hearted young widow disillusioned with love. Add to the mix the amazing ranch country of Southern Alberta, a baby and Christmas a-comin’ and I think this becomes one of the most tender tales I’ve ever told!

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, would you come visit me on Facebook and let me know? I am amazed by how technology has given us this wonderful ability to connect!

Wishing you the most wonderful Christmas ever,

Cara

About the Author

CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the ‘Love and Laughter’ category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com.

Snowed in
at the Ranch

Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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 mind—clearly it was impossible—it came again. Louder. A babbling sound, like cold creek water tinkling over the first thin shards of ice.

And even though he was not a man with much experience in such things, Ty knew exactly what it was.

There was a baby inside his house.

Ty backed off his porch on silent feet, took a deep breath, felt a need to ground himself. He paused at the corner of his house, surveying the rolling land of the foothills, black against the midnight-blue of a rapidly darkening sky.

Snow-crusted pasture rolled away from him, beyond that a forested valley, all of it ringed by the craggy magnificence of the Rocky Mountains. The rugged sweep of his land soothed him, though it was not “safe.” A man could die—or be injured—in this country fast and hard. The arrival of the cougar was a case in point, though getting wet and lost in December was far more dangerous than an old mountain lion.

Still, for all its challenges, if ever a place was made to put a man’s soul at ease, wasn’t it this one? He had gone away from here once, and nearly lost himself.

The baby’s happy squawking from inside the house was revving up a notch and he felt the simple shock of it down to his wet, frozen toes inside his boots.

A baby?

The truth be told, the danger of the cougar that had passed through his pastures appealed to him more than the mysterious presence of an infant inside his house.

Ty moved along the side of the house until he stood at the front. At the top of a long, long drive that twisted endlessly up the valley from Highway 22—sometimes called The Cowboy Trail—a car was parked in the gravel turnaround.

It was not the kind of car anyone in these parts would be caught dead driving.

No, folks around here favored pickup trucks, diesel, big enough to haul cattle and horses and hay. Trucks that could be shifted into four-wheel drive as the seasons changed and the roads became more demanding. People around here drove vehicles that were big, muddy and ugly.

No one Ty knew drove a car like this: bright red, shaped like a ladybug, impractically low to the ground.

Cute.

No surprise that a baby seat sat in the back, cheerfully padded with a bright fabric that had cartoon dogs and cats on it.

Ty placed his hand on the hood. Cold. The car had been here for a time.

He checked the plate. Alberta. A Calgary parking sticker was in the left-hand corner of the windshield. Not so far from wherever home was, then, maybe one and a half, two hours, if the roads had been good.

It would be easy enough to slide open the door and find the paperwork, but when he tried the door, it was locked. Under different circumstances he might have seen that as hilarious. Locked? He allowed his eyes to sweep the unpopulated landscape again. Against what?

He turned back to the house. Then he saw his front window.

For the second time in less than five minutes, Ty felt himself stumble backward in shock. His sense of being in an exhausted state of distorted reality increased. He made himself stand very still, squint through the sleet and snow, demanding it go away.

It was a Christmas tree. And it was real, because when he blinked hard and looked again, it was still there. Behind plate glass, bright lights winked against dark boughs, sent little splashes of color onto the gathering snow in his front yard.

He checked his driveway again, seeking familiar landmarks. Turned and studied his house, reassured himself that had been his pasture the cows had been shepherded into, his barn where he had put up his horse.

His eyes went back to the tree.

As far as Ty knew, there had never been one set up in the new Halliday house.

Or at least not in the twenty-six years he had lived here.

And in Ty’s exhausted mind, a single, vulnerable hope crept in, a wish that he had made as a small boy.

Maybe his mother had come home.

He shook off the thought, irritated that it had somehow breached the wall of his adult world. Wishes were for children, and there had been no chance of his ever coming true, thanks to his father.

In his tired mind it did not bode well that the car in the yard, and the baby in his house, and the tree in his window had stirred something up that was better left alone, that he had not given any power to for years.

He went around to the back door again, habit more than anything else. In these parts the front door was rarely used, even by company. The back entrance was built to accommodate dirty boots and jackets, hats, gloves, bridles hung indoors in cold weather to keep the bits warm.

Ty Halliday took a deep breath, aware that the pit of his stomach felt exactly as it had in his days on the rodeo circuit when you gave that quick nod, the chute door opened, and suddenly you were riding a whirling explosion of bovine motion and malice.

He put his hand on the doorknob and felt it resist his flick of the wrist. At first he thought it was stuck, but then in an evening where he could have done without one more shock, he was shocked again. His door was locked.

Okay. Maybe one of his neighbors was playing a practical joke on him. Unlocked doors invited pranks. It was a tightly knit community and they all loved to have a laugh. Melvin Harris had once come home to find a burro in his living room. When Cathy Lambert had married Paul Cranston some of the neighbors had snuck into their house and filled every single drawer with confetti. They’d been married six years, and sometimes you still saw a piece of it sticking to one of Cathy’s sweaters.

Ty lifted a worn welcome mat and found a rusty key. Sometimes he locked up if he was going to be away for a few days.

He slid the key in the door and let himself in, braced for some kind of battle, but what greeted him was enough to make him want to lay down his weapons.

His house, which he had always seen primarily as providing shelter, felt like home.

First, it smelled good. There was a light perfume in the air, woman, baby, underlying the smell of something wonderful cooking.

Second, the sound was enough to break every barrier a man had placed around his heart—and Ty would be the first to admit in his case, that was many. The baby was now chortling with glee.

Ty took the bridle he had slung over his shoulder and hung it on an empty peg. Then he took off his wet gloves and tossed them on the floor. He slid his sodden feet from muddy boots, and then took a deep breath—gladiator entering the ring to face unexpected horrors—and went up the stairs off the landing and surveyed his kitchen.

A fat baby with a shock of impossibly curly red hair sat dead center of Ty’s kitchen on a blanket surrounded by toys. The baby, a boy, if the dump trucks and fire engines that surrounded him were any indication, was gurgling joyously.

The baby turned at his entrance, regarded him solemnly with gigantic soft brown eyes.

Instead of looking alarmed by the arrival of a big, irritated stranger, whose long Aussie-style riding coat was dripping water on the floor, the baby’s eyes crinkled happily, and the joyous gurgling increased.

“Papa,” he shouted.

Ty said a word he was pretty sure it was against the law to use in the presence of babies.

Or ladies.

Not that she looked like a lady, exactly. Through a wide archway, the kitchen opened onto the living room, and first a crop of hair as curly as the baby’s appeared from behind the boughs of the tree. And then eyes, like the baby’s, too, large and soft and brown, startled now.

Startled?

It was his house.

Cute. Just like the car. She had a light dusting of freckles across a delicate nose, curly hair the color of liquid honey in a jar. At first, he thought she had a boyish build, but Ty quickly saw her curves were just disguised in a masculine plaid shirt.

She didn’t have on a speck of makeup and was one of those rare women who didn’t need it, either.

“Who are you?” she demanded, a tiny tremor in her voice.

What kind of question was that to be asked in his own house? He could tell, from the way her eyes skittered around—looking for something to hit him with if he moved on the baby or her—that she was not just startled, she was scared. Any remaining thought that this might be a prank disappeared.

Her pulse beat frantically in the hollow of her slender neck.

Ty had to fight, again, the notion that he was somehow dreaming, and that he was going to wake up very soon. He didn’t like it one little bit that exhaustion would make it way too easy to appreciate this scene.

That exhaustion was making some childhood wish try to push out of a dark corner of his mind.

Annoyed with himself—a man who believed in his strength and his determination, a man who put no faith at all in wishes—Ty planted his legs firmly apart, folded his arms over his chest.

She darted out from behind the tree, dropped the tangle of Christmas tree lights that were in her hand and grabbed a lamp. She yanked it off the side table and stood there holding it like a baseball bat.

Ty squinted at her. “Now, what are you going to do with that?” he asked mildly.

“If you touch my baby or me, you’ll find out!”

The lamp was constructed out of an elk antler. It was big and heavy and it was already costing her to hold it up. It made him very aware of how small she was.

He had to fight to get beyond the exhaustion and the irritation that came with the weariness, to the same calm energy he tapped into to tame a nervous colt. He thought of the locked car and the locked back door.

He said, “I’m way more scared of a baby than that lamp. Especially one who calls me Papa.”

He thought maybe her hold on the lamp relaxed marginally.

“How did you get into my house?” she demanded. “I locked the door.”

“I used a key,” he said, his voice deliberately quiet, firm, calm. “I happen to have one. I’m Ty Halliday. And last time I looked, this was my place.”

The lamp wavered. Doubt played across her features for a second. Then she brought her weapon back up to batting position, glaring at him.

“Why don’t you put that down?” he suggested. “Your arms are starting to shake. We both know I could take it from you if I had a mind to.”

“Just try it,” she warned him.

It was a little bit like an ant challenging an aardvark, but somehow he didn’t think pointing that out to her was going to help the situation, and he reluctantly admired her spunk.

Something yanked on the hem of his coat. He looked down. The baby had crawled over and had grabbed a fistful of the wet oilskin of Ty’s jacket. He was pulling himself up on it.

“Papa!” he crowed.

“Don’t touch him!”

“Believe me, I’m not going to.”

In a flash, she had set down the lamp, crossed the room, pried her baby’s fist loose of his jacket and scooped him up into her arms.

This close he could smell them both. Her scent was subtle. Some flower. Lilac? No. Lavendar. It was mingled with baby powder. He wasn’t sure how he recognized either of those scents, not common to his world, but he did, and it felt as if they were enveloping him.

She took a step back, eyeing him warily.

“You’re in the wrong place,” he said. “This really is my house. I’m cold and I’m wet and I’m dead tired, so let’s get this sorted out so you can move on and I can go to bed.”

Apparently the fact that he wanted to get rid of her rather than steal either her baby or her virtue reassured her in some way.

She pondered him. “If this is really your house, what’s in the top drawer in the kitchen?”

“Knives and spoons and forks.”

“That’s in the top drawer of every kitchen!”

“You asked the question,” he reminded her.

“Okay, second drawer.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m losing patience,” he warned her, but then gave in. The sooner he got that scared look off her face, the sooner she would realize her error and get on her way.

“Tea towels, once white, now the color of weak tea. One red oven glove with a hole burned right through it. Next drawer—potato masher, soup ladle, rolling pin, hammer for beating the tough out of rough cuts of beef.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

“How long have you been here that you know what’s in my drawers?”

Her eyes shifted guiltily and made him wonder exactly what other drawers she had been investigating.

He swore softly. “Have you made it as far as my bedroom?”

“Oh, God,” she said again.

The fear drained out of her, leaving her looking pale and shaky. She actually wobbled on her feet.

“Don’t faint,” he said. “I don’t want to have to catch the kid.”

“Oh,” she said sharply, drawing herself up, annoyed, “I am not going to faint. What kind of weak ninny do you take me for?”

“Weak ninny? How about the kind that reads Jane Eyre? How about the kind who is lost in the country, setting up housekeeping in someone else’s house?” he said smoothly.

The truth was he liked her annoyance better than the pale, shaky look. He decided it would be good, from a tactical standpoint, to encourage annoyance.

“You don’t look like you would know the first thing about Jane Eyre,” she said.

“That’s right. Things are primitive out here in the sticks. We don’t read and can barely write. When we do, we use a tablet and a chisel.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking hard. “Now I’ve insulted you. I’ve moved in to the wrong house and I’ve insulted you. But I’m not going to faint. I promise. I’m not the fainting kind.”

“Reassuring,” he said drily. “And just for the record, I’m not easily insulted. It would take a lot more than the insinuation that I’m not up on my literary classics.”

She sucked in a deep, steadying breath. “This isn’t the McFinley residence, is it?”

Her face was crumpling, all the wariness and defiance seeping out of it. It was worse than pale and shaky.

He had the most ridiculous notion of wanting to comfort her, to move closer to her, pat her on the shoulder, tell her it would be all right.

But of course, he had no way of knowing if it would be all right, and he already knew if you moved too fast around a nervous colt, that little tiny bit of trust you had earned went out the window a whole lot faster than it had come in.

“But you know the McFinleys?” she asked, the desperation deepening in her voice. “I’m housesitting for them. For six months. They’ve left for Australia. They had to leave a few days before I could get away….”

He shook his head. He had the horrible feeling she was within a hairsbreadth of crying. Nervous colts were one thing. Crying women were a totally different thing. Totally.

The baby had sensed the change in his mother’s tone. His happy babbling had ceased. He was eyeing his mother, his face scrunched up alarmingly, waiting for his cue.

One false move, Ty warned himself, and they would both be crying.

Ty checked the calendar in his mind. It was six days before Christmas. Why did a woman take her baby and find a new place to live six days before Christmas?

Running.

From what, or from whom, he told himself firmly, fell strictly into the none-of-his-business category.

“Mona and Ron?” Her voice faded as she correctly read his expression.

He was silent.

“You’ve never heard of them,” she deduced. She sucked in another deep breath, assessing him.

Ty watched, trying not to let amusement tug at his mouth, as she apparently decided he was not an ax murderer, and made the decision to be brave.

She moved the baby onto her hip and wiped her hand—she’d been scared enough to sweat?—on slacks that weren’t made for riding horses. Like the shirt, the slacks emphasized the surprising lushness of such a slight figure.

All the defiance, all the I’ll-lay-my-life-down-for-my-baby drained out of her. She looked wildly embarrassed at having been found making herself at home in someone else’s house. Still, blushing, she tried for dignity as she extended her hand.

“I’m Amy Mitchell.”

The blush made her look pretty. And vulnerable. He didn’t want to take her hand, because despite her effort to be brave she still looked a breath away from crying, and the baby was still watching her intently, waiting.

“Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, even though she wore no wedding band. He took her hand.

Ty knew instantly why he had resisted taking it. Amy Mitchell’s hand in his felt tiny, soft beyond soft. The touch of her hand, his closeness to her, made him aware of his bleak world in ways that made him uncomfortable.

Her eyes were not brown, as he had initially thought from across the room, but a kaleidoscope of greens and golds, shot through with rich, dark hints of coffee color.

Now that she didn’t feel she had her back against the wall, with a home invader coming at her, her eyes were soft and worried. Her honey-in-a-jar hair was scattered about her face in a wild disarray of curls that made him want to right it, to feel its texture beneath his fingertips.

Ty Halliday’s world was a hard place. There was no softness in it, and no room for softness, either. There was no room in his world for the tears that shone, unshed, behind the astounding loveliness of her eyes; there was no room in his world for the bright, hopeful lights of the Christmas tree.

The baby, eyes shifting from him to his mother and back again, suddenly relaxed. “Papa,” he cooed, and leaned away from his mommy, reaching for Ty.

Ty took a defensive step backward.

There was no room in his world for such innocence or trust. All these things were as foreign to Ty as an exotic, unvisited land.

He realized he was still holding Amy Mitchell’s hand. She realized it, too, and with a deepening blush, slipped it from his.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered. “I have GPS.”

She said that as if her faulty system or reading of it was the cause of the stain moving up her cheeks, instead of her awareness of him.

And maybe it was.

But he didn’t think so.

Still, he focused on the GPS, too, something safe in a room that suddenly seemed fraught with dangers of a kind he had never considered before.

The faith city folk put in their gadgets never failed to astound him, but aware she was still terrifyingly close to the tear stage, he tried to think of a way to phrase it that wouldn’t wound her.

“It wouldn’t be the first time GPS got people into trouble in this country,” he said after some thought.

“Really?”

Obviously, she was pleased that hers was not an isolated case of being misled by her global positioning system, and he could have left it at that.

Instead, he found the worry lines dissolving on her forehead encouraging enough to want to make them—and the possibility of tears—disappear altogether.

“One of the neighbors found an old couple stranded in George’s Pass last year. They’d been on the news. Missing for a week.”

But instead of being further reassured that her mistake was not all that uncommon, Amy looked aghast. He remembered the locked doors and saw her considering other scenarios. Disastrous possibilities flashed through her eyes as she considered what could have happened to her if she had followed her GPS instructions somewhere other than his driveway.

Which just served as a reminder that he could not really be trusted with soft things or a woman so frightened of life she locked everything all the time and was ready to defend herself with a lamp if need be.

She marshaled herself and turned away from him. She plunked the baby down on his padded rear and began to whip around the room, picking up baby things, putting them in a pile. Given the short amount of time she had been here, the pile grew to a mountain with astonishing swiftness.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Halliday. We’ll go right away. I’m so embarrassed.”

If he had thought she was blushing before, that had only been a hint of the main event.

Amy Mitchell was turning a shade of red that matched some of the lights on the tree. Was that a smile tickling around the edges of his mouth? He tried to remember the last time he had smiled.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town had made him smile, he decided. He’d reread that a week or so ago.

No doubt his current good cheer was because his visitor was so intent on leaving. There was no need to tell her to pack her baby and get the hell out of his house. She was doing it all on her own.

“It will take me a minute to gather my things,” she said, all business and flurrying activity. “I’ll leave the groceries.”

“Groceries?”

“Oh, I stocked the fridge. I thought I was going to be living here, after all.”

“You’re not leaving the groceries,” he said.

“Oh, no, really. You didn’t have a thing in your fridge. That’s part of why I thought I was in the right place. Nothing in the fridge, no tree up, no socks on the floor.”

She had been in his bedroom.

“Really, I didn’t think anyone had lived here recently.” She shot him a look that was faintly accusing and faintly sympathetic. “It certainly didn’t look as though anyone lived here.”

“I don’t need your groceries,” he said a bit more tightly than he intended. He was so hungry, and whatever she had in the fridge would be better than the tin of stew he had planned on opening. But to admit that might invite more sympathy, and he definitely didn’t need her sympathy.

So his place looked unlived in. So it wasn’t going to be the featured house on Cozy Country Homes. So what? It was a place to hang his hat and lay his head. He didn’t need more than that.

Or at least he hadn’t felt as if he had for a long, long time. But there it was again, unwanted, uninvited emotion whispering along his spine.

Yearning. A wish he had managed to bury deep to have something that he did not have.

“I started to unpack. I’ve got some things in the bedroom,” she explained as she scurried around the room, the remnants of her embarrassment making her awkward. She dropped a baby puzzle on the floor, and the wooden pieces scattered.

He just knew she had been in there, in his bedroom. And he knew, suddenly, why it bothered him, too. That could move yearning in a whole other direction if he let it, which he wasn’t going to.

He hadn’t allowed himself feelings for a long, long time. It must be the Christmas tree, the baby, the scents, the astonishing discovery of a woman in his house, his own exhaustion, making him oddly vulnerable, making him aware of a hole a mile deep where his soul should be.

He watched Amy Mitchell, on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces of the puzzle, stuffing them into a box. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the baby roll off his rear end onto all fours.

With startling speed and unsettling determination, he crawled across the floor, making a beeline for Ty.

Ty stepped out of his way. The baby followed like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.

“Papa!” he yelled.

“Where is his papa?” he asked, deftly sidestepping the baby one more time.

CHAPTER TWO

“SO, that’s what they call the Texas two-step,” Amy said, rocking back on her heels to watch, after something in Ty’s tone had made her look up from where she was gathering the puzzle pieces.

“It’s not funny. Tell him to stop it.”

But it was funny, watching the big cowboy trying, not without desperation, to evade the determined baby. She giggled.

The cowboy glanced at her, glared, shifted away from the baby. “Don’t laugh,” he warned her.

“I’m sorry. It just looks as if you’d be completely unfazed by almost anything life threw at you. And you’re running from a baby!”

“I am not running,” he said tersely. “Call him off.”

She did laugh then. Ty glared at her, stepped away from the baby. He had waltzed around half the living room.

“Just stop and pick him up,” Amy managed to advise between snorts of laughter. “He thinks it’s a game.”

Oh, it felt good to laugh. She knew it was partly reaction to the situation she found herself in, a release from the fear she had felt when she had been startled by the big cowboy appearing in a home she’d already been busy making hers. But life had been such a serious affair for far too long.

The tall cowboy glaring at her warningly only seemed to make it more impossible to control her rising mirth.

“Now you want me to pick him up? Before you were going to hit me with a lamp if I even looked at him.”

“That was when I thought you were the intruder,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Now I know it’s me who is the intruder. If you pick him up and cuddle him for a few seconds, he’ll lose interest.”

“Cuddle?”

“You mustn’t say that as if I’m asking you to get friendly with a rattlesnake!”

“It was the word cuddle that I took offense to!”

“A threat to your masculinity, is it?”

“I’m wet. I’m dirty.”

“You’re scared.”

He looked at her darkly, and then heaved a sigh.

“Terrified,” he admitted, and the laughter, recently tamed, burst free again. It still felt good to release the tension that had been building in her since Ty Halliday had set her world upside down by coming in the back door of the house she had been assuming was going to be all hers for the next six months.

The tiniest smile tugged at the edges of that hard mouth, and her laughter died. Nothing in her entire existence—she’d lived all over the world, gone to university, married into a well-to-do society family—had prepared her for a man like Ty Halliday.

In a world filled with illusions, the man was absolutely, one hundred per cent real. He had physical power and presence. He was as big as an oak tree, and just as solid. He had seemed to fill the room, to charge the air in it with a subtle hiss of dark sensuality. There was something about him standing there, all cowboy, that was equal parts menace and romance.

There was toughness in the chiseled angles of his dark whisker-shadowed face, something uncompromising about the set of his chin, the muscle that jerked along his jawline, the hard lack of humor around the line of his lips.

He was handsome—Amy was not sure she had ever seen eyes that color, a flinty blue sapphire—almost beyond words, but his good looks were of the untouchable variety. He wore solitude, self-reliance, as comfortably as he wore that past-his-knees, dark, dripping Australian-style riding coat that emphasized the broadness of his shoulders and the impossible length of his legs.

“If you pick him up, the chasing-papa game will be over,” she said, though suddenly she was not at all sure she wanted to see her baby in those strong arms.

She needn’t have worried. Ty Halliday was not picking up anyone’s baby. He stepped away, Jamey followed, crowing demandingly.

“At least stop and pat him on the head and say hello to him. His name is Jamey, with a Y.”

“The Y part is important?”

“Very important,” she said solemnly. It marked one of the few occasions she had stood up to her husband and her in-laws. They had wanted James. She had not. She had thought Jamey was a wonderful compromise. They had not. But for once, she had stood firm.

“Just try it,” she said encouragingly.

Ty stopped, contemplated the situation. Jamey pitched himself into the hesitation, grabbed the hem of the wet coat and pulled himself up.

“Papa.”

Looking very much as if he was reaching out to a full-grown tiger, Ty rested a reluctant hand on Jamey’s nest of red curls.

“Hey. Little fella. Jamey.”

“Papa,” Jamey crooned, leaned into the jacket without letting go, and plopped his thumb in his mouth.

“Why does he think I’m his papa, for heaven’s sake?”

“Don’t take it personally. He calls every man that.”

“Why? Where is his papa?”

Ty looked at her then, and his gaze seemed uncomfortably all-seeing.

“Are you running from something?” he asked softly.

She actually shivered from the fierce look that crossed his face. She told herself not to take it personally. He would just be one of those men with a very traditional set of values, thinking women and children—much as he disliked the latter—were in need of his extremely masculine self for protection.

Amy hated that the old-fashioned notion actually filled her with the oddest sense of comfort.

“What would make you think I’m running from something?” she hedged, because of course that was uncomfortably close to the truth.

“Less than a week before Christmas, and you’re looking for a new home?”

“It’s just the timing,” she said. “The McFinleys wanted to be in Australia by Christmas.”

He did not look convinced, but he did not look as if he cared to pursue it, either.

“Where’s his papa?” he asked again, patting Jamey—who was showing absolutely no sign of losing interest in him—with surprising gentleness, on the head.

“I’m a widow,” she said quietly. “Jamey’s father was killed in an accident three months after he was born. It’s nearly nine months ago now.”

Some shadow passed over his face and through the depths of those amazing sapphire eyes. She felt as if Ty Halliday could clearly see the broken place in her.

She could feel his awkwardness. It was obvious from his house that he was a man alone in the world, and had been for a long time. There was not a single feminine touch in this place. It was also obvious he was a man allergic to attachments. There were no pictures, no family photographs. There was no ring on his finger.

On arriving, she had thought the McFinleys had taken their personal touches down so that she could put up her own and feel more at home. But she had not even asked herself about the unlocked door, the lack of curtains, or throw rugs or little lace dollies. She had not asked herself about the dresser still filled with neatly folded clothes.

Now, feeling his eyes on her, Amy knew it was way beyond this solitary cowboy’s skill level to know what to say to her. She was touched when he tried.

“That seems to fall squarely into the life-is-unfair department,” he said gently.

She lifted her chin. “I stopped expecting life to be fair a long time ago.”

He frowned. “No, you didn’t.”

“Pardon me?”

“That sounds like something I would say. And you’re not like me.”

“And what are you like?”

“Cynical. World-weary.”

“That’s me exactly!” she protested.

A small smile teased the devastating curve of his lips. “No, it’s not,” he said. “You just wish it was. It’s evident from looking at you, you are nothing of the sort.”

“You can’t possibly know that about me on such a short acquaintance.”

“Yes, I can.”

“How?” she demanded, folding her arms over her chest, some defense against what he was seeing. No, what he thought he was seeing.

She was not the naive girl she had once been, so reliant on the approval of others, begging for love, so desperate for a place to call home that it had made her overlook things she should have seen. Amy Mitchell was on a new path now.

She was going to be fully independent. She was not going to rely on anyone else to make a home for her and her baby.

Looking after the McFinley house, venturing so far from the familiar, expanding her website, Baby Bytes, into a viable business from there, were all part of her new vision for her life.

She hated it that a complete stranger thought he could see through it.

She hated it even more that her first day of her new life was turning into something of a fiasco.

Thankfully, no one but Ty Halliday ever needed to know.

She had called her in-laws as soon as she stepped in the door to let them know she had arrived safely.

She had heard her mother-in-law’s disapproval, so like her son’s had been.

“For heaven’s sake, Amy, give up this harebrained scheme. John and I are delighted to look after you and Jamey. Delighted.”

Delighted to control and criticize her, just like their son had done. Delighted to keep her dependent on them. She shivered. Wouldn’t they love to see the predicament she was in now?

But they never had to know. In a little while she would be where she was supposed to be, none the worse for the wear, no one to question her competence.

“By the way,” she said, “before I forget, I owe you money for a phone call. My cell phone wouldn’t work here. Now, how can you know so much about me?”

“No one with a truly jaded soul would offer me money for a phone call I wouldn’t even know you made for a month. And no one truly fed up with life arrives at a new home and makes it their first priority to put up a Christmas tree,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I don’t even know where you found this stuff. The tree is obviously too big to have arrived in your shrimpy little car.”

That shrimpy little car was the first major purchase she had ever made on her own. Her mother-in-law, not aware that Baby Nap had just signed up to be a sponsor on the website, had not thought it was a sensible use of funds.

“I prefer to think of it as sporty,” Amy said proudly. The car was part of the new independent her!

“Sporty. Shrimpy. There is no way a Christmas tree arrived in the trunk of it.”

“The tree was in your basement.”

He turned and scanned her face, looking for a lie. “This tree was in my basement?”

“Along with all the decorations and lights and such.”

“No kidding.” He whistled, long and low. “Who would buy an artificial tree when there are a million real ones two steps out the back door?”

“So you usually have a real tree?” she asked.

He snorted. “We’ve never had a tree up in this house.”

“But why?” she whispered, horrified by his revelation.

He looked at her and shook his head. “You want me to believe you’re cynical when you cannot imagine a world with no Christmas tree, a world without fluffy white kittens, a world without fresh baked chocolate chip cookies?”

“Is it for religious reasons?” she asked solemnly.

He threw back his head and laughed then, but it was not a nice laugh.

“Religion is as foreign to this house as Christmas trees. And now, Miss Cynical, you look like you took a wrong turn and ended up in the devil’s den.”

At least he had dropped the Mrs.

Amy was aware she should let it go. And couldn’t. “I just can’t believe you never had a Christmas tree. Why?”

“It wasn’t a big deal. My mom left when I was about the same age as your little guy. It was just me and my dad. Christmas was just another day, filled with hard work and the demands of the ranch.”

She felt appalled, and it must have shown on her face.

“Don’t get me wrong. The neighbors always had us for dinner.”

That did not make her feel any less appalled. “Your mom left you?” She knew she shouldn’t have asked, but she couldn’t help it. She thought of what it would take to make her leave Jamey.

And the only answer she could come up with was death.

He was irritated by her question, and it was clear he had no intention of answering her. He rolled his shoulders, and she could tell he hated that he had said anything about himself that might be construed as inviting sympathy. She offered it nonetheless.

“I guess I’m not the only one life has been unfair to,” she said softly into his silence.

He wouldn’t look at her. He shook free of Jamey, again and moved over, looked in one of the boxes. He shuffled through some old ornaments and a Christmas tree star.

And then he took his hand out and stared at it.

He was holding a packet of letters, yellow with age, tied with a blue ribbon. He swore, his voice a low, animal growl of pain.

Amy froze, stared at him wide-eyed.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and rubbed his brow with a tired hand. “Sorry.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, and she knew instantly, from the way his expression closed, that he couldn’t bear it that she could see something was wrong.

He shoved the letters into a deep pocket on his jacket.

“I’ve just come home from a real devil of a day to find my house invaded by a lamp-wielding stranger with a baby who wants to call me Papa. What’s wrong? Why, nothing!”

“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I really am. I’m leaving as fast as I can.”

And she meant it.

There was something about him that was so alone it made her ache. It made her want to lay her hand on the thickness of that powerful wrist and say to him, Tell me.

But if he did, if he ever confided in her, she knew instinctively it would change something irrevocably and forever.

Like her plan for a new life.

Still, looking into his closed face, she knew she was in no danger from his confidences.

He kept things to himself.

He did not lean.

He did not rely.

He was the last of a dying breed, a ruggedly independent man who was entirely self-sufficient, confident in his own strength to be enough to get him by in an unforgiving environment.

He was totally alone in the world, and he liked it that way.

She was leaving. She did not need to know one more single thing about him.

He moved to the window, away from Jamey’s relentless pursuit. He looked out and sighed.

“I don’t think life is quite done being unfair to either one of us,” he said, his voice deep, edged with gravel and gruffness.

“What do you mean?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

Amy moved beside him and was stunned to see that while she had been decorating the tree, oblivious, a storm had deepened outside the window. The snow was mounding on his driveway, like heaps of fresh whipped cream. Already the gravel road that twisted up to the house was barely discernible from the land around it.

His eyes still on the window, not looking at her, he said, “Mrs. Mitchell?”

“Amy.”

“Whatever. You won’t be going anywhere tonight.”

“Not going anywhere tonight?” Amy echoed. But she had to. She had to correct her mistake, hopefully before anyone else found out.

The urgency to do so felt as if it intensified the moment he said she wasn’t going anywhere.

If there was one thing Amy Mitchell was through with, it was being controlled. It was somebody telling her what to do. It was being treated as an inferior rather than an equal.

And she fully intended to make that clear to Mr. Ty Halliday. He wasn’t going to tell her what to do.

“I have to go,” she said.

“This isn’t the city. Going out in that isn’t quite the same as going to the corner store for a jug of milk. If you get in trouble—”

“And you think I will.”

“—and I think there’s a chance you might, it can turn deadly.”

She shivered at that.

“There’s not a lot of people out here waiting to rescue you if you go in the ditch or off the road, or get lost some more or run out of gas.”

“I’m a very good driver,” she said. “I’ve been driving in winter conditions my whole life.”

“Urban winter conditions,” he guessed, and made no effort to hide his scorn. “I don’t think that’s a chance you want to take with your baby.”

“You’re probably overstating it.”

“Why would I do that?” he asked, and his eyebrows shot up in genuine bewilderment.

Yes, why would he? He had made it plain her and Jamey’s being here was an imposition on him. The possibility startled her that he wasn’t trying to control her, that he was only being practical.

“The native people have lived in this country longer than both of us,” he continued quietly. “When they see this kind of weather, they just stop wherever they are and make the best of it. They don’t think about where they want to be or what time they should be there and who might be waiting for them. They stay in the moment and its reality and that’s why they don’t end up dead the way somebody who is married to their agenda might.”

Amy saw, reluctantly, how right he was. This was the kind of situation that had made her husband, Edwin, mental. And her in-laws. Delayed flights. Dinner late. Any wrench in their carefully laid plans sent them off the deep end.

This was her new life. If she just applied the same old rules—if she rigidly adhered to her plan—wasn’t she going to get the same old thing? Feeling uptight and harried and like she had somehow failed to be perfect?

What if instead she saw this as an opportunity to try something new, a different approach to life? What if she relaxed into what life had given her rather than trying to force it to meet her vision and expectation?

What if she acted as if she was free? What if she just made the best of whatever came?

Her desire to protest, to have her own way, suddenly seemed silly and maybe even dangerous, so she let it dissipate.

And when it was gone, she looked at Ty Halliday, standing in the window, his coat drawn around him, his handsome face remote, and she was not sure she had ever seen anyone so alone.

At any time of year, that probably would have struck her as poignant.

But at Christmas?

What did it mean that he had never put up a Christmas tree, not even when he was a child? That seemed unbearably sad to her, and intensified that sense she had of him being terribly and absolutely alone in the world.

What if she used these altered circumstances to make the best of it? What if she made the best of it by giving him an unexpected gift? What if she overcame her own hurt, the unfairness of her own life, and gave this stranger a gift?

A humble gift. A decorated tree.

Wasn’t that really what Christmas was all about? When she had left the safety of her old world behind her this morning, she hadn’t been running away from something, as he had guessed.

No, she hoped she was running toward something. Hadn’t she hoped she was moving toward something she had lost? Some truth about who she really was? Or maybe about who she wanted to be? About the kind of life she wanted to give her baby?

She did not want to be so wrapped up in her own grievances she could not be moved by the absolute aloneness of another human being.

She took a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said, “I guess I could stay. Just for the night.”

He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lifted, as if amused she thought she had a choice.

“In the morning,” he said with the annoying and quiet confidence of a man who was accustomed to being deferred to, “I’ll see that you get where you’re going.”

I’ll look after you.

Maybe it was the fury of the storm that made that seem attractive. Or maybe, Amy thought, she had an inherent weakness in her character that made her want to be looked after!

“I can clearly see it makes sense to avoid going out in the storm tonight, but no thank you to your offer to show me the way in the morning. I am quite capable of looking after myself.”

The wind gusted so strongly that it rattled the glass of the window, hurled snow against it. Nature, in its unpredictable wrath, was reminding her that some things were going to be out of her control.

But not, she reminded herself, how she handled those things. And so she would be a better person and finish decorating this tree, her gift to a stranger, before she left here tomorrow and never looked back. It would not matter to her if he didn’t show appreciation.

Somewhere in his heart he would feel the warmth of the tree and the gesture, and be moved by it.

She slid him another glance, and saw the man was dead on his feet. And that he was soaked from the top of his dripping cowboy hat to his wet socks. He hadn’t driven up in a vehicle.

“You were out in that,” she said, and was ashamed by how thoroughly she had made it all about her.

He glanced at her and seemed to find her concern amusing. “That’s my world,” he said with a touch of wryness. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad then.”

“You’re starving,” she guessed. “And frozen.”

He said nothing, a man accustomed to discomfort, to pitting his strength against whatever the world brought him, and expecting to win. Ty Halliday was obviously a man entirely used to looking after himself.

So, since she was stuck here anyway, she would make the best of it, and this would become part of her gift to him.

“I’ve got a chicken potpie in the oven. I’ll make a salad while you go shower. Everything should be ready in twenty minutes.”

Her take-charge tone of voice was probably spoiled somewhat by the fire she felt creep up her cheeks after she mentioned the shower.

The very thought of him in the shower, steam rising off a body that she could tell was hard-muscled and powerful, made something hot and sweet and wildly uncomfortable unfold inside of her.

He regarded her for a moment too long. She suspected he wanted to refuse even this tiniest offer to enter his world. But then he sniffed the air like a hungry wolf and surrendered to the fact she was already in his world. He turned away.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It smells good.”

She could tell it was not easy for him to accept her offer, but obviously, like her, he knew he had to just try and make the best of an awkward situation.

He went by her, and his scent overrode that of the potpie in the oven. He smelled of wet oilskin, wild horses, pure man, and his aroma enveloped her. And then he was gone. Amy waited until she heard a door down the hallway snap shut before she went and sank down on her knees beside her baby. She was aware her knees were trembling.

The wrong house?

Her clothes, her partially unpacked suitcase, were spread out on Ty Halliday’s bed!

It all seemed as if it might be a terrible omen. She had set out on the road this morning to a brand-new life.

She had not listened to the objections of her family or her in-laws.

She was done with the stuffiness of it all. She was done with being stifled. Lectured. Patronized.

This morning, she had felt joy unfurl in her for the first time in a long time. Amy had followed her heart instead of her head.

But where had it led her?

Amy tried to still the trembling of her knees and her heart by picking up Jamey and settling him on her lap.

“Papa?” he asked, a plaintive whisper, his eyes glued to the place where Ty Halliday had disappeared down the hallway.

“No, sweetie, not Papa.” There was no sense telling Jamey, yet again, there was no papa. In all his nearly a year of wisdom, even though his father had been gone for longer than he had been in Jamey’s life, Jamey had become determined to have what his little pals at play school had—a daddy.

“Papa,” Jamey insisted, leaning back into her and putting his thumb in his mouth.

Amy heard the shower turn on in another part of the house and was horrified to feel a heated blush move up her cheeks.

Good grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.

She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!

She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.

Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.

Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”

But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.

Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?

Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?

Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?

The answer was no.

But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.

Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.

Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.

And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.

Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.

She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.

“Just like its owner,” she muttered.

“Papa,” Jamey supplied.

“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.

“Don’t call him that, sweetie. He’s not your papa.”

“Umpa?”

“No, not your grandpa, either. Call him—” The oven made another noise, and she went and opened the door and peered in. The burner was red-hot and making a hissing sound.

“Oh, damn,” she said, and turned it back down.

“Odam,” Jamey repeated.

“Sure,” she said distractedly, “call him that.”

The oven looked after, and papa renamed something Jamey could pronounce, Amy turned to the salad.

In every place in the world where her family had moved to, Amy, to her career-oriented mother’s bewilderment, had always found sanctuary in the kitchen. She loved to cook.

As she was ripping and washing lettuce, she heard the water shut off in the bathroom and had a renegade thought about naked wet skin and steam.

And then, as if her thoughts were too hot to handle, the smoke alarm started to shriek.

She turned from the sink to see smoke was roiling out of the oven.

Jamey, startled, began to wail along with the smoke alarm.

Amy donned the red oven mitt with the hole burned right through it, and opened the oven door a crack. Just as she had suspected, the potpie had boiled over onto the burner.

She shut the oven off and slammed the door. She opened the kitchen window, and picked up her howling baby.

“Hey. Hey, little man, it’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. Because just then, through the haze of smoke that filled the kitchen, Ty appeared.

Ty scanned the room, every muscle taut. Amy could have sworn he was prepared to lay down his life for her and Jamey, two near strangers. A strange emotion clawed at her throat.

Then, when Ty saw there was no emergency, he stood down. Instantly. He went from ready to relaxed in a second, though a certain level of annoyance marred his altogether too handsome features.

But while Ty relaxed, Amy felt as if her nerve endings were singing with tension. It wasn’t just that he had been prepared to lay down his life for them, either.

No, Ty Halliday was nearly naked, clad only in boxer shorts.

And if the smoke alarm had not been going off before, it certainly would have started now. Because Ty Halliday was nearly naked. Even his feet were sexy!

He was everything she had imagined he would be, only about a hundred times off the scale of where her imagination went to.

His dark slashing eyebrows, the dark shadow of whiskers on his face, had made her think his hair would be dark under the cowboy hat he had worn.

But he was blond, his wet hair the color of antique pieces of gold in a just opened treasure chest.

But the astonishing color of his hair held her attention for only a millisecond. He was lean and strong and his skin was flawless. His arms, corded with muscles of honed steel, were deeply tanned, a color that didn’t go away, apparently, even in these long days of winter. His legs were equally powerful-looking: long, straight, made to curve around a horse, or a bucking bull, or…

She couldn’t go there. Instead, she let her hungry gaze go to his chest, deep and smooth. His shoulders were impossibly broad and his stomach a perfect washboard of rippling, hard muscle. Ty was just way too hot to handle, and as the smoke detector continued to shriek, Amy was aware her own five-alarm fire had started going off deep inside of her.

She dared look at the boxers. Her mouth fell open.

Ty Halliday was wearing bright red boxer shorts, low, snugged over his flat hips and the taut lines of his lower belly. And what were his red boxer shorts covered with?

Santa, his sleigh and twelve reindeer. She presumed twelve reindeer, because she really shouldn’t count.

She didn’t want to appear too interested, but she could not draw her eyes away until she had read the words that were also dancing across the shorts.

Have you been naughty or nice?

For the second time that day, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard the tears squirted from her eyes.

Or maybe that was the smoke.

Ty folded those gorgeous muscled arms over an equally gorgeous muscled chest, planted his long, muscled legs far apart.

If it weren’t for the shorts, he would definitely have the intimidating presence she was fairly certain he was aiming for.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he yelled over the screaming alarm, the baby howling and her laughter.

“You don’t?” she gasped.

“No, I don’t,” he said sternly.

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