Rebecca Winters: Daddy's Christmas Miracle

Love and family make the most precious gifts!

Daddy’s Christmas Miracle

Three all-new stories to warm your heart this winter from favourite authors Rebecca Winters, Marie Ferrarella and Shirley Jump

Daddy’s Christmas Miracle

Santa in a Stetson

Rebecca Winters

The Sheriff’s Christmas Surprise

Marie Ferrarella

Family Christmas in Riverbend

Shirley Jump

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Santa in a Stetson

Rebecca Winters

REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include five beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high alpine meadows full of wild flowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favourite vacation spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her romance novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church. Rebecca loves to hear from readers. If you wish to e-mail her, please visit her website at www.cleanromances.com.

Dedicated to the Smart family,

who never gave up or lost hope. You and your

courageous daughter are an exemplary model

in faith for the rest of us.

“The bus is coming. Bye, Dad. Don’t forget I’m going to Jen’s house after school for a sleepover. Her mom is driving us all home tomorrow so you won’t have to worry about it.” Allie leaned across the front seat of the truck and gave him a hug.

“I haven’t forgotten anything, but I think your cold’s worse,” Colton Brenner said. Throughout the week, her congestion had become more noticeable. “Maybe you’d better give this party a miss and have an early night.”

“I can’t! It would ruin the whole weekend!” She sounded so upset he was sorry he’d said anything. “We’ve made too many plans, but I promise not to stay up late. The decongestant pills you gave me are in my purse.”

“If you’re not improved tomorrow, I’m taking you to the doctor.”

“Everyone has a cold right now. It’s not a big deal.” Her warm brown eyes slid away from his. When they did that, it signaled she didn’t want to get into a heavy discussion with him.

“But not everyone is my daughter.” He kissed her cheek. “I love my children.”

“We love you, too.” She opened the door and got out.

“Later!” his son called from the backseat.

He turned. “Bye, Matt. I’ll be at your wrestling match at three o’clock.”

“Don’t forget it’s in Livingston.”

“Would I do that?” They high-fived each other before he jumped down. “We’ll go for pizza after.”

“Cool!” Matt shut the door.

Colton—Colt to his friends—sat back in the seat, eyeing his fifteen-year-old twins as they waited for the school bus that would drive them into Bozeman eight miles away.

Every morning he brought them down to the entrance of the Circle B to make sure they got off safely. The family always ate breakfast together and talked over the day’s plans. His housekeeper Noreen picked them up at the same spot after school. It was a ritual he’d started years earlier and had never deviated from.

When their mother had pulled her permanent disappearing act, he’d made it his mission to be there for them in every possible capacity. He loved them more than life.

This morning their breath curled in the invigorating air. Twenty degrees above zero wasn’t bad for mid-November in the Bridger Mountains of Montana. He could remember other Novembers at twenty below. Unfortunately the weather couldn’t be good for Allie’s cold.

More snow wasn’t forecast until tomorrow evening. With a lull between storms, this was the best time for him and his foreman to ride up to the north forty with some of the hands and finish repairs on the fencing. If he left with them now, he’d be able to get in a good six hours of work before he had to leave for Livingston, twenty-six miles away.

Now that football season was over and Matt’s team had lost in the playoffs, Matt had joined the wrestling squad. His school’s first preseason match was today. The boy was shooting up, but he wanted to get more buff. Colt smiled. He remembered wanting the same thing at Matt’s age.

After his children boarded the bus, he waved to the driver before heading back to the ranch house three miles up the mountain. His eyes took in the blanket of snow covering evergreen forests and copses of aspens. He loved it all, from harshest winter to the glory of summer, when wildflowers filled the alpine meadows. Every season highlighted different aspects of the ranch’s beauty and brought him renewal.

Thanks to his Scottish ancestors who’d emigrated here in the late 1800s, the setting of the Brenner cattle ranch was the most beautiful mountain spread this side of the Continental Divide. He counted his blessings.

The one thing missing from his life hadn’t mattered to him in years. He’d long since put the pain of his travesty of a marriage behind him. Though everything else had failed during those nightmarish twelve months of supposed wedded bliss, he and his nineteen-year-old bride had made perfect babies together. Matthew and Allison … nonidentical brunettes who came with their own individual spirits.

Loving his children, working the ranch to leave them a legacy for the future, was his reason for living.

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Kathryn McFarland had the distinction of having been kidnapped from her parents’ mansion on South Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lost to them for the first twenty-six years of her life. The people at Skwars Farm, Wisconsin, who’d taken her in had called her Anna Buric. Her origins were a mystery to everyone. Then one day a miracle happened.

She was found!

In an instant, she’d become Kathryn McFarland. And like the pauper who’d suddenly been thrust on the throne as the Prince of England, she inherited lands, titles, wealth and a loving, illustrious family eager to embrace her.

That was more than four years ago. Yet every time she let herself inside her penthouse condo at the McFarland Plaza in downtown Salt Lake, she experienced alternating waves of gratitude and guilt—gratitude because she’d been united with the most wonderful, generous parents imaginable and guilt because she needed her own space.

She knew it seemed unfair to her family that after waiting twenty-six years to get their little baby back, Kathryn had returned a grown woman who needed her family desperately, but secretly needed her independence, too.

They’d lost all that time with each other. So had she, with them. It was only natural for her to live with them and bask in their love, but it couldn’t go on forever.

Kit Talbot McFarland, Kathryn’s sister-in-law, knew exactly how Kathryn felt. She, too, had been kidnapped as a baby in the same bizarre case twenty-six years earlier, and had been found a few months before Kathryn. But in the process she’d met Cord, one of Kathryn’s two older brothers. It wasn’t long before they were married and now had a little girl and another baby on the way.