Marie Ferrarella - Her Mistletoe Cowboy

Even now, he wasn’t sure if Sam had exactly been a man of faith, or just someone who believed in the healing power of having a place to go where you were forced to think outside of yourself. Church had perhaps been that place for Sam.

Maybe that wouldn’t have been good for some, but it certainly turned out to be good for Jackson and for him, Garrett thought now, still carefully scanning the road below. He would have hated to think where he and his brother would have wound up if it hadn’t been for Sam and his rather strict way of doing things.

One thing was for sure, if it hadn’t been for Sam, he wouldn’t be here right now, looking for a long-overdue magazine writer.

According to the phone call he’d taken from the main editor of the bimonthly magazine doing that story on the Healing Ranch, the writer he’d sent, a woman named Kimberly Lee, should have gotten to them by now. The man who’d called an hour ago said he’d tried to reach her cell phone and received the message that it was out of range—something that was all too familiar around here. The editor had decided to call the ranch.

“She might have gotten lost,” the man, a Stan Saunders, had told him. “I told her to get a car with a GPS, but even if she did, it’s still possible that she’s gotten lost. I called the airport rental agency and they said she rented a tan compact Toyota,” he’d added as an afterthought.

The editor had started to recite the license plate to him, but he’d stopped the man, saying it was enough that he had a description of the car. There weren’t exactly an abundance of compact Toyotas of any color in this part of Texas.

“People tend to drive Jeeps and trucks out here,” he’d told the man. “But to be on the safe side, maybe you could describe your writer to me.”

Saunders had immediately rattled off the pertinent details as if he was staring at a picture of the writer. “Kim’s five-two, twenty-eight years old, has really dark brown eyes, blue-black hair, straight, chin length, oh, and she’s Eurasian, if that helps any,” he said as if he’d just remembered the last detail.

“I’ll find her,” he’d promised the man, more than a little intrigued now by the mental picture he’d formed from Saunders’s description.

Before he left, he’d stopped to tell Jackson where he was going because this was the morning he was supposed to be overseeing some of the recent arrivals’ progress. Now, because of the missing writer, Jackson was going to have to double up and take his boys, as well as his own.

Not that his brother minded extra work when it came to the teens on the ranch. That was, after all, the entire point of the ranch’s existence. But he could see that Jackson minded the reason for his being unavailable for a while.

Ordinarily easygoing and unflappable, Jackson had frowned at the prospect of his going out to hunt for the supposedly missing writer.

“If you hadn’t said yes to the story in the first place,” Jackson had pointed out, “you wouldn’t have to go running around, trying to track down the whereabouts of some displaced big-city tenderfoot who could just have gotten herself really lost out there.”

“It’ll all be worth it in the end,” he’d promised Jackson just before he’d gone off.

Of course, he hadn’t been all that sure about it at the moment.

And he still wasn’t any surer about finding her now. Granted that looking for a tan compact foreign car was somewhat better than looking for a needle in the haystack—but not by much. There was a lot of terrain to cover between Forever and Laredo, and if this woman was really as bad at following directions as that editor had said she was, he just might have to enlist Sheriff Santiago and his deputies to help him find her.

What kind of a Navajo brave are you?

He could almost hear his uncle growling the question at him in that hoarse, gravelly voice of his.

Unlike a great many residents in and around the reservation that was located ten miles outside of Forever, Sam White Eagle had been very proud of his heritage. Proud to be both a Navajo and an American, and it was because of Sam that both he and Jackson had their feelings of self-worth and their self-esteem intact.

It hadn’t always been that way, at least not for Jackson, who was only half Navajo. The mother who had deserted him had been Caucasian and from what his own mother had told him about the other woman, she had made Jackson feel that his Native American side was what dragged him down.

Jackson had had a lot going against him and to his credit—and Sam’s—he had come a long way, Garrett thought. That was part of what he wanted this writer’s article to reflect. That Jackson had been the first youthful offender who had been turned around by what he’d learned at the Healing Ranch—even if the ranch hadn’t been called that at the time. Back then it had just been a working ranch—and he and Jackson had been the ones doing the working—right alongside their uncle.

These days it was still a working ranch, but its purpose now was a little different from the one it had when Jackson was brought in to work there as a troubled teen.

Damn, how could this woman have gotten lost? Garrett wondered, slowly urging his horse on. The road was fairly straight from Laredo to here. All she had to do was stay on it.

There were no storms anywhere in that stretch of land to divert her, not even one brewing on the horizon, according to the latest weather report, so where the hell was she?

Garrett squinted as he stared out along the road below. Even from here, he should be able to see the dust the car was kicking up.

Okay, so the car was tan and that didn’t exactly stand out immediately in this area. If she’d rented a car that was a royal blue, the color that was still pretty popular in the glossy magazine ads he looked at on occasion, she would be easier to spot. But even in a tan car, he felt he could still find her. It was just harder.

But harder didn’t mean impossible. It just meant that—

Garrett abruptly stopped giving himself a pep talk and really stared down at the road below him. There was something pulled over to the side.

It was a tan compact car.

Her car, he thought triumphantly. He’d found her, Garrett congratulated himself.

There was no cloud of dust, big or little, coming from around it. Now that he had finally spotted it, he saw that the vehicle wasn’t moving.

Why wasn’t it moving? he wondered in the next heartbeat. Had she run out of gas, or had the car just died?

And then an even worse thought suddenly occurred to Garrett.

Had the woman passed out for some reason?

With women like his late mother, Sylvia, Miss Joan, the tart-tongued woman with the heart of gold who owned the diner, and now Debi, the nurse who had married his brother, populating his life, he was accustomed to thinking of women as inherently strong. He was used to women like Debi who rolled up her sleeves, went out and got the job done, not women who fainted at the first sign of trouble.

From what he’d managed to gather from the editor he’d talked to, this woman from the magazine might very well fall into the latter group, not the former.

If that was the case, whether she was spooked or had fainted, he had better get down there to her pronto. There was no telling what sort of condition this woman was in—and how that might, ultimately, reflect on the Healing Ranch.

He knew that was a selfish thought, but when it came to Jackson, he could be as selfish as he had to be.

The fastest way from where he was to where she was down below was straight down the hillside. It was the fastest way, but definitely not the easiest.

“You up to this, boy?” he asked, patting his golden palomino’s neck.