Page 4 of Must Love Mistletoe

Until now.

Here’s looking at you, Red.

Right here. Right now.

Longdead.

Didn’t have to be a coroner to see that.

The cookie he’d not long devoured threatened to reemerge. If his heart thumped any harder his ribs would fail to keep it caged.

“Hey, Cal. Wha—”

“Back up,” he bellowed, startling the heifer into a jog—good job, Cal, you utter hammerhead—his attention now torn between Sam, the startled cow, and the raggedy corpse all tangled up in the fallen tree. “Get behind the cows and push them back to the truck.” No way should Sam see any part of this. He needed to remember his fatheralive. “Now, Sam.”

“But—

“Go.We’re done here.” Red could wait. The cows could wait. Stopping Sam from seeingthatwas all that mattered now. “I’m right behind you.”

The return trip took half the time the outward trip had taken, with Cal’s horse enjoying the brisker pace and Old Plod stepping up to prove he’d once been the best horse on the ranch. Sam remained utterly silent the whole way back, and Cal had nothing to say either.

Ride hard, stay on task, and try and come up with a plan.

Be practical.Wasn’t he supposed to be good at that?

What needed to happen next, besides protecting Sam from a brutal memory that could never be erased?

Only after they reached the truck and tethered the horses, and Cal had reached for the satellite phone he kept charged and in the glovebox, did Sam finally find his voice.

“There’s a body back there, isn’t there.”

The boy was practically vibrating with tension, and Cal took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Someone had to be strong enough to carry this motherlode, and he was the only ox around. “Yes.” He crouched down so they were eye to eye and held Sam’s troubled brown gaze. Beth’s penny-brown eyes. Red’s freckles.But otherwise, all Sam. “Sorry I yelled. I didn’t want you to see that.”

“Is it my dad?”

How sure was he? More to the point, what good would come of lying? “I reckon so.”

Sam’s eyes filled with tears, and then Cal had his arms full of sobbing boy, and, yeah. He held Sam close, gentle like, because in spite of Cal’s size and his strength, he knew how to temper strength, too.

He waited while a young boy’s hope for the return of his missing father washed away in a waterfall of tears.

He waited until his own heartbeat had steadied and Sam was tucked into the curve of his shoulder before making that first call to the authorities, his next one to Seth, and a third call to Mason.

What use was rock-solid backup if a man never used it?

He was going to need all the backup he could get after making his next call to Beth.

Chapter Two

Beth Evans feltlike she’d just come off a fourteen-hour high, as she stripped off her surgical gown and cap in the hospital locker room and tossed them in the waiting laundry bin. She’d crash soon. Slide right down off that adrenaline rush that came with long hours of intense surgery and a positive outcome, but hopefully, she’d be home before that happened.

Tiredness rode her hard these days. No matter how much she tried to catch up on sleep, on chores, on parenting, she just couldn’t seem to get ahead. Being a nurse, running a ranch, being a mom—all doable, but not all at the same time. That was her main problem, never mind all the money problems bearing down on her like an avalanche.

She didn’t have enough feed to last a long winter, and winter had set in early this year. It was time to sell some of her breeding cows—the ones in calf to one of Cal Casey’s prize bulls—because there was no other stock left to sell besides the three horses, and Sam would never forgive her if she sold those.

He probably wouldn’t forgive her anyway when she put the ranch on the market.

Lose her boy to neglect because she was never there to parent him, or default on the dream of keeping his father’s legacy intact and lose him then. Those were her choices.

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