Page 15 of The Cowboy's Miracle Baby

Cami took themto the Gallagher Tree Farm and they spent the next half hour hiking up the gentle hillside to find the perfect specimen. The fragrance of pine filled the air and somehow boosted Cami’s mood. It was cold and they walked through a few inches of snow still covering the ground, but it was also sunny, and the crisp, blue sky overhead seemed to go on forever. PerfectlyDecemberin Montana.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” echoed up from speakers below at the check-out stand as they wove through the nursery of pine trees. Though she’d come here many times in the past to cut down a Christmas tree with her family, it felt distinctively different to be here with Gus and Eloise.

Christmas had always been her favorite season, filled with scents and sounds as familiar as her family. This year, for some reason, she’d felt too overwhelmed to truly enjoy its approach. What with the guest ranch business, helping to plan Will and Izzy’s wedding, teaching and the Christmas pageant, it felt as though she was living in the middle of a storm. And that was all before the baby showed up. Now, her life had seemed to cross some threshold ofunmanageable.

Still, some crazy voice inside her said she could handle it. Handle it all. Maybe she was deluding herself, but it had always been her experience that her capacity to embrace life had always expanded with the arrival of need. And that baby needed her.

They scrambled up the hillside, Ella slipping and sliding in the snow. She started a snowball fight with Gus and before long they were all involved, all of them laughing and ignoring the judgy looks they got from the serious tree shoppers until they were all covered with snow and chilled to the bone. They looked and looked, with Ella discounting all the ones Gus pointed to, the perfect six-foot tall ones, with cone shapes and thick, full branches.

“She has a mind of her own,” he said out of her earshot to Cami, who agreed with a smile.

“She’s great,” Cami said. “Smart as a whip. Did she really teach herself to read?”

“Yup. One day, she brought me that book and read the whole thing to me. I thought at first she’d just memorized it. And maybe she did in the beginning, but when I pointed at the words individually, she knew them.”

“Impressive.” Cami studied him as he walked beside her. He was a good seven inches taller than she was with an athletic build that was regrettably hidden by his thick winter coat. But her gaze fell to his strong hands. A doctor’s hands, she thought. Long fingers, hands strong enough to coax stubborn calves from their mothers’ bellies and gentle and skilled enough to do surgery on the smallest baby goat, if she didn’t miss her mark. Illicitly, and without preamble, she wondered what else such skilled hands could do.

Gus looked up to find her watching him and a flush of color climbed his neck. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. She got all that fire from her mom.”

There was no ring on his left hand. But for all she knew, he could be one of those who shunned jewelry. But the look on his face when he spoke about Eloise’s mother told her that probably wasn’t the case. But she didn’t want to ask. She didn’t have to.

“My wife… died two years after Ella was born. Cancer. It’s okay. Most people wonder.”

“I—” she began. “I’m so sorry.”

He gave a quick nod, staring out after his daughter. “And Ella’s got a string of people, including me, who love her. My brother, Luke, who you met last night. Rebecca White, a local woman who babysits when I need her. When we lived back East, Luke stood in for me when I had my hands full at work. What they say about it taking a village? That’s very true.”

“Just the same… it couldn’t have been easy, raising her on your own. While you were…”While he was grieving.

“No. But my late, great-aunt who raised me used to always say nothing that’s good ever comes easy. And Ella’s the best thing in my life.”

She smiled as they walked together up the hill, following his daughter who was hopping around the trees after a bunny she’d spotted. “And you must love what you do,” Cami said. “Liam says you’re the best large animal vet he’s ever worked with.”

“Well, that’s kind of him. I do love it. To be honest, I prefer animals to most people. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Well. That’s a relief. I mean, on a scale of one to Angus cow.”

He laughed. “And aside from taking in lost babies and wrangling children in a Christmas pageant, Ella says you’re also a teacher at her school.”

“That’s me. The crazy, overcommitted one. But I love it all. I really do. Now… the baby… that’s another level of crazy, I guess.”

“You don’t really think the mother is going to come back, do you? Sounded pretty final to me in that note.”

“I don’t know. You can never underestimate the power of motherhood. Who knows why she did it? But if I can track her down, somehow, maybe this isn’t a lost cause. She could be anywhere. She could be here in town still. She could be someone we know. And it’s just a matter of finding her and sorting it out. Which is why I hesitate to call social services. What’ll happen to that baby then? She entrusted her to me. I have no idea why.”

He brushed his fingers along the pine needles of a noble fir and the pine scent was strong. “I didn’t sleep much last night either.”

Surprised, she turned to him. “You didn’t?”

“No. I kept thinking about that bracelet she came with. The one with her name engraved on it.”

“What about it?”

“Well,” he said. “Unless it belonged to the mother or was handed down, she had to have gotten it engraved somewhere pretty recently. Probably here in town.”

Cami stopped dead. “You’re right. There can’t be that many places that do engraving here. I can think of one or two off the top of my head.”

“And if you check there, maybe they’ll have some kind of record of it.”

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