A Stone Creek Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

Cacti. Sweeping desert vistas. Eighty-degree winters.

      But Stone Creek was in northern Arizona, near Flagstaff, a place of timber and red rock—and the occasional blizzard.

      It wasn’t like him to overlook that kind of geographical detail, but he had. He’d signed on the dotted line because the money was good and because Brad was a good friend.

      “How about if I come back there? We’ll spend Christmas in New York—skate at Rockefeller Center, see the Rockettes—”

      Sophie loved New York. She planned to attend college there, and then medical school, and eventually set up a practice as a neurosurgeon. No small-time goals for his kid, but then, the doctor gene had come from Kat, not him. Kat. As beautiful as a model and as smart as they come, she’d been a surgeon, specializing in pediatric cardiology. She’d given all that up, swearing it was only temporary, to have Sophie. To travel the world with her footloose husband…

      “But then I wouldn’t get to see Butterpie,” Sophie protested. A raw giggle escaped her. “I don’t think they’d let her stay at the Waldorf with us, even if we paid a pet deposit.”

      Tanner pictured the pony nibbling on the ubiquitous mongo flower arrangement in the hotel’s sedate lobby, with its Cole Porter piano, dropping a few road apples on the venerable old carpets. And he grinned. “Probably not.”

      “Don’t you want me with you, Dad?” Sophie spoke in a small voice. “Is that it? My friend Cleta says her mom won’t let her come home for Christmas because she’s got a new boyfriend and she doesn’t want a kid throwing a wet blanket on the action.”

      Cleta. Who named a poor, defenseless kid Cleta?

      And what kind of person put “action” before their own child, especially at Christmas?

      Tanner closed his eyes, walking toward the dark house he didn’t know his way around in yet, since he’d spent the first couple of nights at Brad’s, waiting for the power to be turned on and the phones hooked up. Guilt stabbed through his middle. “I love you more than anything or anybody else in the world,” he said gruffly, and he meant it. Practically everything he did was geared to provide for Sophie, to protect her from the nameless, faceless forces who hated him. “Trust me, there’s no action going on around here.”

      “I’m going to run away, then,” she said resolutely.

      “Good luck,” Tanner replied after sucking in a deep breath. “That school is hermetically sealed, kiddo. You know that as well as I do.”

      “What are you so afraid of?”

      Losing you. The kid had no way of knowing how big, and how dangerous, the world was. She’d been just seven years old when Kat was killed, and barely remembered the long flight home from northern Africa, private bodyguards occupying the seats around them, the sealed coffin, the media blitz.

      “U.S. Contractor Targeted by Insurgent Group,” one headline had read. “Wife of American Businessman Killed in Possible Revenge Shooting.”

      “I’m not afraid of anything,” Tanner lied.

      “It’s because of what happened to Mom,” Sophie insisted. “That’s what Aunt Tessa says.”

      “Aunt Tessa ought to mind her own business.”

      “If you don’t come and get me, I’m breaking out of here. And there’s no telling where I’ll go.”

      Tanner had reached the old-fashioned wraparound porch. The place had a certain charm, though it needed a lot of fixing up. He could picture Sophie there all too easily, running back and forth to the barn, riding a yellow bus to school, wearing jeans instead of uniforms. Tacking up posters on her bedroom walls and holding sleepovers with ordinary friends instead of junior celebrities and other mini-jet-setters.

      “Don’t try it, Soph,” he said, fumbling with the knob, shouldering open the heavy front door. “You’re fine at Briarwood, and it’s a long way between Connecticut and Arizona.”

      “Fine?” Sophie shot back. “This place isn’t in a parallel dimension, you know. Things happen. Marissa Worth got ptomaine from the potato salad in the cafeteria, just last week, and had to be airlifted to Walter Reed. Allison Mooreland’s appendix ruptured, and—”

      “Soph,” Tanner said, flipping on the lights in the entryway.

      Which way was the kitchen?

      His room was upstairs someplace, but where?

      He hung up his hat, shrugged off his leather coat, tossed it in the direction of an ornate brass peg designed for the purpose.

      Sophie didn’t say a word. All the way across country, Tanner could feel her holding her breath.

      “How’s this? School lets out in May. You can come out here then. Spend the summer. Ride Butterpie all you want.”

      “I might be too big to ride her by summer,” Sophie pointed out. Tanner wondered, as he often did, if his daughter wouldn’t make a better lawyer than a doctor. “Thanksgiving is in three days,” she went on in a rush. “Let me come home for that, and if you still don’t think I’m a good kid to have around, I’ll come back to Briarwood for the rest of the year and pretend I love it.”

      “It’s not that I don’t think you’re a good kid, Soph.” In the living room by then, Tanner paused to consult a yellowed wall calendar left behind by the ranch’s previous owner. Unfortunately, it was several years out of date.

      Sophie didn’t answer.

      “Thanksgiving is in three days?” Tanner muttered, dismayed. Living the way he did, he tended to lose track of holidays, but it figured that if Christmas was already a factor, turkey day had to be bearing down hard.

      “I could still get a ticket if I flew standby,” Sophie said hopefully.

      Tanner closed his eyes. Let his forehead rest against the wall where a million little tack holes testified to all the calendars that had gone before this one. “That’s a long way to travel for a turkey special in some greasy spoon,” he said quietly. He knew the kid was probably picturing a Norman Rockwell scenario—old woman proudly presenting a golden-brown gobbler to a beaming family crowded around a table.

      “Someone will invite you to Thanksgiving dinner,” Sophie said, with a tone of bright, brittle bravery in her voice, “and I could just tag along.”

      He checked his watch, started for the kitchen. If it wasn’t where he thought it was, he’d have to search until he found it, because he needed coffee. Hold the Jack Daniel’s.

      “You’ve been watching the Hallmark Channel again,” he said wearily, his heart trying to scramble up his windpipe into the back of his throat. There were so many things he couldn’t give Sophie—a stable home, a family, an ordinary childhood. But he could keep her safe, and that meant staying at Briarwood.

      A long, painful pause ensued.

      “You’re not going to give in, are you?” Sophie asked finally, practically in a whisper.

      “Are you just figuring that out, shortstop?” Tanner retorted, trying for a light tone.

      She huffed out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “Okay, then,” she replied, “don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

       Chapter Two

      It was a pity Starcross Ranch had fallen into such a state of disrepair, Olivia thought as she steered the Suburban down the driveway to the main road, Ginger beside her in the passenger seat, Rodney in the back. The place bordered her rental to the west, and although she passed the sagging rail fences and the tilting barn every day on her way to town, that morning the sight seemed even lonelier than usual.

      She braked for the stop sign, looked both ways. No cars coming, but she didn’t pull out right away. The vibe hit