Snowed in at the Ranch. Cara Colter

snow was mounding on his driveway, like heaps of fresh whipped cream. Already the gravel road that twisted up to the house was barely discernible from the land around it.

      His eyes still on the window, not looking at her, he said, “Mrs. Mitchell?”

      “Amy.”

      “Whatever. You won’t be going anywhere tonight.”

      “Not going anywhere tonight?” Amy echoed. But she had to. She had to correct her mistake, hopefully before anyone else found out.

      The urgency to do so felt as if it intensified the moment he said she wasn’t going anywhere.

      If there was one thing Amy Mitchell was through with, it was being controlled. It was somebody telling her what to do. It was being treated as an inferior rather than an equal.

      And she fully intended to make that clear to Mr. Ty Halliday. He wasn’t going to tell her what to do.

      “I have to go,” she said.

      “This isn’t the city. Going out in that isn’t quite the same as going to the corner store for a jug of milk. If you get in trouble—”

      “And you think I will.”

      “—and I think there’s a chance you might, it can turn deadly.”

      She shivered at that.

      “There’s not a lot of people out here waiting to rescue you if you go in the ditch or off the road, or get lost some more or run out of gas.”

      “I’m a very good driver,” she said. “I’ve been driving in winter conditions my whole life.”

      “Urban winter conditions,” he guessed, and made no effort to hide his scorn. “I don’t think that’s a chance you want to take with your baby.”

      “You’re probably overstating it.”

      “Why would I do that?” he asked, and his eyebrows shot up in genuine bewilderment.

      Yes, why would he? He had made it plain her and Jamey’s being here was an imposition on him. The possibility startled her that he wasn’t trying to control her, that he was only being practical.

      “The native people have lived in this country longer than both of us,” he continued quietly. “When they see this kind of weather, they just stop wherever they are and make the best of it. They don’t think about where they want to be or what time they should be there and who might be waiting for them. They stay in the moment and its reality and that’s why they don’t end up dead the way somebody who is married to their agenda might.”

      Amy saw, reluctantly, how right he was. This was the kind of situation that had made her husband, Edwin, mental. And her in-laws. Delayed flights. Dinner late. Any wrench in their carefully laid plans sent them off the deep end.

      This was her new life. If she just applied the same old rules—if she rigidly adhered to her plan—wasn’t she going to get the same old thing? Feeling uptight and harried and like she had somehow failed to be perfect?

      What if instead she saw this as an opportunity to try something new, a different approach to life? What if she relaxed into what life had given her rather than trying to force it to meet her vision and expectation?

      What if she acted as if she was free? What if she just made the best of whatever came?

      Her desire to protest, to have her own way, suddenly seemed silly and maybe even dangerous, so she let it dissipate.

      And when it was gone, she looked at Ty Halliday, standing in the window, his coat drawn around him, his handsome face remote, and she was not sure she had ever seen anyone so alone.

      At any time of year, that probably would have struck her as poignant.

      But at Christmas?

      What did it mean that he had never put up a Christmas tree, not even when he was a child? That seemed unbearably sad to her, and intensified that sense she had of him being terribly and absolutely alone in the world.

      What if she used these altered circumstances to make the best of it? What if she made the best of it by giving him an unexpected gift? What if she overcame her own hurt, the unfairness of her own life, and gave this stranger a gift?

      A humble gift. A decorated tree.

      Wasn’t that really what Christmas was all about? When she had left the safety of her old world behind her this morning, she hadn’t been running away from something, as he had guessed.

      No, she hoped she was running toward something. Hadn’t she hoped she was moving toward something she had lost? Some truth about who she really was? Or maybe about who she wanted to be? About the kind of life she wanted to give her baby?

      She did not want to be so wrapped up in her own grievances she could not be moved by the absolute aloneness of another human being.

      She took a deep breath.

      “Okay,” she said, “I guess I could stay. Just for the night.”

      He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lifted, as if amused she thought she had a choice.

      “In the morning,” he said with the annoying and quiet confidence of a man who was accustomed to being deferred to, “I’ll see that you get where you’re going.”

      I’ll look after you.

      Maybe it was the fury of the storm that made that seem attractive. Or maybe, Amy thought, she had an inherent weakness in her character that made her want to be looked after!

      “I can clearly see it makes sense to avoid going out in the storm tonight, but no thank you to your offer to show me the way in the morning. I am quite capable of looking after myself.”

      The wind gusted so strongly that it rattled the glass of the window, hurled snow against it. Nature, in its unpredictable wrath, was reminding her that some things were going to be out of her control.

      But not, she reminded herself, how she handled those things. And so she would be a better person and finish decorating this tree, her gift to a stranger, before she left here tomorrow and never looked back. It would not matter to her if he didn’t show appreciation.

      Somewhere in his heart he would feel the warmth of the tree and the gesture, and be moved by it.

      She slid him another glance, and saw the man was dead on his feet. And that he was soaked from the top of his dripping cowboy hat to his wet socks. He hadn’t driven up in a vehicle.

      “You were out in that,” she said, and was ashamed by how thoroughly she had made it all about her.

      He glanced at her and seemed to find her concern amusing. “That’s my world,” he said with a touch of wryness. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad then.”

      “You’re starving,” she guessed. “And frozen.”

      He said nothing, a man accustomed to discomfort, to pitting his strength against whatever the world brought him, and expecting to win. Ty Halliday was obviously a man entirely used to looking after himself.

      So, since she was stuck here anyway, she would make the best of it, and this would become part of her gift to him.

      “I’ve got a chicken potpie in the oven. I’ll make a salad while you go shower. Everything should be ready in twenty minutes.”

      Her take-charge tone of voice was probably spoiled somewhat by the fire she felt creep up her cheeks after she mentioned the shower.

      The very thought of him in the shower, steam rising off a body that she could tell was hard-muscled and powerful, made something hot and sweet and wildly uncomfortable unfold inside of her.

      He regarded her for a moment too long. She suspected he wanted to refuse even this tiniest offer to enter his world. But then he sniffed the air like a hungry wolf and surrendered to the fact she was already in his world.