Christmas Kisses with My Cowboy. Kate Pearce

by Kensington Publishing Corp.

      To my editor and friend of many, many years,

      Tara Gavin, with love

      Chapter One

      He had a first name, but they all called him by his last name: Parker. He was part Crow. In fact, he had an aunt and uncle who still lived on the reservation. His parents had divorced when he was young. His mother was long dead, even before he went overseas in the military. He didn’t know, or care, where his father was.

      He worked on a huge ranch owned by J.L. Denton, near Benton, Colorado. He was the world’s best horse wrangler, to hear J.L. tell it. Of course, J.L. had been known to exaggerate.

      It was autumn and the last lot of yearlings had gone to market. The bulls were in winter pasture. The cows were in pastures close to the ranch so that they could be taken care of when snow started falling. That would be pretty soon, in the Colorado mountains, because it was late October, almost Halloween.

      All the hands had to do checks on the cattle at least two or three times a day; more on the pregnant cows, especially on the pregnant heifers, the first-time mothers. Calves dropped in April. The pregnant cows and heifers had been bred the last of July for an April birthing date, and there were a lot of pregnant female cattle on the ranch.

      Calves were the soul of the operation. J.L. ran purebred Black Angus, and he made good money when he sold off the calf crop every year. Not that he needed money so much. He was a multimillionaire, mostly from gas and oil and mining. The ranch was just cream on top of his other investments. He loved cattle. So did his new wife, who wrote for a famous sword and sorcery television series called Warriors and Warlocks that even Parker watched on pay-per-view. It was fun trying to wheedle details out of the new Mrs. Denton. However, even though she was a kind, sweet woman, she never gave away a single bit of information about the series. Never.

      Parker lived in a line cabin away from the ranch house, where he broke horses for J.L. for the remuda, the string of horses each cowboy had to keep for ranch work. Horses tired, so they had to be switched often on a working ranch, especially during high-stress periods. He was good with all sorts of livestock, but he loved horses. He was blessed in the sense that horses also loved him, even outlaw horses. He’d had the touch since he was in grammar school on the Crow reservation up at Crow Agency, near the Little Bighorn Battleground at Hardin, Montana. His mother had encouraged him, emphasizing that sensitivity wasn’t a bad thing in a man. His father said just the opposite.

      Parker remembered his father with anger. He’d married Parker’s mother, Gray Dove, in a moment of weakness, or so he’d said. But he had no plans to live on a reservation with her. So she went with him to his job in California until their son, Parker, was born. She and the child seemed to be an ongoing embarrassment to Chadwick Parker. He never stopped chiding his wife about her stupid ceremonies and superstitions. Finally, when Parker was six, she gave up and went back to Montana. It would have been nice if Parker’s father had missed her and wanted her back. He didn’t. He filed for divorce. Parker had never heard from him again. He doubted if the man even knew who he was. But it didn’t matter. One of Gray Dove’s brothers had taken him in when she died prematurely of pneumonia. He was part of a family, then, but still an outsider, even so. He fell in with a local gang in his teens and barely escaped prison by going into the military. Once there, he enjoyed the routine and found himself blessed with the same intelligence his absent father had. He was a mathematical genius. He aced any math courses he took, even trig and calculus and Boolean algebra.

      Those skills after he graduated, with a degree in physics, served him well with government work. He didn’t advertise the degree around Benton. It suited him to have people think he was simply a horse wrangler.

      Parker had found work on J.L. Denton’s ranch fresh out of the army, through an army buddy who’d been with him overseas in the Middle East. He had a knack for breaking horses without using anything except soft words and gentle hands. Word got around about how good he was at it, that he could do the job in a minimum of time and without injuring the animal in any way. He got job offers all the time, but he admired J.L. and had no plans to leave him.

      He had a first cousin, Robert, in the home he’d been given after his mother’s death. He kept a careful eye on the boy and made sure he had enough money for school and athletics on the rez. Robert graduated from high school and also went into the military. He was now a petty officer aboard a navy ship somewhere in the Atlantic. He wrote home, but not often. Parker often got the feeling that his cousin was ashamed of his poverty-stricken beginnings and didn’t advertise them to people. It broke his parents’ hearts that the boy didn’t come to visit when he was on shore leave. But they adapted. People did, when they had to.

      Money was never a worry for Parker. He had more than enough these days, now that his cousin had become self-supporting. He did send money to his cousin’s parents. His aunt and uncle had been kind to him, and they’d had his cousin late in life. They weren’t old, but they were middle-aged and Robert’s father was disabled. Parker helped out.

      Parker didn’t drink, smoke, or gamble and he didn’t have much to do with women these days. So money wasn’t a problem. Not anymore.

      He did like the occasional cigar. It wouldn’t appear obvious to an outsider, but Parker had a mind like a supercomputer. He could break any code, hack his way into any high-level computer that he liked, and get out without detection. It was a very valuable skill. His degree in astrophysics didn’t hurt, either, but it was his math skills that set him apart in intelligence work. So from time to time, men in suits riding in black sedans pulled up at the cabin and tried to coax him out of Colorado.

      Finally, he’d accepted an assignment, for a whole summer. The amount they paid him had raised his eyebrows almost to his hairline. Even after paying taxes, the cash left over was more than enough to invest in stocks and bonds and make him a tidy nest egg for the future.

      That one summer led to other summers, and top secret clearance, so that now he could have afforded to retire to some nice island and laze in the sun and drink piña coladas for the rest of his life. But he didn’t like liquor and he wasn’t partial to beaches. So he gentled horses and waited for the next black sedan to show up. There was never a lack of them.

      He was thirty-two and he longed for a home and a family. But he didn’t have many friends left on the rez. Most of the girls he’d gone to school with were long married, with lots of children. His best friend had died of a drug overdose, leaving behind two children and a wife who lived in the same condition that had caused his friend’s death. He’d tried to get help for her, but she’d gone out of the rehab center the day after he got her in and she never looked back.

      Life on the rez was hard. Really hard. They gave all this aid to foreign countries, spent all this money, making horrible weapons that could never be used in a civilized world, while little kids grew up in hopeless poverty and died too young. The big problem with the rez was the lack of job opportunities. What a pity that those entrepreneurs didn’t set up low-impact manufacturing plants on the rez, to make jobs for people who faced driving hours to even find one. They could have offered jobs making exclusive clothing or unique dolls; they could have made jobs creating prefab houses and easily-set-up outbuildings; they could have opened a business that would make sails for boats, or wind chimes, or furniture. There must be a thousand things that people could manufacture on the reservation if someone would just create the means. Craftsmanship was so rare that it was worth diamonds in the modern world. It was almost impossible to find anything made by hand, except for quilts and handcrafted items. Well, there were those beautiful things that the Amish made, he amended. He had Amish-built furniture in his cabin, provided by a small community of them nearby, from whom he also bought fresh butter and cheese and milk. Now there, he thought, was a true pioneering spirit. If the lights ever went out for good, the Amish wouldn’t have to struggle to survive.

      * * *

      Parker had been running one of J.L.’s new fillies through her paces while he pondered the problems of the world, and was just putting her up, when he heard fast hoofbeats and a young, winded voice yelling.

      He