Christmas Kisses with My Cowboy. Kate Pearce

kept his usual foul language to himself, not wanting to unsettle the young boy, who looked frantic enough already.

      “Hey,” Parker called. “What’s going on?”

      “My . . . horse!” came a high-pitched wail from the bent-over youngster. She stood up and a wealth of blond hair fell out of her hat. It wasn’t a boy after all. She sat down on the ground. She was crying. “She’ll make me give him back,” she sobbed. “She’ll never let me keep him. He knocked over part of the fence. She was calling the vet when he ran away and I was afraid . . . he’d hurt . . . himself!”

      “Wait a bit.” He went down on one knee in front of her. “Just breathe,” he said gently. “Come on. Take it easy. Your horse won’t go far. We’ll follow him with a bucket of oats in a minute and he’ll come back.”

      She looked up with china blue eyes in a thin face. “Really?” she asked hopefully.

      He smiled. “Really.”

      She studied him with real interest. She must have been nine or ten, just a kid. Her eyes were on his thick black hair, in a rawhide-tied ponytail at his back, framing a face with black eyes and thick eyebrows and a straight, aristocratic nose. “Are you Indian . . . I mean, Native American?” she asked, fascinated.

      He chuckled. “Half of me is Crow. The rest is Scots.”

      “Oh.”

      “I’m Parker. Who are you?”

      “I’m Teddie. Teddie Blake. My mom lives over that way. We moved here about four months ago.” She made a face. “I don’t know anybody. It’s a new school and I don’t get along well with most people.”

      “Me, neither,” he confessed.

      Her eyes lit up. “Really?”

      He chuckled. “Really. It’s not so bad, the town of Benton. I’ve lived here for a while. You’ll love it, once you get used to it. The palomino’s yours?” he added, nodding toward where the horse had run.

      “Yes. He was a rescue. We live on a small ranch. It was my grandmother’s. She left it to my dad when she died. That was six months ago, just before he . . .” She made a face. “Mom’s a teacher. She just started at Benton Elementary School. I’m in fifth grade there. The ranch has a barn and a fenced lot, and they were going to kill him. The palomino. He hurt his owner real bad. The vet was out at our place to doctor Mom’s horse and he told us. I begged Mom to let me have him. He won’t like it,” she added with a sour face.

      “He?”

      “Mom’s would-be boyfriend from back East,” she said miserably. “He works for a law firm in Washington, D.C. He wears suits and goes to the gym and hates meat.”

      “Oh.” He didn’t say anything more.

      She glanced at his stony face and didn’t see any reaction at all. He’d long since learned to hide his feelings.

      “Anyway, he says he’s going to come out and visit next month. Unless maybe he gets lost in a blizzard or captured by Martians or something.”

      He chuckled. “Don’t sound so hopeful. He might be nice.”

      “He’s nice when Mom’s around,” she muttered.

      His face hardened. “Is he, now?”

      She saw the expression. He wasn’t hiding it. “Oh, no, he doesn’t . . . well, he’s just mean, that’s all. He doesn’t like me. He says it’s a shame that Mom has me, because he doesn’t want to raise someone else’s child.”

      “Are your parents divorced?”

      She shook her head. “My daddy’s dead. He was in the army. A bomb exploded overseas and he was killed. He was a doctor,” she added, fighting tears.

      “How long ago?” he asked, and his voice softened.

      “Six months. It’s why Mom wanted to move here, to get away from the memories. My grandmother left us the ranch. She was from here. That lawyer helped Mom get Daddy’s affairs straight and he’s really sweet on her. I don’t think she likes him that much. He wanted to take her out and she wouldn’t go. He’s just per . . . per . . .”

      “Persistent?”

      She nodded. “That.”

      “Well, we all have our problems,” he returned.

      There was a sound of hoofbeats. They turned and there was the palomino, galloping back toward them.

      “Wait here a sec. Don’t go toward him,” he added. “It’s a him?”

      “It’s a him.”

      “Be right back.”

      He went to the stable and got a sack of oats. The palomino was standing in the road, and the girl, Teddie, was right where he’d left her. Good girl, he thought, she wasn’t headstrong and she could follow orders.

      “Look here, old fellow,” Parker said, standing beside the dirt road. He rattled the feed bag.

      The palomino shook his head, raised his ears, and hesitated. But after a minute, he trotted right to Parker.

      “Pretty old creature,” Parker said gently. He didn’t look the horse in the eyes, which might have seemed threatening to the animal. He held a hand, very slowly, to the horse’s nostrils. The horse sniffed and moved closer, rubbing his head against Parker’s. “Have some oats.”

      “Gosh, I couldn’t get near him!” Teddie said, impressed.

      He chuckled. “I break horses for J.L. Denton. He owns the ranch,” he added, indicating the sweep of land to the mountains with his head.

      Parker smoothed the horse’s muzzle. “Let’s see.” He eased back the horse’s lip and nodded. “About fifteen, unless I miss my guess.”

      “Fifteen?” she asked.

      “Years old,” he said.

      “I thought he was only a year or so!”

      He shook his head. He hung the feed bag over the horse’s head and smoothed his hand alongside him, all the way to the back.

      “You know about horses?” he asked Teddie.

      She shook her head. “I’m trying to learn. Mom knows a lot, but she doesn’t have time. There are these YouTube videos. . . .”

      “You never walk behind a horse unless you let him know you’re going to be there,” he explained as he smoothed his way down the horse’s flank to his tail. “Horses have eyes set on the sides of their heads. They’re prey animals, not predators. Their first instinct is always going to be flight. As such, they’re touchy and sensitive to sound and movement. They can see almost all the way around them, except to their hindquarters. So you have to be careful. You can get kicked if you don’t pay attention.”

      “Nobody said that on the video I watched,” she confessed.

      “You need some books,” he said. “And some DVDs.”

      She sighed. “Mom said I didn’t know what I was doing. He was such a pretty horse and I didn’t want them to put him down. They arrested his owner.”

      Parker just nodded. He was seeing some damage on the horse’s back, some deep scars. There was a cut that hadn’t healed near his tail, and two or three that had on his legs. “Somebody’s abused this horse,” he said coldly. “Badly. He’s got scars.”

      “They said the man took a whip to him.” She grimaced. “They told me not to touch him on his front leg, but I was trying to look at his hoof and I forgot.”

      “His hoof?”

      “He was favoring that one.” She pointed to it.

      He patted the horse’s