A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

Not that she’d never run from someone, but she’d given up counting on men to take care of her. That only ended one way. It all bumped along nicely for a while, and then inevitably it exploded and she was left with less than she had before. Always.

It was why she’d been resolutely without a man for about three years.

“Then why are you sleeping out here?”

“I’m new to town,” she said, keeping her tone casual, as if they’d met on a bustling street in the bright light of day and not like this.

And she was new in town. That much was true.

“My truck broke down and it cost a crap load to fix.” And ultimately she’d had to let the thing go and give it up for dead, after giving up all the money she had to get this far. “While I was waiting for the prognosis, I was stranded for a few days longer than I anticipated. Had to stay in a hotel for some extra time.” And then she’d ended up hitchhiking into Gold Valley after her truck’s inglorious death on a stretch of lonely highway. “Anyway. I ran out of money. I’m hoping to get a job in town, but I haven’t managed it yet. Even when I do get a job I’m not going to get paid for a few weeks.”

“You couldn’t camp?”

“As much as I would love to sleep out under the stars beneath this threadbare blanket, that’s a hard pass. I mean, obviously I would have if I had to.”

“Homeless shelters?”

She snorted. “I’m not homeless.”

With a hard bump of her heart against her breastbone, it hit her that...she was lying. This cabin was the only place she had to sleep. She had nowhere to go back to. Nowhere she was heading to.

That was the definition of homeless, and she was it.

She never figured rock bottom would look like a damp wooden floor. But hell, it seemed to be.

She had managed to stay a few steps ahead of that since she had been turfed from the last foster home she’d been in eight years ago. But now... Of course, it was the move back home that had done it.

Home.

Gold Valley was home.

A home that she couldn’t remember, but it was the place her father was from, the place her mother had been born. The place she had been born. She had decided that it was time to come back. Time to try and... Find where she came from. She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to be stuck in this endless loop. Dead-end jobs, crappy apartments. Nothing but barely making ends meet forever.

She supposed that was life for some people. For a lot of people.

But she’d hit the end of it. She’d had her birth certificate in a folder with all her legal documents—all gifted to her by the great state of Oregon on her eighteenth birthday when she’d been turfed out into the real world—and it had simply been sitting there.

Her every connection printed on a black-and-white document, as flat and dead as the paper itself.

Annie Tate was listed as her mother. And under father, a name McKenna had never even heard before. Henry Dalon.

Searches for him had turned up nothing promising.

While working as a waitress, McKenna had ended up having a conversation with a customer about a website that allowed free searches for public records. And McKenna had gone searching. She’d started with her father’s name, and then switched tactics.

She’d searched her own, and discovered not the printed, digitized version of her birth certificate but a scanned version of the original. Where handwritten down in the bottom corner, and smudged, was a name that looked a lot more like Henry Dalton.

Apparently, she’d learned after calling the records office, misspellings on records were common enough. Especially when no one had requested the documents, or done any checking on them. Seeing as Annie Tate had surrendered her parenting rights when McKenna was two, it didn’t shock her that her mother had never done her due diligence making sure everything on McKenna’s birth certificate looked right.

From there, McKenna had printed off the certificate and folded it up in her backpack, a piece to the puzzle of her life she was actively trying to put together.

She’d started searching for him after that.

Annie Tate, with her common first and last name, was impossible to track down, and anyway, McKenna already knew she didn’t want to know her.

There were a few Henry Daltons, but one in particular that was in the right geographical location to be a likely candidate. Henry “Hank” Dalton.

He’d had been all over her searches. A famous rodeo rider with three sons. Three sons who were McKenna’s half brothers, most likely.

Caleb, Jacob and Gabe.

Brothers. Family.

In Gold Valley.

But she had to figure it all out. She had to get the scope of things. The lay of the land.

She watched as the man took his phone out of his pocket, and the screen lit up.

“Come with me,” he said.

Panic fluttered around in her breast like a caged bird. “Are you calling the police?”

“No,” he said, his thumb swiping over the screen a few times. “I’m taking you to my brother’s house.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s food there,” he said simply.

She scrambled to her feet, her stomach growling. She realized that she had only eaten a couple of times in the past three days. And trail mix and granola bars could only get you so far. They weren’t...food food.

“Why do you want to feed me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But you’re harmless.”

She huffed. “I’m not harmless.”

“Really?”

“I have a pocket knife. I can cut you up.”

“Right. Anyway. Harmless. And probably hungry.”

“And you care?” This offer of food and his lack of...calling the cops on her had all her defenses up. People weren’t just...nice.

It made her feel compelled to push. To push him away. To push him to get down to what his deal actually was.

She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust anyone.