A Cold Creek Noel

He smiled—not a huge smile but a genuine one. Her stomach flip-flopped again and she remembered that moment when she had walked into the clinic and found him half-dressed.

What in heaven’s name had come over her? She did not react to men this way. She just didn’t. Oh, she dated once in a while. She wasn’t a complete hermit, contrary to what her brothers teased her about. She enjoyed the occasional dinner or movie out, but she usually worked hard to keep things casual and fun. The few times a guy had tried to push for more, she had felt panicky and pressured and had done her best to discourage him.

She couldn’t remember having such an instant and powerful reaction to a man, this immediate curl of desire. She certainly wasn’t used to this jittery, off-balance feeling, as if she were teetering in the loft door of the barn, gearing up to jump into the big pile of hay below.

Ridiculous. She wasn’t even sure she liked Ben Caldwell yet. She certainly wasn’t ready to jump into any pile of hay with him, literally or figuratively.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he answered. “If it has three bedrooms and a halfway decent kitchen for Mrs. Michaels, I don’t care about much else.”

She drew in a breath and subtly shifted to ease her shoulder away from his. “For all you know, it might be a hovel. You would be surprised at the living conditions some ranchers force on their workers.”

“I would like to think you wouldn’t have suggested it if you didn’t think it would work for my family.”

“That’s trusting of you. You don’t know anything about me. For all you know, maybe I make it a habit of bilking unsuspecting newcomers out of their rent money.”

“Since we’re talking about trading veterinary services for rent, that’s not an issue, is it? But if you insist, I guess I could stop by your ranch later this morning after Joni comes in to relieve me. She’s coming in around ten.”

“That should work. I should have just enough time to rush back there and hide all the mousetraps and roach motels.”

This time he laughed outright, as she had intended. It was a full, rich sound that shimmied down her spine as if he’d pressed his lips there.

This was a gigantic mistake. Why had she ever opened her big, stupid mouth about the foreman’s cottage in the first place? The last thing she needed on the ranch right now was a gorgeous man with a sexy chest and a delicious laugh.

“Should I help you take Luke outside before I go?”

He seemed to know she was doing her best to change the subject. “No. I can handle it.”

She nodded. “I’ll see you in a bit, okay?” she said, rubbing the dog’s head again. “You need to stay here just a little longer and then you can come home.”

Luke whined as if he knew she were going to leave. It was tough but she shut the crate door again.

“You know he’ll probably never be a working dog now. I set the bones as well as I could, but he’ll never be fast enough or strong enough to do what he used to.”

“We’re not so cruel that we’ll make him sing for his supper, Dr. Caldwell. We’ll still find a place for him on the River Bow, whether he can work the cattle or not. We have plenty of other animals who live on in comfortable retirement.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he answered.

She firmly ignored his disreputable smile and the jumping nerves it set off in her stomach.

“Thanks again for everything. I guess I’ll see you later.”

She headed to the door, but to her dismay, he beat her to it and held it open, leaving her no choice but to brush past him on her way out. She ignored the little shiver of awareness, just as she had ignored all the others.

She could do this, she told herself. It would only be for a few weeks and she likely would see far more of his housekeeper and children than she would Ben, especially if he consistently maintained these sorts of hours.

Chapter Four

“But I like staying at the hotel. We have Alex and Maya to play with there and someone makes breakfast for us every day. It’s kind of like Eloise at the Plaza.”

Ben swallowed a laugh, certain his bristly nine-year-old daughter wouldn’t appreciate it. If there was one thing Ava hated worse than eating her brussels sprouts, it was being the object of someone else’s amusement.

Still, as lovely as the twenty-four room Cold Creek Inn was, the place was nothing like the grand hotel in New York City portrayed in the series of books Ava adored.

“It has been fun,” he conceded, “but wouldn’t you like to have a little more room to play?”

“In the middle of nowhere with a bunch of cows and horses? No. Not really.”

He sighed, not unfamiliar with Ava’s condescending attitude. He knew just where it came from—her maternal grandparents.

Ava wasn’t thrilled to be separated from his late wife’s parents. She loved the Marshalls and tried to spend as much time as she could with them. For the past two years, since Brooke’s death, Robert and Janet had filled Ava’s head with subtle digs and sly innuendo in an ongoing campaign to undermine her relationship with her father.

The Marshalls wanted nothing more than to take over guardianship of the children any way they could.

He blamed himself for the most part. Right after Brooke’s death, he had been too lost and grief-stricken to see the fissures they were carving in his relationship with his children. The first time he figured it out had been about six months ago. After an overnight stay, Jack had refused to give him a hug.

It had taken several days and much prodding on his part, but the boy had finally tearfully confessed that Grandmother Marshall told him he killed dogs and cats nobody wanted—a completely unfair accusation because he was working at a no-kill shelter at the time.

He had done his best to keep distance between them after that, but the Marshalls were insidious in their efforts to drive a wedge between them and had even gone to court seeking regular visitation with their grandchildren.

He knew he couldn’t keep them away forever, but he had decided his first priority must be strengthening the bond between him and his children, and eventually he had decided his only option was to resettle elsewhere to make the interactions between them more difficult.

“It’s only for a few weeks, until our house is finished,” he said now to Ava. “Haven’t you missed Mrs. Michaels’s delicious dinners?”

“I have,” Jack opined from his booster seat next to his sister. “I looove the way she makes mac and cheese.”

Ben’s mouth watered as he thought of the caramelized onions she scattered across her gooey macaroni and cheese.

“If we move into this new place, that will be the first thing I ask her to make,” he promised Jack and was rewarded with a huge grin.

“It hasn’t been bad going for dinner at the diner or having stuff from the microwave in the hotel room,” Ava insisted. “I haven’t minded one single bit.”

He sighed. Her constant contrariness was beginning to grate on every nerve.

“What about Christmas? Do you really want to spend Christmas Eve in the hotel, where we don’t even have our own tree in our rooms?”

She didn’t immediately answer and he could see her trying to come up with something to combat that. Before she could, he pursued his advantage. “Let’s just check it out. If we all hate it, we can stay at the hotel through the holidays. With any luck, our new house will be done by early January.”

“Will I have to ride the bus to school for the last week of school before Christmas vacation?”

He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He supposed he should have considered the logistics before considering this option. “You can if you want to. Or we can try to arrange our schedules so I can take you to school on my way to the clinic.”

“I wouldn’t want to ride a bus. It’s probably totally gross.”

That was another lovely gift from his late wife’s parents, thank you very little. Janet Marshall had done her best to turn his daughter into a paranoid germaphobe.

“You can always use hand sanitizer.” This had become his common refrain, used to combat her objections for everything from eating in a public restaurant to sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall.

She sniffed but didn’t have a response for that. Much to his relief, she let the subject go and subsided into one of her aggrieved silences. He had a feeling Ava was going to drive him crazy before she made it to the other side of puberty.