Cowboy Kisses: Free Christmas eBook short read by Jan Scarbrough

Monday, December 9, 2024

Free Christmas eBook short read by Jan Scarbrough

Several years ago, I wrote a short Christmas novella called Hank. This guy was a recurring character in my Dawsons of Montana series, but I needed him for the hero of my next series Ghost Mountain Ranch.

Now until December 30, 2024, you can grab a copy of this Christmas short read from BookFunnel. Just click this link: https://BookHip.com/SCLSPMA

Blurb

Hank brings two romantic series together: The Dawsons of Montana and Ghost Mountain Ranch!

Christmastime at the Six Buckles Guest Ranch. Hank, the Dawson’s trusted wrangler, nurses a broken heart after Liz’s marriage to Chaz. Ashleigh, Chaz’s daughter, is new to ranch life. Can she survive the results of her bad judgement and make a home with her father’s new in-laws?

On Christmas Eve, Hank accepts the job of ranch foreman over the mountains in the Gallatin Canyon. But something dark is happening at the Ghost Mountain Ranch, where the past is reaching out in dangerous ways to haunt the living.

Chapter One

Six Buckles Guest Ranch

December 2018

Hank Slade rested a forearm on his saddle horn and leaned against it. He peered through the ears of his horse across the valley shrouded in a mantle of snow that stretched out below him. Sagebrush, still smelling pungent and sweet despite the weather, poked through the otherwise unbroken, white landscape. Warmer air from the creek-fed lake generated a ghostly haze in the valley so that the ranch cabins, lodge, and outbuildings appeared cloaked, as if hiding from the world.

Just like Hank wanted to do—hide—or, better yet, run away.

That morning, after plowing the snow from the gravel road to the county highway, he’d ridden up the cleared road behind the lodge on his favorite horse simply to get away. He was a cowboy and wrangler, a stock man who had tended the Dawson cattle and then dude ranch horses for almost twenty-five years. Trouble was, he had nowhere else to go. No real place of his own. No living family. The ranch was his only home and the Dawsons his only family ever since the patriarch Jim Dawson had given him a job when he was thirty and fresh out of the army.

The first Mrs. Dawson had been alive then. Bonnie was the mother of the oldest child Ben. She’d embodied everything a good wife and mother should be, but, as in many things beautiful and perfect, death took her early, throwing the ranch—its real family and extended family—into a tailspin of grief and despair.

But it wasn’t long before Liz came into everyone’s lives. Poor Jim had not known what had hit him, falling hard for a divorced mother with baggage—a ten-year-old son named Brody Caldera. Jim had been riddled with guilt at first, and probably for years after their wedding. Ben had resented a new stepmother, particularly one as young and beautiful as Liz, so soon after his mother’s death. But things have a way of happening for a reason. Baby Mercer was the unexpected cause of a happy marriage that lasted until Jim’s untimely death from a riding accident almost two years earlier.

But if things happen for a reason, why do bad things happen to good people?

That was a question Hank could not answer. He was merely a wrangler, not a philosopher or theologian. He dealt with the everyday care of living creatures. He handled routine. Day in and day out, he fed and watered stock, tended hooves and fresh cuts, brushed manes and tails, cleaned and fixed saddles and bridles, mucked stalls, and in the summer saddled horses for city dudes and guided them into the mountains so they could enjoy the beauty of Montana.

His life was simple. His only pleasure, his guitar and a few songs around the summer campfire. He enjoyed the accolades of the ranch guests. He enjoyed helping them mount a steady quarter horse and laughed with them when they dismounted, sore from using muscles never exercised when sitting behind a computer screen. And he loved the Dawsons—from watching the older children grow, to teaching Mercer to ride and rope, to showing Livy—Brody and Stef’s daughter—how to care for her new pony. He’d lived through the tragedy of Bonnie’s and then Jim’s deaths. The Dawsons’ happiness was his happiness. Their sadness, his.

He just didn’t know how he could live through Liz’s remarriage.