A Creed Country Christmas by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online

the creekside and began shattering ice an inch thick, two in some places.
    If he’d stayed in Boston, he reflected, Beth might have lived, the two babies, too. Gracie would have been able to go to a real school, too.
    Inwardly, Lincoln sighed. Left in Wes’s incapable hands,the ranch would be gone by now, his mother displaced, Tom Dancingstar ripped up by the roots and left to wander in a world that not only underestimated him, but often scorned him, too. All because he was an Indian.
    He’d been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, Lincoln had, and if he’d made the wrong choice, there was no changing it now. The ranch wasn’t making him rich, but he’d gotten it back in the black with a lot of hard work and Creed determination.
    But what a price he’d paid.
    Tom appeared beside him, toting another pickax. Sent Gainer and Joseph back to the hay barn, nearer the house, where the two remaining ranch hands, Art Bentley and Mike Falstaff, waited to load the sleigh up again.
    “You look mighty grim this mornin’,” Tom observed.
    “Hard work,” Lincoln said without looking at his friend.
    “You’ve been working since you were nine. I don’t think it’s that.”
    Lincoln stopped to catch his breath, sighed. Cattle nosed up behind him, scenting the water. “You going to insist on chatting?” he asked.
    Tom chuckled. Cattle pushed past them to get to the creek, so they moved a little farther down the line, outof their way. “Something’s thrown you, that’s for sure. I reckon it’s Miss Juliana Mitchell.”
    Lincoln felt a surge of touchy exasperation, which was unlike him. He started swinging the pickax again. “I might have had a thought or two where she’s concerned,” he admitted.
    Tom laid a hand on his arm. “She needs a place to light. You need a wife and Gracie needs a mother. Why don’t you just offer for Juliana and be done with it?”
    A growl of frustration escaped Lincoln. He drove the pickax deep into the hard ice, felt satisfaction as the glaze splintered. “It’s not that simple,” he said in his own good time.
    “Isn’t it?” Tom asked.
    “I’m paying you to work,” Lincoln pointed out, humorless, “not spout advice for the lovelorn.”
    “Is that what you are?” Tom asked, and looking sidelong, Lincoln saw amusement dancing in the older man’s eyes. “Lovelorn?”
    “No, damn it,” Lincoln snapped.
    Tom was relentless. “You’re a young man, Lincoln. You ought to have a woman. Gracie ought to have a mother, brothers and sisters. If you were willing to bring in astranger from someplace else and put a wedding band on her finger, why not Juliana?”
    “I was hoping for a governess or a housekeeper,” Lincoln said. “Taking a wife was a last resort.”
    “All right, then,” Tom persisted, “Juliana’s a teacher. She would make a fine governess. Maybe even a decent housekeeper.”
    “She won’t want to stay out here on this ranch,” Lincoln argued. “She’s a city girl—you can see that by the way she moves, hear it in the way she talks.”
    “Beth was a city girl, and she liked the ranch fine.”
    It was all Lincoln could do not to fling the pickax so far and so hard that it would lodge in the snow on the other side of the creek. Tom sometimes went days without talking at all; now, all of a sudden, he was running off at the mouth like a lonely spinster at high tea. “Why? Why is this different, Lincoln? Because you think you could care about Juliana?”
    Lincoln didn’t answer because he couldn’t. His throat felt raw, and a cow bumped him from behind, nearly sent him sprawling into the cold creek water. “I loved Beth,” he said after a long time, because Tom would have kept at him until he gave some kind of answer.
    Tom laid a hand on his shoulder. “I know that,” he said. “But Beth is gone, and you’re still here. You and Gracie. That child is lonesome, Lincoln—sometimes it hurts my heart just to look at her. And you’re not doing