Also by Carolyn Brown
Lucky Cowboys
Lucky in Love
One Lucky Cowboy
Getting Lucky
Talk Cowboy to Me
Honky Tonk Cowboys
I Love This Bar
Hell, Yeah
My Give a Damn’s Busted
Honky Tonk Christmas
Spikes & Spurs
Love Drunk Cowboy
Red’s Hot Cowboy
Darn Good Cowboy Christmas
One Hot Cowboy Wedding
Mistletoe Cowboy
Just a Cowboy and His Baby
Cowboy Seeks Bride
Cowboys & Brides
Billion Dollar Cowboy
The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby
The Cowboy’s Mail Order Bride
How to Marry a Cowboy
Burnt Boot, Texas
Cowboy Boots for Christmas
The Trouble with Texas Cowboys
One Texas Cowboy Too Many
A Cowboy Christmas Miracle
The Shop on Main Street
The Sisters Café
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the Palo Duro Canyon. Creed Riley has found the ranch of his dreams in the big crater out in the Texas Panhandle and just in time for Christmas. There are a couple of little stipulations in the deal. He has to live on the ranch for three weeks before he and the owner sign the legal forms, and he has to agree to let her granddaughter live on the ranch as long as she wants.
No problem!
And then the snowstorm blows in, shuts down the electricity, and roads are closed into and out of the canyon. He and the granddaughter are stuck in a small house together with an ugly stray mutt and a momma cat. He’s determined that he is buying the ranch; she’s determined to change her grandmother’s mind about selling and his about buying.
Husband and I discovered the Palo Duro Canyon when we were out on a research trip south of that area. A little town called Post, Texas, was the place I had in mind to set this book, but something about it wasn’t the “right” place. So we drove on, and on, and on, until we reached Silverton. I almost had a “feeling” about that place, but when we drove north toward Claude (mentioned in Darn Good Cowboy Christmas) and found the canyon, I knew I’d found the setting for this book.
Husband and I made several trips to the canyon before this book was actually finished. It is an amazing place with its rock formations rising up like castles or huge chimneys to heights so tall that the eagles nesting at the tops look like tiny toys. It’s a desolate, lonely land dotted with mesquite and scrub oak and cows, but there was something about it that said love and romance could be found there with the right characters at the right time.
Happy Reading!
Carolyn Brown
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2012, 2020 by Carolyn Brown
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Dawn Adams/Sourcebooks
Cover images © kajakiki/Getty Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
www.sourcebooks.com
Originally published as Mistletoe Cowboy in 2012 in the United States of America by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Excerpt from Honky Tonk Christmas
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Joanne Kennedy, my fellow smut peddler
Chapter 1
“Dammit!”
Sage’s favorite cuss word bounced around inside her van like marbles in a tin can, sounding and resounding in her ears.
She had slowed down to a snail’s pace and was about to drop off the face of the earth into the Palo Duro Canyon when two men dragged sawhorses and a “ROAD CLOSED” sign toward the middle of the road. She stepped on the gas and slid between the sawhorses, slinging wet snow all over the highway workers.
The last things she saw in her rearview mirror were shaking fists and angry faces before the driving snow obliterated them. They could cuss all they wanted and even slap one of those fines double where workers are present on her if they wanted. She didn’t have time to fiddle-fart around in Claude waiting for eight to ten inches of snow to fall and then melt. She had urgent business at home that would not wait, and she was going home if she had to crawl through the blowing snow and wind on her hands and knees.
She’d driven all night and barely stayed ahead of the storm’s path until she was twenty miles from Claude and got the first full blast of the blinding snow making a kaleidoscope out of her headlights. If she was going to stop, she would have done so then, but she had to get home and talk her grandmother out of the biggest mistake of her life. With the snowstorm and the closed roads into and out of the canyon, Grand wouldn’t be making her afternoon flight for sure. Maybe that would give Sage time to talk her out of selling the ranch to a complete stranger.
“Dammit!” she swore again and didn’t even feel guilty about it. “And right here at Christmas when it’s supposed to be about family and friends and parties and love. She can’t leave me now. I should have listened to her.”
What was Grand thinking anyway? The Rockin’ C had been in the Presley family since the days of the Alamo. It was one of the first ranches ever staked
