Santa's Sweetheart (The Christmas Tree Ranch #4)(71)
Maggie hugged her puppy. Her eyes felt wet. But that was all right. Sometimes, when there was more happiness inside you than you could hold, it spilled out as tears.
Please read on for an excerpt from Janet
Dailey’s brand-new release, Calder Brand,
coming soon!
The Calder family patriarch is known throughout Montana as a force no one in his right mind would cross. But sometimes love can make a man do crazy things . . .
Ambition drove Joe Dollarhide across the parched plains from Fort Sam Houston to Dodge City. He was determined to one day have a spread every bit as impressive as his employers’. But when a wild stampede separates him from the cattle drive, it’s not just survival that keeps him going. Joe has a burning need to settle the score with Benteen Calder, the cattle boss he used to worship. The man who’d left him for dead. Yet he’d soon have something greater than revenge to inspire him . . .
Sarah Foxworth is traveling toward her dream of becoming a doctor when she’s attacked by a violent gang. Luckily, Joe is the one to rescue her—and win her heart. Still, she presses on to the future awaiting her on the frontier. But her plans, and her reputation, are ruined when she gives birth to an illegitimate baby . . .
Years later, Sarah reappears in Joe’s world—with a son there’s no denying is his own. Now a prosperous rancher, Joe yearns to finally build a life with the woman he’s never forgotten. Only Joe’s own road to riches has been strewn with obstacles, some still standing in his way. But time has also shown him that nothing worth having comes easy. And that Sarah is a woman worth fighting for . . .
Prologue
Montana
November 22, 1891, nightfall
Joe Dollarhide stood on the wide, covered porch of his hilltop home, watching the season’s first snowfall coat the land with white. Would this storm be a brief flurry or a full-blown blizzard that would make the roads impassable by morning? It made no difference, Joe told himself. Whatever the weather, he had to be in Miles City when the bank opened for Monday business tomorrow morning. Being first in the door was vital to his pride, his honor, and his need to avenge the betrayal he’d suffered more than twelve years ago—a betrayal that had festered in him over time, like a wound that never healed.
A betrayal at the hands of none other than Chase Benteen Calder.
The snow was falling harder now, the flakes a white blur against the darkness. Joe could hear the howling wind and feel the biting cold on his face. Maybe he should have taken a chance and left at once, as the storm was blowing in. With luck, he could have made it to Miles City, booked a room for the night, and arrived early at the bank. Take a chance—that’s what Benteen Calder would probably have done. For all Joe knew, Benteen could already be there, buying drinks at the hotel bar to celebrate his victory.
But Joe’s wife had put her foot down. “The storm’s getting worse,” she’d insisted. “People die in weather like this. They get trapped or lost, and they freeze to death. If you go tonight, not caring whether you leave me a widow and your sons orphans, so help me, Joe, I will never forgive you.”
So Joe hadn’t gone. Now, as the storm gained in ferocity, he had to concede that his wife had been right, as she usually was. In his years as a Montana rancher, he’d seen blizzards come and go. This one could be a killer, the kind of storm that buried fences and left livestock frozen in the pastures. If he’d left for Miles City tonight, he would still be on the road. And in the time it took for a man to freeze to death, Joe would lose a life that had given him all the things he’d ever wanted.
At twenty-eight, he was a man in his prime, with an impressive home, a thriving business, and a fortune in land, horses, and cattle. He had a beautiful wife that he loved to the depths of his soul, and two fine young sons.
But looking back over the years, Joe realized that none of what he’d gained had come without a price. Luck and fate had played a vital role in his success. But so had sacrifice, heartbreaking effort, and backbreaking work.
As he watched the swirling snow, Joe’s memory drifted back twelve years, to the beginning of his great adventure, when he’d left his family’s Texas farm to join Chase Benteen Calder’s cattle drive.
He’d been so young then, so full of dreams, and so eager to do his part in herding 2,500 longhorn cattle north from the dry Texas plains to the wild, rich grasslands of Montana. The journey, up through the Texas Panhandle, through the Indian Territories, into Kansas and Nebraska, Wyoming and finally Montana, had taken months, from spring to early autumn. By the time it was done, Joe had told himself, he would be a grown man, ready to wrest his own fortune from the wild, western land.