“No,” she answered as she picked up Jolie and headed back toward the kitchen. “They’re for the party tomorrow.”
“Everything you make is for some party or a reception or something stupid like that. Why can’t we eat any of it?” Hayden complained.
“You can have another snickerdoodle after you feed the horses. I made plenty of those.”
“I wanted a tart,” her oldest muttered.
Naturally. If she had told him the snickerdoodles were offlimits, that would have been the only thing he wanted. She loved him dearly but this sudden contrariness of his sometimes drove her crazy. Hayden was only ten and she already felt like she was battling all the teen stuff her friends had warned her to expect.
Maybe there was a lesson in that for her, she thought after she had shooed Hayden and Drew out the door to take care of their chores in the barn and returned to preparing for her last holiday party of the season.
Carson McRaven was definitely off-limits to her. Beyond the fact that she disliked him personally, he was a multimillionaire tech investor with a reputation for finding products the world didn’t realize it couldn’t do without, while she was an overtired widow with a struggling catering business and more obligations than she could begin to handle.
She wasn’t genuinely interested in any man. In the first place, when on earth would she have the time for one? Between helping the boys with homework, taking care of Jolie, the upkeep on their remaining twenty acres, taking care of her mother-in-law and starting up a struggling catering business, she had nothing left.
In the second, her heart still ached for Joe and probably always would. After two years alone, she still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes and turned over, trying to snuggle into his warmth, only to find a cold void where he used to be. Just like the one inside her heart.
She pushed away the echo of pain out of long practice as she rolled more cookie-dough balls in the cinnamon sugar mix, then set them on the cookie sheet.
Yes, every time she saw Carson McRaven, her heart seemed to race a bit faster and her stomach trembled. She didn’t like her reaction but it was a little easier to comprehend when she told herself it was only because he represented the unattainable.
She almost believed it, too.
Chapter Two
She was impossibly stuck.
Jenna revved the engine one more time and tried to rock her van out of the deep snowbank just outside the turnoff for the Wagon Wheel. Carson McRaven might call it Raven’s Nest now but to her this would always be the Wagon Wheel, named after three generations of Wheelers who had worked this corner of eastern Idaho in the western shadow of the Grand Tetons.
She glared at the clock on her dashboard and then at the snow still falling hard outside the van windows. Of all the miserable, rotten, lousy times to be stuck. She had a van full of food and an extremely short window of time in which to prepare it.
She thought she had everything so carefully orchestrated in order to have all the last-minute details ready for the party she was catering that evening. The moment the boys climbed onto the school bus, she had loaded Jolie into her van and driven to Idaho Falls, where the grocery selection was more extensive—and fresher—than anything she could find here in Pine Gulch.
She had budgeted a little over two hours, figuring that would give her time to drive there, shop and then drive home.
Naturally, it started snowing the minute she left Idaho Falls and hadn’t let up the entire forty-five-minute drive since then. At least four inches had fallen, laying a slick layer of white over everything.
As frustrating as she found the snow to drive in, it did set the perfect scene for Christmas. The evergreen trees on the mountainside looked as if they had been drizzled with Royal Icing and Cold Creek matched its name by burbling through patches of ice.
She only wished she had time to enjoy it all. Then again, if she had taken a few extra minutes to slow down and pay attention to her driving instead of her extensive to-do list, she wouldn’t be in this predicament. Instead, she had been driving just a hair too fast when she headed over the bridge just before the driveway split, one route going toward Carson McRaven’s new, huge log house and the other heading toward home.
Just as she made the turn, her van tires slid and she hadn’t been able to pull out of the skid in time before landing in the drift.
She knew better than this. That was the most aggravating thing about the whole situation. She had been driving these Idaho winter roads since she was fourteen years old. She knew the importance of picking a driving speed appropriate for conditions, knew that this section could be slick, knew she had to stay focused on the road—not on the baby field-green salad she still had to make or the tricky vodka blush sauce she still hadn’t perfected for the penne.
But she had just been in such a big darn hurry to make everything just right for this party. It was her biggest event yet, and the one she hoped would make her the go-to person for catering in this area.
None of which would happen if she didn’t manage to extricate herself from this blasted snowdrift.
She shoved the van into Reverse again. If she could just get a little traction, the front-wheel drive on her van might be able to do the job. But try as she might, shifting between Reverse and Drive to try rocking out of the snow, the wheels just spun, kicking up snow and mud and gravel behind her.
Blast it all. She wanted to cry at the delay but she just didn’t have the time.
She looked in the rearview mirror to the backseat, where Jolie was babbling quietly to herself in her car seat and playing with her favorite stuffed dog, bouncing him on her lap then twirling him in dizzying circles.
“Well, bug, it looks like we’re walking home. We’ll go get your daddy’s big, bad pickup truck with the four-wheel drive and come back for the food.”
No big deal, she assured herself. She only had to walk a quarter mile from here down the driveway to the house. If she hurried, she could make it in ten minutes and be back here in fifteen.
She pulled Jolie out of her car seat. Her daughter beamed at her. “Walk, Mommy?”
“Looks like.”
She settled her daughter on her hip, grateful she had at least had the foresight to wear her boots that morning, even though it hadn’t been snowing when she left home.
She had just crossed her slide tracks and started up her long driveway that followed the river when she heard a pickup truck coming down the hill from Raven’s Nest.
She only had time to whisper a prayer that it would be Neil or Melina Parker, McRaven’s ranch foreman and his wife who served as caretaker when Carson wasn’t there, before the pickup pulled up next to her.
Apparently nobody was listening to her prayers today. She sighed as Carson rolled down the passenger-side window.
“You look like you could use a hand.”
Her pulse did that stupid little jumpy thing at his deep voice and she could feel her face heat up. She could only hope he didn’t notice, probably too busy thinking what an idiot she was for driving into a snowbank like that.
“I was just planning to walk to my house for my pickup. I’ve got groceries in the back I need to take care of quickly.”
“Put your baby back in the van, where it’s warm and out of the snow. I should have a tow rope in the pickup truck somewhere. I’ll have you out in a second.”
She wanted to balk at his commanding tone and tell him to go to Hades but for the first time in her life she understood the old saying about pride being a luxury she simply couldn’t afford right now.
She should just be grateful for his help, she reminded herself, even if she found it both humiliating