He made a kind of rueful grimace that plainly told her he wasn’t any more thrilled than she was about the situation, while he fished around behind the seat of the pickup and pulled out a thick braided red tow rope. “Here we go.”
Before she quite knew how it happened, he was crouched in the snow, attaching the tow to her rear bumper. McRaven probably had more money in loose change than she would see in any lifetime but he didn’t seem to have any qualms about dirtying his hands a little. It was an unexpected facet of a man who she was beginning to believe just may be more complicated than she might have guessed. He hitched the other end of the tow around his own pickup’s bumper, then came to her window again.
“Okay, now start it up and just steer out when you feel your van pull free of the snowbank. You should be on your way in a minute or two.”
She nodded and waited while he climbed back into the truck. Over her shoulder, she watched him engage the four-wheel drive of his truck. He appeared to barely ease forward but just that tiny extra bit of help was enough to accomplish what ten minutes of spinning her tires in the ice and snow hadn’t been able to do.
Another life lesson for her, maybe? she wondered ruefully. Accepting a little help in the short-term might be humiliating but could save much heartache and struggle.
She didn’t have time to wax philosophical this morning, not when her to-do list felt longer than her driveway and just as slickly treacherous.
“Thank you,” she said through her open window when Carson returned to her vehicle to unhook the tow rope.
“No problem. You’re going to want to take things slow until that access road gets plowed. I slid about four times coming down the hill from my place.”
“I know. I was just in too big of a hurry and wasn’t paying attention to how fast I was going. I’ll be sure to concentrate better now. Thanks again.”
He studied her for a moment, then she saw his blue eyes shift to Jolie in the backseat, who beamed at him and waved.
“Hi, mister,” she chirped, which was what she called every adult male of her acquaintance, from her Uncle Paul to the pastor at church to the bagger at the grocery store.
“Hi,” he said, his voice a little more gruff than usual, then he stepped back and waved her on.
With her wipers on high, Jenna slowly put the van in gear and inched through the swirling snow that seemed to have increased dramatically in just the few moments since Carson arrived. She was so busy paying attention to the road—and trying to keep from sliding into the icy Cold Creek that paralleled her driveway—that she didn’t notice the headlights behind her until she was nearly home.
What was Carson doing? She frowned as his pickup continued to tail her along the winding drive. Maybe something had fallen out of her van when she was stopped and he was returning it. Or maybe he decided she needed more of a lecture on her winter driving skills, or lack thereof.
She wouldn’t put it past him. The man seemed to want to give her plenty of advice on child rearing. Judging by past comments, he apparently put her abilities as a mother somewhere between incompetent and negligible and seemed to think she let her boys run wild and free through the countryside with no supervision.
And now he probably thought she was just as inept at driving. She pulled into her garage and stepped out of her driver’s seat to walk back outside, already squaring her shoulders for another confrontation.
“Is something wrong?” she asked coolly when he rolled down his window.
“I just wanted to make sure you made it home safely. I’ll send one of my guys over with the tractor to plow the driveway in case you need to get out soon.”
She blinked at him as hard, wind-whipped snowflakes stung her cheeks. Her first reaction was astonishment and a quick spurt of gratitude, both that he was concerned at her welfare enough to follow her home and that he would offer to help her plow her road.
One less chore to do, right? she thought. Especially since digging out the driveway wasn’t among her favorites.
At the same time, she didn’t want him to think she needed to be looked after like some kind of charity case.
“I have a tractor with a front plow,” she answered. “I can take care of it. I would have done it earlier but it wasn’t snowing when I left for Idaho Falls.”
She regretted her words the moment she uttered them. She didn’t owe Carson McRaven any explanations.”
“I’ll send someone,” he answered. “Stay warm.”
Before she could protest, he hit the button to automatically wind up his window, put his big pickup in gear and drove away.
She watched him go for a moment as the wind howled through the bare tops of the cottonwoods and lodgepole pine along the river. Her neighbor was nothing if not confounding. She couldn’t quite peg him into a neat compartment. On the one hand, he was arrogant and supercilious and seemed to think her family’s entire focus in life was to annoy him as much as humanly possible.
On the other, he had been kind to her boys the day before and he had certainly helped her just now when he really could have looked the other way.
She shivered as the wind cut through her parka and turned back to the garage. She had far more critical things to occupy her mind with right now than obsessing—again—about her new neighbor.
Jolie chattered away as Jenna carried her into the house. Only about one word in three was recognizable and none of them seemed to require a response, but her daughter never seemed to mind carrying on a conversation by herself.
She was a complete joy and far more easygoing than any of the boys had been. She didn’t complain when Jenna took her straight from her car seat to her high chair and set some dry cereal and a sippy cup of milk on the tray while she went out to cart the groceries inside from the van.
Just as she was carrying the last armload in, the phone rang. She thought about ignoring it, but with three boys in school, she couldn’t take the risk it might be one of their teachers or, heaven forbid, the school principal.
“Phone, Mama. Phone.”
“I know, honey. I’ll get it.”
She quickly set down the bags on the last clear counter space in the kitchen and lunged for the cordless handset before the answering machine could pick up.
“Sorry. Hello,” she said breathlessly.
“Hello, my dear.”
Jenna smiled at the instantly recognizable voice on the other end of the line. Viviana Cruz was one of her favorite people on earth. She and her second husband had a ranch a little farther up the creek and raised beautiful Murray Gray cattle.
“Viviana! How are you?”
“Bien, gracias. And you? How do you do? Busy, busy, I would guess.”
“You would be right, as usual, Viv. I’m running a little late, but I promise, all will be ready in time.”
“I do not doubt this. Not for un momentito. The food will be delicious, I have no worries.”
At least one of them was confident, Jenna thought as nerves fluttered in her stomach. This job was important to her, not only professionally but personally. Viviana had taken a big risk hiring her to cater the holiday event she was hosting for the local cattle growers’ association, of which she served as president. This was the biggest job Jenna had undertaken since she started her catering business six months earlier. Before this, she had mostly done small parties, but this involved ranchers and business owners from this entire region of southeastern Idaho.
Viv had told her there would be people coming from the Jackson Hole area, as well. She planned to have her business cards out where everyone could see and made a mental note to also stick the magnetic