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his parka and started for the door. “He’ll need me to give him a hand.”
    “Bring him back inside,” Muriel called after him. “And you come, too, Henry. There’s plenty of food.”
    By now, it was getting dark outside. As Henry stepped onto the back porch, a gust of wind almost knocked him over. The door blew out of his hand and slammed back hard against the kitchen wall. Stinging, ice-flecked air rushed into the kitchen. Kylie sprinted across the room to shove the door closed. “Good grief!” she exclaimed. “I hope this storm blows through fast. We still need to get a tree from somewhere before Christmas.”
    “There should be one of those old flocked-silver trees in the attic.” Muriel was using salad tongs to fish the dropped spoon out of the stew. “I haven’t bothered with a tree in years, but you’re welcome to use it. Maybe Hunter can haul it down for us.”
    “No!” Amy had sounded so grown-up a moment ago. Now she was pouting like a little girl. “Those old fake trees are hideous! You said we could have a real tree, Mom. You promised !”
    “Yes, I did. And I haven’t given up.” Kylie sighed. She’d vowed to give her children a good Christmas, and that included a fresh pine tree with her family’s treasured decorations on its fragrant boughs and beautifully wrapped presents piled underneath. Why should that be so hard? Why, for once, couldn’t doing something good for her children be easy?
    So help her, she would get a real tree for Christmas, even if she had to borrow a saw, wade through the snow, and cut one down herself!
    Muriel had rescued the spoon and was rinsing it off in the sink. “I still can’t believe you had the bad luck to wreck the cowboy’s motorcycle,” she said. “Was he mad?”
    Kylie shuddered. “He was livid. After we discovered we knew each other, he did his best to calm down. But according to Henry, he’s still angry—and I can’t say I blame him. I ruined one of his most precious possessions.”
    “You say you knew each other?”
    “That’s right. We went through school together, all the way from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Shane was always skating the edge of trouble. In high school, I remember him ditching class to go roaring off on that old bike.” And she remembered how she’d ached to ride behind him, her arms around his waist, holding him tight as her hair bannered behind her in the wind. Sometimes he took girls on his bike—girls who were reputed to be wild and fast. But he never took her.
    “You were valedictorian, as I recall,” Muriel said.
    “And Shane managed to graduate by the skin of his teeth. He was smart as a whip, but he was bored with school. All he wanted was to get out of Branding Iron and see the world.” Kylie carried two extra bowls and plates to the table for the men. With Shane there, she wouldn’t have much of an appetite, but she owed it to Muriel to put on a good face.
    “Knowing how much he wanted to leave, I was surprised to see Shane was still in town,” she said.
    Muriel lifted the pot of stew off the hot burner. “Well, dear, sometimes family duty trumps selfish wishes. He’s done a fine job of running the ranch for his father all these years.”
    Kylie wanted to bite her tongue. Shane and Muriel had made similar sacrifices—giving up whatever dreams they’d had to stay home and carry on for ailing parents. Who was she to sit in judgment?
    The sound of boots stamping off snow on the back porch broke into the conversation. The door opened far enough to admit Henry, then Shane, who was gripping the knob to keep the wind from blasting it out of his hand. Wrapped in a thick sheepskin coat with the collar turned up to his ears, snowflakes glimmering in his dark, tousled hair, his face ruddy from the cold . . . Kylie stifled a groan. Muriel’s cowboy neighbor looked as delectable as a hot-fudge sundae with sprinkles.
    She was long since over Shane, of course. He’d been nothing more than a one-sided