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wanted to get home and hole up in his room until this whole holiday thing was over.
    “Could we get this done?” Dalton complained, clapping his gloved hands together for warmth. “I’ve got a date tonight.”
    Wyatt blew out a sigh and saw his frosty breath. “Gawd almighty.” He’d been around Jed along enough in the past couple of years to know when the old man was trying to teach them a lesson. The sooner they figured it out, the faster they could get back to the ranch. He took a quick look around him, scanning the wooded area. The wind whistled through the tall pine with a lonesome sound. Not one tree was less than fifty feet tall or better. “Where the hell are we supposed to find a tree to cut down?”
    “I know a place.”
    Wyatt’s gaze, as did Dalton’s, swung to the new kid. It was a startling revelation to the two of them that he could speak without being prompted. Something strange shifted inside Wyatt. He saw Rein in a different light, as a real person—a teenager, who’d, had to deal with burying his parents. His circumstance was far different than being abandoned like excess baggage. “Okay then, genius.” He played the big brother role with ease. “Lead on and let’s get this done, so we can all go back to where it’s warm.”
    The years reeled by in Wyatt’s memory, a blur of events and holidays thereafter. They did find the tree. Jed had planted it in honor of Rein’s birth, and on the rare occasion that Jed’s sister and brother-in-law visited for the holidays, Jed had taken his nephew out to where the tree was planted. Wyatt never knew what pleased old Jed more, the fact Rein remembered the tree, or that the three boys had somehow managed to work together to accomplish the task he’d entrusted to them. Wyatt stared for a moment more at the picture, smiling at how Jed once again had used the ordinary things in life to bond the three of them, causing them to rely on each other, instead of him. A twinge of guilt assaulted his brain. They hadn’t bothered yet with a tree, and Wyatt chalked it up to having too much work to do with the ranch. True, after Jed died, the spirit of the season seemed to die with him. The tradition dwindled to one of those last-minute decisions, sometimes made at the halftime of a Saturday afternoon football game on TV.
    They’d flip a coin to see who got the honors of chopping down a medium-sized tree, one to fit in the giant old crock that Jed had always used. Once or twice, without fanfare or coin toss, Dalton would throw on his coat and disappear for a few hours, eventually dragging back a fragrant fir tree that he’d drop on the deck. Without a word, he’d toe off his boots, grab a beer, park himself in front of the game, and leave the fate of the tree to Rein and occasionally, Wyatt. This year, however, might be different. If the two didn’t get back, there was certainly no reason to go to the trouble of having a tree. He’d already been entertaining thoughts on how he’d spend the holidays alone. His cooking wasn’t bad. He had his classes starting soon and while some reveled in the idea of warm family gatherings and children anxiously awaiting for Santa to arrive, he was just as happy to prop his feet up with a good book. Truth was, for a variety of reasons, he’d never been very good with Christmas—either that or he was settling comfortably into what people in town thought about him.
    He sauntered back to the fireplace and stood there a moment, listening to the wind howling down the chimney flue. An occasional snap from a log would break the stony silence. His mind drifted back to his perky visitor in her pink jacket and he let himself muse over whether she wore candy-flavored lip balm on that tempting mouth. The few relationships he’d tried to forge in his younger days had ended in disaster, mostly with similar complaints about his lack of emotional involvement. The fact that this woman had reawakened a fierce need inside of him spelled