Page 13 of Christmas at the Ranch
The worst part was it was only 8:00A.M. Much too early for a drink.
Chapter Four
Samantha sat in the ranch’s living room and waited for the other guests to come downstairs. She had skipped breakfast. Instead, she’d spent the last two hours in her room, tapping out a new plot for a Sloane Parker book.
Sloane Parker is at a weekend house party at a Scottish castle and she’s certain someone is trying to get rid of her. At first, she thinks it’s the host, Lord Percival. Only Sloane knows that the castle doesn’t really belong to Percival, but to his half brother, Charles. At dinner, Percival announces he’s going to share his inheritance with Charles; there’s room in the castle for both of them. Then Sloane suspects the butler. In crime novels, the butler is often guilty. The butler turns out to be Charles’s son, so he has no reason to dislike Sloane. A mysterious woman in a red dress appears and Sloane recognizes her old nemesis, Clarissa Cooper. Of course, it’s Clarissa! She was Phineas’s favorite agent at British Intelligence until she was accused of selling secrets to the Russians. She’ll do anything to get back in Phineas’s good graces, including rubbing out her competition.
“Samantha.” Drew approached her. “You weren’t at breakfast.”
Samantha pulled her mind from her thoughts.
“I wasn’t hungry,” she admitted.
“Martha, the cook, was disappointed,” Drew said with a smile. “She wants all the guests to experience her ‘cowboy breakfast.’ Eggs and sausage and johnnycakes like the pioneers used to make over a campfire stove.”
Samantha didn’t know what a johnnycake was, but the thought of eating sausages when her stomach was doing nervous flips made her feel sick.
“I’ll make up for it tomorrow,” she promised. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“I brought you something,” Drew said, handing her a small package.
She unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a pair of binoculars.
“They’re for viewing the elk,” Drew explained. “So you can feel like you’re right next to them.”
Samantha turned them over carefully. She had no desire to make the elk seem closer than she absolutely had to. Drew was only being kind. It wasn’t his fault she was spending Christmas week at his father’s ranch.
“Thank you.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sure it will make it even more exciting.”
Two cars drove the group to the National Elk Refuge at the foot of the Teton mountains. The air was fresh and the sky was the palest shade of blue. Even the sun seemed to be struggling to make a difference. It was almost noon, but the temperature on Samantha’s phone read below zero.
Everyone piled out and Drew walked beside her.
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” he said, his hand sweeping over the view. The refuge was completely flat and stretched for miles. There was only one fence separating it from the road. Above them, the mountains were sharp and immovable. The entire landscape was covered in a deep layer of snow.
“When I was in high school, I attended summer camp in Jackson Hole,” Drew said. “At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. It was so far away from home. But my father had spent time in Jackson Hole during college and he wanted me to experience the same things. By the second summer, I was hooked. I loved the fishing and hiking, swimming in the glaciers, and rafting on the river. I’m so glad he bought this ranch. He had been looking for the right property for ages, and this one came available last summer. He’s so happy here, he’s like a kid. And as an adult, I understand his obsession more clearly.” He paused and his eyes were thoughtful. “Everything is so big out here, sometimes it makes our own problems seem quite small.”
Samantha glanced at the clusters of elk and felt the opposite. Her problems weren’t small at all. They weighed seven hundred pounds and if she moved wrong, they could trample her.
Not even Sloane Parker could easily outrun a pack of stampeding elk. Sloane had enough trouble when she ended up in the middle of a bullfight in Barcelona. The bullfighter, Ricardo, was actually a fellow agent who had been badly gored by the bull. Thank god Sloane was wearing her red Valentino gown. She ripped it off to use as a cape and managed to avoid the bull and rescue Ricardo at the same time.
“I thought we were going to watch the elk from the car,” Samantha said to Drew. Her heart pounded and there was a tightness in her chest.
“The car brought us to the refuge.” Drew pointed to a red wooden box that resembled a child’s wagon. “We see the elk from the sleighs. We can get closer that way, and the elk aren’t afraid. They keep feeding as if we’re not even there.”
“We’re going to watch the elk from that!” Samantha gulped. The sleigh hardly looked sturdy enough to hold ten adults. And it was completely open. Like one of those miniature cereal boxes with the top cut off.
“Let’s get seats in the front.” Drew motioned to her. “If we have to sit in the back, we might not see anything at all.”
Samantha slipped in beside him. She was tempted to close her eyes but she didn’t want the other guests to know she was frightened. Instead she tried to focus on something small and familiar. She wanted to quickly pull out her phone to look at her background photo of Socks. But the first thing the tour guide did when they climbed into the sleigh was instruct everyone to put away their phones. There was nothing to look at except twenty-four thousand acres of wild landscape that was home to six thousand elk.
The guide kept up a steady prattle of facts to entertain them. The elk refuge was started in the 1800s. The elk population had dwindled and it was difficult for the elk to keep up their yearly migration. These days, the elk arrived in early December and stayed until summer after the calves were born. They were allowed to roam freely and shared the refuge with other wild animals.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll see bison and foxes and even some wolves,” the guide said so brightly that Samantha was tempted to slap her. If a wolf came near the sleigh, Samantha would scream. No one could blame her. Humans were supposed to be afraid of wolves, that’s how one didn’t get eaten.
“Is something wrong?” The guide had noticed Samantha’s panicked expression.
Everyone turned to Samantha and her cheeks flushed.
