The Humbug Man
Authors: Diana Palmer
It’s a Christmas miracle in Montana with
New York Times
bestselling author Diana Palmer’s beloved story, THE HUMBUG MAN.
Montana rancher Tate Hollister was the grouchiest man that widowed Maggie Jeffries had ever met. It’s Christmastime, and Maggie was determined not to let her Scrooge-like neighbor ruin her young son’s holiday. Nearly ten years old, Blake adored Tate for some reason Maggie couldn’t fathom.
But there’s more to Tate than his brusque manner. As the holiday season progressed, Maggie discovered that Tate—with his smoldering black eyes and roguish good looks—wasn’t completely immune to the Christmas spirit. In fact, his loving embrace might just be the gift of a lifetime…
“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”
—
Publishers Weekly
on
Renegade
The Humbug Man
Diana Palmer
Table of Contents
Chapter One
T
ate Hollister lived alone, which wasn’t surprising to his nearest neighbor. He had a temper like black lightning and seemed to hate people in general, and boys in particular. Maggie Jeffries had gotten an earful about the taciturn rancher from her late father-in-law, and her son Blake was an ongoing verbal documentary on his life. If she hadn’t loved the boy so much, she might have had some terrible fights with him over the incredible case of hero worship he had for Hollister. Maggie had seen their black-eyed neighbor from time to time over the years, but he avoided her the same way he tried to avoid Blake. But he didn’t have a lot of success with the boy; Blake was almost ten and Hollister was his hero.
It was hard to overlook Blake’s constant chatter about the man, but Maggie loved her son, so she tried not to be annoyed. She also kept in mind that Blake had never known his father. Bob Jeffries had been a war correspondent. He’d died in Central America covering a story, leaving Maggie destitute and three months pregnant. She’d supported herself by working as a secretary to a printing corporation executive. When the company had moved its headquarters from Tennessee to Tucson, Arizona, Maggie had decided to go along with little Blake. Her parents were dead and her three brothers were scattered all over the country, but Grandpa Jeffries had still been alive. She wanted to be close enough that Blake could spend some time with him on his rural Montana ranch.
Over the years, Maggie had rapidly climbed to executive secretary and held a responsible job. Then Grandfather Jeffries had died unexpectedly in the fall and had left this small ranch to Maggie.
Blake, who’d been in military school for the past year, had jumped at the chance to go to Montana. Couldn’t they, he pleaded, just for the Christmas holidays? Then Maggie could decide if she wanted to sell the place, couldn’t she? After all—he played his trump card with a dejected expression that was only partially faked—they hardly saw each other anymore.
That had done it. Maggie missed her son, despite the fact that she wanted him to be independent and not tied to her apron strings. She’d asked for two weeks leave from her job, just through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Then she’d found them a temporary secretary to take her place, and she and young Blake had left for the wilds of Montana.
And here they were. In two feet of drifting snow, on a rickety, run-down ranch facing the Bitterroot mountains, with no close neighbors except for the elusive and unfriendly Mr. Hollister, whom Blake seemed to worship from afar for God alone knew what reason.
The ranch house was more of a large cabin than a house, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It had just four rooms, two of which were bedrooms. The living room and dining room were combined, with a small kitchen in one corner and a bathroom that was definitely an afterthought. The furnishings were wood, and all of it had a definite Indian influence, from the blankets and rugs to the paintings that decorated the rough wood walls. The only difference now was the few Christmas decorations that Maggie and Blake had added, like the pine boughs around the fireplace with their red velvet bows and the cheerful red and green candles and the artificial holly on the coffee table.
Maggie found the idle pace of life in Montana familiar. It brought back memories of her childhood spent in the mountains of southern Tennessee, so close to the Georgia line that it had once been disputed border territory. She’d lived in the backwoods with her parents and her brothers, and it had been a satisfying life until Bob had passed through covering a story and had wooed Maggie out of her mountains and into Memphis and a small apartment.
Sometimes that part of her life seemed like a long-ago dream. If it hadn’t been for the photos, she would hardly remember what Bob looked like, although she’d loved him desperately at the age of eighteen. Now she was twenty-eight, and there were faint threads of silver in her wavy, dark brown hair. She was tall and slender as a willow, but her eyes had a haunted look these days. She was restless lately, and sometimes she felt like she was searching—but she didn’t know for what.
“It’s fun here.” Blake was grinning as he stared out the window at the snow. “I don’t miss prickly pear cactus and creosote and roadrunners and dry washes, you bet.”
“At least in southern Arizona we didn’t have all that snow, or haven’t you glanced out the window lately?” she asked, smiling, and her eyes crinkled at the corners. She had an elfin face, very mischievous, and an elegant carriage, which had come from her mother’s insistence on proper posture. Those contradictions, added to the faint traces of her southern mountain drawl, made her something of an enigma. She did attract men occasionally, but her rigid Scotch-Irish upbringing didn’t allow for a casual outlook on life, and most of the city men she ran across were as easygoing about sex as they were about letting a woman buy them a meal. It was a kind of life that suited many, but Maggie had too many hang-ups. So she was still single.
She wondered sometimes if Blake was being deprived of male companionship solely because of her attitudes. It bothered her, but she didn’t want to change.
“Snow is awesome,” he sighed, using a word that he used to denote only the best things in his life. Cherry pie was awesome. So was baseball, if the Atlanta Braves were playing, and football if the Dallas Cowboys were.
She smiled at his dark head, so like her own. He had her slender build, too, but he had his father’s green eyes. Bob had been a handsome man. Handsome and far too brave for his own good. Dead at twenty-seven, she sighed, and for what?
She folded her arms across her chest, cozy in the oversize red flannel shirt that she wore over well-broken-in jeans. “It’s freezing, that’s what it is,” she informed her offspring. “And it isn’t awesome; it’s irritating. Apparently, the electric generator goes out every other day, and the only man who can fix it stays drunk.”
“That cowboy seems to know how,” Blake said hesitantly.
Maggie agreed reluctantly. “I know. Things were running great until our foreman asked for time off to spend Christmas with his wife’s family in Pennsylvania. That leaves me in charge, and what do I know about running a ranch?” she moaned. “I grew up on a small farm, but I don’t know beans about how to manage this kind of place, and the men realize it. I suppose they don’t have any confidence in working for a secretary, even just temporarily.”
“Well, there’s always Mr. Hollister,” Blake said with pursed lips and a wicked grin.
She glared at him. “Mr. Hollister hates me. He hates you, too, in fact, but you don’t seem to let that stand in the way of your admiration for the man.” She threw up her hands, off on her favorite subject again. “For heaven’s sake, he’s a cross between a bear and a moose! He never comes off his mountain except when he wants to cuss somebody out or raise hell!”
“He’s lonely,” Blake pointed out. “He lives all by himself. It’s hard going, I’ll bet, and he has to eat his own cooking.” He sat up enthusiastically, his thick hair over his brow. “Grandpa said he once knew a man who quit working for Mr. Hollister just because the cook got sick and Mr. Hollister had to feed the men.”
Maggie glanced at her son with a wicked gleam in her eyes. “He probably fed them some of his razor blades,” she murmured.
“Oh, shame on you,” Blake said with a chuckle. “How did I wind up with a mother like this?” he asked the ceiling.
“Well, they ran out of ugly, mean ones, and here I was,” Maggie sighed, striking a pose.
Blake laughed harder. He would have agreed with her if he could have stopped laughing. He thought she was the best mom in the whole world, even if she did have this annoying hang-up about his beloved Mr. Hollister. “But really, Mom, you’re going to have to do something about the cattle and the men pretty quick,” he finally said, sounding grown-up and almost knowledgeable. “The cattle are straying real bad. I saw some down on Mr. Hollister’s place just this morning.”
She drew in a breath. “Why didn’t you say so? For God’s sake, don’t just sit there. Get some barbed wire, and I’ll send for a few land mines….” She shuddered.
“He’s a nice man. You just don’t understand him,” Blake said.
She lifted her eyebrows. “Are we talking about the same Mr. Hollister? The one who looks like a hat and mustache sitting on a rock?” she asked, turning away from Blake’s amused grin. “I’ll bet if he ever smiled, his face would break.”
“Grandpa liked him,” he reminded her. “I do, too. You just don’t know him, that’s all. He’s a real jake guy.”
“I don’t want to know him. That’s why I spent every minute I came up here hiding out from him. And I will never learn to understand the language you speak,” she informed him. “It goes from mumble to street jive to unintelligible—” A loud knock at the door stopped her in midsentence. “Maybe it’s the man who can fix the generator,” she said hopefully and went to open the heavy oak door.
A rush of cold air hit her in the face, temporarily blinding her. Montana in winter was uncomfortable, even for natives. The windchill factor was nearly unbearable, and the snow never seemed to stop. This small ranch that she’d inherited from her father-in-law was located between the Bitterroot mountain range on the west and the Pryor mountains on the east, with the Wyoming border to the south. Tate Hollister’s much larger ranch and enormous house were on her north border and only about a quarter of a mile from the small frame house she shared with Blake.
She wasn’t really surprised to find Tate Hollister on her doorstep when she got her eyes cleared of snowflakes. He was tall already, but he seemed to have grown two feet since Maggie last saw him. He glared down at her from black eyes in a thin-lipped, deeply tanned face, which was all hard lines and sharp angles. He looked to be in his late thirties, and he was as wild a man as Maggie had ever seen. In his battered black ranch hat and sheepskin jacket, worn jeans and black boots, he looked like an outlaw. He needed a shave and his mustache needed trimming. His thick, shaggy hair was disheveled. Just the sight of him was enough to intimidate most men, much less Maggie.
“Yes?” she asked with forced pleasantness, her head cocked warily as he removed his gloves and slapped them into his palm.
“Ten head of your cattle are grazing on my winter feed supply,” he said without preamble. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Award them the Croix de Guerre for bravery above and beyond the call of duty,” she answered without hesitation.
He stared at her as if he wasn’t quite certain that he’d heard her. His head tilted slightly and his dark eyes narrowed, while Blake struggled with suppressed laughter. “I don’t think you understand the situation,” he tried again. “If you don’t get them off my land and out of my hay, I’m going to throw down on them.”
“That is an old Western expression,” Maggie explained to Blake. “It means he’s going to shoot them.” She looked back at Tate Hollister. “I hope you plan to give them a sporting chance. They are, after all, unarmed.” She smiled vacantly.
Hollister’s dark eyes were shadowed with surprise, and his mustache actually twitched, but there was no smile on his lips. “Mrs. Jeffries, this isn’t a laughing matter.”
“Yes, sir.” She curtsied. “What would you like me to do about the cattle?”
He looked as confused as a man could. He glanced at Blake, glowering at the boy’s grin, which was quickly erased.
“Oh, for God’s sake, where’s Jack Randall?” he demanded, his deep voice like a bass fiddle with the wind howling outside the door.
She stared at him. “Jack who?”
“Your foreman, lady!”
She sighed. “Oh, him. He left two days before we got here.”
“Left!”
She put a hand to her ear. “Please. I have sensitive ears. Yes, he left. He took his wife back east to visit her people for Christmas.”
“Christmas!” he muttered, and Maggie stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to come out with a hearty “Bah, Humbug.” The sentiment was in his expression, even if he didn’t say the words, and she had to stifle a giggle. That made him scowl even more. “Are you really this boy’s mother?”