Christmas at Roosevelt Ranch Read online

  Christmas at Roosevelt Ranch

  A Roosevelt Ranch Novella

  Elise Faber

  CHRISTMAS AT ROOSEVELT RANCH

  BY ELISE FABER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  CHRISTMAS AT ROOSEVELT RANCH

  Copyright © 2020 Elise Faber

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-84-5

  Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-83-8

  Cover Art by Jena Brignola

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Roosevelt Ranch Series

  Also by Elise Faber

  About the Author

  One

  Dale

  Expensive shoes.

  Clicking across his floor.

  How did he know this when his head was currently under the frame of a car?

  Because boots did not make that sound.

  And because people around here didn’t wear shoes that were not boots. Especially not in the fall when the rain had come, snow was falling at intermittent intervals but not yet sticking to the ground. Dirt had become mud, and mud had become quicksand, and click-clicking shoes were definitely a danger.

  Especially in these parts.

  And now, Dale sounded like a wannabe cowboy.

  The Darlington he’d grown up in might have been rough around the edges, but the Darlington of today was a quaint, small town in northeastern Utah. It was a place he’d spent more hours outdoors than in, trailing through the cattle ranches, the peach orchards, the vineyards. He’d trekked through that mud, had sloughed through the snow, had enjoyed traversing the green hills until they were turned brown by the summer’s heat.

  And he’d enjoyed that, too.

  Long summer days, the sun rising early and setting late. So much heat that it was easy to spot, shimmering waves as it rose off the ground.

  But he’d stayed out for all of it.

  Because it hadn’t been inside.

  Because inside had been absolutely unbearable.

  Those shoes continued to click-click across the garage floor, moving toward him and not away like he’d hoped.

  This engine was a bitch to work on, and he’d promised to have it finished by noon for his customer, so he could close up early and get over to his friend Kelly’s by one to help her and her husband set up for their annual Christmas party. Which was both too fucking close to now, since the car wasn’t fixed, and was still too far away, considering the grief this fucking P.O.S. had been giving him since it had been towed to the shop.

  The shoes stopped just next to the driver’s side tire, perfectly centered in his line of vision.

  And tapped.

  Click-click.

  Click-click.

  Click-click.

  When the clicking continued even as he did his damndest to ignore it—or rather, them, the pointy, shiny black leather pumps with a flash of red at every tap and mud ringing their perimeter.

  Unfortunately, ignoring didn’t help.

  The muddy shoes didn’t disappear.

  They stayed.

  And clicked.

  “Fucking hell,” he muttered, pushing with his feet and sliding out from beneath the car. The creeper cart’s wheels screeched as they found purchase against the concrete floor, and—

  Holy fucking hell.

  Long, long legs. Hips and breasts and—

  A fiercely beautiful face that was glowering down at him.

  He sat up, wiping his hands on the towel he kept in his pocket. “Can I help you?”

  Silence, imperious brown eyes staring down at him, and a brow lifted.

  Dale stood. “Was the brow-lifting supposed to be an answer to my question?” he asked. “Because I’m not great at interpreting the intricacies of the various eyebrow languages.”

  “I am looking for the owner of this establishment.”

  Rich tones of an English accent, the bearing of old—or perhaps expensive manners. To go with her expensive clothes and very expensive shoes.

  Or maybe he was just a small-town hick.

  “I’m the owner,” he said. “Your car break down?”

  “Precisely.” She turned, spun away. “This way.”

  Click-clicking across the cracked and stained concrete, as though she were the queen traversing across the finest marble tile. All that click-clicking had the side benefit of making that fabulous ass sitting atop those long, long gorgeous legs bounce just the slightest bit.

  Not that he was looking.

  Nope. No women for him. Give him the rolling hills and the various parts of a car engine. Hell, even give him balancing the books at the end of the month, which was pretty much the only thing he hated about running his own business.

  The cars were easy.

  Even the customers mostly were.

  But he had the feeling this one wouldn’t be.

  He followed her out through the yard—the small parking lot that was more dirt than asphalt—and currently more mud than dirt due to the most recent rain. He’d saved up his profits, would be able to afford brand new asphalt the entire length, but he was waiting for spring. There was no need to subject his new road and parking lot to a fierce Utah winter right off the bat.

  “Uh-hem.” A sharp cough drew his focus to melted chocolate eyes . . . filled with disapproval.

  “Where’s your car?”

  The barest narrowing of her eyes before she spun and continued down the short drive. Dale followed her as she turned right and click-clicked all the way down the road to a sleek black sedan.

  Wouldn’t last the winter around here with a car like that.

  The problem was easy to spot, the back tire completely flat.

  “Engine trouble then?” he deadpanned.

  She stopped, spun, face pressed into sharp lines. “It’s—” Clarity dawned as she realized he was joking with her, and the lines got somehow sharper. “Hilarious,” she said. “Can you fix the tire?”

  He nodded. “Pop the trunk.”

  “Pop the . . . what?” An arched question.

  “The trunk.” He tapped the back. “Open it up, please.”

  “Ah.” She reached into a small handbag, one of her spring-like curls sliding forward to cover her cheek. An annoyed flick of her head had it darting back in place like a soldier out of formation, and a moment later, she had her keys in hand.

  Pop.

  The trunk opened, and he made short work of loosening the jack and retrieving the spare tire. It was surprisingly hard with these fancy cars—as though the manufacturers had all decided to make a mechanic’s life a living hell. Unlike his perfectly sensible truck, this wasn’t undoing a couple of screws to gain access to the spare. This was five minutes of frustration and stifled cursing as he fought tooth and nail to loosen the compartment where everything he needed was located.

  But eventually—and with no audible curses—he was lifting the tire out and bending to position the jack in place.

  As luck—something h
e’d never had much of, and something he’d really been lacking of late—would have it, when she’d pulled off the road, she’d perfectly positioned the flat tire in the mud.

  Perfect.

  Perhaps also unfair of him to be further annoyed, as this entire stretch was currently mud. So, he couldn’t move the car forward or back to save himself the sludgy bath he was about to take.

  Maybe he should have put her off, but he was behind on his work and wanted to be done with this interruption. Plus, based on the clicking, on the impatience in every line of her body, he instinctively knew that any delay on his part would have been met with arguing on hers. So, he figured he might as well get her tire changed and the sexy little priss back out on her way.

  “Pretty shoes you got there,” he said, giving in to the inevitable and kneeling in the mud.

  “They serve their purpose,” she replied.

  “Maybe,” he said, loosening the lug nuts. “If you spend most of your life indoors.” A beat. “Or at least on mostly paved roads.”

  She shifted, and he watched her study her shoes—now caked with no small amount of mud. “I expected the roads to be . . . more road-like.”

  “You’re in the country now.”

  “Hmm.”

  Silence followed. Or well, the silence of being outside on a quiet road, the wind rustling through the vegetation, whistling softly through the rocks on the road, and the unobtrusive wooshing sound of the water in the nearby puddles.

  Unobtrusive until someone was knee-deep in it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “How long until the tire is changed?”

  “Five minutes,” he told her. “Your name? If I’m kneeling in the muck, I should at least know who I’m rescuing.”

  “I am not a woman who needs rescuing.”

  He snorted. “So you were going to change this yourself?” Pushing back, he went to stand. “I’ll just let you get on with it then.”

  His gaze went to hers, and he saw the fire in those brown depths.

  But only for a moment.

  “My name is Elizabeth.” She lifted her chin. “And if you don’t mind, you’ll complete your task of changing the tire, so I can be on my way.”

  He swapped the tires, tightened the lug nuts. “I’m Dale,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “I—”

  Standing, he moved back to the trunk, stowed the jack, wrestled the muddy tire into the truck, and slammed the metal lid closed. Then he turned to face her. “All set.”

  “Thank—”

  He spun away, began heading back to the shop.

  If he hustled, he might still make that noon deadline.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I have work to do,” he said, not stopping, not rotating back to face her.

  “I need to pay you.”

  A shrug. “I don’t charge for simple tire changes.”

  “I must—”

  He trudged through a puddle, ignored her.

  “Stop!”

  Yeah. Not happening. “Goodbye, Elizabeth.”

  Then Dale went back to doing what he did best—working, ignoring the rest of the world, and . . . oh, working.

  Two

  Elizabeth

  Her cell rang as she watched the handsome mechanic’s stride eating up the path that led back to the garage.

  It was a lucky feat that her tire had blown so near the shop.

  She might not like to pretend she needed anyone’s help, but tire-changing was not one of the skills she considered as hers. Running a business. Yes. Wondering why on God’s green earth she was in the outskirts of Utah as a responsibility of that business. Also yes.

  Staring after a sexy man giving her serious Idris Elba vibes.

  No.

  Hard no.

  She didn’t do men, and she most certainly didn’t do men from small towns who didn’t have any clue how to deal with a woman like her.

  Demanding. Confident. Brusque. Cold-hearted and business-minded.

  The company came first.

  Always. Always.

  Which was why she was here when she might very well wish to be anywhere else on the planet.

  Mud and wide-open skies. Cool air and rolling hills.

  And flat tires. And ruined shoes. And—

  Her phone rang again.

  Cursing, she lifted it to her ear and answered the call, barking orders into the receiver at her assistant as she attempted to scrape the mud from her heels. Definitely ruined and definitely not suitable for these parts.

  But she hadn’t spent much time anywhere outside of a boardroom of late, and the heels were a mask.

  A painful mask paired with tailored trousers and silk shirts—feminine to the extreme and yet somehow not. Powerful, confident, pure business, she had a closet full of that exact same outfit. In a variety of muted colors, of course, but still a wardrobe filled with . . . masks.

  “What happened?”

  “Production is down,” Francisco, her assistant, said. “All of the new machines are malfunctioning.”

  “Shit,” she muttered. “Have the head of operations call me the moment you’re off the phone with me.”

  “Will do.”

  “Now, tell me the rest of it.”

  She listened with growing dread to the rest of Francisco’s report.

  All of which basically amounted to the wheels falling off the bus.

  Perfect.

  She’d been gone less than twenty-four hours, and everything was going to hell.

  “Schedule a call with the head of finance after operations,” she ordered. “And for fuck’s sake, if anything else goes poorly, you need to call me immediately. No trying to handle this yourself.”

  “Got it,” Francisco said.

  She hung up without another word and turned on the car.

  Why was she in the middle of nowhere?

  Oh yes, because only she could apparently attend this ridiculous event and see to the business that needed to take place.

  Her father had been friends with the father of the man she was meeting, and they’d extended this invitation as a way to welcome her into the business circle of the super-rich.

  Pft.

  They didn’t know that she had been running the business for near on five years now, that her father had been merely the face of the company.

  And she was the brain.

  The engine.

  The heart.

  Because otherwise, they would have lost it all. Twenty-three thousand employees without jobs, customers without the medical supplies they needed, distributers with channels to ship product but no product to transport.

  Their company made one thing—heart valve replacements—and they certainly didn’t have a monopoly on the device, but theirs was the best. Their valve could be replaced laparoscopically, and the recovery time was shortened exponentially. This meant they were the preferred brand around the world.

  Great for business.

  They’d grown from small potatoes to power in just a few years and had undergone the expected growing pains.

  Pains that were insurmountable for a CEO who’d just lost his beloved wife.

  Pains Elizabeth had shouldered because . . . well, that was what she did.

  Head down. Endure on.

  Even if that enduring meant that she now had to take the place of her father at this trifling Christmas party.

  A broken hip.

  It was so cliché a thing to have sidelined her sixty-six-year-old father, a depressing reminder that he was getting older, and that he, for the most part, had seemed to give up.

  “I’m ready to join your mother,” he’d told her from that hospital bed.

  “And what about me?” she’d wanted to ask.

  But she hadn’t, of course, hadn’t wanted to rub salt in the wound, to be selfish when he was clearly still hurting—

  No.

  She hadn’t asked that because she’d known it wouldn’t make
a difference.

  She was capable and strong and used to being on her own.

  Growing up with parents who loved each other truly was perhaps one of those enviable characteristics that school children dreamed up. But the reality could be darker, especially when those parents loved each other more than anything else—more than work, than their families, than . . . their own child.

  “Enough,” she muttered, glancing into her mirror and checking the road for traffic.

  Not that there was much of it in these parts. She’d barely seen another car for the last hour, knew she was lucky to have made it to the edge of town and the mechanic’s shop on her flat. But she was also skirting that edge of the town, driving beyond it to the ranch Justin Roosevelt currently resided on with his wife and children in blissful happiness.

  Or that was what the Medical Insider magazine had declared when they’d discussed his taking over the reins of the family business from his father, Vincent.

  Distribution.

  That was what the Roosevelts specialized in.

  That was why she was here. Attending the fucking Christmas party.

  With gifts for the children in the back seat of her rental.

  The Roosevelts handled the second most important job of Hjerte—meaning heart in Danish and referencing how her late mother had been her father’s heart. It was a sickeningly sweet and yet somehow still touching show of affection from a man who loved deeply enough to name his company after a woman and to highlight her family’s ancestral roots. But she digressed. Because names aside, the Roosevelt operations handled the most critical operation of Hjerte after the creation of the actual product: distribution.

  Otherwise, their valves would be languishing in warehouses instead of helping hearts pump better in tens of thousands of patients’ chests.

  She pulled onto the road, navigated the curving street that was grossly pot-holed and surrounded by high muddy embankments. On either side, there were large ditches filled with puddles that were ringed with dirty-looking snow.