Midnight Faith. Gena Dalton

she told the cowboy. “He was the very best.”

      She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them while she stared at the tree. Maybe she’d just stay here and not go to dinner. At this moment she had no desire to eat.

      The John McMahan Memorial School of Horsemanship.

      That would look good over the gate to the arena. Or over the door of the barn.

      She had loved John with all her heart. From the very first minute they’d met, two strangers sharing a table to eat pizza from a cart in the trade show at the Quarter Horse Congress, he had treated her as if she were a princess. John had been nicer to her than any other man she’d ever dated.

      He’d been nicer to her than any other man she’d ever known.

      His blue eyes had twinkled when he talked to her and his brown hair had lifted and fallen in the wind. Gently. John was a gentle man and a gentleman and she had loved him with her heart and soul.

      She had never loved a man until she loved John.

      But it was his big brother Clint who stirred her blood now.

      Cait closed her eyes and pushed the feelings away—the feelings that tried to take her breath every time she even thought of Clint. She didn’t know how to name them and she didn’t even want to try.

      All she knew for sure was that John had wanted her here, with his family. In his family.

      Clint did not.

      But she wouldn’t think about Clint.

      She drew in a deep breath of the wonderful, spicy smell of the tree. She looked up. It must be nine feet tall.

      A storybook tree. For a storybook Christmas.

      “Mer-ry Christ-mas! And to your mama and daddy, too!”

      It was Bobbie Ann’s voice, floating in from outside where she was saying goodbye to the last of the guests.

      “Tell them we’re so sorry they didn’t feel up to coming with you all. I’ll be over to see them soon.”

      John had told her that all the guests on Christmas Eve who came to the Rocking M with their guests were from families who’d been friends with the McMahans since the Comanches had signed a treaty with the first German settlers. The only treaty between Native Americans and Americans that had never been broken.

      “Well,” John had said, laughing, “actually it was between Native Americans and Texans. Maybe that’s why.”

      She couldn’t even imagine families who had known each other for so many years, for generations. Families who had grown and multiplied and become intertwined with all the others. Families who had lived in one county for a hundred and fifty years.

      When her grandparents couldn’t even stay in the same country. When her parents couldn’t even keep the three of them together or stay in the same apartment for half a year.

      John was gone.

      Clint was here.

      And she was here, in his home, with the first horses she had ever owned and the first important job that God had ever given her. The most important dream she’d ever set out to fulfill.

      Clint wanted her gone.

      Lord? You brought me here, didn’t You? Isn’t this where You meant for me to be? Maybe I was wrong about Clint. But isn’t this where You sent me to make a mark for You?