True-Blue Cowboy Christmas
Big Sky Cowboys, #3
Author: Nicole Helm
Pub Date: October 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781492641537
BIG SKY CHRISTMAS
Thack Lane
has his hands full. For the past seven years, he’s been struggling to move on
from his wife’s tragic death and raise a daughter all by his lonesome. He
doesn’t have time for himself, much less a cheerful new neighbor with a smile
that can light up the ranch.
Christmas
spirit? Bah, humbug.
With
Christmas right around the corner, Summer Shaw is searching for somewhere to
belong. When her neighbor’s young daughter takes a shine to her, she is
thrilled. But Thack is something else altogether. He’s got walls around his
heart that no amount of holiday wishes can scale. Yet as joy comes creeping
back to the lonely homestead, Summer and Thack may just find their happily ever
after before the last of the Christmas miracles are through…
Buy Links:
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Top Five Holiday Traditions
I admit it, I’m a Christmas junkie. I used to
take boxes of Christmas decorations to my college dorm/apartment every year. I
have three trees in my basement and a plethora of tubs of ornaments, books,
sparkly things, decorative plates and the like. December is all Christmas music
all the time. I love Christmas.
Which was why it was fun to mix the magic of
Christmas and the magic of romance in True-Blue Cowboy Christmas. My favorite
part of Christmas is family, which is why I brought the whole crazy Shaw
clan together for this final book in my Big Sky Cowboys series.
To me, the holidays are all about love, so my
favorite holiday traditions are either done with family or because they
remind me of family.
1.
Watching It’s A Wonderful Life.
When I was growing up, this was something we always did on Christmas Eve (much
to the complaints of my younger sisters). But It’s A Wonderful Life is by far
my favorite Christmas movie, and in my adulthood no one will watch it with me,
so I usually watch it late Christmas Eve night when I’m wrapping up the kids’
presents, and that’s actually become one of my favorite traditions in it of
itself. Though I love the holiday season because I get to see family and spend
time with loved ones, it’s nice to have a few hours of quiet in the midst of
all the visiting to enjoy a movie about finding hope and peace while I’m
creating magic for my guys.
2. Christmas Lights Looking. Every
year, at least once, we go to one of the parks in our area completely decorated
in Christmas lights. It’s always fun to see what people can do and the cute
displays different parks come up with. My kids ooh and ahh over the blinking,
giant lights, the radio plays soft Christmas music, and we all get to be
together experiencing something beautiful.
3. Go to Iowa. This
probably isn’t on everyone’s favorite traditions list (but if it is,
Iowa fist bump), but my extended family is mostly in Iowa, which means every
year since my family moved away we make the trek up the Avenue of Saints to see
my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. This was always my favorite part of
Christmas as a kid, and now as an adult I love sending my kids down to the
basement with my cousins’ kids to play, because that’s what my cousins and
sisters and I all did as kids. Eating cookies my grandma gets from her church
cookie swap, or letting them run out into the yard to play in the snow with my
grandpa’s dogs—just like I did as a kid.
4. Making Sugar Cookies. I
can vividly remember standing on a chair in my grandma’s kitchen and decorating
sugar cookies cut out into different Christmas shapes, and it just isn’t
Christmas without spending a day making edible snowmen, snowflakes, santa hates
and the like. These days, it’s usually my own kitchen with my mom and boys, or my
mother-in-law’s kitchen with my sisters-in-law.
Either way, there’s something special about making and decorating things
together, and I hope my kids remember it as adults.
5. Eating! I’m sorry,
it’s true, I love eating through the holidays! There are a lot of one-time
treats that come out at my house, or in the houses we visit. I love to make
Kringla, but it’s a pain, so I only make it at Christmas time. My grandma
always has gingerbread cake, which feels especially like Christmas to me, plus
the afore-mentioned sugar cookies. My mom or I make Swedish Rye Bread. My
tastebuds are always very happy the week of Christmas. And all these eating
usually happens with some of my favorite people in the world, which makes it
that much more fun.
There are a million other things I love to do
around Christmas time as well, but I’ll spare you my never-ending list.
True-Blue Cowboy Christmas features a few (Rudolph, tree trimming, etc), and if
you’re looking for a heart-warming Christmas read, I hope you’ll check it out.
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EXCERPT:
Summer started walking, but Thack took
the guitar case from her. “Here, let me help.”
It wasn’t necessary, but it was
awfully nice. Especially when his free hand took hers, their fingers
intertwining. It was like the culmination of so much desperate belief—that not
all men were like the men Summer had met through her mother. That something
sweet and easy and normal could exist, and that it could be something she might
earn. She swallowed at the lump in her throat. How silly she was to be emotional
over something so…little.
The frigid, dark air helped her get
her bearings. She led him to where her car was parked, and he helped her load
the guitar in the back. When she shut the door, she turned to look at him and
managed her best flirtatious-if-nervous smile. “So. Walk?” Though she didn’t know how
long they’d last in the freezing temperatures, she thought she might tempt
frostbite if it meant spending time with him.
“Yeah.
Just…one thing first.”
Before she could even ask what, his
mouth was on hers and she sighed into the kiss, leaning into him. She loved the
way his hands tangled in her hair, that even though they weren’t exactly at
ease around each other one hundred percent of the time, this was easy.
No, easy wasn’t the right word.
It just worked. Their bodies fit and somehow his mouth always knew
exactly how to move against hers, like they had been built to match in all of
the right places—two puzzle pieces that on the surface hadn’t looked like they
would fit together.
But the surface was never the whole
story, and while for the past two years she’d desperately tried to make the
layers fit, she couldn’t erase those first twenty years of her life.
Somehow, kissing Thack in the middle
of a dark Montana town, she found she no longer wanted to erase the experience
of those years. It was a part of her, a part of how she’d gotten here, to this
place where his kiss, his hands, he felt like magic.
She wanted more. He wanted more. They
wanted each other. She didn’t want to freeze her butt off on a walk down Main
Street. Not when, for the first time, their time together was truly just the
two of them. No matter where this took them, that was something to grab with
both hands and not waste.
“We
could skip the walk,” she said, holding on to his coat, ignoring the press of
the car door handle in her back.
His eyes narrowed as if he wasn’t
quite certain she was suggesting what he thought she was suggesting. “Um. What exactly would we do instead?”
“You
could take me home.” She sounded breathless and probably ridiculous, but she
didn’t care. This was something she’d dreamed about. Over the years, she had
put a great deal of thought into the details—when and how, and what type of
person would be the one she would want to give those last pieces of herself to.
Thack wasn’t exactly what she’d
pictured, but at the same time, he was more. Strong, steady, dedicated.
Everything about him awed her. He had her pressed against a car door, and she
was deliriously excited with it. How could she not want to jump in feet first?
“But
we have two cars and… I’m taking this too literally, aren’t I?”
She couldn’t stifle the laugh, both
happy and nervous. “You
are. I mean, if you have to get back to Kate, I understand. But you could
escort me home. If you have the time. If you want.”
“Dad
said he’d call if he and Mrs. Bart needed me, so I could take you home. You
know, I…I’m kind of curious about what the inside of that thing you live in
looks like.”
“I’ll
give you a tour.”
“Thank
you for being ten times better at this whole flirting thing than I am.” He
brushed a kiss against her mouth.
She smiled up at him. “Luckily, you make up for the bad
flirting in the kissing department.”
He gave a short laugh. “Not a bad trade.”
She took a deep breath and mustered
all of her courage and all of her determination. She set goals, and she reached
them. Thack didn’t have to be any different. “So, follow me home?”
He gave a short nod and held the
driver’s side door open for her as she slid in. She started the old clunker,
only partially sad when it actually started. It would have been kind of nice if
he’d been able to drive her home.
Oh well. “Parked around front?”
“Ah,
yes. Meet me there?”
“Yup.”
He hesitated again, then smiled. “I’ll see you soon.” Carefully, he
closed her door. In the rearview mirror, she watched him walk away, her heart
pounding wildly. She’d invited him to her place. She’d offered a tour, which she hoped was obviously more
euphemism than reality.
Well, it didn’t matter. Because
tonight…tonight she was going to go after exactly what she wanted.
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NICOLE HELM writes down-to-earth
contemporary romance specializing in neighbors who don’t live close enough to
be a problem. When she’s not writing, she spends her time day dreaming about
someday owning a barn. She lives with her husband and two young sons in
O’Fallon, Missouri.
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