Maisey Yates – A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas (страница 5)

That was the definition of homeless, and she was it.

She never figured rock bottom would look like a damp wooden floor. But hell, it seemed to be.

She had managed to stay a few steps ahead of that since she had been turfed from the last foster home she’d been in eight years ago. But now... Of course, it was the move back home that had done it.

Home.

Gold Valley was home.

A home that she couldn’t remember, but it was the place her father was from, the place her mother had been born. The place she had been born. She had decided that it was time to come back. Time to try and... Find where she came from. She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to be stuck in this endless loop. Dead-end jobs, crappy apartments. Nothing but barely making ends meet forever.

She supposed that was life for some people. For a lot of people.

But she’d hit the end of it. She’d had her birth certificate in a folder with all her legal documents—all gifted to her by the great state of Oregon on her eighteenth birthday when she’d been turfed out into the real world—and it had simply been sitting there.

Her every connection printed on a black-and-white document, as flat and dead as the paper itself.

Annie Tate was listed as her mother. And under father, a name McKenna had never even heard before. Henry Dalon.

Searches for him had turned up nothing promising.

While working as a waitress, McKenna had ended up having a conversation with a customer about a website that allowed free searches for public records. And McKenna had gone searching. She’d started with her father’s name, and then switched tactics.

She’d searched her own, and discovered not the printed, digitized version of her birth certificate but a scanned version of the original. Where handwritten down in the bottom corner, and smudged, was a name that looked a lot more like Henry Dalton.

Apparently, she’d learned after calling the records office, misspellings on records were common enough. Especially when no one had requested the documents, or done any checking on them. Seeing as Annie Tate had surrendered her parenting rights when McKenna was two, it didn’t shock her that her mother had never done her due diligence making sure everything on McKenna’s birth certificate looked right.

From there, McKenna had printed off the certificate and folded it up in her backpack, a piece to the puzzle of her life she was actively trying to put together.

She’d started searching for him after that.

Annie Tate, with her common first and last name, was impossible to track down, and anyway, McKenna already knew she didn’t want to know her.

There were a few Henry Daltons, but one in particular that was in the right geographical location to be a likely candidate. Henry “Hank” Dalton.

He’d had been all over her searches. A famous rodeo rider with three sons. Three sons who were McKenna’s half brothers, most likely.

Caleb, Jacob and Gabe.

Brothers. Family.

In Gold Valley.

But she had to figure it all out. She had to get the scope of things. The lay of the land.

She watched as the man took his phone out of his pocket, and the screen lit up.

“Come with me,” he said.

Panic fluttered around in her breast like a caged bird. “Are you calling the police?”

“No,” he said, his thumb swiping over the screen a few times. “I’m taking you to my brother’s house.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s food there,” he said simply.

She scrambled to her feet, her stomach growling. She realized that she had only eaten a couple of times in the past three days. And trail mix and granola bars could only get you so far. They weren’t...food food.

“Why do you want to feed me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But you’re harmless.”

She huffed. “I’m not harmless.”

“Really?”

“I have a pocket knife. I can cut you up.”

“Right. Anyway. Harmless. And probably hungry.”

“And you care?” This offer of food and his lack of...calling the cops on her had all her defenses up. People weren’t just...nice.

It made her feel compelled to push. To push him away. To push him to get down to what his deal actually was.

She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust anyone.

But there was always some part of her...some small part that glowed bright sometimes and made her ache.

Hope.

Yeah. Well, for all the good hope had done her. She was filthy and cold and had no money. She’d do better to expect him to turn out to be a creep than a nice person who was actually offering to feed her for nothing.

He stared back at her, his features completely shadowed still. “No. Not really.”

It was the lack of niceness that made her hackles lower, just a bit.

There was something about that honesty that struck her. People were never honest. At least, they weren’t kind and honest. There were people who were cruel, who spent no small amount of time lecturing her about how her circumstances were her own fault.

And maybe they were.

Sure, she’d been sent out to live on her own at eighteen with a garbage bag full of her belongings, but there were plenty of people who didn’t have advantages in life who probably did better than she did.

But people like this... Who could openly admit they didn’t actually care, but offered help, anyway...

There were no people like this. She had no idea what kind of anomaly she was staring down right now.

“Do you want food?” he asked, sounding irritated and impatient now.

“Yes,” she said, scrambling to a standing position. She looked at her blanket, and her backpack.

“Grab those,” he said.

Right. Because of course he was willing to bait her out of the cabin with food, but it wasn’t like he was going to let her stay here. She felt pressure behind her eyes, but she knew she wouldn’t cry. She had quit doing that a long time ago. There was no point.

“Okay,” she said, taking hold of the blanket and her bag and holding them both close.

The man took a step forward, holding out his hand, and that was when her lantern caught his face.

He was...

He was beautiful.

His dark hair was a little bit shaggy, and he had a light beard that might be intentional, or might just be because he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His nose was straight, his lips firm looking, set into a flat line. His shoulders were broad, and so was his chest, his waist lean, the tight T-shirt suggesting that he was also...well, fully and completely built.

She hadn’t made any assumptions about his looks when he had first come in, mostly because he had shocked her, waking her from a dead sleep. And then... He had sounded a bit like a curmudgeon, so she had assumed that he was an older man. But now she thought he couldn’t be much older than thirty.

“Let me take those,” he said, taking the bag and blanket from her.

She started to protest, but he had taken them before she could get the words out. It made her feel naked. He had her things. Everything she owned in the entire world. Except the lantern. She bent down and picked it up, clutching it to her chest. She would hold that.

He didn’t offer to take it from her. He turned, without a word, and walked out of the cabin, clearly just expecting her to follow.

There was an offer of food, so of course she was.

She scrambled after him. It was still dark outside, and it was cold. She had a jacket, but it was in her bag, and currently Mr. Tall, Dark and Cranky was holding it. So she figured the best thing to do would be to follow along.

The place he led her to was a small cabin, but he didn’t go to the front door; instead, he went to an old truck. “We’re going to drive to my brother’s house. It’s on the property. But I don’t really want to walk.”