Page 2 of Yuletide Cookies (Christmas Card Cowboys #1)

Chapter Two

Even the lunch hour was more trickle than rush, and all she could think about was that forty-thousand-dollar balloon loan. Could her grandmother’s business effects hold hidden assets not in her QuickBooks? Apparently, Gram had a secret account for the interest payments.

She thought she’d been through everything with the CPA. How had this slipped past? Well, clearly not everything since she’d been blindsided. There must be other records somewhere. But where?

The storeroom?

She went through the kitchen to the storeroom on the far side of the building. The door stuck, swollen from too many years and coats of paint. She pressed her shoulder against it and gave a solid shove.

It groaned open, and she slipped through into the dim quiet.

Flour sat stacked against one wall, sugar sacks along another. Flavor extracts lined shelves, along with rolls of foil, parchment paper, and cling wrap.

In the far corner, three cardboard boxes from the clean-out of Gram’s personal things when Eliza sold the house to pay for memory care still waited to be sorted, like everything else she hadn’t had time or heart to face.

“Gran,” she whispered at the ceiling, “if you left me anything, please, now is the time.”

In the first box, the packing tape was already cut.

She’d most likely done it right after the funeral when everything was blurry and her apartment over the bakery smelled of Stargazer lilies and casseroles.

Inside, she found recipe cards. Hundreds of them.

Some in Grandmother’s handwriting, shakier each year.

No miracle here. Just evidence of all the women descended from Maggie Hart Foster, feeding this town through snowstorms and summer fairs and every Christmas in between. All those lives intersecting over the simple act of baking.

The second box was heavier and harder to get through.

Photo albums. Black pages, white corners biting at the edges. Shots of the bakery through decades. Same tin ceiling, same stubborn bell above the door. Different faces behind the counter, but all with that straight Foster nose and firm, determined chin you could crack walnuts on.

The flood of ’73. Water marks still visible on the baseboards.

The fire in the retail store next door in ’89.

The picture showed her mother, barely twenty and just married to Eliza’s dad, helping pull inventory out while smoke billowed.

The recession in 2008 when half the shops on Main Street went out of business. Foster’s managed to survive somehow.

A yellowed clipping of an article when Eliza was fourteen and ran the bakery by herself after everyone else in the family came down with the flu. ELIZA KEEPS FOSTER’S RUNNING SINGLE-HANDED. Small town paper with a slow news day.

She took a lot of pride in that story. Honored she could do it alone. Independence felt like the highest aspiration.

And then she found the journals.

Dozens of them, one for each year since Gram took over the bakery. Nothing revealing, nothing personal, though. All business. She shuffled through the ledgers and found the one for the current year.

Held her breath.

Cracked it open. Of course, the entries stopped in May when Gram went into memory care. Eliza flipped from back to front, searching for any mention of renovations or a loan.

And then she found it, hours after she started looking.

Feb. 13th: I’ve messed up badly. Trusted the wrong contractor. Lost 40K. But I’ll shoulder the burden. Carry it in silence. Find a way to make the payment without burdening Eliza. I’m so very ashamed. I must make this right.

Tears pressed against her eyes, slid down her cheek. “Oh, Gram, I’m so sorry this happened and that you felt like you couldn’t share it with me.”

She inhaled deeply and swiped away the tears with her thumbs. Spilled milk. The money was gone. Nothing left to do but earn it back. She closed the journal and put it aside.

Onward.

Last box, third box. Smaller. Heavier than its size suggested.

Christmas ornaments on top. A snow globe, bone dry, a tiny ice skater trapped in a world without water, her arms raised as if she’d been mid-spin.

A cigar box full of buttons, every color and size: pearl, brass, carved wood, and one shaped like a tiny pie.

At the bottom, tissue paper. It crumbled like stale meringue when she touched it. Yellow-brown. Older than old. She unwrapped the paper, pieces breaking off and fluttering to the ground.

Inside, a hand-painted Christmas card.

The lettering announced, “MERRY CHRISTMAS” in cursive gold. The picture was rendered in intricate detail.

A handsome old West cowboy at a chuckwagon. It looked so lifelike. Photorealism beyond the pale. The wood grain was sharp, the ding in the coffee pot evident, the mud on his boots.

But it was the man who captivated her.

Sleeves rolled past his elbows, caught mid-motion, reaching for something beyond the frame, a kindly smile on his sun-weathered face.

The individual threads in his shirt caught her eye, the weave going one way on the body, another on the cut sleeves.

A wear pattern on his belt where a holster should sit, but there was no gun in the picture.

A thin, silvered scar on his left hand, a line like a hyphen between who he’d been and who he was becoming.

His eyes. Magnetic, dark. She knew that level of exhaustion.

She flipped the painting over.

Wyatt McCready’s chuckwagon. December 1st, 1878.

Written in brown ink, the cursive looped and old-fashioned, the ink sunk deep into the fibers.

1878

The same year Foster’s opened. Her great-great-great-grandmother, Maggie Hart, just twenty-two, fresh from St. Louis with a steamer trunk full of Southern recipes, a mail-order bride for Samuel Foster. Sam had bought the bakery as her wedding present.

“I wish…” Eliza murmured past the pang in her chest.

Wished what?

The card seemed to pulse in her hands, but it must be her own pulse, pounding hard and strange.

“I wish I had someone to help me keep this bakery alive.”

The card warmed.

No. She was imagining things.

Cold storeroom. Chilled hands meeting old paper. Simple physics. Had to be. The paper wasn’t warm, just her own skin.

Except it seemed to be getting warmer.

Wyatt McCready’s painted eyes bore into hers. Excellent portraiture technique, like the Mona Lisa. She could feel his stare.

She blinked, and his pupils seemed to widen like he’d stepped from sun to shade. The brushstrokes on his shirt shifted.

You’re being silly.

Hot now. Too hot. Like grabbing a pan bare-handed from the oven, that same shock of wrong, drop it, drop it now .

But she couldn’t let go. Her fingers locked around the card’s edges.

Light wavered around the card, then bent toward it, the shelves warping at their edges like a desert mirage. The fluorescent lights pitched into a thin whine that climbed until she couldn’t hear it, only feel the electrical buzz in her teeth.

What was happening?

The air thickened, turned syrupy, then became nothing. She pulled for breath and got none. Alarmed, she tried to scream, but no sound came from her throat.

The Christmas card flared white, not a flash but a tear, as if someone grabbed the corner of the world and yanked.

Hard.

A sound like fabric ripping, enormous, the sound the sky would make if it fell. She flinched. Red light flared behind her eyes, and then cold rushed in like a door thrown open in winter. Light collapsed inward, and suddenly a man appeared in her storeroom.

Her brain refused the shape of him. Wrong. Impossible.

The card fell from her nerveless fingers and fluttered to the concrete. Sound tunneled to a weird whooshing in her head.

Run , said some primal part of her, the part that knew what to do with impossible things. To where? The doorway he blocked?

No. No. Shock. Low blood sugar. Hallucination? Gas leak? She sniffed. No eggy tang, just cinnamon, bleach, and something else now.

She pressed a thumbnail into the inside of her wrist until it hurt. Real pain. Real wrist. Real man who could not be real.

She stumbled back, and her spine bumped the wall. Shelves rattled. The top sack of cake flour slumped and puffed white dust into the air that drifted between them.

He swayed.

She whimpered and slapped both hands over her mouth.

His arm shot out, caught the metal shelving. His fingers, real fingers, with knuckles and calluses and that scar from the painting, wrapped around the chrome.

Clang.

The sound echoed off the walls and came back changed.

Her fingers found the bench scraper in her apron pocket. Cool steel, a ridiculous weapon, but it had weight and an edge, and she knew its shape.

“What in the Sam Hill—” His voice was rough, like a door that hadn’t opened in years finally pushed through.

Goosebumps flooded both her arms, chased by a wash of heat.

He spun fast, boots skidding on the concrete, spurs jangling. His gaze took in the light fixtures, lingered there, wonder plain on his face.

“Those lights,” he said, “there ain’t no flame. What manner of—” He stopped, gulped.

His eyes landed on her. Brown, tired, warmer than they’d been in the painting. Flecks of gold she couldn’t have seen in the tiny portrait were there now, catching the artificial light.

He went very still, like something wild or something holy or something that might shatter if she breathed wrong.

“Miss.”

Her throat worked, but no words came out. Her hands shook like cottonwood leaves before a storm. She pressed them to her apron and felt the outline of her phone through the fabric.

Dial 911.

He straightened a fraction. The scar on his left hand was pink at the edges. Campfire smells tucked into his clothes, along with lard, salt, and cold air that belonged to a different December, a different century.

She noticed the strength in the tendon of his wrist when he flexed his fingers. Stupid to notice, but human. The body had its priorities, even when the world unmade itself.

“Where am I?” His voice was a rich baritone that could calm both a skittish horse and a panicked baker.

“Foster’s Bakeshop.” Her voice came out as a whisper because anything louder might break the edges of this, might send him back to a painted Christmas card and her back to bankruptcy. “Evergreen Springs, Montana.”

His forehead creased. A line appeared between his brows, the kind that came from squinting into sun and storm.

“Foster’s.” He tasted the word. “Maggie Foster’s place?”

“Maggie was my three-times-great-grandmother.” The words felt absurd. Introductions across centuries. “I’m Eliza. Eliza Foster.”

His mouth opened. Closed. He peered down at the card on the floor between them, as if it were a snake he nearly stepped on or a door he walked through and couldn’t walk back out.

“What year?”

She knew why he asked. She felt the weight of the question, the impossible answer building in her throat.

“Twenty twenty-five.” She heard the numbers, felt them thud against the wall of what the world was supposed to be.

His knees softened, and he sat down hard on the floor.

“Twenty twenty-five?” He stared at his hands. Turned them. Palms. Backs. Palms again, as if they might provide a different answer on the second read.

“I was making supper biscuits for the drovers.” He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed under thick stubble. “December 1st, eighteen seventy-eight.”

December 1st. Today, but 147 years later. The words clicked together like magnets finding their match.

His gaze went to the Christmas card she dropped on the floor. “That’s me. That’s my chow wagon.”

“You’re Wyatt McCready.”

“I am.” His gaze came back to her and held. “And you’re Maggie’s kin.”

She nodded.

“The nose.” The corner of his mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Samuel Foster’s whole family has that same regal nose. Your chin’s all Maggie’s, though.”

This stranger talked about ancestors like neighbors, and it should have been terrifying, except there was gentleness in the way he said “Maggie” that made something in her chest ease.

A ridiculous little spark lit, the part of her that had eyes and a pulse, and she tamped it down hard and found it didn’t go.

“This isn’t possible.”

“No.” He didn’t move. “It’s not.”

“Are you going to harm me?” It came out small, dry, and too honest.

Something crossed his face, something like affront, quick, then gone. What stayed looked like exhaustion and gentleness had put their hats on the same head.

“No, miss. I’m just trying to understand what’s happened to me.” He glanced at the card again, then back at her, as if weighing his disbelief against the evidence. “Where I’ve landed and why I’m here.”