A Cowboy Christmas Miracle (Burnt Boot, Texas Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

we talk to the preacher Sunday evening, we’ll make plans and a list.”
    She told herself that the vibes she’d felt were the result of too much whiskey, but her heart warned her that she was playing with pure fire. She put her hand in his and attributed the fiery jolt that rippled through her body to the fact that she was in cahoots with a Brennan.
    * * *
    The hall clock chimed twelve times as Declan started up the stairs. The house seemed bigger and emptier since his sister, Leah, had moved out and gotten married last August. It felt as if it was waiting on him to do the same, as if he no longer belonged there, even though he’d been born there and had the same room since he was a baby.
    He tossed his black felt hat on the bed, threw his coat on the back of a wooden rocking chair in his bedroom, and kicked off his boots. Then the pacing began—from one end of the room, around the foot of the queen-size poster bed, to the other side of the room and back again.
    “I hate this,” he mumbled. “But I hate to let a Gallagher win even more, and Betsy is a Gallagher. She wouldn’t blink an eye at doing the same thing if she were in my place.”
    He tugged his shirt over his head, unfastened his belt, and quickly finished undressing before heading to the bathroom. One nice thing about not having a female on the second floor meant he didn’t have to be careful about running naked from bedroom to bathroom.
    Standing under the shower, he kept telling himself that he was a Brennan and all was fair in love, war, and feuds. He’d grown up knowing that it was okay to cheat, lie, or steal from a Gallagher but never from anyone else. And it was never, not even in the wildest stretch of the imagination, okay to date, go to bed with, or even kiss a Gallagher woman.
    When he made it back to his room, he slipped beneath the covers and shut his eyes, but all he could see were Betsy’s pretty, emerald-green eyes filled with tears when she found out that she’d been nothing more than a pawn in a bet.
    His eyelids snapped open, and he chuckled. “Hell, she won’t cry when she finds out. She’ll come after me with a loaded shotgun and a tongue lashing that will cut me to shreds.”
    * * *
    Light from all the windows made a yellow streak across the yard at the Wild Horse ranch house. Betsy inhaled deeply and let it out slowly as she parked her truck in front of the house and got out. A blast of cold air hit her face and brought with it the first snowflakes of the season.
    She wiped at the flakes stinging her face and opened the front door. A rush of warm air greeted her along with her grandmother’s voice yelling from the well-lit kitchen.
    “Betsy, come on in here. I’m having hot chocolate. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the Thanksgiving dinner, so I got up and started making a list,” Naomi said.
    Betsy stopped at the door and leaned against the doorjamb. “It’s getting close to midnight.”
    Her grandmother had a deal with a very good hairdresser that kept her red hair beautifully styled and dyed so that not a single root or gray hair ever showed. Her green eyes, the same color as Betsy’s, were set in a bed of wrinkles, and her round face had begun to resemble a bulldog’s, with its drooping jaws.
    Betsy studied her grandmother carefully. She should look like a bulldog because her nature was exactly like one—grab hold of a bone and hang on for eternity, no matter if something better, like a rib eye, came along.
    It took an attitude like that to run this ranch, young lady , the voice inside Betsy’s head said loudly.
    Naomi pointed at the clock on the wall. “It is past midnight. Where have you been? Down at that bar trying to pick up a man?”
    “No, ma’am, to the last. Yes, ma’am, to the first. I had two beers and…” She stopped before she blurted out that she’d gone to the river and talked to Declan.
    “And a shot of whiskey. I can smell it on your breath all the way over here. You’re not drunk