Christmas at Thunder Horse Ranch

She blurted out, “I’m not afraid of either.” Her head dipped and she stared at her boots. “I’m afraid of me.”

His heart melted at the way her bottom lip wobbled. “Why?”

Her glance shifted to the corner of the room and she didn’t say anything for a full ten seconds. “I’ve been independent for so long, I’m afraid of becoming dependent on anyone.”

“Relying on someone else doesn’t have to be a bad thing. And it’s only temporary, then you can go back to being independent.”

She didn’t throw it back in his face, so he figured she was wavering. He went in for the clincher.

“Besides, you saved my life twice.” He lifted one of her hands to his lips and pressed a kiss there. “I owe you.”

Christmas at Thunder Horse Ranch

Elle James

A Golden Heart Award winner for Best Paranormal Romance in 2004, ELLE JAMES started writing when her sister issued a Y2K challenge to write a romance novel. She has managed a full-time job and raised three wonderful children, and she and her husband even tried their hands at ranching exotic birds (ostriches, emus and rheas) in the Texas Hill Country. Ask her, and she’ll tell you what it’s like to go toe-to-toe with an angry three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bird! After leaving her successful career in information technology management, Elle is now pursuing her writing full-time. Elle loves to hear from fans. You can contact her at ellejames@earthlink.net or visit her website at www.ellejames.com.

This book is dedicated to my fans who kept writing, asking when Dante would have his book.

Without my fans I wouldn’t be pursuing the career I love. Thank you for reading and falling in love with my characters. May all your lives be blessed!

Contents

Cover

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Big sky...check. Flat plains...check. Storm clouds rolling in...check.

Like ticking off his preflight checklist, Dante Thunder Horse reviewed what was in front of him, a typical early winter day in North Dakota before the first real snowstorm of the season. It had been a strange December. Usually it snowed by Thanksgiving and the snow remained until well into April.

This year, the snow had come by Halloween and melted and still the ground hadn’t yet grown solid with permafrost.

Based on the low temperature and the clouds rolling in, that first real snow was about to hit their area. The kids of Grand Forks would be excited. With the holidays just around the corner, they’d have their white Christmas after all.

A hundred miles away from base, flying the U.S.-Canadian border as an air interdiction agent, or pilot, for the Customs and Border Protection, Dante was on a mission to check out a possible illegal border crossing called in by a concerned citizen. A farmer had seen a man on a snowmobile coming across the Canadian border.

He figured it was someone out joyriding who didn’t realize he’d done anything wrong. Still, Dante had to check. He didn’t expect anything wild or dangerously crazy to happen. The Canadian border didn’t have near the illegal crossings as the southern borders of the United States. Most of his sorties were spent enjoying the scenery and observing the occasional elk, moose or bear sighting.

Chris Biacowski, scheduled to fly copilot this sortie, had come down with the flu and called in sick.

Dante was okay with flying solo. He usually liked having the quiet time. Unless he started thinking about his past and what his future might have been had things worked out differently.

Three years prior, he’d been fighting Taliban in Afghanistan. He’d been engaged to Captain Samantha Olson, a personnel officer who’d been deployed at Bagram Airfield. Every chance he got he flew over to see her. They’d been planning their wedding and talking about what they’d put on their dream sheet for their next assignments.

After flying a particularly dangerous mission where his door gunner had taken a hit, Dante came back to base shaken and worried about his crew member. He stayed with the gunner until he was out of surgery. The gunner had survived.

But Dante’s life would be forever changed. When he had left on his mission, his fiancée had decided to go with a few others to visit a local orphanage.

On the way back, her vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. Three of the four people on board the military vehicle had died instantly. Samantha had survived long enough to get a call through to the base. By the time medics arrived, she’d lost too much blood.

Dante had constructed images in his mind of Samantha lying on the ground, the uniform she’d been so proud to wear torn, a pool of her own blood soaking into the desert sand.

He’d thought through the chain of events over and over, wondering if he’d gone straight from his mission to Bagram, would Samantha have stayed inside the wire instead of venturing out? Had their talk about the babies they wanted spurred her to visit the children no one wanted? Those whose parents had been collateral damage or killed by the Taliban as warning or retribution?

Today was the third anniversary of her death. When Chris had called in sick, Dante couldn’t cancel the flight, and he sure as hell couldn’t stay at home with his memories haunting him.

For three years, he’d pored over the events of that day, wishing he could go back and change things so that Samantha was still there. How was he expected to get on with his life when her memory haunted him?

The only place he felt any peace whatsoever was soaring above the earth. Sometimes he felt closer to Samantha, as if he was skimming the underbelly of heaven.

As he neared the general area of the farm in the report, movement brought his mind back to earth. A dark shape exploded out of a copse of trees, moving swiftly into the open. It appeared to be a man on a snowmobile. The vehicle came to a halt in the middle of a wide-open field and the man dismounted.

Dante dropped lower and circled, trying to figure out what he was up to. About the time he keyed his mic to radio back to headquarters, he saw the man unstrap what appeared to be a long pipe from the back of his snowmobile and fit something into one end of it.

Recognition hit, and Dante’s blood ran cold. He jerked the aircraft up as quickly as he could. But he was too late.

The man on the ground fired a rocket-propelled grenade.

Dante dodged left, but the grenade hit the tail and exploded. The helicopter lurched and shuddered. He tried to keep it steady, but the craft went into a rapid spin. Realizing his tail rudder had probably been destroyed, Dante had to land and if he didn’t land level, the blades could hit first, break off and maybe even end his life.

The chopper spun, the centrifugal force making it difficult for Dante to think and move. He reached up and switched the engines off, but not soon enough. The aircraft plummeted to the ground, a blade hit first, broke off and slammed into the next blade. The skids slammed against the ground and Dante was thrown against the straps of his harness. He flung an arm over his face as fragments of the blades acted like flying shrapnel, piercing the chopper’s body and windows. The helicopter rolled onto its side and stopped.

Suspended by his harness, Dante tried to key the mic on his radio to report his aircraft down. The usual static was absent, the aircraft lying as silent as death.

Dante dragged his headset off his head. Frigid wind blew through the shattered windows and the scent of fuel stung his nostrils.

The sound of an engine revving caught Dante’s attention. The engine noise grew closer, moving toward his downed aircraft. Had the predator come to finish off his prey?

He scrambled for the harness releases, finally finding and pulling on the quick-release buckles. He dropped on his left side, pain knifing through his arm. Gritting his teeth, he scrambled to his knees on the door beneath him and attempted to reach up to push against the passenger door. Burning pain stabbed his left arm again and he dropped the arm and worked with his good arm to fling the passenger-side door open. It bounced on its hinges and smashed closed again, nearly crushing his fingers with the force.

He hunched his shoulder and nudged the door with it, pushing it open with a little less force. This time, the door remained open and he stood, his head rising above the body of the craft. As he took stock of the situation, a bullet pinged against the craft’s fuselage.

Dante ducked. A snowmobile had come to a stop a hundred yards away, the rider bent over the handlebars, pointing a high-powered rifle in his direction. With nothing but the body of the helicopter between him and the bullets, Dante was a sitting duck.

He sniffed the acrid scent of aviation fuel growing more potent as the time passed and more bullets riddled the exterior of the craft. If he stayed inside the helicopter, he stood a chance of the craft bursting into flames and being burned alive. If the bullets sparked a fire, the fuel would burn. If the flames reached the tanks, it would create a tremendous explosion.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the bright orange flicker of a flame. In seconds, the ground surrounding his helicopter was a wall of fire.

Amid the roar of flames, the snowmobile revved and swooped closer.

Debating how long he should wait before throwing himself out on the ground, Dante could feel the heat of the flames against his cheeks. If he didn’t leave soon, there wouldn’t be anything left for the attacker to shoot.

The engine noise faded, drowned out by the roar of the fire.

With fire burning all around him, Dante pulled himself out of the fuselage one-armed and dropped to the ground. His shoulder hit a puddle of the flaming fuel and his jumpsuit ignited.

Rolling through the wall of flames, Dante couldn’t get the flame to die out. His skin heated, the fuel was thoroughly soaked into the fabric. He rolled away from the flame, onto his back, unzipped the flight suit and shimmied out of it before the burning fabric melted and stuck to his skin.

Another bullet thunked into the earth beside Dante. Wearing nothing but thermal underwear, Dante rolled over in the snow, hugging the ground, giving his attacker very little target to aim at.

Covered in snow, with nothing to defend himself, Dante awaited his fate.

* * *

EMMA JENNINGS HAD spent the morning bundled in her thermal underwear, snow pants, winter jacket, earmuffs and gloves, one of them fingerless. Yes, it was getting colder by the minute. Yes, she should have given up two days ago, but she felt like she was so close, and the longer she waited, the harder the ground got as permafrost transformed it from soft dirt to hard concrete.

The dig had been abandoned by everyone else months ago when school had started up again at the University of North Dakota. Emma came out on weekends hoping to get a little farther along. Fall had been unseasonably warm with only one snowfall in late October that had melted immediately. Six inches of snow had fallen three days ago and seemed in no hurry to melt, though the ground hadn’t hardened yet. The next snowfall expected for that evening would be the clincher, with the predicted two feet of snow.

If she hadn’t set up a tent around the dig site months ago, she never would have come. As it was, school was out and she’d come with her tiny trailer in tow, with the excuse that she needed to pull down the tent and stow it for the winter. If not for the steep roof, the tent would easily collapse under the twenty-four inches of white powder. Not to mention the relentless winds across the prairie would destroy the tent if it was left standing throughout the wicked North Dakota winter.

Each weekend since fall semester began had proved to be fair and Emma had gone out to dig until this weekend. Some had doubted there’d be snow for Christmas. Not Emma. She’d lived in North Dakota all her life, and never once in her twenty-six years had the snow missed North Dakota at Christmas.

So far, the dig had produced the lower jawbone of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Emma was certain if she kept digging, she’d find the skull of the animal nearby. The team of paleontologists and students who’d been on the dig all summer had unearthed neck bones, and near the end of the summer, the jawbone. The skull had to be close. She just needed a little more time.

There to tear down the tent before it was buried in knee-deep drifts, she’d ducked inside to find the ground smooth and dry and the dirt just as she’d left it the weekend before. She squatted to scratch away at the surface with a tool she’d left behind. Before she knew it, she’d succumbed to the lure of the dig. That had been two days ago.

Knowing she had to leave before the storm hit, she’d given herself half of the last day to dig. Immersed in her work, the sound of a helicopter cut through her intense concentration and she glanced at her watch. With a gasp, she realized just how long she’d been there and that it was nearing sunset of her last day on the site.

She still needed to get the tent down and stowed before dark. With a regretful glance at the ground, she pushed the flap back and ducked through. High clouds blocked out any chance for warmth or glare from the sun.

The thumping sound of blades churning the air drew her attention and she glanced at the sky. About a mile away, a green-and-white helicopter hovered low over the prairie.

From where she stood, she couldn’t see what it was hovering over. The ground had a gentle rise and dip, making the chopper appear to be almost on the ground. Emma recognized the craft as one belonging to the Customs and Border Protection.

There was a unit based out of Grand Forks and she knew one of the pilots, Dante Thunder Horse, from when he’d taken classes at the university. A handsome Native American, he had caught her attention crossing campus, his long strides eating up the distance.

He’d taken one of her anthropology classes and they’d met in the student commons on a couple of occasions and discussed the university hockey team games. When he’d finally asked her out, she’d screwed up enough courage to take him up on it, suggesting a coffee shop where they’d talked and seemed to hit it off.

Then nothing. He hadn’t called or asked her out for another date. He must have finished his coursework at the university because she hadn’t run into him again. Nor did she see him crossing campus. She’d been disappointed when he hadn’t called, but that was at the end of last spring. The summer had kept her so busy on the dig, she wouldn’t have had time for a relationship—not that she was any good at it anyway. Her longest one had lasted two months before her shyness had scared off the poor young man.

Emma wondered if Dante was the pilot flying today. She marveled at how close the helicopter was. In all the vastness of the state, how likely was it that the aircraft would be hovering so near to the dig? Then again, the site was fairly close to the border and the CBP was tasked with protecting the northern border of the United States.

As Emma started to turn back to her tent to begin the job of tearing it down, a loud bang shook the air. Startled, she saw a flash in her peripheral vision from the direction of the helicopter. When she spun to see what had happened, the chopper was turning and turning. As if it was a top being spun faster and faster, it dropped lower and lower until it disappeared below the rise and a loud crunching sound ripped the air.

Her heart stopped for a second and then galloped against her ribs. The helicopter had crashed. As far away from civilization as they were, there wasn’t a backup chopper that could get to the pilot faster than she could.

Abandoning her tent, she ran for the back of the trailer, flung open the utility door in the rear, dropped the ramp and climbed inside. She’d loaded the snowmobile on the off chance she couldn’t get the truck all the way down the road to the dig. Fortunately, she’d been able to drive almost all the way to the site and had parked the truck and trailer on a hardstand of gravel the wind had blown free of snow near the edge of the eight-foot-deep dig site.

Praying the engine would start, she turned the key and pressed the start button. The rumble of the engine echoed off the inside of the trailer but then it died. The second time she hit the start button, the vehicle roared to life. Shifting to Reverse, she backed down the ramp and turned to face the direction the helicopter had crashed.

A tower of flames shot toward the sky, smoke rising in a plume.

Her pulse pounding, Emma raced across the snow, headed for the fire.

As she topped the rise, her heart fell to her knees. The helicopter was a battered heap, lying on its side, flames rising all around.

Gunning the throttle, Emma sped across the prairie, praying she wasn’t too late. Maybe the pilot had been thrown clear of the aircraft. She hoped she was right.

As she neared the wreck, movement caught her attention. Another snowmobile was headed toward the helicopter from the north. Good, she thought. Maybe whoever it was had also seen the chopper crash and could help her free the pilot from the wreckage and get him to safety. She waved her hand, hoping the driver would see her and know she was there to help. He didn’t give any indication he’d spotted her. But the snowmobile slowed. The rider pulled off his helmet, his dark head in sharp contrast to his white jacket. He leveled what appeared to be a rifle across the handlebars, aiming at something near the wall of flames.

Emma squinted, trying to make out what he was doing. The pop of rifle fire made her jump. That’s when she noticed a dark lump on the ground in the snow, outside the ring of fire around the helicopter. The lump moved, rolling over in the snow.

The driver of the other snowmobile climbed onto the vehicle and started toward the man on the ground, moving slowly, his rifle poised to shoot.

Emma gasped.

The man was trying to shoot the guy on the ground.

With a quick twist of the throttle she sent her snowmobile skimming across the snow, headed straight for the attacker. At the angle she was traveling, the attacker wouldn’t see her if he was concentrating on the man on the ground.

Unarmed, she only had her snowmobile and her wits. The man on the ground only had one chance at survival. If she didn’t get to him or the other snowmobile first, he didn’t stand a chance.

Coming in from the west, Emma aimed for the man with the gun. She didn’t have a plan other than to ram him and hope for the best.

He didn’t see her or hear her engine over the roar of his own until she was within twenty feet of him. The man turned the weapon toward her.

Emma gave the engine all it could take and raced straight for the man. He fired a shot. Something plinked against the hood of the snowmobile engine. At the last moment, she turned the handlebars. Her machine slid into the side of his and the handlebars knocked the gun from his hand.

She twisted the throttle and skidded sideways across the snow, spinning around to face him again.

Disarmed, the attacker had turned as well and raced north, away from the burning helicopter and the man on the ground.

Emma watched as the snowmobile continued into the distance. Keeping an eye on the north, she turned her snowmobile south toward the figure lying still on the ground.

She pulled up beside him and leaped off the snowmobile into the packed snow where he’d rolled.

A man in thermal underwear lay facedown in the snow, blood oozing from his left arm, dripping bright red against the pristine white snow.

Emma bent toward him, her hand reaching out to push him over.

The man moved so quickly, she didn’t know what hit her. He rolled over, snatched her wrist and jerked her flat onto her belly, then straddled her, his knees planted on both sides of her hips, twisting her arm up between her shoulder blades.

Until that point, she hadn’t realized just how vulnerable she was. On the snowmobile, she had a way to escape. Once she’d left the vehicle, she’d put herself at risk. What if the man shooting had been the good guy? In the middle of nowhere, with a big man towering over her, she was trapped and out of ideas.

“Let me up!” she yelled, aiming for righteous contempt. Her voice wobbled, muffled by a mouthful of snow it sounded more like a frog’s croak.

She tried to twist around to face him, but he planted his fist into the middle of her back, holding her down, the cold snow biting her cheek.

“Why did you shoot down my helicopter?” he demanded, his voice rough but oddly familiar.

“I didn’t, you big baboon,” she insisted. “The other guy did.”

His hands roved over her body, patting her sides, hips, buttocks, legs and finally slipping beneath her jacket and up to her breasts. His hands froze there and she swore.

Emma spit snow and shouted, “Hey! Hands off!”

As quickly as she’d been face-planted in the snow, the man on top of her flipped her onto her back and stared down at her with his dark green eyes.

“Dante?”

“Emma?” He shook his head. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Chapter Two

“Well, I’m sure not on a picnic,” Emma said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Dante stared down at the pretty young college professor he’d met when he’d taken classes at the University of North Dakota, working toward a master’s degree in operations management.

She stared up at him with warm, dark chocolate-colored eyes, her gaze scanning his face. “What happened to you?” She reached up to touch his temple, her fingers coming away with blood. “Why was that man shooting at you?”

“I don’t know.” Dante’s brow furrowed. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“No, it was all a blur. I thought he was coming to help, but then he started shooting at you. I rammed into him, knocking his gun out of his hands. Then he took off.”

“You shouldn’t have put yourself in that kind of danger.”

“What was I supposed to do, stand by and watch him kill you?”

“Thankfully, he didn’t shoot you. And thanks for saving my butt.” Dante staggered to his feet and reached down with his right hand and helped her up. “He shot down my helicopter with an RPG and would have finished me off if you hadn’t come along.” A bitterly cold, Arctic breeze rippled across the prairie, blowing straight through his thermal underwear. A shiver racked his body and he gritted his teeth to keep them from chattering.

Emma stood and brushed the snow off her pants and jacket. “What happened to your clothes?”

“I fell into a puddle of flaming aviation fuel when I climbed out of the helicopter.” He glanced back at the inferno. “We need to get out of here in case the fire ignites the fuel in the tank.”