A Baby for Dry Creek and A Dry Creek Christmas

“A Baby for Dry Creek shows how losing a parent can affect a young child for a lifetime. This sweet romance is both suspenseful and entertaining.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Janet Tronstad’s quirky small town and witty characters will add warmth and joy to your holiday season.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on A Dry Creek Christmas

“Janet Tronstad pens a warm, comforting story that brings joy to its characters.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Shepherds Abiding in Dry Creek

“Amid angels, Christmas pageants and unknown danger, Ms. Tronstad creates a very enjoyable story about learning to believe and love again.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on An Angel for Dry Creek

A Baby for Dry Creek & A Dry Creek Christmas

Janet Tronstad

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

A BABY FOR DRY CREEK

Prologue

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

Epilogue

A DRY CREEK CHRISTMAS

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

Epilogue

JANET TRONSTAD

grew up on a small farm in central Montana. One of her favorite things to do was to visit her grandfather’s bookshelves, where he had a large collection of Zane Grey novels. She’s always loved a good story.

Today, Janet lives in Pasadena, California, where she works in the research department of a medical organization. In addition to writing novels, she researches and writes nonfiction magazine articles.

For I was hungry and you gave me food;

I was thirsty and you gave me drink;

I was a stranger and you took me in.

—Matthew 25:35

This book is dedicated with many fond memories to my forty cousins, both the Norris side of the family and the Tronstad side of the family. Thanks for the good times!

Prologue

Chrissy Hamilton figured her life couldn’t get much worse. On the morning of what was supposed to be her wedding day, she had found another woman in her fiancé’s bed. And that wasn’t even the worst part. After she’d stomped out of Jared’s bedroom and driven almost all the way to Dry Creek, Montana, in her cousin’s truck, she’d met a man who made her knees melt so fast she wouldn’t have cared if an entire cheerleading squad had been camped out in Jared’s bed.

Of course, nothing could come of her attraction. She was two and a half months pregnant and just about as confused and miserable as an eighteen-year-old in trouble could be.

Besides, if Chrissy couldn’t trust the man she’d loved since she was fifteen, she certainly wasn’t going to risk trusting some Montana rancher she’d just met.

It was too bad about the rancher, though. With his black hair and sky blue eyes, Reno Redfern was the sexiest man she’d ever seen. Which was one more reason to leave Dry Creek.

Seven and a half months later

Dry Creek did not have a postmaster. It didn’t even have a post office. Everyone knew that. Still, the letter addressed to the postmaster sat there on top of all the other letters the mail carrier had left on the counter of the hardware store this cold spring morning. The mail carrier hadn’t even looked at the letter before crawling back into the postal truck and heading down Interstate 94 to the next small Montana town on his busy route.

The hardware store sold everything a rancher needed, from weed killer to waterproof gloves, and most of it was sitting on long wooden shelves that lined the walls. A stack of ceramic mugs stood on a cart beside the stockroom door and the smell of brewing coffee welcomed customers every day of the week except Sunday, when the store was closed.

Of course, not everyone was a customer. The hardware store served as an informal community center, and some retired ranchers, like Jacob, spent most of their waking hours there arguing about cattle prices and waiting for the mail.

“Who’d be writing to our postmaster?” Jacob asked as he lifted the first envelope and read the address. He had been a rancher for sixty of his seventy-seven years, and his gnarled fingers showed it as he held up the letter.

“We don’t have a postmaster.” Mrs. Hargrove also waited for the mail. She didn’t sit, like the men, preferring to stand on the rubber mat by the counter so her muddy boots didn’t dirty the wood floor as the men’s boots were doing. She would rather distribute the mail herself, since she could do it more efficiently than Jacob, but she was a fair-minded woman and Jacob had gotten to the mail counter first.

In addition to Mrs. Hargrove, a half dozen ranchers were waiting for their mail, and the door was opening to let more into the store. Each time the door swung back or forth, a gust of wind came inside. As usual, spring had started out cold, but everyone had expected it to warm up by now. Most of the ranchers said they could still smell winter in the air and they didn’t like it. They should be planting their fields, and it was too muddy to even plow.

“We might not have a postmaster, but we got us a letter,” Jacob said as he put the envelope up to the light and tried to see through it before lowering his eyes and looking around at the others. “From a law firm. In California.”

“What would a law firm want with our postmaster? We haven’t broken any laws.” Another retired rancher, Elmer, spoke up from where he sat by the black woodstove that stood in the middle of the hardware store. The morning was chilly enough that a small fire was burning inside the stove.

As he was speaking, Elmer stood up and frowned.

The inside of the hardware store got quiet as Elmer slowly walked toward the counter. The people of Dry Creek had a large respect for the law and an equally large distrust of California lawyers. They also knew that Elmer had an instinct for trouble, and if he was worried enough to leave his chair, they were worried, too.

“I keep telling folks we need to get a more regular way of sorting the mail,” said a middle-aged rancher, Lester, as he looked up from the bolts he was sorting along the far wall. He scowled as he took up the old argument. “You’re not supposed to see other folks’ mail—it’s not legal. The FBI can get involved.”

“The FBI has better things to worry about than who sees your seed catalogs,” Elmer said as he finished walking over to Jacob and looked down at the letter the other man still held. “Besides, no one in California would care how we sort through our mail. Would they?”

“Well, open it up and read it to us,” Mrs. Hargrove finally said. She had a raisin bread pudding baking in her oven and she didn’t want the crust to get too brown. “We haven’t got all morning.”

Jacob took out his pocketknife and used it as a letter opener. Then he cleared his throat and carefully read the entire letter aloud word by word. Jacob had always been proud of his speaking abilities, and he hadn’t had many chances in his life for public performances. If there hadn’t been so many people gathered in the hardware store, he probably would have listened to what he was saying instead of just focusing on getting all the words spoken correctly and loudly the way Mrs. Baker, his first-grade teacher, would have expected.

,!

Joseph K. Price, Attorney-at-Law

918 Green Street, Suite 200

Pasadena, California 91104

Dear Dry Creek Postmaster,

I’m writing to request your help in locating a man who lives in your community. Unfortunately, I do not know the man’s full name, so I cannot write to him directly. The nature of my business is this man’s relationship with a young woman, Chrissy Hamilton, and her new baby. It is the paternity of the infant that I wish to establish.

Miss Hamilton was in your community last fall. I am hopeful you will know the young man who spent the night with Miss Hamilton in her cousin’s truck. The man’s first name is Reno. If you can supply me with the man’s full name, I assure you that my client, Mrs. Bard, will be happy to reward you (you have no doubt heard of the family—they own the national chain of dry cleaners by the same name). I realize this is an unusual request, and I want to assure you that no one is asking the man to assume financial responsibility for the baby. Quite the opposite, in fact. Mrs. Bard is anxious to adopt the baby should it be proven to her satisfaction that her son, Jared, is the baby’s father. I apologize for the unorthodox nature of this request. It would not be necessary if Miss Hamilton were more cooperative. But she is young (eighteen, I believe) and does not yet see the full advantage to herself in this arrangement. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours truly,

Joseph K. Price, Esq.

The whole store listened and then stood still in stunned silence for a moment.

Finally Elmer spoke. “Our Reno?”

“Nothing says Reno’s the baby’s father,” Mrs. Hargrove cautioned, and then her voice softened. “Imagine, a baby.”

“Where is Reno, anyway?” Elmer looked around. “He’s usually here to get his mail by now.”

Chapter One

Reno Redfern stopped his pickup in front of the hardware store in Dry Creek. He was late and splattered with thick gray mud. Hopefully someone would have sorted the mail by now, and he could quietly pick up his few bills and get back to the ranch and shower. If he had been paying more attention to the road, he wouldn’t have slipped into the ditch and ended up with the wheels of his pickup stuck in the mud.

Reno shook his head. He’d made it a point to thank God repeatedly for the rain—what rancher wouldn’t?—but he was working on being honest in his dealings with God, and so far he hadn’t been able to say anything polite about the mud. The mud just lay everywhere, making the ground look forlorn and generally being a nuisance.

Reno had liked the first part of spring well enough. The cold of winter had eased up a little and he could walk from the house to the barn without pulling his cap down over his ears. But later, for some reason, everything had turned to mud. The mountains were no longer covered in snow, but the grass hadn’t taken hold yet either. Gray clouds hung in most of the skies, and the air was wet even when it wasn’t raining. The worst part was the deep clay that trapped everyone’s wheels.

Reno frowned as he opened the door to his pickup. The one good thing he could say for the mud was that it matched his mood these days. If it had been a normal Montana spring with endless blue sky and those tiny purple wildflowers blooming beside the gravel roads, he wouldn’t have been able to take all the love and sunshine flowing around the Redfern Ranch now that his sister, Nicki, had settled into married life.

At first Reno had wondered in alarm if he were jealous of Nicki’s wedded bliss. But that wasn’t it. He just missed the way things used to be.

There was such a thing as too much happiness, Reno finally decided, and his sister proved it. Nicki was so sweet these days it made his teeth ache. If she weren’t so sweet, he probably wouldn’t miss the old Nicki so much.

But as much as he tried to bring Nicki back to her senses, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get her going on a good argument about cattle prices and fertilizer, and those used to be her favorite topics for heated discussion. But now all she wanted to talk about was curtain fabric and love. She had a perfectly good rancher’s brain that was turning to sentimental mush, and he was powerless to stop it.

And she wasn’t content to limit her new sentimental thoughts of love to herself and her new husband. Oh, no—she had started to speak of marriage with a missionary zeal that made Reno nervous. He had seen the speculation in her eyes several days before she came right out and asked him if he’d like her to set him up.

Set him up! Reno still couldn’t believe it. He and Nicki had had a pact. Neither one of them was going to get married, at least not for love. Of course, they’d made that vow when they were ten and twelve, a good four years after their mother had left their father and they’d heard every day since about the damage love could do from their father’s own bitter lips.

Besides, even if Reno decided to take leave of his senses and look for a wife, he didn’t need his sister doing the looking for him. There were plenty of women who wanted to date him. Granted, he wasn’t exactly in touch with any of them at the moment, but that was only because he was busy feeding the new calves and, well—things.

“I’m getting around to it.” Reno had set his glass of water down on the kitchen counter when Nicki asked her question. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m doing fine.”

“Really, you’ve met someone you want to date?”

Reno scowled. She didn’t need to sound so surprised. “Well, no, but I will—”

“When you have time,” Nicki finished for him, and shook her head. “I know as well as you do that there’s never any extra time when you’re ranching—you have to make time for what’s important.”

“Getting the alfalfa planted is important.”

“With mud like this, you can’t even plow. That’s why Garrett and I decided to go to Denver. There’s nothing to do right now.”

“I can change the plugs on the tractor.”

“Or you could do something fun for a change, like maybe go down to Los Angeles and pay a visit to Chrissy Hamilton.”

Reno was struck dumb. Chrissy was the cousin of Nicki’s new husband, Garrett Hamilton. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you’ve been, well, morose since Chrissy visited here last fall. That’s not like you.”

Morose? Ever since Nicki had married her trucker husband, she’d started learning a new word every day. Reno didn’t like to discourage anyone who wanted to learn. Still…“That’s not because of Chrissy.”

Well, Reno admitted to himself, it might be a little bit because of Chrissy, but it wasn’t in the way his sister thought.

Chrissy had come to Dry Creek last fall looking for Reno and Nicki’s mother. Before Chrissy moved back to Los Angeles, she had been a waitress in the Las Vegas casino where their mother worked. The two had become friends, and Reno could understand why.

If Chrissy was upsetting to him, it was only because she reminded him of his mother. Both women had that high-wattage, bright-color sway that went with a place like Las Vegas. They wore fancy sequin dresses with the same ease that women in Dry Creek wore their aprons.

It was clear that neither his mother nor Chrissy belonged in Dry Creek, and that’s why Chrissy had bothered him. Really the only reason she still bothered him, he told himself.

Nicki looked at him as if she didn’t believe him. “You’re not still afraid to get married, are you?”

“Huh?”

Nicki had the grace to blush. “I know we both said we would never get married, but we were kids. What did we know?”

“We knew what Dad told us.”

“Ah, well, he only saw one side of being married. If he’d known there were people out there like Garrett, who can really love someone, he wouldn’t have wanted us to stay single all our lives.”

Reno decided he shouldn’t argue with his sister on this one. “I suppose he might have been okay with you marrying.”

Nicki looked relieved. “And you, too.”

Reno doubted all of it. He had known his father. But he held his tongue.

“Anyway, here’s Chrissy’s address and phone number,” Nicki said as she pulled a piece of paper out of her jeans pocket and set it on the kitchen counter. “You could at least call and talk to her—or write her a letter or something.”

With that, Nicki turned and walked away.

She might as well have left a stick of live dynamite on the kitchen counter.

Reno just stared at the paper.

He didn’t tell his sister that he didn’t need to call Chrissy or write her a letter to find out if the two of them were destined for some kind of wedded bliss. For even a little bit of bliss to happen, the woman would have to like him, and it appeared the very thought of dating him made Chrissy Hamilton want to cry.

Even someone as lovestruck as his sister would have to agree that was not a good sign. Fortunately, no one knew about him and Chrissy.

When Chrissy had been at the ranch last fall, he’d decided to invite her to eat dinner at the café in Dry Creek with him. He hadn’t thought it was any big deal. He’d spent the afternoon convincing himself that just because her green-gray eyes made him want to take up painting storm clouds, that was no reason to think he was interested in anything but getting to know someone who could tell him more about his mother.

He’d even stopped himself from wondering about Chrissy’s lips once he decided they looked as soft as they did because of some sort of Las Vegas beauty trick.

No, he’d put all that aside. Dinner was just a logical thing. Hamburgers and fries for two hungry people at the café in Dry Creek. Maybe spaghetti and garlic bread, if they had it. He’d started out by saying there was no reason to go to any trouble and change clothes and they both had to eat, so would she like to come with him to eat at the—

That’s as far as he’d got before she’d given him a stricken look and started to cry. He hadn’t known what to do but take her in his arms and let her sob against his last clean shirt. After the first burst of tears had ended, she’d pulled back and looked embarrassed. Her cheeks had been pink, and her eyes had dared him to ask about her tears.

Before he could say anything, she’d thanked him for the invitation in a businesslike voice and added she was sorry she couldn’t date him. She was also sorry about the shirt, she said, and added that a little bleach should take the mascara out.

By then he couldn’t say he hadn’t been asking her out on a date, so he’d just thanked her for the laundry tip. He hadn’t added that he was surprised. He’d never figured someone like Chrissy would know anything about laundry.

Fortunately, no one knew about any of this, and Reno wasn’t about to tell anyone. He picked up the slip of paper from the kitchen counter, intending to crumple it up and throw it away. He should be glad Chrissy wasn’t interested in him.

Reno was cautious when it came to women. Even if he hadn’t had his father to remind him of how fickle women could be, his mother had taught him that some women just weren’t meant to live on a ranch.

Life on the Redfern Ranch could never compete with the excitement of a big city. Ranch life was plain, good living, and that was all Reno wanted, but he knew there was no theater, no fine dining, no museums, no upscale shopping.

A Vegas cocktail waitress like Chrissy would never stay in a place like Dry Creek any more than his mother had. Oh, Chrissy might think it was quaint and amusing enough for a week or so, but in the long term she’d leave. Dry Creek would never be enough for her.

Yes, throwing away that piece of paper his sister had left on the counter was the only sensible thing to do. Reno said those words to himself, but for some strange reason he didn’t listen. Instead, he folded the piece of paper into a small square and put it in his shirt pocket.

He told himself he’d throw it away tomorrow. When tomorrow came, he told himself it wouldn’t hurt to wait until the next day.

That was two weeks ago Monday, and he no longer even bothered to lie to himself. Every day when he changed his shirt, he moved that piece of paper to the new pocket.

Reno shook his head. This past Saturday he’d actually looked at a map to see which freeways he’d need to take if he drove down to Los Angeles. He’d gone so far as to remind himself he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean and had a good reason to drive down to Los Angeles, quite apart from seeing Chrissy. A man ought to see the ocean some time in his life.

Reno scraped his feet on the porch of the hardware store. At least no one in Dry Creek knew about that slip of paper in his pocket or the foolish thoughts going around in his head. He wouldn’t have had any peace if they did. Sometimes it felt as if he had a dozen grandparents, each one of them anxious for him to date someone so they could plan a wedding and then begin the more serious business of knitting baby booties.

Reno didn’t know why the seniors in Dry Creek were so set on babies. But all he heard these days were wistful remarks that, given all the marriages in Dry Creek lately, it sure was a shame there weren’t any babies.

No, he didn’t want the people of Dry Creek to know he was even thinking of visiting Chrissy. They’d start putting their hopes on him, and he’d only let them down.

Chapter Two

Reno opened the door. The hardware store was silent, and for a brief second the light was such that Reno thought no one was inside. Then he saw all his neighbors, and they saw him. It was a toss-up as to who was more startled.

“It’s that clay mud,” Reno finally said as he stepped inside. They were looking at him as if he were covered with tar or something toxic. “I guess I look a little odd.”

“You look just fine,” Mrs. Hargrove declared stoutly as she smoothed down the skirt of her checked gingham dress. Mrs. Hargrove had to be eighty years old, and she’d worn the same set of gingham dresses since the late 1950s. She had one in every color of the rainbow. A good dress, she told folks, never wore out as long as you took care of it. Over the dress she wore a black wool sweater that had been stretched out by too many washes. She had rubber boots on her feet and a paperback mystery stuffed into the pocket of her sweater.

Reno stopped and stood still. If Mrs. Hargrove had to defend him that strongly, he must look worse than he thought. She’d been his Sunday-school teacher years ago, and she was loyal to her students. He’d been in the first grade when he’d realized that she fussed with her hair or her dress on the few occasions she was nervous. She’d done it when Randy McCall asked where Eve got her babies from, and she was doing it now.

Mrs. Hargrove reached up and patted her gray hair to make sure her bun was secure. She could have saved herself the effort. Mrs. Hargrove’s hair wouldn’t dare misbehave, any more than the first-grade boys would have years ago.

“If someone will just hand me my mail, I’ll step back to the porch,” Reno offered as he looked down. He must have left giant tracks on the clean floor or something, but the floor was already muddy, and not with his footprints. “I’ll have to remember this one for April Fools’ Day. I don’t think Lester got this much of a reaction when he dressed up like Elvis and went to the café for breakfast. Who would have thought he was that much of a clown?”