A Small Town Thanksgiving

  A LOT TO BE THANKFUL FOR

  Ghostwriter Samantha Monroe has just arrived in Forever, Texas, to turn a remarkable woman’s two-hundred-year-old journals into a personal memoir. The Rodriguez clan welcomes her with open arms…and awakens Sam’s fierce yearning to be part of a family. But it’s the eldest son—intensely private rancher Mike Rodriguez—who awakens her passion.

  Hiring Sam to preserve his great-great-great-grandmother’s story for future generations was Mike’s inspiration. He just didn’t realize how much he’d want her to be part of his family’s continuing saga. Delving into the past has made Sam hungry for a future—with Mike. The next move is up to him—if he doesn’t make it, the best woman he’s ever met just might waltz back out of his life forever!

  “What part of ‘I don’t lie’ is unclear to you?”

  It was apparent that his supply of patience was seriously running low.

  Sam blew out a breath. “No part,” she freely admitted. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand what Mike was claiming—she just didn’t know whether she actually believed him. “I just never met anyone who didn’t, let’s say, ‘bend the truth’ once in a while when it was to their advantage.”

  “Well, now you have.” He gave her a penetrating look that was meant to intimidate her. It annoyed him that it failed and yet it was also the start of grudging respect for her feistiness. “Are you going to argue with me all the way into town, or are you finally going to stop looking a gift horse in the mouth and just accept the fact that you lucked out?” he asked.

  A few choice hot words rose to her lips, but she managed to keep them under wraps. Someday, though, she promised herself, she and this man were going to have it out—and she would put him in his place the way no one else apparently ever did.

  Dear Reader,

  I cannot remember when I first became fascinated by the various cultures of the first inhabitants of North America. I’ve been told that it seems to be a hallmark of foreign-born citizens to embrace Westerns. Me, I embraced the underdog in those Westerns. I was into learning about Native Americans way before it was popular, at a time when they were still known as Indians and no one realized that Custer provoked the confrontation at Little Big Horn because he wanted to be seen as a brave hero by the country. His goal was to be elected president the way Grant had been.

  But I digress (occupational habit). When I was in fifth grade, I read a book called White Squaw, about a wife and mother who was kidnapped by Indians and eventually returned to her family. That story has stayed with me all these years. I thought it might be interesting if Mike Rodriguez decided to have someone organize and transcribe his great-great-great-grandmother’s journals so his own grandchildren would be firmly connected to their roots. As luck would have it, Mike’s ancestor was kidnapped by the natives of the area. And, as luck would also have it, the ghostwriter whom he hires to create a book from the journals is a widow searching for roots herself. By the time she has organized the journals into a coherent whole, she winds up capturing Mike’s heart and he hers. Happy endings all around. (What? You were expecting maybe not?)

  As always I thank you for reading. I take none of you for granted and hope I have succeeded in entertaining you. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

  All my best,

  Marie

  A SMALL TOWN

  THANKSGIVING

  Marie Ferrarella

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marie Ferrarella, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author, has written more than two hundred books for Harlequin, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

  Books by Marie Ferrarella

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  1329—THE SHERIFF’S CHRISTMAS SURPRISE‡‡

  1338—RAMONA AND THE RENEGADE‡‡

  1346—THE DOCTOR’S FOREVER FAMILY‡‡

  1369—MONTANA SHERIFF

  1378—HOLIDAY IN A STETSON

  “The Sheriff Who Found Christmas”

  1402—LASSOING THE DEPUTY‡‡

  1410—A BABY ON THE RANCH‡‡

  1426—A FOREVER CHRISTMAS‡‡

  1462—HIS FOREVER VALENTINE‡‡

  HARLEQUIN ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  1664—PRIVATE JUSTICE

  1675—THE DOCTOR’S GUARDIAN**

  1683—A CAVANAUGH CHRISTMAS*

  1688—SPECIAL AGENT’S PERFECT COVER

  1699—CAVANAUGH’S BODYGUARD*

  1715—CAVANAUGH RULES*

  1725—CAVANAUGH’S SURRENDER*

  1732—COLTON SHOWDOWN

  1736—A WIDOW’S GUILTY SECRET

  1751—CAVANAUGH ON DUTY*

  1760—THE COLTON RANSOM%

  1767—MISSION: CAVANAUGH BABY*

  SILHOUETTE ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  1503—A DOCTOR’S SECRET**

  1511—SECRET AGENT AFFAIR**

  1515—PROTECTING HIS WITNESS*

  1528—COLTON’S SECRET SERVICE

  1556—THE HEIRESS’S 2-WEEK AFFAIR

  1571—CAVANAUGH PRIDE*

  1575—BECOMING A CAVANAUGH*

  1580—THE AGENT’S SECRET BABY

  1587—THE CAVANAUGH CODE*

  1596—IN BED WITH THE BADGE*

  1612—CAVANAUGH JUDGMENT*

  1616—COLTON BY MARRIAGE

  1623—CAVANAUGH REUNION*

  1644—IN HIS PROTECTIVE CUSTODY**

  HARLEQUIN SPECIAL EDITION

  2117—A MATCH FOR THE DOCTOR‡‡‡

  2122—WHAT THE SINGLE DAD WANTS…‡‡‡

  2131—THE BABY WORE A BADGE^

  2167—FORTUNE’S VALENTINE BRIDE#

  2192—ONCE UPON A MATCHMAKER‡‡‡

  2210—REAL VINTAGE MAVERICK-

  2240—A PERFECTLY IMPERFECT MATCH‡‡‡

  2246—A SMALL FORTUNE***

  2252—TEN YEARS LATER…‡‡‡

  2264—WISH UPON A MATCHMAKER‡‡‡

  SILHOUETTE SPECIAL EDITION

  1910—DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH†

  1917—THE BRIDE WITH NO NAME†

  1941—MISTLETOE AND MIRACLES†

  1946—PLAIN JANE AND THE PLAYBOY††

  1958—TRAVIS’S APPEAL†

  1977—LOVING THE RIGHT BROTHER

  1983—THE 39-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN

  2006—A LAWMAN FOR CHRISTMAS†

  2017—PRESCRIPTION FOR ROMANCE‡

  2031—DOCTORING THE SINGLE DAD‡‡‡

  2041—FIXED UP WITH MR. RIGHT?‡‡‡

  2060—FINDING HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER‡‡‡

  2084—UNWRAPPING THE PLAYBOY‡‡‡

  2107—FORTUNE’S JUST DESSERTS=

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  **The Doctors Pulaski

  †Kate’s Boys

  ††The Fortunes of Texas: Return to Red Rock

  ‡The Baby Chase

  ‡‡‡Matchmaking Mamas

  =The Fortunes of Texas: Lost…and Found

  ‡‡Forever, Texas

  ^Montana Mavericks: The Texans Are Coming!

  #The Fortunes of Texas: Whirlwind Romance

  -Montana Mavericks: Back in the Saddle

  ***The Fortunes of Texas: Southern Invasion

  %The Coltons of Wyoming

  To Nik,

  Who Finally

  Got It All Together

  And Got It

  Right

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

&nb
sp; 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

  Excerpt

  Prologue

  The day began like all the days that had come before. It was too hot with too much to do and none of it to my liking. I was bored and yearning for excitement, for an adventure that would take me away from trying to coax a bit of green, a bit of growth out of the parched, dry ground that destroyed more than it yielded.

  I was young and wanted to live before I was old and dried up before my time, like Abuela and Tia Josefina. Tia and Abuela came to live with Papa after Mama died. Papa said she died bringing me into the world. I have no way of knowing if that is true since she was gone by the time I started to remember things. But Papa does not lie, so I suppose it must be so.

  Frustrated with my futile efforts in the garden, I went to fetch water from the stream that ran on our property. Anything to get away from the boredom and the hard work, if only for a moment.

  The stream is always cool and I can take my shoes and stockings off so I can feel the water against my sweating skin.

  Sometimes, when I go to the stream, I pretend I am a princess, held against my will, waiting for a prince to come rescue me and take me away to his castle in the mountains. I pretend so hard that once or twice, I thought I heard the whinny of a horse and the sound of hooves against the ground.

  I am disappointed when I look to see that the sound belongs to my imagination. Or to a stray mustang running closer than he should.

  There are horses here that have no masters, that run where they want to and are freer than I am. I envy them. Or I did before...

  But since that afternoon, I find myself longing for the boredom of home, for the tedious labor of scratching the ground, coaxing life from the hard, dry soil. For the feeling of triumph the few times I succeeded. When you lose something, that is the time when you realize that you really wanted it and did not have the sense to value it when it was yours.

  But that day, when I went to fetch the water and dreamed of princes searching for their princess, the sound of horses existed outside my imagination. They existed in the real world.

  The sound belonged to the Indian ponies that came galloping at me. Indian ponies mounted with riders. When I saw them coming, I ran as if the very devil was after me because he was. Abuela and Tia and Papa all warned me to be careful, that the Mescalero-Apaches would just as soon kill us than look at us. Papa said that they thought we invaded their land. When I asked him if we had, he told me that we were making it better, but that they did not understand that. I think they do not understand that because we do not speak their language and they do not speak ours.

  I was swift of foot and could beat my brothers whenever we ran, but I was not swifter than an Indian and one of the riders caught me and picked me up as easily as I could pick up one of Tia’s baby chicks.

  I begged him to put me down and the rider yelled something to another rider and then at me, but I could not understand.

  For the first time in my fourteen years, I thought about dying for I was more frightened than I could ever recall being.

  I prayed for God to welcome me and to make my dying less painful.

  * * *

  LETTING OUT A long breath, Miguel Rodriguez stared at the faded ink in the worn book he had just discovered and been reading for the past half hour. The pages of the book were so dry they fairly crackled beneath his fingers as he turned them. Afraid they might tear, he was handling them as gently as humanly possible for a man with hands the size and thickness of leather catchers’ mitts.

  The book was one of half a dozen or more such tattered, cloth-covered journals he had just uncovered in his attic.

  He had come up to the attic driven by a sudden desire to put his house in order figuratively and literally, something he’d felt compelled to do since suffering a heart attack earlier in the year. The unexpected event had unceremoniously brought him to the brink of his existence and taught him how truly fragile life was—as if he really needed that lesson since his beloved wife had passed on all these years ago.

  But with his sons Miguel, Jr. and Ramon caring for his ranch and his other four offspring volunteering sporadically whenever they had the time, Miguel found he had a lot of free time to himself now. Never one who could handle too much free time well, he decided to get busy and turned his attention to things that had long been neglected.

  Things like the attic, where nonessential items far too precious to part with at the moment were sent to await a verdict about their future.

  Unfortunately, “out of sight, out of mind” seemed the golden rule for dealing with the attic and he had forgotten about over half the things that had been stored up there over the years. Some he barely remembered even after having spent the past few days browsing through the storage boxes.

  This particular box, however, contained the journals that he couldn’t remember ever having looked through before.

  Vaguely, as he thought back now, Miguel thought he recalled his mother giving the battered old container to him more than fifty years ago, saying something about passing it on to the next generation to preserve. His mother had mentioned that they were stories that had been written by his great-great-great-grandmother, Marguerite Perez-Rodriguez.

  At the time, he now remembered, he’d thought that his mother was talking about short stories, that the box contained some sort of a creative writing endeavor attempted by his long-departed ancestor.

  But looking at the journal in his hand now, he was beginning to suspect that perhaps his mother had meant that they were memoirs or recollections from his great-great-great-grandmother’s youth, not some sort of stories she had made up.

  Sitting here now, a lantern turned up to its maximum capacity to banish the darkness from that one corner of the attic, Miguel ran his hand along the journal’s tattered spine with reverence, as if he was touching something very precious.

  For all the world, he felt as if he had just stepped into the past. A past that connected him to his family, to his roots and, in an odd sort of way, to the future and to the children who had yet to come.

  His unborn grandchildren.

  An idea suddenly came to him, taking hold of his imagination. The more he thought about it, the more pleased he became.

  But if this was going to happen, he needed help.

  Miguel sat there in the stillness and the aging dust, trying to think of who he might turn to with this, who could advise him who he should seek out in order to get started on this journey into the Rodriguez past.

  And then he smiled as a name occurred to him.

  For once, it wasn’t one of his children.

  Chapter One

  Miguel Rodriguez Jr. referred to as “Mike” by everyone but his father, frowned as he sat in the cluttered room that his father referred to as his study, listening to Miguel Sr. tell him about his latest plan, the one involving not the ranch but the ranch house.

  Mike could feel his frown deepening with each word that his father uttered.

  When the older Rodriguez paused because he was either finally finished or—more likely—just taking a breath, Mike saw his opportunity to register and give voice to his displeasure at this newest turn of events.

  “You know, Dad, this keeps up and whenever the occasional tourist passes through Forever, asking where the local hotel is, people’ll just start sending them in this direction.”

  Six m
onths ago had seen his father inviting Valentine Jones, a movie location scout who thought their property would be perfect for her studio’s next film, to stay at their house for part of the shoot. That had turned out fairly well, especially for Rafe, but that had been a fluke. The thought of another stranger living here at the house left Mike cold.

  He didn’t really mind strangers, but he wanted them in his own terms. And he did value his privacy—a great deal.

  “Why are we putting up this person again?” he grumbled at his father.

  “Because, as you so wisely pointed out, my beloved oldest son,” Miguel said expansively, rocking back in his chair, “there is no hotel here in Forever. The woman who has agreed to go over those diaries and journals that I found in the attic needs to stay somewhere while she works.”

  Mike supposed what his father said was logical, but as far as he was concerned, it was also logical not to get in the habit of welcoming strangers with open arms. At times it was hard enough having not just four brothers and a sister, but their various spouses, moving through the house. Adding an unfamiliar face to the mix was flirting with the proverbial straw that had brought such grief to the camel and his back.

  “Never said she didn’t,” Mike pointed out. “But why does it have to be here?” His dark eyes narrowed as he repeated a well-known fact. “I don’t like strangers traipsing through the ranch.”

  “Once you meet her, she will no longer be a stranger,” Miguel told his son, echoing an optimistic, upbeat philosophy he strongly believed in. “And since she will be working on your great-great-great-grandmother’s journals, it is only right that she stay here. That way, if she has any questions,” Miguel explained, “she will not have far to go for an answer.”

  Mike knew it was futile to point out that there were such magic devices as telephones and their brethren that could easily handle any questions that might come up. Instead, he went on record and voiced a lament.

  “You know, Dad, I liked it a lot better when we were all struggling to keep one jump ahead of the bill collectors and you didn’t have time for any fancy projects that had us holding an open house. What’s next?” Mike asked. “We turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast?”