Holiday Homecoming Read Free Page A

the ice. Talk about dangerous conditions. He was a decent driver, but there was no sense in putting himself or anyone else at risk. A fair amount of his practice was comprised of car-accident victims. He’d done enough rotation time in the E.R. to know what could happen.
    Maybe the wisest thing to do was hunt down a hotel room somewhere . Boise was crammed full of stranded travelers who’d booked every available room for theholiday weekend. He knew because he’d spent forty straight minutes on the phone. But maybe there was something available farther down the road, in one of the little towns a few miles north. He’d drive until he found a motel room—he wasn’t picky. He was too tired to drive on icy highways until dawn.
    Okay, where had the road gone? It had to be somewhere in front of him. There was a metal post, good thing he didn’t hit it. Wait—a soft glow of light broke through the blizzard.
    Perfect. He was headed the wrong way. The snow thinned on the lee side of the terminal as he crept through the empty passenger-loading zone. There was only a lonely taxi waiting alongside the curb with lights blinking. It was quickly being covered by snowfall.
    Light from the terminal broke through the downfall to sheen on the road ahead of him and that’s when he saw her in his peripheral vision. Kristin McKaslin in her chic tan coat and designer clothes, sitting with her head in her hands, alone behind the long wall of windows.
    She was stranded, too. And all by herself. That just wasn’t right. He eased the vehicle to the curb with a bump. No way was he going to let her sit there. Not when Providence had handed him a four-wheel drive and, like it or not, he was still heading home.
    Through the glass, backlit by fluorescent light, he could see her perfectly, with that short golden bob of her hair falling forward as she sat. He could feel her misery.
    Yet although she looked every bit the stranded traveler, Kristin McKaslin was still the picture of perfection in her upscale clothes and her every-hair-in-place do.
    It must be nice to have a life like hers. He tried not to hold it against her, and the old envy surprised him. It wasn’t exactly envy, but it was close. As a boy growing up, he’d gotten an eyeful of the McKaslins’ storybook life via his mom. He saw the Thomas Kinkade-like coziness of the house she’d grown up in, heard endlessly from Mom how the McKaslin girls never gave their mother any grief the way he did. As a kid, his own inadequacies hurt and he was ashamed of them, so he did his best to cover them up with bravado and stupid recklessness.
    He’d grown up, tried hard to be a good man. But some things didn’t change—like the truth in a man’s heart. He’d wanted that life. To live in a warm and roomy house with a whole family, instead of in a cramped, tumbling down house with a widowed mom who worked three jobs to keep food on the table. He’d never been able to come to terms with his father’s death. Or the simple fact that Mom’s life would have been without hardship and he would have grown up differently if his dad had been there.
    Maybe—just maybe—his heart would be whole if tragedy hadn’t struck.
    Let the past go, man. Sometimes it was the only thing he could do. Instead of reexamining a past he couldn’t fix, it was better just to do the best he could now, in the moment. And that meant helping Kristin.The way he figured it, anyone who looked so broken over the thought of missing her family, didn’t deserve to be stranded and alone on Thanksgiving. Maybe that was another reason the Lord had made sure a vehicle was available. So that he could offer her a ride.
    Ryan liked it when the Father gave him a purpose. It was easier to forget his own troubles and to not think about what awaited him in Montana. He’d worked so hard to stay away since he left for college.
    He tapped the horn, hoping she