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d and clamped his mouth shut in a mutinous line.
As if on cue, his mother Sloan entered the room. A mingling of amusement and exasperation rippled across her face when she located her son behind the desk.
“What about your mom?” Chase wanted to know.
“She says I can’t wear my cowboy boots in the Christmas play. She says I have to wear sandals. I don’t, do I?” Jake insisted, confident he had an ally in his great-grandfather.
“You’re supposed to be a shepherd boy, aren’t you?”
His brow furrowed in an unhappy frown. “Yeah, but…”
“No buts, Jake.” Chase held up a silencing hand. “Let me explain it this way, if Jesus had been born here on the Triple C, cowboys would have come to worship Him in their cowboy boots. But Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So shepherds knelt before Him, and they wore sandals.”
“Sandals are for girls, Greypa,” Jake protested, using the name he had coined for him when he first began to talk and couldn’t wrap his tongue around a mouthful like great-grandpa.
“Girls and shepherd boys. Right?” The single-word question challenged the boy to agree.
Jake heaved a big, disgruntled sigh. “Right.”
From the doorway, Sloan marveled, “I don’t know how you do it, Chase. I’ve gone around and around with him over this issue of the sandals. You say a couple things to him and it’s a done deal.”
“Dad has always had a way with young children.” Cat smiled widely in a mix of pride and approval.
Chase sliced her a quick look. “It’s the older ones that give me trouble.”
Laredo chuckled and hooked a leg over one corner of the desk. “Tell me, Jake, have you started making a list of what you want Santa to bring you for Christmas?”
Brightening visibly at the change of topic, Jake turned to him. “Yeah, I gotta lot of things I’m putting on it.”
“Like what?”
“I need chaps and a belt and a rope—”
“You already have a rope,” Laredo reminded him.
The response was a quick wrinkling of the nose. “That rope’s for babies. I need a gooder one.”
“My mistake.” Laredo struggled to hold back a smile.
“Do you think Santa would bring me a saddle? I sure could use one,” Jake added with an adult like nod of emphasis.
“And you could use jeans, a winter coat, socks, and underwear,” Sloan inserted. “He’s outgrown just about everything he has.”
“You have been shooting up like a little weed.” Laredo gave the top of Jake’s brown hair a playful ruffle.
Jake started to protest the mussing then suddenly remembered, blurting, “And an ATV of my own.”
Laredo laughed outright. “Now there’s a modern cowboy for you. Why walk when you can ride an ATV.”
“Santa would bring me one, wouldn’t he?” Jake sought confirmation from Chase.
Out of the corner of his eye, Chase caught the negative movement of Sloan’s head. “Something tells me Santa will wait on a present like that until you’re older.”
“How old?” Jake wanted to know.
Chase shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Santa that one.”
Jake thought about that for a second and nodded, then gave Chase a bright look. “What do you want Santa to bring you for Christmas, Greypa?”
