A Cold Montana Christmas: Chapter One

What We Carry, What We Keep

COLD MONTANA CHRISTMAS: A CROSSFIRE CANYON NOVEL

A Cold Montana Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Copyright © 2021 by Mina Beckett

ebook ISBN: 978-1-7375127-0-7

Print ISBN: 978-1-7375127-1-4

Published by CurtissLynn Publishing

Cover and internal design by Shiver Shot Design

Editing by The Killion Group, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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Behind the Words: A Cold Montana Christmas
By Mina Beckett

Every story begins with a question. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s blunt as a hammer. With A Cold Montana Christmas, the question was this: What happens when the person you loved most sees the worst part of you—and leaves?

Colton and Lauren Ritter came to me sideways. I’d tucked them into the earlier books, gave them fragments—a line here, a glance there. A shared history too raw to touch, too layered to unpack. I knew they'd loved each other. I knew they'd broken under it. What I didn’t know was whether they’d ever find their way back.

That’s the story.

Not the fairytale version. But the one that comes after the bruises, after the silence, after the years you can’t get back.

Colton came home from war with more than scars. He came back changed. And Lauren, for all her strength, had her own damage to carry. Love between them didn’t die. It just stopped being enough. So I asked: What does it take to rebuild something real? Not from where you left off, but from where you are now, after everything.

The opening of the book drops you into the middle of goodbye. It’s raw. It’s cold. And it’s personal. Because before Colton and Lauren can say hello again, they have to mourn what they lost, together, and separately.

This isn’t a story about fixing the past. It’s about owning it. Standing in the middle of a hard winter and choosing, deliberately, to try again. Not because it’s easy. Because it matters.

The land plays a part in that choice. Ranching in Montana isn’t a backdrop. It’s a crucible. It demands everything. So does love, if you’re doing it right.

Thanks for reading. I hope this story finds you at just the right moment.

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CHAPTER ONE

Colton Ritter rested his shoulder against the knotty cedar post of the cemetery entrance. Once tall and sturdy, its weak form now creaked against his weight.

His dad, Jack Reid Ritter, had taken a similar stance against the hoary post years ago as he tried explaining his grandfather’s death to Colton.

Son, there are three forces in life a man can’t understand. The weather, the heart of a woman and death.

Colton lifted his eyes towards the snow-covered crests of the Big Belt Mountains and welled his lungs with a deep breath of frigid Montana air.

He’d been seven when his grandfather died, but he recalled the time distinctly. The bite of the cold wind as it swept through the cemetery and the unfamiliar ambiance of grief surrounding his dad was a memory Colton would never forget.

Faint lines had furrowed through his dad’s brow as he fought back tears and lost. With icy rivulets streaking down the hard planes of his weather-worn cheeks, his red-rimmed eyes had searched the cold horizon.

Now at thirty-six Colton wasn’t any closer to understanding the weather, the heart of a woman, or death, but he was feeling the full measure of those tears, the soul-shattering grief, and the bone-crushing weight of loss as it threatened to buckle his knees. And like his dad, Colton couldn’t find any justification for the demise of a great man as his gaze roamed the same snowy vista for solace.