Her Christmas Cowboy (The Wyoming Cowboy #5) - Jessica Clare Page 0,1

one talk about to a schoolteacher? The weather? Everyone was going to talk about the weather to her. He needed to say something different. Maybe something about school? But he didn’t have children that went to the school . . . Maybe Christmas?

Surely he’d think of something. He wiped his brow, sucked in a deep breath, and got out of the truck.

* * *

* * *

Most of the parents at Painted Barrel Elementary knew the drill for picking up their children. Amy took the ones who rode the bus out to the bus driver’s line in front of the principal’s office. She quickly counted heads and then went back to her classroom, where the other children waited with their backpacks for their parents to pick them up. Picking up their child in the classroom instead of outside was better all around, Amy figured, since it was cold and snowy in Wyoming in December, and little hands needed gloves, and those were the first things her students tended to lose.

Plus, it gave Amy a good chance to talk to the parents, to pass along notes about behavior, and to make sure everything was going well. With a small class of twelve students, she could do such a thing. It was one of the main reasons she’d moved out to Painted Barrel and accepted the low-paying teaching job instead of taking a far more lucrative one in a big city. She really wanted to connect with her students. She really wanted the opportunity to influence her kids and watch them grow. She wanted to be a teacher they remembered.

Plus, she was starting over—her life, her career, everything. What was better than starting over in all ways? She’d lived in bigger cities all her life. Now Amy just wanted to blend in to a tight-knit community and be part of things. Maybe being part of a community would help choke down that black hole of loneliness inside her that had just gotten bigger and bigger since her divorce.

Maybe.

This wasn’t the time to think about her divorce from Blake, though. Right now, she had to focus on her kids. So as the first parents showed up, she went into teacher mode, chirping about how wonderfully this or that kid did in class today, helping put on little jackets, and finding mittens. More parents showed up, and then her classroom was an absolute cluster of people bundling small children in warm outdoor gear, and so she got her clipboard and checked off names and parents while one of the PTA moms chattered in her ear about the upcoming school Christmas Carnival. It was another one of those ways Amy was probably a bit too anal-retentive about her kids, but she was able to get away with it because it was a smaller class. She carefully kept track of who picked up who every day, and then kept a logbook in her desk. Safety was important.

As parents left with their children and the room started to clear out, she tried to focus on the woman talking nonstop in her ear. She kept an eye on the children left in the classroom as Linda talked about Santa’s Workshop and the plans to give each child a small present from the teachers.

“Don’t you think that’s a good idea?” Linda asked as Amy gazed at the empty rows of desks in her classroom.

“Great,” Amy enthused, noting that she was down to two students. One was Billy Archer, whose mom worked a bit later on certain days, so it was to be expected. The other was Libby Watson, though, and usually her enormous bear of a father was here right on time. That was unusual. Libby was calmly coloring at her desk, unconcerned.

“So you’ll be Mrs. Claus?” Linda asked as Amy headed toward the school hallway. “We really need a volunteer and I think you’d be great.”

“I can do that. Would you excuse me for a second? I just want to make sure I didn’t miss someone.” Tucking her clipboard under her arm, Amy headed out into the hall and looked around. Occasionally a parent would get distracted by their phone and wander into the wrong classroom, so it was worth checking. She peered down the hall and didn’t see anyone, then turned around—

—and nearly ran into a large, bearded man with a cowboy hat in his hands.

Amy bit back a yelp of surprise, hating that she’d jumped up, startled. Her hand went to her chest, where her heart was