A Baby on the Ranch

Kasey felt as if there was a lead weight lying across her chest. There was a very private, shy woman beneath the bravado. A woman who wanted her secrets to remain secrets.

“How many other people know?” she asked him.

“For now, just Rick and the deputies.”

For now.

“Now,” she knew, had an exceptionally short life expectancy. As Eli had said, rumors being what they were, she had a feeling that everyone in town would know that Hollis had taken off before the week was out—if not sooner.

It was a very bitter pill for her to swallow.

But she had no other choice.

Chapter Three

“I guess you’re right. No point in pretending I can hide this,” Kasey finally said with a sigh. “People’ll talk.”

“They always do,” he agreed. “It’s just a fact of life.”

Fact of life or not, the idea just didn’t sit well with her. She wasn’t a person who craved attention or wanted her fifteen minutes of fame in the spotlight. She was perfectly content just to quietly go about the business of living.

“I don’t want to be the newest topic people talk about over breakfast,” she said, upset.

“If they do talk about you, it’ll be because they’re on your side. Fact of the matter is, Hollis more or less wore out that crown of his. People don’t think of him as that golden boy he once was,” Eli assured her. Over the years, he’d become acutely aware of Hollis’s flaws, flaws that the man seemed to cultivate rather than try to conquer. “Not to mention that he owes more than one person around here money.”

Kasey looked at him, startled. Her mouth dropped open.

Maybe he’d said too much, Eli thought. “You didn’t know that,” he guessed.

Kasey’s throat felt horribly dry, as if she’d been eating sand for the past half hour.

“No,” she answered, her voice barely above a shaken whisper. “I didn’t know that.”

If she didn’t know about that, it was a pretty safe bet that she certainly didn’t know about her husband’s dalliances with other women during the years that they were married, Eli thought.

Hollis, you were and are a damn fool. A damn, stupid, self-centered fool.

He could feel his anger growing, but there was no point in letting it fester like this. It wasn’t going to help Kasey and her baby, and they were the only two who really mattered in this sordid mess.

“Are you sure?” Kasey asked. She’d turned her face toward him and placed a supplicating hand on his upper arm, silently begging him to say he was mistaken.

It was as if someone had jabbed his heart with a hot poker. He hated that this was happening to her. She didn’t deserve this on top of what she’d already gone through. All of his life, he’d wanted nothing more than to make life better for her, to protect her. But right now, he was doing everything he could. Like taking her to his ranch.

Dammit, Hollis, how could you do this to her? She thought you were going to be her savior, her hero.

The house that Kasey had grown up in had been completely devoid of love. Her father worked hard, but never got anywhere and it made him bitter. Especially when he drank to ease the pain of what he viewed as his dead-end life. Carter Hale had been an abusive drunk not the least bit shy about lashing out with his tongue or the back of his hand.

He’d seen the marks left on Kasey’s mother and had worried that Kasey might get in the way of her father’s wrath next. But Kasey had strong survival instincts and had known enough to keep well out of her father’s way when he went on one of his benders, which was often.

Looking back, Eli realized that was the reason why she’d run off with Hollis right after high school graduation. Hollis was exciting, charming, and fairly reeked of sensuality. More than that, he had a feeling that to Kasey, Hollis represented, in an odd twist, freedom and at the same time, security. Marrying Hollis meant that she never had to go home again. Never had to worry about staying out of her father’s long reach again.

But in Hollis’s case, “freedom” was just another way of saying no plans for the future. And if “security” meant the security of not having to worry about money, then Hollis failed to deliver on that promise, as well.

Eli had strong suspicions that Kasey was beginning to admit to herself that marrying Hollis had been a huge mistake. That he wasn’t going to save her but take her to hell via another route.

Most likely, knowing Kasey, when she’d discovered that she was pregnant, she had clung to the hope that this would finally make Hollis buckle down, work hard and grow up.

Eli blew out a short breath. He could have told her that Hollis wasn’t about to change his way of thinking, and saved her a great deal of grief. But lessons, he supposed, couldn’t be spoon-fed. The student could only learn if he or she wanted to, and he had a feeling that Kasey would have resisted any attempts to show her that Hollis wasn’t what she so desperately wanted him to be.

Eli tried to appear as sympathetic as possible. As sympathetic as he felt toward her. This couldn’t be easy for her. None of it.

“I’m sure,” he finally told her, taking no joy in the fact that he was cutting Hollis down.

Kasey shook her head. She felt stricken. “I didn’t have a clue,” she finally admitted, wondering how she could have been so blind. Wondering how Hollis could have duped her like this. “What’s wrong with me, Eli? Am I that stupid?”

“No, you’re not stupid at all,” he said with feeling. “What you are is loyal, and there’s nothing wrong with you.” To him, she’d always been perfect. Even when she’d fallen in love with Hollis, he hadn’t been able to find it in his heart to take her to task for loving, in his opinion, the wrong man. He’d just accepted it. “Hollis is the one who’s got something wrong with him. You’ve got to believe that,” he told her firmly.

Kasey lifted her slender shoulders in a helpless shrug and then sighed again. It was obvious that she really didn’t want to find fault with the man who’d fathered her child. The man whom she’d loved for almost a decade. “He was just trying to get some money together to make a better life for us,” she said defensively.

The only one whose lot Hollis had ever wanted to improve was his own, Eli thought grudgingly, but he knew that to say so out loud would only hurt Kasey, so he kept the words to himself.

After pulling up in front of his ranch house, he turned off the engine and looked at her. “Until you’re ready, until you have a place to go to and want to go there,” he added, “this is your home, Kasey. Yours and Wayne’s. What’s mine is yours,” he told her. “You know that.”

He saw her biting her lower lip and knew she was waging an internal war with herself. Kasey hated the idea of being in anyone’s debt, but he wasn’t just anyone, he silently argued. They were friends. Best friends. And he had been part of her life almost from the time they began forming memories. There was no way he was about to abandon her now. And no way was he going to place her in a position where she felt she “owed” him anything other than seeing her smile again.

“Don’t make me have to hog-tie you to make you stay put,” he warned.

The so-called threat finally brought a smile to her lips. “All right, I won’t.”

Feeling rather pleased with himself, at least for the moment, Eli unfolded his lanky frame out of the Jeep and then hurried over to Kasey’s side of the vehicle to help her out. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have even thought of it. She’d always been exceedingly independent around him, which made her being with Hollis doubly difficult for him to take. Kasey couldn’t be independent around Hollis.

Hollis enjoyed being in control and letting Kasey know that he was in control. That in turn meant that he expected her submission. Because she loved him, she’d lived down to his expectations.

Unlike Hollis, he was proud of the fact that Kasey could take care of herself. And also unlike Hollis, he liked her independent streak. But at the moment, that had to take a backseat to reality. It was obvious that her body was having a bit of difficulty getting back in sync after giving birth only a few days ago. Eli just wanted to let her know that he was there for her. Whether it meant giving her a hand up or a shoulder to cry on, she could always rely on him.

She knew he meant well, but it didn’t help her frame of mind. “I don’t like feeling like this,” she murmured, tamping down her frustration.

Eli took her hand and eased her to her feet. “It’ll pass soon and you can go back to being Super Kasey,” he quipped affectionately.

Just as she emerged from the passenger side, the tiny passenger in the backseat began to cry.

“Sounds like someone’s warming up to start wailing,” Eli commented, opening the rear door. “You okay?” he asked Kasey before he started freeing Wayne from all his tethers.

She nodded. “I’m fine.” A sliver of guilt shot through her as she watched Eli at work. “I should be doing that,” she said, clearly annoyed with herself. “He’s my responsibility.”

“Hey, you can’t have all the fun,” he told her good-naturedly, noting that she sounded almost testy. He took no offense, sensing that she was frustrated with herself—and Hollis—not him.

The baby was looking at him, wide-eyed, and for a moment he had stopped crying. Eli took that to be a good sign.

“Hi, fella. Let’s get you out of all those belts and buckles and into the daylight,” he said in a low, gentle voice meant to further soothe the little passenger.

In response, the baby just stared at him as if he was completely fascinated by the sound of his voice. Eli smiled to himself, undoing one belt after another as quickly as possible.

Behind him, he heard Kasey say, “I’m sorry, Eli.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, puzzled. “About what?”

“About being so short with you.” He was being nothing but good to her. He didn’t deserve to have her snapping at him.

“Can’t help being the height you are,” he answered wryly.

“I meant—”

He didn’t want her beating herself up about this. God knew she had reason to be upset and short-tempered.

“I know what you meant,” he told her, stepping back from the Jeep and then straightening. Holding Wayne securely in his arms, he changed the subject. “I can’t get over how little he is. It’s like holding a box of sugar. A wiggling box of sugar,” he amended as the baby twisted slightly.

He saw that the infant’s lips were moving. “Rooting,” he thought the nurse had called it on one of his visits to hospital. It was what babies did when they were hungry and searching for their mother’s breast.

“I think your son is trying to order an early dinner,” he told her. Wayne had latched on to his shirt and was sucking on it. Very gently, he extracted the material from the infant’s mouth.

Wayne whimpered.

Eli was right, Kasey realized. The nurse had brought her son to her for a feeding approximately four hours ago. She needed to feed him.

Kasey took the baby from Eli and Wayne turned his little head so that his face was now against her breast. As before, he began questing and a frustrated little noise emerged from his small, rosebud mouth.

“I think you’re right,” she said to Eli, never taking her eyes off her son.

She still wasn’t used to Wayne or the concept that she was actually a mother. Right now, she was in awe of this small, perfect little human being who had come into her life. Holding him was like holding a small piece of heaven, she thought.

That her best friend seemed so attuned to her son made her feel both happy and sad. Happy because she had someone to share this wondrous experience with and sad because as good and kind as Eli was, she was supposed to be sharing this with Hollis. Her husband was supposed to be standing beside her. He should be the one holding their son and marveling about how perfect he was.

Instead, Eli was saying all those things while Hollis was out there somewhere, heading for the hills. Or possibly for a good time. And it was Hollis who had gambled their home right out from under them and then hadn’t been man enough to face her with the news. He’d sent in Eli to take his place.

What kind of man did that to the woman he loved—unless he didn’t love her anymore, she suddenly thought. Was that it? Had he just woken up one morning to find that he’d fallen out of love with her? The thought stung her heart, but she had a feeling that she was right.

Meanwhile, Wayne was growing progressively insistent and more frustrated that there was nothing to be suckled from his mother’s blouse. All that was happening was that he was leaving a circular wet spot.

Glancing toward the protesting infant, Eli abandoned the suitcase he was about to take out.

“I’d better get you inside and settled in before Wayne decides to make a meal out of your blouse,” he said. Nodding at the suitcase, he told her, “This other stuff can wait.”

With that, he hurried over to the front door and unlocked it. Like most of the people in and around Forever, he usually left the front door unlocked during the daytime. But knowing he was going to be gone for a while, he’d thought it was more prudent to lock up before he’d left this morning.

Not that he actually had anything worth stealing, but he figured that coming into a house that had just been ransacked would have been an unsettling experience for Kasey, and he’d wanted everything to be as perfect as possible for her.

Despite their friendship, coming here wasn’t going to be easy for her. Kasey had her pride—at times, that was all she had and she’d clung to it—and her pride would have been compromised twice over if she’d had to stay in a recently robbed house. If nothing else, it would have made her exceedingly uneasy about the baby’s safety, not to mention her own.

She had more than enough to worry about as it was. He wanted to make this transition to his house as painless, hell, as easy as possible for her. That meant no surprises when he opened the front door to his house.

“Don’t expect much,” he told her as he pushed the front door open. “I’m still just settling in and getting the hang of this place. It’ll look a lot better once I get a chance to get some new things in here and spruce the place up a bit.”

Walking in ahead of him, Kasey looked around slowly, taking everything in. She knew that Eli had bought the ranch in the past couple of months. Though she’d wanted to, she hadn’t had the opportunity to come by to visit. It wasn’t so much that she’d been too busy to spare the time, but that she’d had a feeling, deep down, Hollis hadn’t wanted her to come over. That was why, she surmised, he’d kept coming up with excuses about why he wasn’t able to bring her over and he’d been completely adamant about her not going anywhere alone in “her condition,” as if her pregnancy had drained all of her intelligence from her, rendering her incapacitated.

Not wanting to be drawn into yet another futile, pointless argument, she’d figured it was easier just to go along with what Hollis was saying. In her heart, she knew that Eli would understand.

Eli always understood, she thought now, wondering why she’d been such a blind fool when it came to Hollis. There were times, she had to reluctantly admit, when Hollis could be as shallow as a wading pool.

At other times…

There were no other times. If he’d had a moment of kindness, of understanding, those points were all wiped out by what he’d done now. A man who’d walked out on his family had no redeeming qualities.

She forced herself to push all thoughts of Hollis from her mind. She couldn’t deal with that right now. Instead she focused on Eli’s house.

“It’s cozy,” she finally commented with a nod, and hoped that she sounded convincing.

He went around, turning on lights even though it was still afternoon. The sun, he’d noticed shortly after buying the ranch, danced through the house early in the morning. By the time midafternoon came, the tour was finished and the sun had moved on to another part of the ranch, leaving the house bathed in shadows. It didn’t bother him, but he didn’t want to take the chance that it might add to Kasey’s justifiably dark mood.

“By ‘cozy’ you mean ‘little,’” he corrected with a laugh. He took no offense. By local standards, his ranch was considered small. But everything had to start somewhere. “I figure I can always build on to it once I get a little bit of time set aside,” he told her.

She nodded. “I’m sure your brothers would be willing to help you build.”

“And Alma,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget about Alma.”

His sister, the youngest in their family and currently one of the sheriff’s three deputies, was always the first to have her hand up, the first to volunteer for anything. She was, and always had been, highly competitive. At times he had the feeling that the very act of breathing was some sort of a competition for Alma, if it meant that she could do it faster than the rest of them.

His sister had slowed down some, he thought—and they were all grateful for that—now that Cash was in the picture. The one-time resident of Forever had gone on to become a highly sought-after criminal lawyer, but he was giving it all up to marry Alma and settle down in Forever again. He knew they all had Cash to thank for this calmer, gentler version of Alma. Eli could only hope that Alma was going to continue on this less frantic route indefinitely.

“Nobody ever forgets Alma,” Kasey said fondly. Wayne, his cries getting louder, was now mewling like a neglected, hungry kitten. She began to rock him against her chest, trying to soothe him for a minute longer. “Um, could you show me where we’ll be staying?”

Because Hollis had caught him by surprise, he hadn’t had time to do much of anything by way of getting her room ready for her—or, for that matter, make up his mind about which room might be better suited to her and the baby. He was pretty much winging it. Stopping to buy the infant seat, as well as bringing over the baby’s crib, was just about all he’d had time for before driving to the hospital.

“For now, why don’t you just go into the back bedroom and use that?” he suggested. When she continued looking at him quizzically, he realized that she didn’t know what room he was talking about. “C’mon—” he beckoned “—I’ll show you.”

Turning, Eli led the way to the only bedroom located on the first floor. Luckily for him—and Kasey—the room did have a bed in it. It, along with the rest of the furnishings, had come with the house. The previous owner had sold him the house on the one condition that he wasn’t going to have to move out his furniture. That, the old widower had told him, would be one big hassle for him, especially since he was flying to Los Angeles to live with his daughter and her family.

Eli, who hadn’t had a stick of furniture to his name, had readily agreed. For both it had been a win-win situation.

Opening the bedroom door, he turned on the overhead light and then gestured toward the full-size bed against the wall. It faced a bureau made of dark wood. The pieces matched and both were oppressively massive-looking.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Eli urged. Stepping to the side, he added, “I’m going to go out and get your suitcase. Holler if you need anything.”

And with that, he turned and left the room.

Kasey watched him walk away. With each step that took him farther away from her, she could feel her uneasiness growing.

I’m hollering, Eli. I’m hollering, she silently told him.

You’re not the only one in the room, she reminded herself.

Smiling down at Wayne, she turned her attention toward quelling her son’s mounting, ever-louder cries of distress.

Chapter Four

Eli kept looking at the door to the downstairs bedroom, waiting for it to open. It seemed to him as if Kasey had been in there with the baby for a long time.

Was that normal?

He debated knocking on the door to ask if everything was all right. But on the other hand, he didn’t want Kasey to feel as if he was crowding her, either.

He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he just kept watching the door for movement. He had no idea how long it took to actually feed an infant. Alma was the last one born in their family and since he was only eleven months older, he never had the opportunity to be around an infant.

Dragging a hand through his unruly, thick black hair, he blew out an impatient breath. No doubt about it, he’d never felt so out of his depth before.

When he glanced down at his watch, he noted that twenty minutes had passed. Again he wondered if he should be worried that something was wrong. Though she’d tried to hide it, Kasey had been pretty upset when she’d gone into the bedroom with the infant. Not that he could blame her. The man she’d wanted to count on had abandoned her without so much as a shred of consideration for how she would feel about the situation. Hollis certainly hadn’t had the courage to face her before he’d pulled his disappearing act.

She really was better off without him, but, if he said anything like that now, it might strike her as cold.

Frustrated, concerned, Eli ran his hand through his hair again, trying to think of a possible way to make things better for Kasey.

Maybe Hollis should have at least left her a letter or some sort of a note, apologizing for his actions and telling her that he just needed to get his head straight. That once that happened, maybe he could come back and do right by her. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that Kasey would have taken comfort in that.

But there was no point in reflecting on that, since Hollis hadn’t even been thoughtful enough of her feelings to do something as simple as that—

Eli stopped thinking of what was and began thinking of what should have been.

If it helped, why not?

He looked at the door again, and then at the old-fashioned writing desk butted up against the far wall in the living room. Weighing the pros and cons, he wavered for less than a moment, then quickly crossed over to the desk, took out a piece of paper, a pen and an envelope.

With one eye on the entrance to the living room, watching for Kasey, he quickly dashed off a note of apology to her, doing his best to approximate Hollis’s handwriting, then signed it Hollis.

He’d just finished sealing the envelope when he heard the bedroom door opening. The very next moment, he heard Kasey calling to him.

“Eli? Eli, are you down here?” Her voice sounded as if she was coming closer.

Stuffing the envelope into his back pocket, Eli raised his own voice slightly. “Out here. I’m in the living room.”

The next moment Kasey walked into the room. Both she and the baby looked somewhat calmer.

“Well, he’s all fed and changed, thanks to the disposable diapers in that little care packet the hospital gave me.” Even as she said it, Kasey caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He was so tuned in to her, he could almost read her mind. She was already thinking ahead to all the things she was going to need, including a veritable mountain of disposable diapers.

“Well, unless we can get Wayne potty-trained by tonight, you’re going to need more of those,” he commented, taking the burden of having to mention it from her. “Tell you what, why don’t you make up a list of what you’ll need and I’ll take a quick trip into town?” Eli suggested.

Kasey smiled, grateful for his thoughtfulness. How did one man turn out like this while another—

Don’t go there, she warned herself. There weren’t any answers for her there and she would drive herself crazy with the questions.

“Sounds like a good idea,” she agreed. Then her eyes narrowed as she saw the long envelope sticking out of his back pocket. “What’s that?” she asked.

Appearing properly confused, Eli reached behind himself. He pulled out the envelope, looked at it and slowly allowed recognition to enter his expression.

“Oh, in all the excitement of bringing you and Wayne home, I totally forgot about this.”