For Love and Family

Now it was Hunter who didn’t respond readily. Instead he seemed to be thinking it over. Or maybe he was just trying to come up with an excuse.

Worrying that she was out of line, she didn’t wait for an answer and instead spoke again. “Honestly, don’t feel obligated. I give blood regularly so if the blood bank’s supplies hadn’t been depleted Johnny might have gotten my blood, anyway, and I would never have known the difference. So if you want to keep everything the way it’s been for the last four years, it’s okay. It isn’t as if I’ll take the blood back or anything.”

The joke was lame but she was trying to lighten the tone, to keep him from feeling pressured.

“Maybe it wouldn’t even be what’s best for Johnny,” Terese continued, the words spilling out on their own at a breakneck pace before Hunter could respond even if he was ready to. “And I wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t good for him.”

“It’s okay,” the rancher said then, holding up one hand, palm outward, to stop more of the verbal avalanche. “If you’d give me a minute I’d tell you that I don’t see anything wrong with Johnny meeting you.”

Despite the fact that she’d been hoping he would agree, she was shocked that he had.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“And you aren’t saying that just because you feel as if you owe me anything? Because you don’t. I wouldn’t want to do anything that disturbs you. I know that sometimes an adoptive parent’s security can be—”

“I’m not insecure about being Johnny’s dad,” Hunter assured her with a hint of a smile that let her know how true that was. “Adopted or not, he’s my son and nothing is ever going to change that. I don’t think I want him going over to your house or anything like that, but just to have you meet him? I don’t see any problem with that.”

Terese didn’t want to tell him that her twin sister wouldn’t want Johnny at the house any more than he did, so she merely agreed with his qualification. “No, I don’t think it would be good for Johnny to be at the house either. I’d come to you. I could even do it here, while he’s in the hospital, if you don’t want me to know where you live or—”

“I’m not sure if seeing him in the hospital is a good idea. There are so many strangers and he’s already pretty intimidated just by being here. But where we live isn’t a secret.”

“I’m willing to do it any way you want to do it,” Terese said.

The rancher paused another moment, and she worried he might be having second thoughts. In fact, he paused for so long and seemed to be watching her so intently, that she began to think he was going to say no after all.

But then, as if he’d made some sort of decision, he said, “You know, I have a guest cabin at the ranch. Nothing fancy, but if you wanted to come out and spend a few days with us, you could meet Johnny and get to know him a little on his own territory. What would you say to that?”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, because she was so stunned that not only was he willing to let her meet her nephew, he was actually offering her a way to get to know the little boy. It was more than Terese had ever hoped for.

“That would be wonderful,” she finally said.

“Can you take some time off work— Do you work?”

“I do. I teach psychology at Portland State University. But I’m on sabbatical right now so my time is my own.”

“Great.”

Another nurse knocked and opened the door just then, coming in with papers for Terese to sign.

Hunter stood to give the stool over to her. “I’ll get out of the way so you can go home. But I’ll call you as soon as I get Johnny out of here and we can set up a time for you to come to the ranch.”

“I can’t wait,” Terese answered.

Hunter gave her a little wave then and left her to the nurse who showed her where to sign the release forms and then told her she was free to go.

“You’ll probably want to put on that sweater,” the nurse said as she left. “It’s feeling very Octoberish out there tonight.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that.”

Terese slipped the sweater over her head and then went to the small mirror on the wall to pull her shirt collar up and make sure she was presentable.

But as she smoothed her hair into place something else flashed through her mind—the image of Hunter Coltrane. The image of Hunter Coltrane with her.

“Now that’s a pipe dream,” she muttered to herself.

And no one knew it better than Terese.

Because Hunter Coltrane was handsome enough to stop traffic and she, as proven by the reflection in the mirror, was hardly the kind of woman who would so much as turn his head.

Her stepmother had always said it. So had Eve. Eve had alluded to it today. And it was an irrefutable fact—Terese Warwick was a Plain Jane.

The kind of Plain Jane who didn’t attract even moderately attractive men on her own merits, let alone men like Hunter.

“And don’t you forget it!” she commanded her reflection as if it were another person.

Then she left the hospital room, telling herself just to be glad she was going to get to meet her nephew.

She worked hard to erase the lingering mental image of her nephew’s father, a mental image that had things inside her sitting up and taking notice.

Just the way the man himself had….

Two

“Uh, Johnny? What do we have going on there?”

It was Sunday evening and Hunter was expecting Terese to arrive at his ranch any minute. He’d had his son home from the hospital since Thursday and after some soul-searching, on Friday night he’d kept his word and called her to arrange a time for her to come out and stay so she could meet Johnny and get to know him.

She’d said she had charity functions to attend this weekend, so would it be all right if she got there around nine o’clock. Hunter had agreed. But she was late and since it was already past Johnny’s bedtime, Hunter had gotten the boy ready for bed, complete with bath and pajamas. But the little boy had just disappeared upstairs for a while and now that he’d returned to the living room, Hunter was surprised to see the results of that trip.

“You look nice and I wanted to, too,” Johnny informed him.

Leave it to his son to notice that he’d taken a second shower and shaved again today, and that he was wearing slacks and a polo shirt rather than the jeans and sweatshirt he would normally have been in on a lazy Sunday evening.

“Come over here and let me see what you’ve done,” Hunter said, trying not to laugh.

Johnny had just turned four last month and was very intent on proving that he was more independent than he had been before. But as Hunter sat on the coffee table and pulled his son to stand between his legs, the boy seemed small and fragile to him.

“So what did you do to yourself?” Hunter asked, surveying how his son had spruced himself up.

Johnny had flaming red hair that Hunter kept short on the sides and in back. But he let the barber leave a little on top and now Johnny had done something to make only the front part stick straight up.

Hunter lightly patted the stiff-looking tips with his palm. “How’d you do this?” he asked, careful to sound impartial so as not to offend what his son was clearly proud to have accomplished.

“My friend Mikey showed me. You wet your hair and then you kinda comb it up with the bar of soap till it stays. Then you let it get dry.”

That was a relief. Hunter was afraid he’d used super-glue.

“It makes you cool,” Johnny informed him.

“Cool,” Hunter repeated. “Uh-huh.”

Accepting the hairstyle for the moment, he lowered his gaze to his son’s chubby-cheeked face with the sprinkling of freckles across his tiny nose.

“And did you wash your face again since your bath?” he asked, surprised since it was always a struggle to get his son to wash his face once, let alone twice.

“I din’t wash it. I shaved just a little bit,” Johnny informed him, rubbing a hand along his peach-skin jawline.

“You must have pressed kind of hard,” Hunter observed. “Your cheeks are all red. You made sure you used the special razor I gave you, didn’t you? It’s more important than ever that you never touch mine, you know?”

“I know. ’Cuz yours has a really sharp thing in it and ’cuz of the hemolilia I got now.”

Hunter had tried to get him to pronounce hemophilia correctly but it was a losing battle.

“Right. And did you put some of the soap in your eyebrows to make them stand up, too?” Hunter asked, seeing that the pale brows over his son’s blueberries-and-cream colored eyes were going in all directions.

“No, I think they musta just getted that way when I dried off my face ’cuz the water in my hair dripped.”

“So can I fix them?”

Johnny nodded and Hunter licked his thumbs and smoothed his son’s eyebrows into place.

Then he glanced down at Johnny’s rodeo pajamas. And the way his son had accessorized them.

“That’s one of my best ties, isn’t it?”

“Yup. I wanted to look nice.”

“And you do,” Hunter assured him. He couldn’t stop the smile that escaped. The tie was knotted into a wad at his throat and hung nearly to his knees. “I’m just thinking that this might not be a necktie kind of night. See? I don’t have one on.”

“Maybe you should put one on.”

“I don’t think so. And you know, a tie is sort of fancy for pajamas. Even for the good rodeo pajamas.”

“I look nice,” Johnny insisted.

“You do. You do. I’m just thinking that our company might not have dressed up quite that much and we wouldn’t want her to feel bad, would we?”

Johnny creased his forehead and looked down at the striped tie. “We could tell her it was okay that she didn’t get dressed up good as us.”

“You really want to leave the tie on, huh?”

“Yup.”

Hunter nodded. He didn’t have the heart to force the issue. “Okay, then. Well, I guess since you’re all ready, you can help me get the rest of your toys put away so this place doesn’t look like a cyclone hit it.”

Apparently feeling dressed up made the little boy agreeable because he didn’t balk at that suggestion the way he usually did. Instead he turned and went right to work.

“Who’s this lady again?” Johnny asked as he picked up his toys.

Hunter hadn’t known how to explain Terese Warwick. Johnny knew he was adopted; Hunter and his wife had decided when he was still an infant that they would be open and honest with him on the subject. Despite that, the whole concept seemed slightly out of his grasp yet. Whenever they talked about it Johnny seemed only concerned with the fact that Hunter was his dad no matter what.

Hunter hadn’t wanted to confuse him by trying to explain that Terese Warwick was the sister of Johnny’s birth mother, so he’d opted for a more simple description. Which he repeated now.

“She’s a friend who knew you when you were only a baby, and she’s the person who has the same kind of blood that you have, so she gave you some of hers when you were in the hospital.”

“When I was bleedin’ on accounta the hemolilia.”

“When your nose was bleeding so badly because of the hemophilia, yes.”

“Is she your girlfriend like Mindy Harper wants to be my girlfriend and kiss me?” Johnny asked, being silly.

“When did Mindy Harper want to kiss you?”

“Before last week. At preschool. When we were havin’ graham crackers and yogurt. She told Mikey she loooved me and she wanted to kiss me and I said yuk.”

Again Hunter suppressed a smile. “No, the lady who’s coming to stay with us for a while is not my girlfriend and there won’t be any kissing going on. She’s just a friend who’s a girl. And really she’ll be here to see you more than to see me.”

“Oh, no!” Johnny shouted in a panic.

It was an indication of how on-edge Hunter still was about his son and his son’s health that that simple exclamation was enough to tense his entire body and make him spin around to face the boy.

But Johnny’s current crisis was far less distressing than the one the week before.

“I forgetted about my hair and put my hat on!” the little boy informed him, holding up his cowboy hat. “I gotta fix it!” Then he dashed back upstairs.

“Don’t put any more soap in it,” Hunter called after him. “Just use a little water if you have to.”

Hunter shook his head and laughed to himself at his son’s antics. Then he returned to straightening up the living room.

He knew that it wasn’t Terese Warwick herself that had Johnny so excited. The little boy didn’t know her, after all. It was merely the novelty of having someone come to stay with them.

Hunter, on the other hand, was a different story. For him it was the woman he was looking forward to seeing again. And he was none too happy about it.

In fact, wanting to see her again was what had caused him to drag his feet about calling her to arrange this visit.

Wanting to see any woman hadn’t happened to him since Margee. It sure as hell hadn’t happened to him since Margee’s death.

But with Terese Warwick it had happened. And it had Hunter feeling pretty unsettled. And confused. Why her, of all people? he kept asking himself.

Of course, she didn’t seem anything like her sister. But maybe the difference between them was actually the problem.

For all her money and high-class social circles, Terese still had a sort of girl-next-door thing going for her. And flashy, overly made-up, beauty-shop-perfect women—like Eve Warwick—put him off. Who wanted somebody who looked as if they needed to be kept on a pedestal and dusted once a week? Somebody who might as well have a hands-off sign posted on her forehead?

But the girl-next-door thing? That had more appeal to him. Give him Terese’s long, thick ponytail over her sister’s helmet hair any day. That ponytail was the color of red oak and shiny and neat and clean.

Give him those few freckles that dotted Terese’s pale porcelain skin, keeping her from being too perfect and putting a hint of mischief into her appearance. And there was no doubt that he preferred Terese’s pert nose to that surgeon-fashioned one her sister sported.

Plus, Terese’s eyes didn’t need all that glitter and fake stuff on the lids, he thought as he tossed a few more of his son’s toys into one of the cupboards that lined a wall of the living room. Terese had eyes that were incredible on their own. Warm, sparkling, iri-descent, vibrant blue eyes, with lustrous dark lashes. He’d rather be looking into those eyes any day of the week than into those cold baby-blues of her sister.

Oh yeah, given a choice, he’d vote for the natural, fresh-scrubbed beauty. And when it came attached to a tight little body with breasts that were just the right size…

“Geez,” he muttered to himself in disgust, knowing he didn’t have any business thinking about her breasts. Not now and not the other ten dozen times he had in the last several days.

It was just that something about Terese had gotten to him.

But it wasn’t only the way she looked that kept coming back into his head to taunt him. Or the way she looked that seemed to set her apart from her twin sister. Terese also seemed sweet and kind and unselfish, though not in a doormat sort of way. After all, she’d stood her ground with her nasty sister and that was saying something.

But at the same time, Terese’s sweetness and kindness and unselfishness had seemed natural, too. Innate. And bolstered by a strength of character her twin clearly lacked.

And so there he was, Hunter thought as he jammed more toys into the cupboard and had to force the door closed. He’d taken two showers in one day, he’d gotten himself dressed up, and he was having problems holding down his own excitement at the prospect of Terese Warwick arriving on his doorstep any minute now.

Excitement he was none too happy about at the moment.

All it did was get him riled up for no good reason.

And why?

Because of the who and the when.

The who being that she was Terese Warwick. Which meant that no matter how much appeal she might have, it came in the shadow of her sister and the fact that her sister was Johnny’s birth mother.

And if that shadow wasn’t enough, Hunter also knew he needed to keep uppermost in his mind the fact that though Terese seemed like the girl-next-door, she wasn’t. She was someone who operated on a whole different level than he did. She was someone who lived in a whole different world than he did.

Oh yeah, who she was was sure as hell something he needed to keep in mind.

And as for the when part?

The when part was even more important. So important that if Terese Warwick wasn’t a Warwick at all, if she was the most amazing, beautiful, perfect, wonderful woman on the face of the earth, he still wouldn’t do anything about it.

Because right now was not the time for a woman in his life. For any woman. Right now was Johnny’s time.

It was a vow Hunter had made to himself. Johnny was his priority. Johnny was the one and only person he was devoted to.

Maybe not forever, because he knew that eventually his son would be more interested in his own friends and activities and wouldn’t want his old Dad hanging around. But for now, for as long as dad was the center of Johnny’s universe, Hunter wouldn’t take that lightly. He wouldn’t let there be any distractions, any intrusions. Not by anyone.

So Terese Warwick couldn’t have more than a superficial place in their lives and that was all there was to it.

Which was why he had no business looking forward to her coming. No business getting excited.

But whether he had any business doing all that or not, the feeling was there, anyway.

So he guessed he’d just have to keep it under wraps. Keep it from flourishing. And he’d also have to make sure he didn’t let anything come of any of it.

This was going to be Johnny’s time with Terese, and her time with him. Hunter would just stand on the sidelines and oversee it. He’d keep himself as removed from it as he could.

That was his plan.

But damn if he wouldn’t feel a lot better if this excitement would go away and leave him in peace.

It was almost nine-thirty when Terese finally found the wooden arch that proclaimed Hunter Coltrane’s ranch, the Double Bar S, and turned from the main road onto the gravel drive.

The drive was lined on both sides by a white rail fence that bordered grassy fields where several cows grazed lazily and watched her without enthusiasm. It was a sentiment she hoped Hunter Coltrane didn’t share at the prospect of having her there.

She was surprised by how small the house was when it came into view in the distance. Of course, not only was the white two-story farmhouse in the midst of a vast expanse of open ground, there were also an enormous white barn and a silo looming up behind it, and it occurred to her that they might be dwarfing Hunter’s home, too.

It was a well-kept little house, though, with black shutters neatly decorating each window. The first level was larger than the second and there was a big covered front porch with a crossbuck railing around it that gave the place an inviting, homey feel.

Terese pulled to a stop at the end of the drive where there was a patch of manicured lawn and a cobbled sidewalk led the rest of the way to the house.

Stretching along the porch were brick-bordered flower beds. Although it was too late in the year for blooms, the flower beds were festively adorned with teepees of dried corn stalks and artfully displayed pumpkins, brightly colored gourds and squashes. There was also a life-sized stuffed scarecrow dressed in a red bandana shirt and denim overalls lounging on the chair swing that hung from chains at one end of the porch.

All in all, even though the place was nothing fancy, Terese liked it.

A porch light to the right of the screened front door was lit for her, providing a warm golden glow even after she’d turned off her engine and her car lights. She got out from behind the wheel and just stood there for a moment, looking at the house and letting it sink in that her nephew really was just inside.

In those first few days of his life, she’d fallen in love with the baby Eve had given birth to. She’d held him and rocked him and cooed to him. She’d felt him curl up against her; she’d spent hours with him sleeping in her arms.

In the process she’d begun to hope that her sister would change her mind about giving up the baby. That she could convince her sister to keep him and that then she would get to be a part of his life.

But nothing she’d said or done had changed Eve’s mind. Eve had wanted nothing to do with that baby. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to hold him. She didn’t even want to know he was alive. And she certainly wasn’t going to keep him.

When Terese had finally had to accept that, her thoughts had turned to an alternate course. She’d decided to adopt the baby herself.

Eve had hit the ceiling when Terese had told her. It was the biggest argument they’d ever had, culminating in Eve’s flat refusal to relinquish the infant to Terese. Then, to make it even harder on Terese, Eve had arranged for the baby to be immediately turned over to the parents Eve had chosen. Terese hadn’t had so much as the opportunity to say goodbye to the baby she’d come to love.

It had wrenched Terese’s heart. In fact, she’d gone through a long period of grieving before she’d given up the hope of ever seeing him again.

And then she’d come home to find Hunter Coltrane in her entryway.

Of course the circumstances had been less than ideal. Certainly she didn’t want a health problem to be the cause of bringing her nephew back into her life. But now that it had happened and she was only moments away from getting to see him again, it seemed too good to be true.

Terese opened the rear door and pulled out her leather suitcase, not wanting to waste any more precious time when she could be meeting her nephew.

And seeing his dad again.

But Terese pushed the thought of Hunter out of her mind as soon as it popped into it. Exactly as she’d been doing since she’d seen him at the hospital. Hunter might be drop-dead gorgeous and honest enough to have kept his word, but meeting and getting to know his son was the only thing this visit was about. And she couldn’t let herself forget that.

Terese was determined not to lose sight of just how touchy the whole situation was. She knew she had to keep in mind that she was an outsider in the lives of both father and son. She had to keep in mind that even though she might be a blood relative of Johnny’s, she still had no rights to him, that she was nothing more than a stranger here, allowed to get to know him only out of the kindness and generosity of his father, a father who could very well have dug in his heels and refused to have the line between birth family and adopted family crossed.

No, she had no doubt whatsoever that this was a touchy situation. Touchy and complicated. And it didn’t need to be complicated even more by her drifting into thoughts of Hunter Coltrane as a man.

Terese closed the rear car door with a resounding slam, as if that would help put an end to any thoughts of her nephew’s father.

Then she climbed the four steps to the front porch with her suitcase in hand.

But before she had a chance to knock on the screen, the carved oak door opened and there stood Hunter Coltrane.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Strappingly good-looking.

Taller, broader of shoulder, and even more strappingly good-looking than her memory had made him in all the images that had haunted her since she’d come in on his confrontation with her sister this past week.

It didn’t help matters.

But Terese tamped down the instant, involuntary appreciation that flooded her at that first sight of him and reminded herself that she was out of his league when it came to looks, and that she’d better remember it.

Johnny. This was only about Johnny….

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said in lieu of a greeting as he pushed open the screen. “I’m the chairwoman for the committee that gave this dinner tonight and I just couldn’t seem to get away.”