The Cowboy, The Baby And The Bride-To-Be

She looked back. His jaw had dropped. It was a strong jaw, deeply shadowed.

“Well, that would be me, ma‘am, but I don’t—”

Nicky exploded from his seat and pushed by her. He ran straight for the big lean man who was eyeing them now with horrified fascination.

Nicky grabbed Turner MacLeod’s blue jeans in a tight chubby fist. His head dropped. He threw up on the man’s boots.

Shayla closed her eyes in mortification. Thousands of miles of open prairie, and Nicky had chosen the man’s boot? Barry would have been furious.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

Nicky was shrieking, still holding that leg.

The man squatted down, ignoring the substance on his boot. He took Nicky’s tiny shoulders in both strong hands and scanned his face, and then touched his forehead quickly with the back of his hand.

Turner scooped up the boy with easy strength, tucked him into his shoulder. “Better come in. He’s got a bit of a fever.”

The calm in his voice quelled the panic in the pit of her stomach.

She froze, looking at them together. Nicholas’s coloring was different from Turner’s, darker and more exotic, but the bone structure was identical.

She had the sudden sinking sensation that Maria had not sent her to the boy’s uncle after all.

Turner MacLeod was Nicholas’s father.

And he didn’t know it.

Love at first sight and he was an utter cad.

She could almost see her mother sniffing triumphantly. Hear her voice in her mind saying, “Don’t you trust hormones or hearts to make those really important decisions, Shayla. This is your mother talking. Use your head. That’s what the good Lord gave it to you for.”

Well, her head was saying run, and run fast. But her feet were following his long stride toward his porch. She couldn’t very well leave Nicky here with a perfect stranger. Even if it was his father.

“I better get him to a hospital,” she said frantically.

He shot her a quick look over his shoulder. “Ma’am, the nearest hospital is a long, long way from here.”

He said it quietly, patiently, even, but she could sense a judgment, and a harsh one. Outsider. City slicker. Not aware of the realities of life in these big empty spaces.

He slipped off his boots at a jack on the porch outside his screen door. Then he opened the door and held it with a foot, indicating for her to follow him.

“I don’t even know you,” she said, hesitating.

He shot her an incredulous look. “You might have thought of that a couple of hundred miles ago.” The door squeaked and closed behind him.

“How do you know how far I’ve come?” She suddenly felt even more suspicious. Oh great, she had driven hundreds of miles to walk straight into the clutches of the only ax murderer in Montana.

“The license plates say Oregon, ma’am. That’s one hell of a pile of time to give some thought to what you’re doing.”

“Back then I thought you knew Nicky!”

“Nicky,” he repeated it slowly. He held the caterwauling boy back, and studied his face.

Nicky was making a lot of noise but not crying. Shayla had noticed the little boy had a particularly tough streak in him. He never cried.

A light came on in Turner MacLeod’s face as he studied the boy. A light, followed by a look of bewildered tenderness that completely erased her worries about the position of the nearest ax.

“Geez,” he breathed under his breath. He looked up at her, his eyes pinning her with intense blue light. “Who’s his mama?”

Just how many beds had his boots been under? she wondered, borrowing a phrase from a song she wished she had written.

“Maria Gerrardi,” she said tightly. She added silently—a good Catholic girl, whose life lies in ruins because of you, you handsome devil you.

Something tightened in his features.

With another look at Nicky’s face, he sighed and disappeared into the darkness of his house.

Chapter Two

She was standing out on his porch deciding whether or not it was safe to come in, he thought wryly.

She was probably from a big city—an alarm on her key chain, a half dozen dead bolts on her doors, a penchant for watching evening news that scared her silly.

She probably thought he had an ax in here.

He set the boy down on a chair. “Stay,” he said sternly.

The little boy continued caterwauling, but looked at him with huge startled eyes. Turner noticed, for all the noise, the kid was dry-eyed.

He had eyes, huge and coal dark, just like Turner’s brother, Nicholas. Even the same name. Nick. A strange coincidence that the boy was here now. He hadn’t seen Nick for nearly four years. And then a couple of days ago the satellite dish had decided to work, and he’d caught the tail end of the news when they did the human interest stuff.

And there was Nick, in a park uniform, talking about grizzly bears and living alone on some godforsaken mountain, studying them.

The reporter, a pert little blond in a miniskirt, asked the typical question of a hermit. “Don’t you crave human company?”

If Turner wasn’t mistaken, there might have been just a hint of invitation in the question to his handsome brother.

“Only one,” Nick had said slowly, missing the invitation. “And I lost her a long time ago. I’ve learned something on this mountain. If you want something with your whole heart and soul, don’t listen when other people try to tell you it doesn’t make sense, don’t listen when they tell you no.”

Of course, he’d been the SOB who told his little brother no to Maria Gerrardi.

Though, from the look of this young pup in front of him, he hadn’t said no quite soon enough.

The interview had opened old wounds. Made him wish he’d done some things differently, made him wish you could go back and try it again. Only with more patience and wisdom—the patience and wisdom that the painful estrangement from his brother had given him.

Turner had been seventeen years old when he was thrust into a man’s world, had had to shoulder a man’s responsibilities. His parents had been killed when their private plane crashed, leaving him to cope with a huge ranch and two younger siblings.

It had been scary and hard. The scary part he never showed, and the hard part he got too good at. He’d been so busy trying to keep everything together, trying to keep Nick and Abby out of trouble, that he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t exactly communicating with them.

And if he had noticed, he probably wouldn’t have known how to change it, anyway. Seventeen. What do seventeen-year-olds know about communicating?

Taking charge. Taking control. Snapping orders. That’s what he’d gotten good at. Too good.

When Nick left he’d shouted angrily at Turner, “No one’s even allowed to breathe around here without your say-so.”

The words still stung.

But now this. His brother’s son here. Did that mean he was going to get a second chance? Was he so much better at communicating now, that he could say, “Nick, it was always for love.” He’d wanted the best for them. For his brother and sister.

Abby knew. But Nick had decided grizzly bears were better than an overbearing brother. Who had meant well. Why hadn’t that part come through?

He sighed. Probably because of Maria. Nick had just finished college. He’d been way too young. He had his whole life ahead of him.

But Turner hadn’t said it like that at all. And when Nick had shown every sign of not listening, Turner had taken it upon himself to go talk to Maria. She’d listened. She’d been gone the next day. And a look as black as the devil’s heart had come into Nick’s eyes and never gone away. After a month of treating Turner to looks snapping with ill-concealed anger, he’d accepted a job at a remote mountain wilderness park.

Turner had thought he would last a month. He’d been wrong. He didn’t like it one bit that his brother matched him for stiff-necked stubbornness.

Why had Maria sent the boy here?

He felt sick when he thought of her crying that night, four years ago. Saying she understood. She wasn’t good enough for his brother...she’d always known that. At the time, Turner had been sure he was doing the right thing, arranging everybody’s lives to his own satisfaction.

Four years without so much as a Christmas card from his brother. A hell of a price to pay for being right. And now, finding out a child had lived without his daddy because he’d been so sure he was right.

Things were about to happen big-time. He could practically sniff it in the air, the same way he could smell a big storm rolling in.

The wee Nicky, built like a sturdy little dump truck, stopped howling. That must have convinced her it was safe, or that she needed to attempt a rescue, but either way the door squeaked open and she came in.

She stood hesitantly inside the door, the light framing her. She was slender and willowy, and despite the jeans and T-shirt, she reminded him of a ballerina he’d seen at the ballet Celia had dragged him to. He’d slept through most of the damned thing, but he remembered that ballerina, looking so fragile and dainty, hiding incredible strength.

“Aspirin’s over the stove,” he told her. “Grab it, would you?”

“I read somewhere you shouldn’t give aspirin to babies because—”

“Look, lady, the nearest drugstore is a pretty long haul, okay? Nearly as far as the hospital. We make do out here.”

He reached into the fridge. A carton of apple juice happened to be among the isolated inhabitants. He grabbed it and slammed the door quick before she caught sight of that plate of blue-green something that he had at one time planned to reheat.

He wondered, briefly, why he cared if she caught sight of the molding contents of his fridge.

“Oh,” she said, from across the room, “this isn’t aspirin. It’s acetaminophen. That’s okay then.”

“Could you crush whatever it is and bring it here?”

Acetaminophen. It was all aspirin to him. He slid her a look.

There was certainly nothing glamorous about his unexpected visitor. She had no high-gloss hairdo, the kind that stayed perfectly in place even when the wind picked up, which it did plenty around here. The sun was shining through her hair right now. Outside, it had looked plain, old light brown. In here it looked like liquid honey, curling around her neck and ending just before her shoulders.

But anybody who called aspirin acetaminophen with such ease probably had taken in a ballet or two herself. And not slept through it, either.

If he was shopping for a woman, which of course he wasn’t, he needed one who wore cowboy boots, not one with painted toenails and flimsy shoes.

He did a quick check. Sandals. Little pink dots on each toe. Cute toes, now that he looked. But no doubt she would be all lace and silk under the plain old T-shirt and jeans she was wearing.

Now what had made him think of that? And why did that quick mental flash make his mouth go dry as if he was stuck in a sandstorm?

Maybe it was the way those jeans had clung in all the right places when she had bent into the car to release the catch on the car seat, and then again when she had stretched up to that cabinet above the fridge.

“What’s the holdup?” Turner growled.

“It’s harder than you think!”

He moved across the kitchen to her, painfully aware suddenly of what a plain room it was. The linoleum was old and worn. The table was a relic from an old bunkhouse. There were only two chairs, one with a plastic seat that had been patched with hockey tape and another with three different colors of paint showing through the worn spots. Well, he hadn’t been expecting highfalutin’ company. At least the place was clean. He’d learned to keep up with housework long ago the hard way. Rinsing a dish right after he ate was a lot easier than trying to blowtorch month-old remains off of them.

He looked over her shoulder. He couldn’t help but notice the top of her head came up to about the bottom of his chin. And that she smelled good. Of soap and shampoo and something sweet and tantalizing that was pure woman.

She was trying to beat the aspirin to death with a soup ladle.

He took two spoons out of his kitchen drawer, placed a tablet between them and squeezed. Instant powder.

“This is how you squish acetaminophen.” He mixed the powder in a teaspoon of apple juice, went back across his kitchen and spooned it into the kid.

The kid spit it out on him.

“Little man, you sure do know how to make a first impression. Squish me another one of those, would you?”

He got up and found some tea towels, ran them under lukewarm water in the sink. “Running water,” he said. “Had it for near six months now.” He drawled it out nice and slow like a real hick. He kept his face completely deadpan.

She cast him a sideways look from under lashes that he noticed were as thick and tangled as a sooty chimney brush. It didn’t look like she had mascara on though, or any other war paint, either. No bright red lips or stripes of green over her eyes. No little pencil-thin eyebrows or slashes of fake pink on her cheeks.

He didn’t revise his first opinion. She was no beauty. But there was something just plain natural about her that was easy on a man’s eyes. He decided he’d had nothing to look at but horses for a sight too long.

She was grunting trying to squish the tablets. Not enough muscle in those arms to wring out a dishrag. If he was shopping for a woman, which of course he wasn’t, he needed one who could heft a bale or two.

She wasn’t Celia, he realized suddenly, and it wasn’t fair to her to treat her like she was, or to assume that all women from the cities would be the same. Maybe she wasn’t even from a city.

“Which part of Oregon are you from?” he asked.

“Portland.”

Best to keep his guard up. Celia, a born-and-bred Baltimore girl, had thought the country would be romantic as all get-out, and she’d had a notion or two about cowboys, too. All of them wrong.

She had thought Turner was rugged and real because she’d seen him ride to glory for eight seconds on the back of a raging bull.

As long as he was handing his Stetson to maître d’s or the hatcheck girl at the ballet her illusions were pretty safe.

Then he’d made the mistake of asking her out here.

Her disappointment and disillusionment had set almost at once. Her first impression of this very room had put a look on her face that would have soured milk.

Then his best reining horse had foaled badly, and the foal had ended up behind the heater in the house, with him trying to coax an eyedropper of milk into it about every ten seconds or so.

It had pretty much sealed his fate when he didn’t even have a candle to light for the special dinner she’d made him. He’d offered to drive over to his sister’s—an hour-and-five-minute round trip—but the moment was definitely lost. She’d said it didn’t matter. When he’d seen those escargot things in full light he’d wished he’d insisted on making the trip.

Turner knew it was for the best, her leaving. They’d been living in some sort of fantasy world, and the reality check had been inevitable. The truth was out. Rugged and real meant he was hardworking, stubborn, a loner, and about as romantic as a skunk in a trap.

He’d wondered so much about whether or not those candles really had mattered that on his next grocery run to town he’d picked up a pair of nice red ones, and bought three videos. For next time.

So far there hadn’t been a next time. The candles were still wrapped and so were the videos.

Maybe his unexpected guest would be impressed. Since the videos were now three years old he doubted it.

He hadn’t been to a rodeo in nearly that long, either. He was getting old, he supposed. At thirty, a ton of Brahma bull, tap dancing on his chest, was not as appealing as it had been a decade ago.

He liked working with horses. He’d finalized an arrangement with his sister and his brother-in-law just last year where they would run the cattle part of the ranch that had been in his family since shortly after Noah, and he could devote himself to doing what he did best. He’d bought this little parcel over here because he liked the barn.

He was a good trainer and he knew it. He had more business than he could handle. Between his training fees, selling colts he’d finished, and his share of the profits from the ranch, he made a pretty fine living. He would actually have lots of money, if he could ever learn to curb his impulse to buy just one more horse.

Turner had paid seven thousand dollars for the lunatic Appaloosa out there. His sister had sighed, looked at his house and had the good sense to say nothing.

Horses made him happy. Show him a house that could do that.

Life was good. Settled. All right, he missed his brother. And from time to time he yearned for the soft company of a pretty woman.

A man got lonely. There was nothing that brought out his vulnerability like this time of year, the promise of winter already in the air at night, the thought of short days and long cold nights filling him with an ache he didn’t want to feel.

He’d wanted very badly for it to work with Celia. But it hadn’t, and it had killed something in him trying to make it. Having a woman digging her spikes into the region near your heart was no less painful than the bull tap dancing. He was too old for them both.

There wasn’t an available woman within a thousand square miles. He knew all the girls, long since turned into women, who had grown up around here, and they were either long gone or long taken. And he was too proud and stubborn and busy to go searching worlds unfamiliar to him like some lonely-hearts-club reject.

But this one had come to him.

Turner slid a glance to her ring finger. Blank. He was aware, suddenly, of a sense of something missing from his life since he’d given up rodeo.

Adventure. Spontaneity. Not knowing precisely what was going to happen next.

Geez, MacLeod, he told himself. Don’t go bein’ no fool. He noticed a little scattering of light freckles over her nose.

She finally managed to break up the acetaminophen.

“You try and give it to him this time,” he said gruffly. “Then we’ll get his clothes off and sponge him down real good.”

She took the juice from him and sat down across from the little boy who looked at her with mulish stubbornness that reminded him of his own brother.

“Oh, little love, open wide,” she sang in such a clear true voice it made Turner start, “let this magic come inside, chase away all the germs that hide—”

The little scoundrel opened his mouth like a baby bird, and swallowed the medicine with a satisfied slurp.

“Did you just make that up, just now?” Turner asked incredulously.

“Oh,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. “It’s silly, but it works.”

Her eyes crinkled up at the edges when she laughed, and they were a nice color. Hazel, he supposed it was called, when they were kind of gold and green and brown all mixed together like that.

“Sing again, Poppy. Now.”

“No,” she said uncomfortably, a sudden blush painting her high cheekbones a becoming shade of scarlet.

Poppy. Despite the color in her cheeks at the moment, it didn’t suit her. Poppies, in his mind, were flamboyant flowers, in too-brilliant shades of red or orange.

She was more like a little brown-eyed Susan.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I liked it.” More than liked it. It was like listening to an angel sing.

But she wouldn’t sing again. Instead she took off the little boy’s shirt and sponged him off with those tea towels he’d prepared.

“Let’s lay him down,” he suggested. “The back room stays cool.”

When she moved to lift the boy, he took him from her.

“He’s not heavy,” she protested.

He shrugged. Oh, right. It was this brand-new world where women did all the same things as men. Never mind that he had just been evaluating her bale-throwing ability. He suspected it was this kind of thing that had driven Nick away—he demanded the best from everyone and then never gave them a chance to show it to him. But other than toss the kid back at her, he didn’t know what to do about it.

They went down the narrow hall. He managed to snag his bedroom door with his toe on the way by and pull it shut before she got a glimpse of three or four days’ worth of dirty shirts and socks on the floor.

His spare bedroom was as plain as the rest of his tiny house. It didn’t even have a curtain. Not many Peeping Toms could be bothered coming out this far.

Especially to only get a peep at him.

“Poppy, sing,” the wee tyrant demanded again as she tucked relatively clean sheets around the tyke.

She glanced self-consciously in Turner’s direction, and he took the hint and left. He had a pair of boots that needed cleaning before they were ruined, anyway.

But as he bent over the boots with the garden hose, he could hear her voice drifting out the window.

“Oh, little love, close your eyes,

Think of sun and wide blue skies,

Deer playing and grass swaying,

Coyotes at the moon baying...”

After a few minutes the singing stopped. He realized he had stood there, frozen, not paying the least bit of attention to his boots.

She came out the back door a moment later. “He went right to sleep.”

“How do you do that? Just make up rhymes to music like that?”

“I don’t know. It just comes to me. I’m sorry about your boots.”

“They’ve seen worse.”

“What could be worse?” she asked, crinkling up her nose.

He decided to be a gentleman and not describe to her in generous detail the afterbirth of a cow.

“Should we call a doctor?” she asked. “Maybe just run Nicky’s symptoms by him?”

“We’ll wait and see. I don’t think it’s much. Could be too much heat. Maybe he’s carsick. I think the temperature will come right down now.”

“You handle a crisis very well.”

He snorted. “This is a long way from a crisis. But when you do have a crisis, you don’t have any choice when you’re this far from anything.”

She hugged herself and looked out over the land. “I think this is right in the middle of everything.”

Sure you do, honey. “Until the first time you crave pizza at two in the morning.”

“Pizza is easy to make.”

“It is?” he said with reluctant respect.

“Oh, sure. A little bread dough and tomato sauce, pepperoni, and fresh green peppers.”

“Fresh. There you have it. What we don’t have.”

“I can eat it without,” she said absently. “You could grow a garden, couldn’t you?”

He shot a guilty look at the dead flowers in the box under the bedroom window.

She followed his gaze. “Oh. Did you plant those?”

“Not hardly,” he said a trifle defensively. Did he look like the kind of man who planted pansies?

Something tightened in her face, and he could read the whole story of what she thought had happened there. He’d had a brief fling with a woman who thought she was staying and had planted flowers. He’d gotten rid of her and not even bothered to water the plants.

Actually, his sister had planted the flowers in one of those periodic attempts she made to spiff his place up. He’d watered them meticulously for a week or so. And then he’d gotten contracts to put thirty days’ training on six horses, plus he’d acquired that renegade, leopard-spotted Appy mare who only had murder—his—on her mind.

He decided, stubbornly, not to tell his uninvited guest those few facts, even if they might have redeemed his hardened soul somewhat in her eyes.

If she was silly enough to think he was some kind of playboy, let her think it. It might keep her from getting any damn fool notions.

That kid was going to be here for a day or two, and she wasn’t leaving without him tucked in his little seat in the back of her little car.

“Poppy, is it?” Perhaps that would explain a sensitivity to perished flowers.