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Shayla was beginning to hear the word now in her sleep.
If her choice was to either keep him for weeks or take him to his uncle in Montana, she was going to Montana.
She had written down Maria’s directions carefully and phoned in to work to tell them the music would be a little late. It was the first time in two years she had missed a deadline, but she was writing the Halloween episode, so she was nearly a month in advance of production, anyway.
As soon as she had started packing, she’d realized she felt happy.
“I think I wanted to get away,” she murmured to herself, pressing down the accelerator just a little bit more. Seventy-two miles an hour. It was absolutely heady stuff.
Away from what?
Her job? It was true that after two years of writing the music for Poppy, her career was something less than challenging now. There were mornings she woke up and absolutely dreaded trying to think of a weather song, or a feelings song or any other kind of song that was going to be sung by adult actors dressed as puppets and furry animals...and clowns.
Which brought her to Barry Baxter. Bo-Bo the Clown on the show. Her beau-beau for the past year.
“You’re going where?” he’d yelped when she’d called him. “Montana? With that kid?”
She’d resented the way he’d said that, as if Nicky was a two-headed monster instead of a child. A bossy child, yes, but still barely a baby nonetheless.
“You don’t like kids, do you?” she’d asked with slow comprehension.
“It’s not that I don’t like them. I’m just surrounded by kid stuff all the time. The show, the kids who come on the show. I’m a man who wears a clown suit for a living. For Pete’s sake when I take it off, I want to be a grown-up. No kids. And especially not that one.”
“It’s going to be that one for weeks, unless I go to Montana.”
“Look, isn’t there a law or something? She can’t just dump her kid off there and expect you to deal with it.”
“Are you suggesting I call the police? On sweet little Maria?”
“She’s abandoned the kid.”
“She has not.”
Shayla sighed as she drove along. That was the real reason it felt so good to get away, she admitted to herself. She had a lot of thinking to do about herself and Barry.
Her mother thought she should marry him. So did Barry.
He was what her mother called a catch. Even though he was an actor, he had a steady job, and he was stable. He was also very good-looking, if just a trifle on the chubby side.
“You’re never going to meet anyone else,” her mother lamented. “You’re a recluse, sitting at home plunking away on that piano. He’s a nice boy. What’s wrong with him?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Shayla said desperately. “Is that a good reason to get married? Because there’s nothing wrong with the person?”
“Shayla, this is your mother speaking. You marry a man with a good heart. A provider. Forget all these schoolgirl romantic notions. Forget your heart beating faster and skyrockets. There’s nothing but pain in those things. I should know.”
Shayla’s mother and father had divorced years ago, a passion burned out quickly.
She had phoned to tell her mother she was going to Montana. How had the whole marriage issue come up?
“He doesn’t like kids, Mom.”
“There are worse things.”
“I like kids.”
“He loves you, Shayla. What more do you want?”
To love him back. She liked Barry. Her mother was right. She’d lived like a recluse until he’d come along. Now she had a charming companion to go to the movies with, to eat dinner with sometimes. They shared a certain creative bent that made them very compatible.
But marry him?
She didn’t even really like kissing him. Why couldn’t things just stay the same? Why did it have to move on? Why couldn’t they just enjoy going to movies and out for dinner together?
But if she truly wanted things to stay the same how could she explain the creeping discontent she felt in a lot of areas of her life? She should like writing Poppy. She should feel lucky to have a job doing something in her field. With the exception of Lillian Morehouse, who was playing with the Philharmonic, ninety percent of her graduating class had not gained employment in the music field. Mike Webster’s job in a record store didn’t count.
It was Montana that was doing this to her—awakening some restless spirit within her, calling to some part of her that was just a touch wild and reckless.
Her mother and Barry had mournfully watched her pack the car to go.
“I can’t believe you’re doing something so harebrained,” Barry had said.
Her mother had nodded vigorous agreement.
Well, she’d hardly been able to believe it herself, but now that she was doing it, it felt great! Perhaps there had been a harebrained side of her, hidden for many years, just dying to get out.
She slowed, approaching an intersection, and glanced at the mileage covered, according to her trip meter. She had passed the small community of Winnet and the even smaller one of Sand Springs. This was it.
The signs were right beside the road, just as Maria had told her they would be.
Provided by the 4-H Club, neat placards said who lived down the road—the family name followed by the number of miles down that road.
Shayla scanned the placards quickly. There it was. MacLeod. Thirty-seven miles down that road. It looked like his closest neighbor was seven miles from him.
The immenseness of the country struck her anew. She got out, looked around, stretched and felt it again. Free.
Nicky slept on. She quietly opened the back door and loosened his little plaid shirt, so painstakingly stitched by his mother. The heat coming off him startled her.
It was a warm day, though, one of those September days that still held the full heat of summer.
When she got back in the car she unrolled the passenger-side window, too, so that the breeze could blow on Nicky.
She reset her trip meter and turned down the gravel road, somehow feeling her whole life was ahead of her.
At mile thirty-seven there was a big-timbered gatepost that spanned a drive on the west side of the road. Hanging from the weathered center beam was a piece of driftwood with the name MacLeod burned deep into it. In this barren country, where only a few spindly deciduous trees grew in the draws, it must have taken quite a bit of effort to get those timbers.
She drove under the sign. She had expected to see a house, but instead it was another road, more narrow now, twisting and dipping over little rolls of land and through small coulees.
She had gone another five miles before she topped a rise in the undulating landscape and saw the buildings sprawled out in the draw below her.
She stopped the car and checked Nicky. He was still sleeping soundly, his cheeks, thankfully, felt cooler to her now.
She looked down at the buildings below her. It wasn’t much, really. A small square of a house, a barn that looked newer and more distinguished than the house, and a few scattered outbuildings.
A cloud of dust drew her eyes beyond the outbuildings to a corral. She shielded her eyes against the sun.
“Oh, my,” she whispered.
A man stood dead center in that corral, while a beautiful black horse galloped around him, kicking and bucking.
Even from a distance she could see he was the quintessential cowboy. Whipcord lean in his dust-covered jeans, denim shirt, a big-brimmed white cowboy hat shading him from the sun. She liked the way he was standing, loose-limbed and calm in the middle of all that ruckus, radiating an easy strength.
And then he took off the hat and wiped a careless sleeve over a sweating brow.
Even from a distance his features seemed even and clean, pleasing to the eye.
Her heart somersaulted, and again she used an expression she had never used until today.
“Love at first sight.”
She blushed at her own silliness.
The man was a stranger, glimpsed from a distance. He did make a decidedly romantic figure, but obviously Montana had had a strange effect on her senses—heightened and honed them to a dangerous sharpness.
If she had an ounce of sense, she would get back in her car and go down the road the way she’d come.
But then if she had an ounce of sense, as Barry and her mother had already told her, she wouldn’t be here in the first place.
She’d made a commitment to deliver Nicky to his uncle, and she would carry it through until the end.
She got back in her car and pointed it right toward those buildings.
The dust behind the car must have told him she was coming. As she pulled up to the house, he was in the yard, if not waiting for her, at least done working the horse for a moment.
He was sitting on the edge of a water barrel in front of his house, one foot anchoring him on the ground, a dipper in his hand. His hat was on the stoop beside him. His hair was thick, the rich color of melted chocolate. He took a slow swallow of water, watching her over the edge of the dipper.
When she drew to a halt, he saluted her mildly, hung the dipper from a nail on the wall, retrieved his hat and, tugging it down over his brow, stood and came toward the car.
For a minute she was absolutely frozen where she was.
He had the lean grace of a cowboy as he moved toward her, one-hundred-percent man.
Not that Barry wasn’t one-hundred-percent man, but it was a different kind of percentage.
He was smiling, a warm smile that showed beautiful teeth and crinkles around his eyes.
Eyes a color she had seen only once before. Last night Just before the sun had gone down, the sky had turned the most incredible shade of blue. Indigo, really.
And he was smiling at her, hypnotizing her with incredible indigo eyes.
She stumbled out of the car.
“Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
She commanded herself to look way up at him, break the spell of those eyes, but she absolutely couldn’t. He was stunning.
She was suddenly aware how rumpled she must look after two days on the road. She wished she’d thought to comb her hair when she’d paused up there on the knoll—applied a little lipstick. And mascara. Eye shadow. Hair dye.
Anything so that it wasn’t plain-Jane Shayla Morrison standing there with the most spectacular man she had ever seen.
“Are you lost?” he asked, his eyes flicking from her to the car, resting for a moment, warmly, on the little bundle snoozing in the back seat.
She was lost all right, and she’d better pull out before she went any farther into the depths of those astounding eyes.
“I’ve brought you your nephew,” she blurted out.
Even before she registered the surprise in his features it occurred to her something was wrong. He should have been expecting her.
“His mother said you would be expecting me.” Her voice trembled. She’d come so far. How on earth could this be happening? She suddenly felt exhausted and confused.
Her mother and Barry had been right. What a harebrained thing to do. Now what was she going to do?
“You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, ma’am. It’s easy enough to do in this country. I don’t have a nephew. One niece.”
His voice was slow and easy, deep and wonderful. How could he say a word as proper as ma‘am and make her feel as if he’d said something deliciously indecent? How could he say something that made her feel deliciously indecent and reassured at the same time?
He didn’t have a nephew, but it was just a wrong turn.
“Wrong turn,” she stammered. “Of course, you must be right. I must have—” she thought of the big sign over the front gate “—I must have found the wrong MacLeod. Is there another one?” She felt flustered as the amusement leaped in his eyes.
“Lots of MacLeods in this country. Which one are you looking for?”
Nicky suddenly let loose a holler from the backseat, like a cat with its toenail caught in the screen door.
“Turner,” she said, pivoting from him, bending into the car to release the belt on the car seat. “I’m looking for Turner MacLeod.”
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.
