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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.
She looked baffled.
“Your name?”
“Good grief, no. Shayla. Shayla Morrison.”
He thought Poppy was a somewhat more sensible name, even if it didn’t suit her. Shayla was an exotic name, which for some ridiculous reason made him wonder about her underwear again. Frills. He’d bet his last buck on that one. Come to that, he’d probably bet his soul for one little peek, so he’d better get himself out of harm’s way and quick.
“Miss Morrison—”
“Shayla, please.”
“Shayla, I’ve got some chores to do, so you’ve got the place to yourself if you want to have a bath or shower. I’ll pull out the sofa bed for the night.”
“I can’t stay here!”
“Well, you sure as hell can’t leave. That kid isn’t going anywhere, and you’re not going anywhere without him.”
She mulled that over. “And the nearest motel?”
“Care to guess?”
“Close to the pharmacy and hospital?”
“Right around the comer.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“An irritating habit I have.”
She smiled, and it was a nice smile that showed small white teeth and lit up a light inside her eyes, making him realize he’d been wrong about one thing. Because she was downright beautiful when she did that.
The smile disappeared, and she gnawed on her bottom lip thoughtfully. “I don’t know what I’m going to do—”
“I think you’re going to have to stick around. For a day or two. I’ll see if I can track down Maria and find out what’s going on.”
“Track her down? But—”
“She used to have some family in these parts.” Family, he remembered, who lived in a frightful little shack with a car corpse or two in the yard. Part of the reason he’d decided she was completely unsuitable for his brother.
MacLeod, he told himself, you’re a real SOB.
“I’m sure she’s planning to call you,” Shayla said. “I can stay the night, but—”
“You can’t leave him here. You either have to stay or take him with you when you go. He strikes me as a tough little tyke, but his Mom’s gone, and I think he’d be scared to death if you dropped him here with a complete stranger.”
The depth of his caring for the little boy took him slightly aback.
“I think you’re right,” she said, apparently as surprised by his sensitivity as he himself was.
“Are you rushing back to a job or a boyfriend or something?”
“Not really. I can do my job anywhere.”
“What job is that?” No mention of a boyfriend? Why did that make his stupid heart skip a beat?
“I write songs for a children’s show.”
“That explains it. The songs you pull out of the air.” For some reason her offbeat job made her seem appealing.
Then again after three years without so much as a kiss, he’d probably see appeal in just about anyone, up to and including Ma Baker who ran a pretty good café in Jordan—and was two hundred and thirteen pounds, and damn proud of every one of them.
And now he’d gone and encouraged her to stay. Sleep in his bed. Take a shower. She’d get out all rosy and smelling of sweetness and soap—
And he’d work himself into the ground until well after dark, come in, hit the sack and fall into a deep, dreamless and exhausted sleep. He could manage that for a day or two. Actually it wouldn’t be that different from his regular routine.
