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

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He watched her go into the house, and he pulled on his newly cleaned boots.

He noticed the door to her car was still open and went to give it a shove before her battery died.

Her suitcase was still in the back seat.

He hesitated. He’d told her she’d have the place to herself, but all her clean clothes were out here. It wouldn’t hurt him to do the gentlemanly thing before he vamoosed down to the corral for a session with that hell-horse.

The one he wasn’t getting paid to work with, he reminded himself with a wry shake of his head.

He picked her suitcase out of the back seat.

It was old and battered, not like those Gucci bags of Celia’s.

He took the steps two at a time and went into the house. He was crossing the living room, when without warning the top flap flew open and her possessions scattered across his living room floor.

He said a word he generally didn’t say within hearing distance of women and children.

Who generally weren’t within hearing distance of him.

He bent and began to cram things back into the suitcase. He was trying hard not to look, but there wasn’t a scrap of lace or silk in the whole works.

Plain old white cotton.

What he felt for her at this moment was the oddest thing. A pretty little woman like that without one pretty little thing. He felt strangely sad for her.

Right from the start he’d known she was the kind of woman who should have silk and lace. He was pretty sure there was passion there, right below that calm surface—

“Oh!”

She had come down the hallway, and was standing there looking at him shoving her personal stuff back into her bag.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “The catch—”

“I know,” she said. “Broken.”

He glanced up at her. She was blushing. Well, unless he was mistaken, so was he.

She came quickly toward him. “Here. That’s all right. Let me.”

She squatted beside him. Her hand touched his in a frantic effort to get to a white unmentionable before he did.

Her skin was as soft as that silk he’d just been thinking of, and a jolt went through him like he’d been hit full-strength with a cattle prod.

He scrambled to his feet. “I’ve got horses to see to.”

“Would you like me to make dinner?”

Dinner. Dinner. “Sure. When you’re hungry. Help yourself.”

“I meant for you.”

“Dinner for me?” He gawked at her.

“I don’t mind. I certainly don’t expect you to cook for Nicky and me.”

“You won’t find anything much to make it with. I think I’ve got some tins of stew and wieners and beans. Frozen dinners in the freezer.”

She smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Now he wasn’t going to be able to hide in the barn until all the lights went off in the house. He was going to have to sit across from her and have dinner and think of things to say.

It had been a long time.

And suddenly he was looking forward to it.

In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. “You’ll find some red candles over there in that drawer.”

He turned abruptly on his heel and left her there neatly folding things back into her suitcase.

Lordy, he was in big trouble. Thank God he had horses waiting—one waiting to kill him.

And with any luck it would do precisely that before he ever found out how big the trouble really was that he was in.

Chapter Three

She was staying. In the home of a complete stranger. A dangerously attractive complete stranger. For one night and maybe two.

It was absurd. Crazy.

Why was she so happy about it?

Because her heart liked him. Her head didn’t. Her head was full of her mother’s voice telling her to beware. Reminding her Turner might be Nicky’s father, not his uncle.

But her heart held tight to the warmth she had seen in his gaze when he first looked at Nicky, to his lack of concern over the condition of his boots after Nicky’s unfortunate accident on them, and to his very real concern for a sick child.

That alone, she told herself, had earned him the pizza she was making him for supper.

His cupboards were quite well supplied with dry goods, though most of the good stuff was way at the back, behind the rows of canned stew, spaghetti and ravioli. She found tomato sauce and tiny tinned sausages and biscuit mix.

His fridge contained a six-pack of soda pop, a twenty-pound bag of apples, a ten-pound bag of carrots, some strange blue-green substance busily growing fur and two small blocks of cheese.

Not an onion or green pepper to be seen.

When everything was ready she set it on top of the oven. She’d wait until he came in.

She checked on Nicky, relieved that he was now cool and breathing easily.

She smiled at the spartan, tidy little room.

His world, Turner’s world, was obviously not within the confines of these four walls. His world was out there—the rough and rugged world she had first seem him in, standing in the center of a dusty corral as some half-wild horse lunged around him.

She lugged her traitorous suitcase down the hall and took a shower, berating herself for not having had the latch fixed and wishing she owned some frothy underwear.

It had been awful seeing his big tanned hands cramming her most personal things back into that suitcase.

Especially since her most personal things were so ordinary.

Everything she owned was ordinary, she thought, getting out of the shower and fishing through each item in her suitcase with a critical eye.

She finally settled for mossy green jeans and a matching cream-coloured flannel shirt with a faint green stripe. She tied her damp hair back with an elastic and made a face at herself in the smoky mirror. She wasn’t trying to make herself attractive for him, was she? She decided, perhaps a little more emphatically than necessary, that she was not. She was a guest in his home, and it was only decent that she make herself neat and presentable.

She had long ago accepted she was not one of those women who was ever going to turn a head as she walked down the street. Construction workers did not whistle at her. Teenage boys did not crane their necks or drive their bicycles into the backs of cars to get a better look.

She had neat and tidy features, ordinary really.

Her university days had been largely without the rush of romance. She’d been dedicated to her studies, and quite shy. She chose the study carrels at the library rather than the open tables. She had developed some very solid friendships with both sexes, but an actual relationship evaded her.

Her mother, who seemed to consider university a happy hunting ground for the unwed, found her lack of romantic involvement with some budding doctor or lawyer very discouraging.

Her mother’s distress had increased when Shayla found a job where she would be working mostly out of her own apartment rather than where she would be meeting people—make that “men”—of interest.

Did part of her actually delight in thwarting her mother’s plans for her?

Is that why her wardrobe was minus form-hugging shirts in siren red, or lace-trimmed blouses that would make her look wonderfully feminine and alluring?