The Rancher's Christmas Promise

But the cop wasn’t listening to Grant. She was looking at Ryder with an earnest expression. “You aren’t just a guy in a picture. You’re our best hope for preventing the child we believe is Grant’s niece from being adopted by strangers.”

That’s when Ryder saw that she’d reached out to clasp Grant’s hand, their fingers entwined. So, she had a dog in this race.

He thought about pointing out that he was a stranger to them, too, no matter whatsort of guy Grant had deemed Ryder to be. “And if I cooperated and the test confirms I’m not this baby’s father, you still wouldn’t have proof that Daisy is—” dammit “—was the baby’s mother.”

“If the test is positive, then we know she was,” Ray said. “Without your cooperation, the proof of Karen’s maternity is circumstantial. We admit that. But you were her husband. There’s no putative father. If you even suspected she’d become pregnant during your marriage, your very existence is enough to establish legal paternity, DNA proof or not.”

The cop looked even more earnest. “And the court can’t proceed with an adoption set in motion by Layla’s abandonment.”

The name startled him. “Layla!”

The three stared at him with varying degrees of surprise and expectation.

“Layla was my mother’s name.” His voice sounded gruff, even to his own ears. Whatever it was that Daisy had done with her child, using that name was a sure way of making sure he’d get involved. After only a few months together, she’d learned enough about him to know that.

He exhaled roughly. Slapped his leather gloves together. Then he stepped out of the way so he wasn’t blocking them from the rest of his home. “You’d better come inside and sit.” He felt weary all of a sudden. As if everything he’d accomplished in his thirty-four years was for nothing. What was that song? “There Goes My Life.”

“I expect this is gonna take a while to work out.” He glanced at the disheveled room, with its leather couch and oversize, wall-mounted television. That’s what happened when a man spent more time tending cows than he did anything else. He’d even tended some of them in this very room.

Fortunately, his aunt Adelaide would never need to know.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess, though.”

Chapter One (#u6f77f426-278a-59ec-b803-b508f02132bf)

Five months later.

The August heat was unbearable.

The forecasters kept saying the end of the heat wave was near, but Greer Templeton had lost faith in them. She twisted in her seat, trying to find the right position that allowed her to feel the cold air from the car vents on more than two square inches of her body. It wasn’t as if she could pull up her skirt so the air could blow straight up her thighs or pull down her blouse so the air could get at the rest of her.

She’d tried that once, only to find herself the object of interest of a leering truck driver with a clear view down into her car. If she’d never seen or heard from the truck driver again, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, she’d had the displeasure of serving as the driver’s public defender not two days later when he was charged with littering.

“I hate August!” she yelled, utterly frustrated.

Nobody heard.

The other vehicles crawling along the narrow, curving stretch of highway between Weaver—where she’d just come from a frustrating visit with a new client in jail—and Braden all had their windows closed against the oppressive heat, the same way she did.

It was thirty miles, give or take, between Braden and Weaver, and she drove it several times every week. Sometimes more than once in a single day. She knew the highway like the back of her hand. Where the infrequent passing zones were, where the dips filled with ice in the winter and where the shoulder was treacherous. She knew that mile marker 12 had the best view into Braden and mile marker 3 was the spot you were most likely to get a speeding ticket.

The worst, though, was grinding up and down the hills, going around the curves at a crawl because she was stuck behind a too-wide truck hogging the roadway with a too-tall load of hay.

Impatience raged inside her and she pushed her fingers against one of the car vents, feeling the air blast against her palm. It didn’t provide much relief, because it was barely cool.

Probably because her car was close to overheating, she realized.

Even as she turned off the AC and rolled down the windows, a cloud billowed from beneath the front hood of her car.

She wanted to scream.

Instead, she coasted onto the weedy shoulder. It was barely wide enough.

The car behind her laid on its horn as it swerved around her.

“I hate August!” she yelled after it while her vehicle burped out steam into the already-miserable air.

So much for getting to Maddie’s surprise baby shower early.

Ali was never going to forgive Greer. Unlike their sister, Maddie, the soul of patience she was not. Just that morning Ali had called to remind Greer of her tasks where the shower was concerned. It had been the fifth such call in as many days.

Marrying Grant hadn’t softened Ali’s annoying side at all.

Greer wasn’t going to chance exiting through the driver’s side because of the traffic, so she hitched up her skirt enough to climb over the console and out the passenger-side door.

In just the few minutes it took to get out of the car and open up the hood, Greer’s silk blouse was glued to her skin by the perspiration sliding down her spine.

The engine had stopped spewing steam. But despite her father’s best efforts to teach the triplets the fundamentals of car care when she and her sisters were growing up, what lived beneath the hood of Greer’s car was still a mystery.

She knew from experience there was no point in checking her cell phone for a signal. There were about four points on the thirty-mile stretch where a signal reliably reached, and this spot wasn’t one of them. If a Good Samaritan didn’t happen to stop, she knew the schedules of both the Braden Police Department and the Weaver Sheriff’s Department. Even if her disabled vehicle wasn’t reported by someone passing by, officers from one or the other agency routinely traveled the roadway even on a hot August Saturday. She didn’t expect it would be too long before she had some help.

She popped the trunk a few inches so the heat wouldn’t build up any more than it already had and left the windows down. Then she walked along the shoulder until she reached an outcrop of rock that afforded a little shade from the sun and toed off her shoes, not even caring that she was probably ruining her silk blouse by leaning against the jagged stone.

Sorry, Ali.

* * *

Ryder saw the slender figure in white before he saw the car. It almost made him do a double take, the way sailors did when they spotted a mermaid sunning herself on a rock. A second look reassured him that lack of sleep hadn’t caused him to start hallucinating.

Not yet, anyway.

She was on the opposite side of the road, and there was no place for him to pull his rig around to get to her. So he kept on driving until he reached his original destination—the turnoff to the Diamond-L. As soon as he did, he turned around and pulled back out onto the highway to head back to her.

It was only a matter of fifteen minutes.

The disabled foreign car was still sitting there, like a strange out-of-place insect among the pickup trucks rumbling by every few minutes. He parked behind it, but let his engine idle and kept the air-conditioning on. He propped his arm over the steering column and thumbed back his hat as he studied the woman.

She’d noticed him and was picking her way through the rough weeds back toward her car.

He’d recognized her easily enough.

Greer Templeton. One of the identical triplets who’d turned his life upside down. Starting with the cop, Ali, who’d come to his door five months ago.

It wasn’t entirely their fault.

They weren’t responsible for abandoning Layla. That was his late wife.

Now Layla was going through nannies like there was a revolving door on the nursery. Currently, the role was filled by Tina Lewis. She’d lasted two weeks but was already making dissatisfied noises.