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

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.