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

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.”