Snowed in at the Ranch

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It smells good.”

She could tell it was not easy for him to accept her offer, but obviously, like her, he knew he had to just try and make the best of an awkward situation.

He went by her, and his scent overrode that of the potpie in the oven. He smelled of wet oilskin, wild horses, pure man, and his aroma enveloped her. And then he was gone. Amy waited until she heard a door down the hallway snap shut before she went and sank down on her knees beside her baby. She was aware her knees were trembling.

The wrong house?

Her clothes, her partially unpacked suitcase, were spread out on Ty Halliday’s bed!

It all seemed as if it might be a terrible omen. She had set out on the road this morning to a brand-new life.

She had not listened to the objections of her family or her in-laws.

She was done with the stuffiness of it all. She was done with being stifled. Lectured. Patronized.

This morning, she had felt joy unfurl in her for the first time in a long time. Amy had followed her heart instead of her head.

But where had it led her?

Amy tried to still the trembling of her knees and her heart by picking up Jamey and settling him on her lap.

“Papa?” he asked, a plaintive whisper, his eyes glued to the place where Ty Halliday had disappeared down the hallway.

“No, sweetie, not Papa.” There was no sense telling Jamey, yet again, there was no papa. In all his nearly a year of wisdom, even though his father had been gone for longer than he had been in Jamey’s life, Jamey had become determined to have what his little pals at play school had—a daddy.

“Papa,” Jamey insisted, leaning back into her and putting his thumb in his mouth.

Amy heard the shower turn on in another part of the house and was horrified to feel a heated blush move up her cheeks.

Good grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.

She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!

She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.

Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.

Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”

But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.

Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?

Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?

Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?

The answer was no.

But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.

Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.

Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.

And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.

Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.

She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.

“Just like its owner,” she muttered.

“Papa,” Jamey supplied.

“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.

“Don’t call him that, sweetie. He’s not your papa.”

“Umpa?”

“No, not your grandpa, either. Call him—” The oven made another noise, and she went and opened the door and peered in. The burner was red-hot and making a hissing sound.

“Oh, damn,” she said, and turned it back down.

“Odam,” Jamey repeated.

“Sure,” she said distractedly, “call him that.”

The oven looked after, and papa renamed something Jamey could pronounce, Amy turned to the salad.

In every place in the world where her family had moved to, Amy, to her career-oriented mother’s bewilderment, had always found sanctuary in the kitchen. She loved to cook.

As she was ripping and washing lettuce, she heard the water shut off in the bathroom and had a renegade thought about naked wet skin and steam.

And then, as if her thoughts were too hot to handle, the smoke alarm started to shriek.

She turned from the sink to see smoke was roiling out of the oven.

Jamey, startled, began to wail along with the smoke alarm.

Amy donned the red oven mitt with the hole burned right through it, and opened the oven door a crack. Just as she had suspected, the potpie had boiled over onto the burner.

She shut the oven off and slammed the door. She opened the kitchen window, and picked up her howling baby.

“Hey. Hey, little man, it’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. Because just then, through the haze of smoke that filled the kitchen, Ty appeared.