Mail Order Cowboy

“Sorry. I guess tall is subjective.”

His scorching brown gaze moved over her, and for an instant she thought she was going to be singed alive. She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he simply turned. She moved to follow him, and he stopped to take the bag from her hand without asking if she wanted him to.

“You’re holding the baby,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, well, Lily doesn’t weigh fifty pounds, and I assume the suitcase does. Either way, I can handle both just fine.”

She had no trouble believing that. Still shamefully taking a visual tour of his muscles, she watched the way he maneuvered both baby and bag easily outside, to where his truck was parked against the curb. There was an old security guard standing right next to it, looking officious, like he was about to make a proclamation. Jackson zeroed that gaze onto the guard. “I’m leaving.”

“It’s for loading and unloading only,” the guard pointed out, tapping the sign with his forefinger to illustrate the point.

“And I’m loading,” Jackson returned, his voice and glare as hard as steel.

Well. He was a whole thing.

Savannah gave an apologetic wave and got into the passenger side of the truck. Jackson hefted her suitcase into the bed, and then opened up his door, gently installing Lily’s car seat in the small bench seat behind the driver side. Then, he got in and started the engine, pulling them both away from the airport.

“How was the flight?” he asked.

“Quick,” she responded. “It’s only a couple hours from Colorado.”

“It’s going to take half that time to Gold Valley,” he said. “Near enough.”

“So there’s no airport in Gold Valley.”

“Nothing beyond a tiny municipal airfield. Not for commercial flights.”

“I figured as much when you told me to fly into Tolowa.”

“Our ranch is a bit out of town. Hope that doesn’t bother you.”

“Who’s... I thought you were... I didn’t think Lily’s mother was in the picture.”

“She isn’t,” Jackson said. “But I live on a family spread with my brothers and my stepsister. Lily and I live in our own cabin, and you’ll stay there with us.”

The idea of living in a cabin, which sounded cozy to the point of being tiny, seemed almost impossible now that she had actually laid eyes on the man. He was so large. He would fill up so much...space. It was impossible that he wouldn’t.

She didn’t say that out loud, though, and hid any discomfort. She’d been looking for a change. Looking for a new job in child care, because that was what she did, and when she had run across the ad from Jackson it had seemed like a godsend. Because wherever she ultimately landed, this job would provide her with the means to get away. And she desperately needed to get away.

Living in a small community where her ex-husband was a hometown legend, where his family owned half of everything, was impossible. She’d been choking on the mile-high air in her old life. A clawing desperation to be anywhere else taking over her every thought, as her options in her little town had been eliminated little by little. But moving was expensive, and it required a hell of a lot more credit than she had at this point in her life. Everything being linked to Darren had been fine when she had assumed that it would be forever. But when her marriage collapsed, she’d been left with nothing.

Jackson’s ad seeking a live-in nanny had seemed perfect, and their back-and-forth conversation online had been effortless, making the decision to take the job even easier. But she hadn’t considered the stark reality of being in such close quarters with a stranger.

“What do you do on the ranch?” she asked. She was desperate to fill the silence. If she didn’t, she would be left with her thoughts, and her thoughts were perplexing her at this point.

“Cattle ranch,” he said. “We supply USDA-approved beef to a large distributor.”

“It keeps you pretty busy?”

He chuckled. “You could say that. In fact, I’d say my life was packed full before I found out I had a kid.”

He hadn’t given her the full story of why he was a single dad, but his choice of words just now was odd. She didn’t know if he was divorced, but it had been pretty clear based on the tone of his messages that there was no one else involved. Maybe his wife had died. But then, he hadn’t mentioned that. He hadn’t mentioned a woman at all. It was like...

Like he had just found a baby on his doorstep.

“I see,” she said, not really seeing all that clearly.

Neither of them said anything else for a while, and Savannah turned her focus to the scenery. It wasn’t completely unlike Colorado. Mountainous and full of pine trees. She liked that. She loved the mountains. Compared to the exceedingly tame neighborhood she’d grown up in on the East Coast, she really liked the way that things were out West. She hadn’t wanted to leave Colorado, per se. She had just needed to escape a town dominated by her ex, where he was still making choices about her life even when he wasn’t directly in it. The way he manipulated things in town...

She’d had to get out.

She had thought that Oregon might be a natural place to get to. It had either been that or Montana, maybe Wyoming. But Oregon was where the opportunity had arisen, and she was also attracted to the idea that she would be able to drive out to the beach. Something she hadn’t been able to do living in Colorado.

They drove through the small town of Gold Valley, all redbrick buildings and Wild West aesthetic, which burned a bright spot inside of her soul. Made her feel like—in spite of the initial awkwardness—she had made the right choice.

They continued on out of town, down a winding two-lane highway lined with thick trees, ferns and thickly carpeting the floor of the forest encroaching over the side, nearly to the road.

He was right, the ranch was quite a ways outside of the town itself, and if not for the two wooden posts holding up a sign over a narrow driveway that said Box R, she wouldn’t have known there was even a ranch there at all.

They turned onto that dirt road. The trees cleared and revealed pastures, several empty, and one with a herd of cattle, before the road narrowed and the pines thickened again. It was just remote enough, just isolated enough that a jolt of adrenaline shot through her. Maybe she’d been stupid to come out here. Maybe there was no cabin and she was just on a dirt highway to murder.

But then they came to the end of the drive and she saw a little cabin. It was rustic, and rough, but then, it was what she’d expected a cabin to be, she supposed. She sat there while he got out, watched as he tended to his daughter. As strange as it all was, the way that those large, battered hands cradled the tiny infant when he took her out of her car seat made her feel...

A whole jumble of things. Most of them centered down deep in the pit of her stomach.

“I’ll just get Lily laid down in her crib, and then I’ll show you to your room and get your things,” he said.

She nodded and watched as he walked up the steps to the front porch and disappeared inside the cabin.

She climbed out of the car. She supposed she could follow him in, but he hadn’t said to, so she just stood there out in the gravel drive, turning a half circle and looking around the isolated place. What in hell had she gotten herself into? She realized it didn’t much matter. She didn’t have anywhere to go back to. She had no real friends left to speak of, no family that wanted anything to do with her.

For better or for worse, this was the place from which she was starting over.

So she had to make it work.

At least for a while.

CHAPTER TWO (#u5424b4bb-6c4d-5d08-acd8-dcc5ad33fa1b)

PLAIN AND TALL.

Jackson played those words over and over in his head as he prepared his coffee and breakfast the next morning.

After he and Savannah had arrived at the cabin, he’d given her a quick rundown on Lily’s schedule and where everything was. He’d shown her to her room—which was across the house from his, and next to its own bathroom—and he’d told her not to worry about taking care of Lily that night, because while he was an ogre sometimes, he wasn’t enough of one to make her interrupt her sleep on a night when she’d been traveling all day.

She’d gone to bed early, early enough that he was pretty sure she was avoiding spending time in his company. Not that he minded. But he didn’t think she’d eaten at all. Which meant he was making up a double portion of bacon this morning.

He hoped she wasn’t a vegetarian, because everything was cooked in the bacon grease, and it was too late for him to do anything about that.