Claim Me, Cowboy

“Don’t test me, Ms. Kelly,” she said, in what he assumed was supposed to be a facsimile of his voice.

“Really?” he asked.

“What? You can’t honestly expect to operate at this level of extreme douchiness and not get called to the carpet on it.”

“I expect that I can do whatever I want, since I’m paying you to be here.”

“You don’t want me to dress up as a teddy bear and vacuum, do you?”

“What?”

She shifted her weight, moving the baby over to one hip and spreading the other arm wide. “Hey, man, some people are into that. They like stuffed animals. Or rather, they like people dressed as stuffed animals.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s a relief.”

“I like women,” he said. “Dressed as women. Or rather, undressed, generally.”

“I’m not judging. Your dad put an ad in the paper for some reason. Clearly he really wants you to be married.”

“Yes. Well, he doesn’t understand that not everybody needs to live the life that he does. He was happy with a family and a farmhouse. But none of the rest of us feel that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“So none of you are married?”

“One of us is. The only brother that actually wanted a farmhouse too.” He paused in front of the door at the end of the hall. He was glad he had decided to set this room aside for the woman who answered the ad. He hadn’t known she would come with a baby in tow, but the fact that she had meant he really, really wanted her out of earshot.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, pushing the door open.

When she looked inside the bedroom, her jaw dropped, and Joshua couldn’t deny that he took a small amount of satisfaction in her reaction. She looked... Well, she looked amazed. Like somebody standing in front of a great work of art. Except it was just a bedroom. Rather a grand one, he had to admit, down to the details.

There was a large bed fashioned out of natural, twisted pieces of wood with polished support beams that ran from floor to ceiling and retained the natural shape they’d had in the woods but glowed from the stain that had been applied to them. The bed made the whole room look like a magical forest. A little bit fanciful for him. His own bedroom had been left more Spartan. But, clearly, Danielle was enchanted.

And he shouldn’t care.

“I’ve definitely lived in apartments that were smaller than this room,” she said, wrapping both arms around the baby and turning in a circle. “This is... Is that a loft? Like a reading loft?” She was gazing up at the mezzanine designed to look as though it was nestled in the tree branches.

“I don’t know.” He figured it was probably more of a sex loft. But then, if he slept in a room with a loft, obviously he would have sex in it. That was what creative surfaces were for, in his opinion.

“It reminds me of something we had when I was in first grade.” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “I mean, not me as in at our house, but in my first-grade classroom at school. The teacher really loved books. And she liked for us all to read. So we were able to lie around the classroom anywhere we wanted with a book and—” She abruptly stopped talking, as though she realized exactly what she was doing. “Never mind. You think it’s boring. Anyway, I’m going to use it for a reading loft.”

“Dress like a teddy bear in it, for all I care,” he responded.

“That’s your thing, not mine.”

“Do you have any bags in the car that I can get for you?”

She looked genuinely stunned. “You don’t have to get anything for me.”

It struck him that she thought he was being nice. He didn’t consider the offer particularly nice. It was just what his father had drilled into him from the time he was a boy. If there was a woman and she had a heavy thing to transport, you were no kind of man if you didn’t offer to do the transporting.

“I don’t mind.”

“It’s just one bag,” she said.

That shocked him. She was a woman. A woman with a baby. He was pretty sure most mothers traveled with enough luggage to fill a caravan. “Just one bag.” He had to confirm that.

“Yes,” she returned. “Baggage is another thing entirely. But in terms of bags, yeah, we travel light.”

“Let me get it.” He turned and walked out of the room, frustrated when he heard her footsteps behind him. “I said I would get it.”

“You don’t need to,” she said, following him persistently down the stairs and out toward the front door.

“My car is locked,” she added, and he ignored her as he continued to walk across the driveway to the maroon monstrosity parked there.

He shot her a sideways glance, then looked down at the car door. It hung a little bit crooked, and he lifted up on it hard enough to push it straight, then he jerked it open. “Not well.”

“You’re the worst,” she said, scowling.

He reached into the back seat and saw one threadbare duffel bag, which had to be the bag she was talking about. The fabric strap was dingy, and he had a feeling it used to be powder blue. The zipper was broken and there were four safety pins holding the end of the bulging bag together. All in all, it looked completely impractical.

“Empty all the contents out of this tonight. In the morning, I’m going to use it to fuel a bonfire.”

“It’s the only bag I have.”

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“It better be in addition to the fee that I’m getting,” she said, her expression stubborn. “I mean it. If I incur a loss because of you, you better cover it.”

“You have my word that if anything needs to be purchased in order for you to fit in with your surroundings, or in order for me to avoid contracting scabies, it will be bankrolled by me.”

“I don’t have scabies,” she said, looking fierce.

“I didn’t say you did. I implied that your gym bag might.”

“Well,” she said, her cheeks turning red, “it doesn’t. It’s clean. I’m clean.”

He heaved the bag over his shoulder and led the way back to the house, Danielle trailing behind him like an angry wood nymph. That was what she reminded him of, he decided. All pointed angles and spiky intensity. And a supernaturally wicked glare that he could feel boring into the center of his back. Right between his shoulder blades.

This was not a woman who intimidated easily, if at all.

He supposed that was signal enough that he should make an attempt to handle her with care. Not because she needed it, but because clearly nobody had ever made the attempt before. But he didn’t know how. And he was paying her an awful lot to put up with him as he was.

And she had brought a baby into his house.

“You’re going to need some supplies,” he said, frowning. Because he abruptly realized what it meant that she had brought a baby into his house. The bedroom he had installed her in was only meant for one. And there was no way—barring the unlikely reality that she was related to Mary Poppins in some way—that her ratty old bag contained the supplies required to keep both a baby and herself in the kind of comfort that normal human beings expected.