A Cold Creek Baby

She refused to think about the bitter irony of that. “You keep everything else from us. Why not this, too?”

Anger briefly broke through the exhaustion and flickered in his hot cocoa eyes. “She’s not mine.”

“Then where did she come from and what are you doing with her?”

His mouth pursed. “That is a really long and complicated story.”

She said nothing, just waited for him to expound. That was a trick she had learned long ago from her Aunt Jo, who had always been eerily effective at letting her foster children dig their own graves with their words.

Cisco apparently wasn’t immune to the technique. After a moment he released a heavy breath. “Her parents were friends of mine. Her father was killed right before she was born and her mother died last week. Belle’s paternal aunt lives in Boise. Before she died, her mother begged me to bring her to the States to her family. Only problem is, the aunt’s not available to take her for a couple of days.”

She could find enough holes in his story for her to drive her shiny new Kubota through, but he was literally swaying on his feet. She had a feeling that meager information was all she would be able to squeeze out of him for now.

She really didn’t want him here. Most days, she liked to think she was strong and capable, in full control of her little world here. Cisco only had to walk back through the door to dredge up all those feelings she worked so hard to fight back the rest of the time. She would have liked to tell him to find a hotel room somewhere, but she couldn’t. Winder Ranch was as much his home as hers, even if he seemed to want to forget that.

“We can talk about this after you have a chance for some rest,” she said. “Let me run up and put fresh sheets on your bed. Tess and Quinn have turned Brant’s old room into a guest nursery for Little Joe when they visit and Abby uses it when she naps. Isabella should be able to stay in the crib there.”

“You don’t have to make the bed. I can take care of it. And right now I’m so tired, I would stretch out right here on the tile floor of the kitchen if I had half a chance.”

“I know where everything is and you know you’ll sleep better on clean sheets. Just relax for a few minutes while I take care of it, if you can stay awake that long.”

“Thanks, East.”

He gave her a guarded smile that didn’t reach his eyes and she hated all over again the awkwardness between them, the tension that always seemed to hum between them like a tightly strung electric fence.

Nothing she could do about that now. She had lived with it for the last five years, since her uncle’s death and the events surrounding it. She could live with it for a few more days in order to provide Cisco and the baby a place to crash.

She took a moment to take off her nightgown and robe and throw on a pair of Wrangler and a T-shirt, then brushed her teeth and pulled her hair into a quick braid before she headed for his old room.

Her Aunt Jo and Uncle Guff hadn’t had the dozen children they had dreamed about to fill all the bedrooms of the old ranch house, so they had instead taken in troubled boys. Cisco hadn’t been the first or the last, but the three of them—Quinn Southerland, Brant Western and Cisco—had been closer than real brothers. Their rooms had always been kept at the ready for their visits home.

She purposely didn’t come into Cisco’s room often. She paid a young mother in town to come in once a month to keep the worst of the dust at bay throughout the house, which allowed her to leave his space largely untouched.

The room wasn’t much different than it had been when he lived here with her aunt and uncle. Plaid curtains in dark greens and blues, a utilitarian chest of drawers, a desk and chair, a full-size bed with the log frame her father and Guff had made.

It was nothing luxurious, just good-quality furnishings in a comfortable space. How must it have appeared to him when he showed up, the orphaned child of migrant farmworkers who had moved him from town to town with them according to the harvest?

She had a vivid memory of the day he arrived. She had been just a kid. Nine, maybe. Her parents had been alive then and she had lived in the foreman’s house just down the drive toward the canyon road. She had been sitting on the horse pasture fence rail watching Brant and Quinn work a new colt under Jo’s supervision waiting for Guff. She remembered how her heart had leaped when Guff pulled up in the old pickup he kept scrupulously clean. He wasn’t alone. A moment later, the passenger side opened and out stepped a dark-haired Latino boy in faded Levi’s that were a couple inches too short and a thin T-shirt in worse shape than the rags her mother used to wash the windows.

They had known he was coming. Jo had told them all about the kid who had been found a week or two earlier living in a tent by himself in the mountains, where he’d hidden away from authorities after his father’s death in a farm accident.

While she knew Brant and Quinn were a bit apprehensive about a new arrival, Easton was excited to add another honorary brother to her growing collection.

She remembered sliding down from the fence rail and walking with Jo toward Uncle Guff’s pickup truck, vaguely aware Brant and Quinn had followed.

Guff had come around the truck and placed a protective arm around Cisco’s narrow shoulders. For a moment, Easton’s heart had squeezed inside her chest at the expression in his eyes—lost and grief-stricken and frightened.

But then he suddenly gave a cocky grin that encompassed all of them. And she fell in love.

She still didn’t know whether it was that quick glimpse of vulnerability in his eyes or his valiant attempts to hide it, but she vowed that night to herself that she would love Cisco del Norte forever.

Easton snapped one corner of a clean fitted sheet over the mattress. What kind of idiotic female holds to a vow she made when she was nine flipping years old? Twenty years later, she still couldn’t get over the man.

She had been telling herself for years that this tangled morass of emotions wasn’t love. She had tried to talk herself out of it—or more accurately into letting herself love someone else. It was only a girlhood crush, something most sane women put away when they reached an age of reason, for crying out loud.

Yes, they had a history together. She drew a shaky breath and tucked in the bottom sheet, her mind drifting back five years to that surreal, painful time.

Plenty of people with difficult histories were able to move on. She was trying. She was even dating again, something she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do with any serious intent since the summer night after her Uncle Guff died, when everything changed.

For the past month, she had been dating the Pine Gulch police chief. On paper, Trace Bowman was everything she wanted. He was great-looking, he was funny, he adored his own family who had a ranch on the other side of town.

She was trying as hard as she could to let her fondness for him grow into something more. She wanted a husband, a family. Seeing Quinn and Tess together with their darling little boy and now Brant and Mimi and Abigail only intensified that ache to watch a child of her own grow and learn, to have someone else in this big rambling house to fill all the empty spaces.

She loved the ranch and found great joy in the hard work needed to make it a success. But she was ready for something more, something she knew she would never be able to find while she was hung up on Cisco del Norte.

She knew darn well she needed to move on. It was long past time. But every time she thought she was on her way, he showed up with that tired, cocky grin and those secrets in his dark eyes and she tumbled head over heels again.

Not this time. She pulled the thick Star of David quilt she, her mother and Jo had worked on the summer after Cisco came. She looked at the kaleidoscope of colors, the vivid blues and bright purples and greens. She could still see where her stitches had been crooked, amateurish compared to her mother’s and Jo’s.

She smoothed a hand over the stitches, remembering the time with two strong, wonderful women. After a moment, she tucked the edges in at the bottom.

She wanted to be tough like her mother and her Aunt Jo, to just forget him and move on. She almost thought she would have an easier time of it if he would only settle down somewhere instead of wandering from country to country in Latin America, doing heaven knows what.

If he ever stopped running, maybe she could relax a little, but she was never free from worrying about him. In all these years, he obviously hadn’t managed to find whatever he’d been looking for or he would have given up that life long ago.

And when he was tired of wandering, he would come back to the ranch for a few days or a week, dredging up all these feelings again.

She wished she could just tell him to stay away until she got her head on straight. But how could she? Winder Ranch was his home, the first and only really secure haven he had ever known.

As much as her heart cried out for him to give her a little peace and leave her alone, she couldn’t deprive him of that connection.

She couldn’t turn him away, but she could control how deeply she allowed her heart to become entangled with him. This time things would be different.

She couldn’t lose all the progress she had made to fall out of love with him. This time she wasn’t going to let those feelings suck her back down again. She needed to move on with her life, to accept that, like that mountain lion she had seen prowling the edge of her property a few days earlier, Cisco del Norte would always be a wild, roving creature she couldn’t contain.

Chapter Two

He shouldn’t have come here.

Cisco sat at the kitchen table in the Winder Ranch kitchen, fighting his way through the strange and twisted mix of guilt and regret and pain tempered by the sweet peace that always seemed to engulf him whenever he drove through the gates.

He was so damned tired and the raw, gaping hole just under his left rib cage tugged and burned like a son of a bitch.

Like he’d told Easton, he wanted to just lie down right here in the middle of the kitchen floor and sleep for a week or two.

Belle banged her sippy cup on the tray of the high chair Easton had pulled from the utility room off the kitchen. “For Joey and Abs,” she had informed him before she took off upstairs to do whatever she was doing with the bedrooms.

He shouldn’t have come here, but he had spoken the truth to her earlier. He hadn’t known what else to do, where else to go.