One Man and a Baby

“I am the top! I own this farm.”

“Let’s get something straight. Your dad owns the farm or I wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be putting up with me.”

Toby Ford walked into the office, carrying the morning paper and a cup of store-bought coffee, and wearing a flat tweed cap that made him look like the epitome of the English gentleman that he was. Though he was close to forty, his boyish face and rakish charm reminded Ashley of someone her own age.

“Morning, Miz Meljac,” he said, taking off his hat, and not meeting her gaze. From his awkwardness Ashley guessed Toby was the first person Rick had told about her nightgown, and the place she’d have to start with damage control.

She straightened her shoulders. “No need to be so formal, Toby, since it’s clear you probably know more about me this morning than you knew this time yesterday.”

Toby peeked at her. “Excuse me?”

“Oh come on, now. If we’re all going to work together, we might as well be honest.”

“About what?” Toby’s eyes widened.

Ashley glanced from Toby to Rick, who was smirking, and then back to Toby again. “He didn’t tell you anything…about…well, this morning?”

“I just got here,” Toby replied at the same time that Rick said, “A gentleman doesn’t tell what he sees in a lady’s bedroom.”

Ashley’s eyes narrowed.

This time when she spoke she had to ungrit her teeth. “Mr. Capriotti felt it was okay to come into my bedroom to wake me this morning.”

Leaning back on the old-fashioned wooden office chair that sat behind the gunmetal-gray desk, Rick linked his hands behind his neck. “Let me ask you something, Toby. If you had a laborer who wasn’t on time for work, what would you do?”

Toby shrugged. “Fire him.”

“My point exactly.” Rick turned his gaze on Ashley. “So you had a choice, sunshine. Get your butt down to this barn or get fired. Since I suspected you didn’t know that rule, I did you a favor by waking you.”

He rose. “Let’s go get you set up to do some mucking.”

“Mucking?” Toby gasped.

“Sure.” Rick smiled at Toby. “Isn’t that how you started most hands when they came to that big farm you ran in England?”

“Well, yes.”

“But I’m not really starting here,” Ashley said, turning her smile on Toby. “Right, Toby? I’ve been around my whole life.”

“Yet, you’ve never mucked a stall,” Rick said.

She took a breath. “No. But I’m fairly certain I have the principle down pat.”

“You probably do,” Rick agreed. “But if you really want to become the boss over people who have been here for the decades you were only riding the horses they cared for, you have to let them see that you don’t think you’re better than they are. That you understand what it’s like to work.”

She held his gaze. More than anything else she wanted her workers’ respect. They would become like family to her, if only because they would be the people she spent the most time with. She needed what Rick was offering her. The chance to prove she believed they were all equal. Family.

He was right. She had to do this.

“Let’s go.”

Ashley wasn’t in the shower until six o’clock that night. The hot water that sluiced over her was like a soothing balm to muscles that ached from the strain of manual labor.

She pressed her face into the steady stream of hot water. Even her cheeks were tired. Her hair smelled like manure. Her legs were so overworked that her thighs quivered. Her hands had blisters.

She looked down and tears filled her eyes. Her hands had blisters. Real blisters. No matter how much she had enjoyed the camaraderie of the farmhands with whom she worked, she couldn’t muck stalls again tomorrow. Not unless she wanted to get blisters on top of her blisters and she did not. Somehow or another she had to get out of mucking tomorrow without giving the employees the impression she thought she was better than they were. Because if she couldn’t she might as well quit…

She squeezed her eyes shut and groaned. That was what Rick wanted. He wanted her to quit! It made sense that he would be trying to get her to give up before she was trained so that when her dad came home in February he’d be the only one in the running for her job.

With water sluicing over from her hair to her neck and aching shoulders, she realized that even if it wasn’t Rick’s intention to get her to quit, he would still win when her dad came home. If he kept her mucking stalls instead of involved in what she needed to learn, he would remain the better choice to run the farm when her dad’s fixation with sailing turned into full-blown retirement next summer. Because she knew it would. She’d already accepted that her dad had moved on. Officially retiring was just the next step. He might come home in February after this three-month sailing excursion, but when he did, she suspected it would only be to pick a replacement.

And that meant there was no way she could let Rick win.

She stepped out of the shower, toweled off, blew her hair dry and brushed her teeth. But instead of sliding into the pair of pink silk pajamas—long pants and a shirt in case Rick decided to wake her again—that she’d laid out on the bed, she marched to her dresser and grabbed a pair of jeans and a clean chambray shirt. She pulled on socks and boots and even got out one of her old cowboy hats, deciding that it couldn’t hurt to look the part of the job she wanted, then she ran downstairs and out the back door to her SUV.

It was only about a quarter mile to the guesthouse. On a day when her legs weren’t still rubbery from exertion, she probably would have walked. But in order to assure that she didn’t crumble on Rick’s doorstep, Ashley drove, pulling her SUV beside his extended cab pickup, then dragging herself up the three steps to the wood plank porch.

A screen door protected the open front door of the living room. The glow from one of the end table lamps provided enough light that she could see no one was on the floral sofa. There appeared to be a lot of “stuff” on the floor, but nobody around.

She glanced down the hall and noticed the kitchen light was on and decided somebody had to be inside. Mustering energy she absolutely didn’t have, she lifted her hand to the door and rapped twice.

No one answered.

“Rick?” she called through the open screen.

No answer.

She knew he was in there. Only an idiot left a house with so many lights on. She frowned. Or maybe he was on the back porch?

Not about to walk down the three porch steps, around the front of the house to the side and down the length of the house to get to the back porch on her shaky, achy legs, she opened the door, stepped into the living room and nearly tripped over a little chair.

She peered down at it and frowned. It looked like a baby seat of some sort. One of those carrier things? Maybe a car seat?

Confused, she stooped down to examine it more closely and two seconds later she heard the sound of feet pounding down the steps. She glanced up to see Rick frozen about midway on the staircase.

Their gazes caught and held. The shadow of beard on his chin and cheeks said he hadn’t yet had time to shave, but his clean jeans and shirt, and slicked-back wet hair said he’d showered.

“I thought this house was mine, for my use.”

Ashley took a breath and rose. “It is. I’m sorry. I saw the lights and assumed you were home.”

He finished his walk down the stairs. “If you’ve come here to tell me that you’re done playing farmhand,” he said, scooping up the chair Ashley was now positive was some sort of baby chair and tossing it behind the overstuffed green sofa in the corner of the room. “Then I’m okay with you just walking into my house. If not—”

“If not what?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “I seem to remember you coming straight into my bedroom this morning, without my permission, when there were no lights on…oh, and, in a house you don’t own.”

His face hardened. “You might own this one, princess, but you assigned it to me. It’s just like a rental. You can’t come in without my permission.”

“And you can’t come into my bedroom without my permission.”