Maybe, Baby

“Which I won’t be doing, since I don’t know how to do ranch work.”

The thought of ranch work—of disgusting things done to half-wild animals that outweighed a man by several hundred pounds, of incomprehensible chores involving tools and machinery that could mangle a body in innumerable ways, all accomplished in conditions reeking of manure and worse—made him draw a deep, calming breath.

Which was immediately followed by a second wave of dread. “You want me to walk into that stew of female biological processes and press a new mother for a business decision?”

Fitz nodded. “That just about sums it up, yeah.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re you.” Fitz gave him a reassuring grin. “The original ice man. Mr. Calm-Cool-and-Collected. And because Nora trusts you.”

“About that trust factor…” Burke dumped the remainder of his water down the tiny bar sink. “If I convince her to do this, will I be acting in her best interests?”

Fitz narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think I like the implications in that question.”

Burke met his friend’s glare with one of his own. “I didn’t think you would, but I thought it needed to be asked.”

“All right.” Fitz nodded. “Here’s another question loaded with uncomfortable implications. If you don’t push her to do this, will you be acting in your own best interests?”

Burke dropped his empty bottle in the dustbin. “Is my job at stake?”

“No, your job is secure.”

“Because of my association with you?”

Fitz’s silence was filled with implications.

“I think Greenberg resents that fact even more than my snotty Brit attitude.”

“You leave Greenberg to me.”

“I bloody well won’t.” Burke shoved his hands into his pockets before he was tempted to ram them into something else. “I know I wouldn’t have this job if I hadn’t started as your assistant. But I’ve got it now, and I intend to do it as well as I can. As well as you expect me to. As well as Greenberg thinks it should be done.”

“So,” said Fitz with a grin, “you’re going to Montana.”

“It appears I am.” Burke lifted a hand to settle his glasses over his nose. “God help me.”

CHAPTER TWO

NORA LOWERED her knitting needles to her lap with a mournful sigh. “It’s snowing again.”

Jenna twitched back one of the lace curtain panels draped in the deep, three-windowed bay in the second parlor of the Harrison family home. The beam of a lamp on the tea table at her side captured the silver threaded through her honey-gold hair and highlighted the tiny lines at the corners of her blue eyes as she peered at the view beyond the glass pane. Rolling pastureland, buried beneath several inches of snow, stretched to the timbered foothills of the Tobacco Root Mountains.

“So it is,” she said in her muted Texas twang.

“Burke isn’t used to driving in snow.”

“Doesn’t it snow in England?” Jenna turned her attention back to her own needlework project, a cross-stitch keepsake for one of the babies due in early summer. Her former daughter-in-law, Ellie, was expecting a baby a few weeks before her daughter, Maggie Hammond.

“Burke’s from London,” said Nora, though she didn’t know much more about his past than that. “I’m sure they don’t let the snow pile up in the streets there. And it’s getting late. And colder. And I don’t think he knows how to put on chains.”

Jenna knotted a strand of pink floss and snipped off the end. “You seem mighty anxious about Burke’s arrival.”

“That’s because I have a good idea why he’s coming.” And that idea, with its dark and complicated twists and turns, was enough to make her throat close up and her palms sweat. Facing Burke meant facing her insecurities about her future.

She scrunched the beginnings of a tiny sweater to the end of one needle before stabbing them both into a ball of fuzzy pink yarn. “It’s like he and Fitz are playing the good cop, bad cop routine. And Burke’s the bad cop.”

She knew she was overacting it, wringing the situation for every dramatic drop. And from the look Jenna sent her, it was obvious that Jenna knew it, too. But an actress had to stretch every once in a while to stay in shape. Besides, her friends here at Granite Ridge often seemed amused by her excesses.

“Well, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Jenna tidied her things and set them aside. “You’re not a criminal.”

“No,” said Nora. “Just a fugitive.”

A door slammed on the far side of the rambling, Victorian-era house. “Gran!” called Ellie’s daughter, Jody, a few moments later. “I got an A on my math test.”

“I’d better go catch her,” said Jenna, “before she and her aunt Maggie decide that’s reason enough to celebrate and spoil their dinners. Those two can empty the cookie jar when their after-school snacking gets out of hand.”

Nora glanced out the window again, fretting over the fat white flakes falling from a darkening sky. Burke was supposed to arrive in time for the evening meal, but perhaps the snowfall would delay him. Or maybe he’d lose his way. He hadn’t been here since Fitz and Ellie’s wedding, and things looked different under all that white.

They looked clean. Clean and pure, and lovelier than anything she’d ever seen. Everyone she’d met here—and everyone back in California—had warned her that winter in Montana could be harsh, but Nora loved it. She loved everything about this place and the people who lived in it.

No one here measured her worth by her looks or her talent or her box office draw, no one criticized her choices or questioned her decisions. No one here expected her to be anything but herself—and they’d given her the space and the freedom to begin to rediscover who that person was.

Maybe she’d abused Fitz’s hospitality a bit too long while hiding from Hollywood’s spotlight through the worst days of her divorce. And maybe she’d relied on Jenna a bit too much for help with her baby. But she’d needed that time and that help while she prepared to face the next phase of her life and take the next steps in her career.

She hadn’t figured on having to face Burke.

Fitz’s long-suffering assistant had always been one of her favorite people, a man she could tease with a safe and sisterly affection. A paragon who could patiently smooth every wrinkle and methodically clip every loose thread. The idea that all that patient efficiency would soon be aimed in her direction was a bit unnerving.

“My, don’t you look domestic.” Maggie sauntered into the parlor, an oversized sugar cookie in one hand and a tall glass of milk in the other. “Seeing you like that makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as that yarn.”

Nora smiled as she tucked her knitting into the tapestry satchel Jenna had given her for Christmas. Warm and fuzzy were the last words she’d choose to describe her friend. Maggie might have had her mother’s coloring, but there was nothing soft or countrified about the woman who stood before her in a short-and-sassy layered hairstyle, a silk-and-velvet kimono-style top and pencil-slim designer jeans.

“Is that for me?” Nora reached for the snack Maggie offered. “My, aren’t you generous.”

“Only because I helped myself to plenty before I came out here. And I’ve got this.” Maggie pulled another cookie from a deep pocket and sank into the chair Jenna had vacated, crossing her model-length legs. “Mom’s fussing over dinner. When is Burke going to show?”

“Any minute now.” Nora sipped the milk and stared past the curtains. “If nothing happened to him.”

“You mean, like a blizzard or an avalanche or some other natural disaster? That’s about what it would take to stop him.”

“He might get lost.”

“Bet he’s got GPS on that phone of his. He’s got practically everything else, including the private numbers for every Hollywood exec, European fashion model and Fortune 500 zillionaire.” Maggie’s mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a gizmo in some pocket that holds a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the launch codes for our intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Nora’s smile stretched around a bite of cookie. “You make him sound like a comic-book character.”

“If the colored tights fit…” Maggie leaned back and stacked her stylish heeled boots on a needlepoint stool. “Actually, I think they’d fit pretty well. And look damn good on him, too.”