The Cowboy and His Baby

by Jessica Clare

Vivian snagged her newest martini from the waiter before he could set it on the table. “Darling, do we need to ask why you’re carrying around pregnancy tests in your purse? You’re pushing forty-seven—”

  “Shhh,” Honoria snarled, a dangerous look in her eyes. “And I’m seeing someone.” She shrugged. “He’s a casting director.”

  Their attention suddenly went to Honoria. “You don’t say,” Kitty leaned in. “Tell us more.”

  “It’s a small, independent film company,” Honoria began.

  Vivian snorted, taking a deep slurp of her drink. “Porn.”

  “No! It’s legit. They do found footage types of movies for Netflix. I promise it’s not porn. Anyway, he’s very nice and he has a lot of money.” She looked smug. “And he’s going to cast me in The Paranormal Castle. He said so.”

  “Oooh, a horror flick.” Kitty’s plastic face was full of longing.

  Annie eyed the pregnancy test on the table. This was ridiculous. And yet . . . before she could overthink it, she snatched the kit from the table and headed back to the restroom.

  There was no way she was pregnant. So she was a little sensitive to smell today. So she’d missed having her period. She’d taken a morning-after pill. That took care of things, right? She wasn’t pregnant. They’d used condoms.

  But one of the condoms had broken.

  Another cold sweat broke out over her body and this time, Annie was prepared for the vomiting.

  Round two of puking was terrible, especially because there was nothing in her stomach. But that just meant she had food poisoning, right? She clung to the toilet for a little, trying not to think about how dirty it was because she could only handle so much this morning. Then, when everything settled, Annie got to her feet, opened the box, and used one of the kits.

  Five minutes later, she used the other kit in the box, just to be sure. It had to be a mistake.

  Both read “pregnant.”

  Tears threatened to flood her eyes. How? How was it possible?

  The bathroom door opened and Annie winced when she heard Vivian’s voice. This was not what she needed at the moment. Maybe if she was quiet, Vivian would go sit down again.

  “Darling?” Kitty said, and Annie bit back a groan, picturing all three women with their drinks huddling in the bathroom outside her stall.

  “I’m here,” Annie managed.

  “Well?”

  “Pregnant,” she admitted. “I don’t understand. I took a morning-after pill.”

  “Those don’t work if you’re ovulating,” Honoria volunteered.

  “How would you know?” Vivian demanded.

  “I have five kids. Of course I know,” Honoria snapped.

  “Hmph. I thought you were getting pregnant for roles.”

  “Oh please. No one gets pregnant just for roles.”

  “Darling.” It was her mother again. “I know a good doctor in Malibu. We can get you fixed right up.”

  “Or you can get a few pregnancy roles,” Vivian suggested. “And I hear there are people that pay for babies in foreign countries, so there’s that.”

  “You’re drunk,” Honoria told Vivian in disgust.

  Annie laughed. What else could she do? Hysterical, she just laughed and laughed, burying her face in her hands. She laughed so long and so hard that at some point it turned into sobbing.

  “Oh honey,” her mother said softly. “Happy Mother’s Day to both of us.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Six Months Later

  You sure you’re okay, honey?” Kitty asked as she rushed around the house, fixing her makeup last minute and then scrutinizing her beaded handbag. She was dressed for a cocktail party despite the fact that it was seven in the morning, because she had a walk-on role and needed to head to the set. “You don’t need another pillow?”

  “I’m good,” Annie told her. She had a pillow behind her lower back and one next to her, just in case. “Go enjoy yourself. Maybe they’ll give you a few more lines.”

  “They have to be good ones, you know,” Kitty told her, putting in a hoop earring. “Viv said that she spoke on her last movie and the director made them reshoot it so he wouldn’t have to pay her scale. Cheapasses.”

  “Super cheap,” Annie agreed.

  “You want me to bring you home anything? In-N-Out maybe?”

  Annie patted her enormous stomach. “No. I think I’m going to skip the milkshakes and burgers today.”

  “It’s probably a good thing,” Kitty said, looking over at her daughter with a faintly puzzled expression. “I don’t recall porking up like you have when I had you, but then again, I do try to watch my figure. I can give you a good laxative—”

  “Bye Mom,” Annie said pointedly. “Have fun.”

  “All right, honey. I’m leaving!” She hesitated, grabbed her beaded purse and put her wallet into the discarded purse, instead, then rushed out the door. “Call if you need anything!”

  “I won’t,” she called back. She waited until the door shut and then breathed a sigh of relief. Annie loved her mother. She really did. But Kitty was difficult to live with at times, and they got along best when they weren’t in each other’s hair constantly. Given that Annie had lived at home for seven months straight with no breaks for a movie—something that hadn’t happened in years—they were getting sick of each other. She was going to need to find an apartment when the baby came, she knew. Her mother’s house was a good size for Hollywood—twelve hundred square feet—but it felt tinier every day.

  Of course, Annie needed steady work before she could get an apartment. Her savings were dwindling and apartments in Los Angeles were an arm and a leg. With a sigh, she picked up her laptop and gave the dog’s head a pat before resting the computer on her belly. Tucked against her other side, Spidey gnawed on one of his chew toys, happiest when he was next to her. She’d kept the dog.

  And she’d kept the baby.

  Her mother hadn’t understood either choice. It wasn’t her choice to make, though. Annie loved Spidey, and after she’d had a few weeks to weep through her feelings, she loved the baby, too. It didn’t matter that Dustin was a jerk or that he’d used her. They’d made a life together and she wasn’t going to get rid of it because it was inconvenient. Hadn’t Kitty raised Annie all on her own? She’d never known her father—her mother just said that he was a guy she’d met on set and that was the end of that. Two generations of Grissom women were going to be single moms, then. It happened. She’d make the best of it. And her mother had loved her and raised her well, so she was going to do the same for her baby girl.

  Or baby boy. Whichever. It didn’t matter—she’d love the little one just the same.

  She reached down and stroked Spidey’s ear as the dog happily snorted, licking peanut butter out of his Kong chew. Maybe she’d see if there was another dog movie that needed a Boston. Sometimes that happened—they didn’t care what breed the dog was as long as he was trained and listened to commands. But it hadn’t happened lately, and Annie’s agent hadn’t been able to line anything up for her at all.

  She knew some of it was that she’d bickered so much with Sloane on the last movie, and because the industry was small, word got out. A few jobs had popped up, but a lot of them had involved traveling to other countries and with Annie’s heavy belly, that was out of the question. When she had a baby, those jobs would be impossible unless she schlepped her kid off to someone else for months on end, and she refused to do that. She sure couldn’t leave the kid with Kitty. Her poor baby would end up on every casting call for infants known to mankind, and she didn’t want to do that to him or her.

  Maybe it was time to get out of the movie business entirely, she realized. Start something new. She could contact a few local pet places, see if they had openings for dog trainers. Heck, she’d run a cash register at a pet store if it’d give her some cash coming in and stead
y work. If she could rebuild her savings, she could think about the next step—like running her own dog training business.

  Until the baby came, though, it was best to think in small steps.

  With a sigh, she shifted on the couch, ignoring the twinges in her lower back. Balancing the laptop, she checked her email. Sandwiched in the usual junk emails was a notice from her agent.

  She opened it . . . and her heart sank.

  The Goodest Boy was going into reshoots. Annie needed to be in Wyoming in three days.

  Reshoots were a fact of life in filmmaking. It was when the director decided that he needed more footage or needed a scene redone, and so everyone had to go back out on location. Reshoots were expensive and usually you weren’t paid for the extra time, but they were in the contract you signed, so it was expected.

  Annie had forgotten all about reshoots for The Goodest Boy.

  That meant going back to Painted Barrel.

  That meant she might see Dustin Worthington.

  And his girlfriend. Or wife. She didn’t know which one it was, just that Annie was the “other woman.”

  Well . . . shit.

  She rubbed her pregnant belly, thinking. She couldn’t exactly bail out of reshoots, given that Spidey was one of the stars. She had to go. Getting there wasn’t a problem, really. She’d rent a car, squeeze her big belly behind the steering wheel, and drive up there again.

  But her stomach churned with dread at the thought of seeing Dustin—or his blonde girlfriend—again. She didn’t know what to do.

  She had three days to figure something out.

  Annie went to the laundromat to wash her clothes, because she would need them for Wyoming. She went to the dry cleaner and picked up her mother’s clothing just because she was out, and then went to the pet supply store and bought an obscene quantity of training treats so she could brush Spidey up on some of his tricks. Hopefully the reshoots wouldn’t be too painful. She kept the day busy with errands so she wouldn’t have to think too hard about Dustin.

  She did anyhow, of course.

  She wondered how he’d react to the thought that she was pregnant. Not just slightly pregnant, but starting-to-waddle, really-big-in-the-waist pregnant. Even her lips had puffed up, as if in solidarity with her ankles, which were permanently swollen at this point. Being pregnant was probably sexy for some people, but she mostly just felt ungainly and awkward.

  Not that she wanted to be sexy around Dustin. Still, if she did run into him, it would be nice for him to be bowled over at how beautiful she was, how he’d messed things up between them. She entertained ideas of him groveling, begging for forgiveness only for her to turn her nose up at him and declare that he’d destroyed everything they might have ever had.

  In reality . . . she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him she was pregnant.

  She could hide it, mostly. Sure, she was poking out in the midsection, but a big bulky sweatshirt or an oversized wraparound sweater would probably hide the worst of it. She could avoid going out into Painted Barrel and stick to her hotel room. They were only going to be doing reshoots for a few days, after all. She might not see him. She might not need to tell him that he was going to be a father.

  But that struck her as . . . kind of wrong.

  Shouldn’t he know? No matter how bad of a person he was, or how big of a user, didn’t Dustin deserve to know he had a child coming into this world? Didn’t her baby deserve to have a father or to at least know of him? Child support aside, she’d often wondered about her own father growing up. As an adult, she didn’t care as much anymore, but with a baby on the way, she was remembering all of the times that other children’d had father figures and she’d only had her movie-obsessed mother.

  Well, and her mother’s equally obsessed friends. And their plastic surgeons, who sent holiday cards to their favorite repeat clients.

  Annie’s childhood hadn’t been all that normal, and the closer she got to her due date, the more she wanted her baby to have everything.

  Everything.

  So . . . it was a dilemma. Did she tell the rotten cowboy he was going to have a wonderful, magical child that she was growing in her belly and that he couldn’t be in the baby’s life unless the baby wanted it? Or did she let it slide and pretend there was no baby until she was safely back home again?

  Annie pondered it late into the day, even as she packed her clothing and dug out every oversize tunic and sweatshirt she possibly could and stuffed them into her bags. Her mother eventually returned home, slightly frazzled and smelling like booze, but beaming. “I had four lines today, Annie! They let me flirt with the bartender in the scene, and the director even said it might stay in the final cut!”

  “That’s great, Kitty.” Annie folded a cream-colored dog sweater and stuffed it into the bag. It was sticky with unseasonably warm weather here, but the mountains would be colder. Spidey would need to make sure he had warm clothing.

  “You’re packing?” Kitty flopped into Annie’s bedroom and sat at the foot of the bed. “What’s going on?”

  “Reshoots for The Goodest Boy. I have to be in Wyoming in three days.”

  Kitty groaned. “Reshoots. As if they think everyone’s made of money and can just drop everything. They don’t even pay for reshoots!”

  “It’s in the contract.” Annie shrugged. “I’ll do it. I have to. I’m just not looking forward to going back to Wyoming.”

  Kitty made a sound of agreement, pushing her bleached hair back off her face. “I imagine it’s hell on your complexion.”

  Annie frowned at her mother. “I don’t care about my complexion—”

  “Well obviously, darling. You should have had those freckles lasered off years ago like I did.”

  “I’m talking about the cowboy, mother. You know, the father of my child?” She patted her stomach, and as if responding, the baby shifted and kicked. She smiled to herself, rubbing. “This little guy is coming in ten weeks and I’m trying to figure out if I should tell the father he exists.”

  “Ugh, why?”

  “Because he’s going to be a parent?”

  “Not if you refuse to put his name on the birth certificate.”

  “Mother.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Fine then. Kitty.”

  Kitty shrugged. “You got on just fine without a father.”

  “I know. But I want to make sure it’s the right choice.” Annie stroked her rounded belly absently. She was constantly touching it now that she’d started to show, as if caressing her own stomach would somehow tell the baby inside how excited she was for him—or her—to arrive. “You never told my father about me, did you?”

  “Oh, I did,” Kitty said breezily.

  “You did?” Annie stared, shocked.

  “Yes. I believe he told me that I was a whore and he gave me two hundred dollars to fix my problem.”

  “Wow. What a winner.”

  Kitty shrugged. “We Grissom women can pick them, it seems.”

  Boy, she was not wrong. The thought was depressing. “But you did tell him.”

  Her mother nodded. “At the time, I thought he should know. Be a father and all that. But I was much younger then, and stupider. Men don’t want to be a father unless it’s their idea.”

  Annie’s stomach hurt, acid burning in her throat. Heartburn, she told herself, though it was most likely nerves. Her mother’s words had brought up a memory of her time with Dustin. Of him talking about his father, and how he’d had to marry Dustin’s mother after he got her pregnant and stayed home, running the family business. How Dustin had never wanted that.

  Wasn’t this the same scenario? Wouldn’t she be forcing this onto him? Ugh. Annie swallowed hard.

  But no, this would be different. She’d be letting him know about the baby . . . and that was it. She didn’t want child support. S
he didn’t want him to have any claim on her baby. Just because she was going to do the right thing didn’t mean that he had to.

  She realized that her mind was made up. For her baby’s sake, she’d tell Dustin about the child. What Dustin chose to do with that information was up to him. She didn’t need—or want—him in her life. He could tell his blonde girlfriend . . . or not. It didn’t matter if the baby caused problems between the two of them.

  Dustin should have thought of that before he’d slept with Annie, after all.

  And really, Annie did best without secrets. She was an honest person and couldn’t live a lie, even if Dustin was okay with it. That wasn’t who she was . . . and she wasn’t going to change for him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dustin’s address was easy enough to find. She found his profile on Facebook (and okay, she might have hate-stalked it a little, but just a little) and then looked up the Price Ranch. It was apparently a big cattle ranch tucked into the mountains near Painted Barrel. While the website was outdated, she recognized the ranch’s “brand”—the symbol she’d seen on Dustin’s belt. That had to be it.

  Once she’d rented a car, kissed her mom goodbye, and loaded up with snacks for both herself and Spidey, Annie headed off to Wyoming.

  Driving across several states was a different experience when you were seven months pregnant. For one, she had to stop constantly to pee. Since she was by herself, every time she got gas or a snack, people gave her pitying looks, as if it were abnormal for a pregnant woman to be by herself. It irritated her—but then again, it could have been hormones causing that, too. Either way, she was in a rather pissy mood by the time she got to Wyoming, and when she found the turnoff for the Price Ranch, she was ready to get out of the car and confront someone.

  The ranch itself looked rather idyllic. It was tucked deep into a valley in the twisting mountains, and the pass she had to take to get up to it was a little dangerous-looking, but it seemed safe enough. There was a light snow on the ground but the road itself was clear enough. She hoped the snow wasn’t going to be a big problem for the reshoots. Stupid if it was going to snow the entire time, but then again, she wasn’t the director. No one asked her opinion. There was a big gate with a grate of some kind across the front to keep the cattle from leaving, and when she turned down the road, she saw an enormous house that looked like a log cabin in the middle of the wilderness. There was a big barn off in the distance, rail fences as far as the eye could see, and cattle speckled over the rolling hills. It looked very pastoral.