Lone Wolf Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  Vanessa sighed and looked up at the ceiling, hoping that nothing would end up needing to be done transvaginally. Although, on her list of concerns, that was pretty low.

  The doctor placed a wand at her stomach, and a watery sound filled the room. But there was nothing that sounded like a heartbeat.

  She continued to move the wand over different parts of her stomach, and suddenly the sound waves shifted, contracted and expanded. And again and again in a rhythmic fashion.

  “There it is,” she said.

  “Oh,” Vanessa said.

  She was overtaken by emotion. By a feeling of being completely and utterly overwhelmed.

  Because here it was. Evidence that what had happened was real. That the baby was real.

  It was... It was alive. And inside her. And growing. And it bonded her to the man sitting across from her, who looked no less in shock as he continued to listen to the sound of his child’s beating heart.

  “Good,” Vanessa said.

  Which seemed a weak, insipid response to such an event.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “Good.”

  The rest of the appointment went by in something of a blur, and before Vanessa knew it, she and Jacob were back out in front of the clinic, an appointment card clutched in Vanessa’s hand for another month out.

  “Something could still go wrong,” she pointed out, staring down at the date on the card.

  “Sure,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

  Something about that casual response and gesture let her know that he really didn’t think anything would go wrong.

  “I wish I knew... I wish I knew more about the first time. So that I would feel a little bit more secure.” She looked up at him. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel right now.”

  “I say we move forward assuming everything will go like these things usually do.”

  “We can keep it a secret for another couple of months,” she said.

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t work for me. That doesn’t give me enough time to figure things out.”

  She scowled. “I didn’t know that I was asking your permission.”

  “I didn’t think you were. But I’m giving you my opinion.”

  “It’s not your uterus.”

  “But this is something that affects my life too. Give me a really good reason not to tell.”

  “We could still lose it,” she pointed out.

  “I would end up telling my brothers about it if we did.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know if I would tell my family.”

  “Telling my family isn’t telling yours.”

  “Maybe. But rumors in this town.”

  “You think we’re not going to start rumors coming and going from the doctor’s office?”

  “Fine. I guess I have some baggage. I still feel a little bit like I’m seventeen whenever I walk through town. Like I have something to hide. But we are adults. We’re having a baby. That’s fine. That’s not utterly horrifying and terrifying onto my soul.”

  “So, you’re doing great,” he said drily.

  “Yeah. Fantastic. How are you?”

  “Ready to do what we have to.”

  “Great. So...we do what we have to.”

  “For me that means telling some people.”

  “Okay. For me that means going back to my place and eating pie.”

  “Do you want me to bring you pie?”

  A funny little sensation hit her in the chest. “No. I can get my own pie.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She stuck her hand out because she didn’t know what else to do. So there, standing in front of the ob-gyn clinic, she did about the most absurd thing in the world and shook the hand of her baby’s father.

  It was like an electric shock, even now. And that jolt seemed to freeze them both in place. She wanted to lean in. But she couldn’t. They couldn’t.

  This was bigger than the two of them.

  It was the three of them now.

  When he released his hold on her, his expression shifted, the corner of his mouth lifting upward into kind of a rueful smile, and then he tipped his hat and walked back toward his truck.

  And Vanessa was left to wonder why her chest felt like there was a rock in it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THEY HAD EVEN managed to get Caleb to come out to the bar. Which meant that Ellie must be settled at home with Amelia, because God knew it was usually difficult to tear his brother away from his personal project.

  Jacob had to wonder how long Caleb could possibly sustain an entire life built around supporting their friend’s widow.

  Mostly, he had to wonder what the hell Caleb’s end goal was.

  Because Caleb had to be in love with her. There was basically no other reason a man would give everything of himself to a woman like that. Maybe it was all guilt, but Jacob had a hard time believing it.

  And Caleb...

  Well, he was starting to wonder if Caleb was just punishing himself.

  But Caleb’s situation was not Jacob’s concern tonight, and he was left to wonder why in the hell he felt so compelled to talk to his brothers about his situation.

  Mostly because this wasn’t something he could pretend wasn’t happening.

  He heard that heartbeat today in the doctor’s office. And he didn’t want to give Vanessa any kind of freak-out, because she wasn’t exactly in the best place either.

  And he needed the plan. Dammit. He was going to have to build a house.

  After he left the office he put in a call to Graybar Construction, talking to them about his property, and when he would need the house built by, how he would need it positioned. They said there was no way that Faith, their world-famous architect, could design a house for him in that space of time with her workload. And he said he hadn’t given a damn about how famous the person who designed his house was as long as it could get built.

  So they’d told him they could give him one of their standard plans and tweak from there.

  It gave him details to control, and that made him happy enough.

  Somehow, he had to get on top of this. Somehow, he had to make it...okay.

  “I’m buying beer,” Jacob said, clapping both his brothers on their backs and turning to walk toward the bar. Laz was there pouring drinks, and Jacob asked him for whatever he had on tap.

  “Dark or light?”

  “Amber,” he returned.

  Laz shook his head but produced three glasses of a local amber ale, which Jacob brought back to the table.

  “I wanted an IPA,” Gabe said.

  “No. I judge you for that and we’re not having it at the table.”

  “I don’t think that’s your choice,” Gabe said.

  “Sure it is. I just paid. Also, I have something to talk to you both about.”

  “Me too,” Gabe said. “I offered West a job.”

  “I’m sorry, you what?”

  “I offered West a job. At the ranch. And he took it.”

  “He took a job at the ranch. Here.”

  “He won’t be coming until around Christmastime. But yeah,” Gabe said.

  “What about... What about the rest of them?”

  “Still working to track them down. I’ve found West, but the other two...no leads at all. I don’t even have names. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “West’s mom didn’t give you names?”

  “No. She barely wanted to share West’s information with me.” He shifted in his seat. “Anyway, what did you want to say?”

  Why did he suddenly feel like a guilty kid?

  An accidental pregnancy would actually be way easier to confess to his dad, who wouldn’t have a stone he could throw. Telling Gabe and Caleb was another thing.

  “I... Well, it turns out that I...” Somehow, it was damn hard to say the words. He wasn’t going to lead with Vanessa being pregnant, because he wasn’t going to
lead with Vanessa’s name. But the words that he was having difficulty forcing out were: he was going to be a father.

  “You’re training to be a ventriloquist?” Caleb asked in a rare display of humor.

  “I’m going to be a father,” Jacob said.

  Gabe quite literally spit his beer out on the table. “What the hell?”

  “No way,” Caleb said.

  “Yeah.”

  “With...who? A wolf that wandered up to your cabin?”

  “Screw you,” Jacob said. “No.”

  “It’s just that as far as I know, you haven’t been around any women in a while.”

  “I clearly have been.”

  “Wow. So...when?”

  “Last week of August,” he grunted, having way too easy of a time picturing how it had been on that hot summer night. Hard and heavy against the wall.

  Again on the counter.

  Though that hadn’t been when she’d conceived.

  But it was memorable.

  “What?” Caleb asked. “Is she an elephant?”

  It took him a while to realize they had been asking about due dates. Not conception.

  He gritted his teeth. “Sometime in June.”

  “Oh. Oh,” Gabe said. “Last week of August. After school started?”

  Jacob hedged. “I don’t know.”

  “She from around here? What the hell are you going to do? Are you going to marry her?” Caleb asked.

  “No, I’m not going to marry her.”

  “Do not make me have a shotgun wedding,” Gabe said. “I swear to God, if you knocked up someone’s daughter from around here, and you’re not going to marry her—”

  “She doesn’t want to get married,” Jacob said. “And we’re not teenagers. We’re going to be perfectly able to work things out. It’s not like we were in a relationship. We just know each other. And it’s fine.”

  “Who is it?”

  Jacob sighed. “Vanessa Logan.”

  That earned him nothing but stony silence. Until Gabe spoke.

  “Really? You knocked up the art teacher?” Gabe asked, his voice laced with disgust.

  “Hey,” Jacob said. “She was completely involved in the knocking up. But it doesn’t matter. She has a job, she’ll be close. The kid will be close.”

  “You actually want a kid?” Caleb asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’m not dead. I’m not going to be. This is my responsibility. I intend to take it. I’m not like him. I’m not like I was.”

  They said nothing for a while. The sounds of the saloon closed in around them and they all lifted their beer glasses and took a long drink, setting them down with three distinct clicks on the scarred wood table.

  “Well,” Caleb said finally. “What do you need?”

  The shift was so abrupt that Jacob wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

  “What do I need?”

  “From us.”

  Gabe nodded. “Yeah, I’m hardly going to exhaust a bunch of resources looking for other siblings while I let one that’s right here twist in the wind. What do you need from us?”

  “I don’t know. I sure as hell didn’t think I’d be the first one of us to have a kid.”

  “Well, neither did I, considering I’m actually engaged,” Gabe said. “Of course, it’s going to take Jamie forever to be ready for that.”

  Jacob winced. “Because of her mom?”

  Jamie’s mother had died shortly after she was born. Complications from childbirth had resulted in the death, and he had to wonder if that had made Jamie a bit nervous about having kids of her own.

  He wouldn’t blame her.

  The whole thing was a minefield of horror.

  “No,” Gabe said. “She just isn’t ready. I wouldn’t mind. But I’m ten years older than she is. So I have to be a little bit reasonable.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “She’s doing rodeo stuff sometimes. She’s not done with that. When she can take a year off, then we’ll talk about it.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Caleb said.

  “You still seem more like father material than I do,” Jacob said. “Hell, you’ve basically taken care of Amelia since she was born.”

  Caleb’s expression shuttered. “She’s not mine,” he said.

  “I know,” Jacob said. “But you do know what to do with her.”

  “Yeah. Look, it’s not that hard. Kids are...great.”

  “Yeah. They’re just great. Except, for some reason, considering our current situation, I’m having visions of mine growing into a little hooligan who hates me and everyone else and has to go to a ranch to dig postholes.”

  “Well, you know how you keep that from happening,” Gabe said.

  “I know how to keep pregnancy from happening. You wear a condom. I failed at that.”

  Gabe winced. “I don’t want to know. But I just mean...be there for the kids. If you see one pattern in these kids, it’s that they didn’t have anyone that was on their team. They didn’t have anyone that was there for them.”

  Except he thought about what Vanessa had said. About the fact that she had all the things that were supposed to make a kid successful. That she had all the things that were supposed to make life easy. Guarantee success.

  “Well, I thank you for the confidence. I’m not sure that I have it. Not yet.”

  “We can do that for you.”

  “I also have to build a house,” Jacob said. “Any volunteers to pick up a hammer?”

  “Can you hire someone? Or can I give you some of my money?”

  “I can hire someone,” Jacob said. “I’ve basically banked all my money that I’ve made going around fighting fires. I haven’t spent anything in the past couple of years.”

  “Well, that’s good. Because I was not about to be building things for you.”

  “That’s great. You ask what I need, and then you put a hard limit on what you’ll do.”

  “Of course. I’m your brother, not a parent. This is not unconditional.”

  Unconditional.

  He supposed that was what parenting was supposed to be.

  He’d just never...leaned on his parents. Not at all. His antics had earned him attention, and that had been enough. Anything he’d actually needed, he handled all that himself. His dad was more than willing to pat him on the back and say boys would be boys. His mother rolled her eyes but didn’t intervene.

  He’d learned that not staying still, not talking allowed for an easy relationship. Gentle ties that didn’t require any depth. And that was the story of his whole life.

  That had worked well enough for a long damn time.

  And he realized his son could very well do the same thing. Or his daughter. Could live a whole life of pain and shove it down and never tell him.

  He didn’t want that. Not for any child of his. He wanted more.

  He wasn’t sure he knew how to get it, since he didn’t know how to give it.

  “You look terrified,” Caleb said.

  “Every few minutes it starts to feel really real. And I start imagining things like teenage years. I don’t even know how I ended up being the one sitting here being worried about this.”

  “Chill out. It’s a fetus still,” Gabe said, clapping him on the back. “It can’t give you any trouble yet.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just not true. I have to get ready for the arrival.”

  “Well, first,” Caleb said, standing, “you can get drunk.”

  And Caleb went back over to the bar and saw to ordering enough rounds to make sure he did just that.

  * * *

  VANESSA HAD DECIDED the first person she would talk to was Ellie.

  Jacob had already talked to his brothers Friday night, and she had let it set over the weekend, figuring she would just talk to Ellie on Monday. So during break she wandered over to Ellie’s classroom and found her sitting there eating a sandwich.

  “You’re just in time,” she said. “Caleb just brought me lunch.”

/>   She wasn’t exactly sure how close Caleb and Ellie were. Though it seemed to her that they essentially lived in each other’s pockets. And for the first time she realized that Caleb might have already said something.

  And maybe Ellie was just waiting, not wanting to intrude.

  “I don’t know if Caleb talked to you already,” she said.

  “What? I mean...I’ve talked to Caleb, but not about you.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well...it’s just that I know that Jacob talked to him.”

  “Jacob talked to...”

  “Jacob is the father of my baby,” she blurted.

  The silence shrank down into a flatliner, a slight buzz rising up in her ears, like confirmation she’d officially killed the conversation.

  “No,” Ellie said finally. “No. Really? I mean, I figured that maybe I didn’t know the father, considering you hadn’t told me. But I was trying to be good and wait. And I really did not expect that it was a man who is basically family to me.”

  “We just went to the doctor on Friday and made sure everything was all right. And he told his brothers a few days ago. I had to make sure they knew first.” She winced. “Are you mad at me for not telling?”

  “No,” Ellie said quickly. “I’m not. I—I can’t even imagine the added stress of dealing with not being in a relationship with the guy you’re having a baby with.”

  Of course, poor Ellie had experienced the heartbreak of losing the man she loved before their baby came into the world. There were different hardships.

  Vanessa, for one, was happy to bear this one. The other seemed too crushing.

  “Did you know him?” Ellie asked. “I mean, before you left town.”

  “Not really. He’s older than me. By a few years. But I knew who he was. And...when I had my miscarriage when I was seventeen, he was the paramedic who responded to my call. I called because it hurt so bad, and I was bleeding so much, I was afraid that something really serious was happening to me. I mean, I guess something was. But you know, I was afraid I was dying. Like, really dying. I called, and he helped me. I refused treatment. I didn’t want to be taken to the hospital. I didn’t want my parents to ever find out. I think he’s the one who made sure the bill was sent in my name. So I was able to take it down to the office and deal with everything myself.”