Grand-Prize Cowboy

by Heatherly Bell

  “We can talk about it later.”

  Annie frowned, anxiety and nerves sending icy fingers down her spine. She didn’t like the sound of that.

  What would she do if he told her she had to find somewhere else for the children to spend Christmas? She would have to quit. She didn’t want to as she enjoyed working here. What other choice would she have, though?

  “Why don’t we, um, go inside,” she suggested. “We can talk more there.”

  “We won, right?” Alice pressed. “We hit you like six times and you only hit us twice each.”

  Her priority right now wasn’t really deciding who won a snowball fight. But then, she was not six years old. “You absolutely won.”

  “Yay! That means we each get two cookies instead of only one!”

  Annie had always planned to give them two cookies each anyway. She was a sucker for these two. The twins knew this and took full advantage.

  “Kids, why don’t you go change out of your snow stuff and hang out in your room for a few moments,” she said when they were inside the mud room. “I’ll be there soon to get your cookies.”

  The twins looked reluctant but they went straight to her apartment through her own private entrance, leaving her alone with Tate.

  Drat the man for somehow managing to seem more gorgeous in person than he looked on screen.

  She must have seen the clip of a public television documentary he had appeared in at least a dozen times, watching him help villagers dig a well in Africa.

  He had looked rugged and appealing on screen, even tired and sweaty. Seeing him now, dressed in jeans and a luxurious-looking leather coat, made her feel slightly breathless, a feeling she wasn’t happy about.

  “You obviously weren’t expecting me.”

  The understatement of the month. And they would probably see a little snow this winter here in Star Valley.

  “No. I’m sorry. Maybe I missed an email or something.”

  Earlier in the year, Wallace would text her about once a month to tell her and the housekeeper/cook Deb Garza that he would be flying in for a few days, when he was arriving, what time to pick him up and how long he would stay.

  That had been his pattern early on, anyway. Then he caught pneumonia in late spring and never seemed to bounce back. He seemed to be a little stronger the last time she spoke on the phone with him in late October and he had been planning to come during the holidays but a heart attack had claimed him out of the blue only a few weeks later.

  “We must have had a miscommunication,” Tate said with a frown. “I thought my grandmother was sending word we were coming and she must have thought I would inform you.”

  “We?” Was someone else here that she hadn’t seen yet?

  “The rest of my family. I’m the advance guard, so to speak, but they’re all showing up by the end of the week.”

  Annie gaped at him. “The rest of your family?”

  “The whole lot of us. My grandmother Irene, her sister Lillian, my mother Pamela and her husband Stanford. And my two sisters.”

  “Both of them? Even Brianna?”

  “Yes. That’s the plan. You were always good friends with Brie, weren’t you?”

  “That was a long time ago. Another lifetime. I think the summer we were eleven was probably the last time I saw her.”

  The instant she said the words, she regretted them. Both of them knew what had happened that terrible summer.

  Brianna and Tate’s father Cole Sheridan, Wallace’s son, had fallen down a steep mountainside to his death while horseback riding with his children.

  The tragedy had lasting ramifications that rippled to this day.

  “Yes. Everyone is flying in Friday. I offered to come out a early to make sure the house was ready for company. Things have been so hectic, I guess I just assumed my grandmother would have informed the staff, like my grandfather used to do.”

  “What staff?” Annie could hear the slight edge of hysteria in her voice. “There is no staff except me, Levi Moran, the ranch manager, and a ranchhand, Bill Shaw.”

  Tate frowned. “What about a housekeeper? A cook?”

  “Deb Garza used to fill both of those roles but after Wallace got sick and stopped coming to Angel’s View, she decided to retire. She moved down to Kemmerer to live with her sister. Your grandfather told me to hold off hiring anyone to replace her for now. We have a cleaning crew that comes a couple times a month to keep the dust bunnies under control but that’s it. I take care of the rest.”

  Tate sighed. “That’s going to be a problem, then. I have four days to get the house ready for Christmas and no idea how the hell I’m supposed to pull that off.”

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  Her Christmas Future

  by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Chapter One

  How could she have been so stupid? She was a doctor!

  She knew what was at stake.

  How could she have thought, even for a second, that she was allowed a few minutes of letting go, of breaking down?

  She could forgive herself the overindulgence of wine.

  But what had come after...

  There was no excuse.

  She had to get to Christine.

  On the drive back to Marie Cove from her ex-husband’s luxury penthouse apartment just outside of Los Angeles, Dr. Olivia Wainwright couldn’t stop castigating herself.

  As the sun rose from the horizon, turning night into day, her panic rose right along with it.

  She was overreacting. She knew it. She also knew that the risk she’d taken was real. That the timing made it so.

  Her volunteer shift at the women’s center was due to start in just hours. She had to get home. Showered. And get her hands on a levonorgestrel pill. Even the thought of the Plan B morning-after contraceptive made her cringe. Not so much because of the hormonal interruption in her system, but because if an egg had been in her fallopian tube she could already be getting pregnant. And a pill would effectively bring an end to that.

  Thinking of Lily, and so many of her tiny, suffering patients in the neonatal unit where she worked, she knew it had to happen that way.

  And cursed herself for even allowing the possibility.

  Even as she ran through a mental list of possibilities for procuring the pill. Any number of her colleagues would provide one for her. Her own gynecologist would.

  The thought of any of them knowing how incredibly irresponsible she’d been had her close to tears.

  Only her gynecologist knew about Lily.

  Her gynecologist...and Christine.

  Owner and founder of the Parent Portal, a well-known private fertility clinic, Christine was also Olivia’s closest friend.

  Her friend’s happiness, her marriage and, mostly, the pending birth of Christine’s second child were all miracles that Olivia celebrated wholeheartedly.

  Just as Christine had turned to Olivia when Christine had been asked to be a surrogate for a frozen embryo the year before, Oliv
ia now needed Christine.

  Things had seemed a little hectic back then, but they’d all worked out better than anyone could have imagined.

  It was always darkest before the dawn.

  Situations weren’t always as bad as they seemed.

  The empty platitudes were irritating her beyond her ability to cope, so Olivia pushed the button on her steering wheel, asked the automated system to call Christine Elliott-Howe and waited for her friend to pick up.

  * * *

  Scents of Olivia wafted through the air. Her perfume. Her sex.

  Wandering around in black boxer briefs, sipping from his second cup of the dark roast Colombian coffee he’d brewed for his ex-wife—and she’d declined—Martin Wainwright looked out past the city skyline to the ocean just beyond. Filling his gaze with magnificent views that didn’t include her waist-length dark hair, creamy tanned skin and chocolaty eyes that always made him feel like he was melting. In another hour he’d be out having his day, playing in a charity golf tournament and then on to the spa, after which, in his newly cleaned black tux without the satin trim, he’d be attending a five-hundred-head-count private birthday party for someone he barely knew.

  His parents, from their perch in heaven, wouldn’t understand that one. Why go to a party for a man who wasn’t your friend? A man you weren’t sure you even liked or trusted?

  Though they’d died years apart, his parents were back together in his thoughts. The fact they’d come to mind at that moment didn’t surprise him overly much. They’d been a poor, overlooked and seemingly unsuccessful pair, but their great love had been his personal life guide forever. Their commitment was a pinnacle he was never going to reach.

  He’d be reaching a whole new class within the next few days, though. His flight on the private jet Sunday morning would give him ample time to write the speech he’d give to a graduating class of IT specialists in Rome—and the stipend he was being paid to do so would make his parents proud.

  They’d raised a scale-mountains type of guy, teaching him that there were no limits to possibilities if he invested himself fully in whatever endeavor he took on. Every success he had was another win for them. His bare feet sinking into carpet so plush it could be someone’s pillow, he allowed himself another second or two to reflect, maybe to wallow in his lover’s abrupt departure, before taking his cup with him into the bathroom. The three-head, walk-in tiled shower had seemed like major overkill when he’d bought the place, but he’d grown to appreciate the overall massage they provided his forty-one-year-old muscles every morning.

  Pushing thoughts of Olivia as far back in his consciousness as he could shelve them, knowing from years of experience that not thinking about her so much was the only way he’d be able to keep his ex-wife in his life, he stood under the tri-stream spray and focused on the work ahead of him that day. On the men he’d be with on the golf course, the two who’d invited him to enjoy an hour of benefit at their spa and the three groups he’d be talking to at the party later that evening. In all three cases, at all three functions, he had one goal. Not to enjoy himself, but to part the men with their charitable donations.

  If all went well, and he had every reason to believe it would, he was set to raise half a million dollars by night’s end. And Fishnet could help hundreds more underprivileged kids successfully climb to the top of their own chosen mountains.

  * * *

  No amount of achieved success, effort or money was going to make this right.

  Still in the previous evening’s formfitting black dress and three-inch black wedges, Olivia walked into the Parent Portal’s back door just behind Christine.

  “You really didn’t have to haul yourself in here so early on a Saturday morning,” she said for the third time. Christine had insisted on meeting her as soon as Olivia hit town.

  “You’re my friend,” was the reply. Each time.

  “How are you feeling?” Olivia asked while she faced up to the incredibly stupid thing she’d done. She focused on Christine’s bump, her impending motherhood, because she’d failed to deal with her jealousy over Christine’s first pregnancy.

  Because she’d never dealt with the pangs raised when Christine had given birth the year before.

  William Ryder Howe was one of the most loved babies ever.

  His aunt Olivia adored and spoiled him; she’d had the important distinction of being the first one, other than Christine, to feel him kick.

  “At the moment I’m feeling worried about you,” Christine said, turning on the light in her private office as they entered. She offered to make tea and then set about doing so without waiting for Olivia’s response.

  A neonatologist of some renown, Olivia took her leftover-dressed-up self to the couch and sat down on the edge of one cushion, legs together, hands in her lap. If only she’d managed to maintain such decorum the night before.

  Damn Martin and the fire he’d always been able to light within her. What was wrong with her? Even after what turned out to be an unsuccessful marriage, she couldn’t seem to get him out of her system.

  Which was no excuse for her current situation. She knew how to have protected sex. They’d been doing it for most of the nine years they’d been divorced.

  “You had unprotected sex with Martin.” Setting a cup of decaffeinated tea in front of Olivia, Christine sat down beside her, her short brown hair and dark brown eyes a sisterly contrast to Olivia’s own dark eyes and waist-length hair.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think you’re ovulating.”

  Hands to her mouth, she nodded. And then, lowering them, she said, “My cycle runs like clockwork.”

  She had to get in front of this. Not hide behind a wall of fear or acts of mental self-flagellation.

  “I need levonorgestrel and I’d very much rather not approach any of my colleagues. I was hoping you could quietly hook me up with someone here...”

  “You could have stopped at a clinic in LA.”

  Stunned, Olivia stared at her friend. She hadn’t even had the thought.

  Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  “I—” couldn’t fathom the idea of walking into a clinic and seeing a doctor whose reputation she didn’t know “—have to be at the women’s center right after breakfast,” she reminded her friend. Both of them volunteered at the local facility designed to help women suffering from domestic violence regain a sense of independence. From teaching life skills and art classes to offering counseling and financial aid, the center also offered some safe housing and took in homeless women.

  Christine and Olivia did anything from teaching crafts to cooking meals. The center was where they’d met. It was where two successful, single women had found family.

  “You have seventy-two hours to take the pill.” Christine’s soft voice filtered through the noise in Olivia’s head—the cotton-like white noise that she was attempting to escape into. And fight her way out of.

  “If the egg is in the fallopian tube, it could be fertilizing already and seventy-two hours from now would be in the morula stage heading toward the blastocyst stage if it wasn’t already there,” Olivia said. “I want it done before that happens.”

  It might be fertilized. But chances of that being the outcome would be less the sooner she took the pill. Not that she’d know, one way or another, so why couldn’t she get the thought of ridding her body of a fertilized egg out of her head?

  “Diana Louer is due in at eight. She can see you and give you the pill,” Christine said. “But I’m wondering if maybe the reason you didn’t go to a clinic in LA—some of which have emergency services open twenty-four hours—and maybe the reason you called me, is because a part of you is hoping that if you did make a baby last night, I might have access to some miracle that could help you bring it to life.”

  Olivia should never have told Christine the truth about her past—about Lily. She’d k
ept her secret for so long because it was the only way she could move on. And because thinking about the little girl she’d lost at just four months old hurt far too much.

  “I can’t gestate a healthy child,” she said, hearing the way her voice hardened. Christine was just wrong on that score. Olivia was not looking for a miracle. She had no hope. None. “And I won’t even take the chance,” she continued. Watching the agony her tiny daughter had to endure every second of her time on earth—the permanent tubes, the tests and procedures...

  Birth defects happened. She spent her days doing everything she could to ease the results of them for her own little patients. And medical results had also, in Lily’s case, shown Olivia’s body to be the likely cause. She had a unicornuate uterus, an abnormality meaning only half her uterus was fully formed. It hadn’t allowed Lily to grow properly. She hadn’t known until she was already pregnant. At only twenty years old, she’d had no cause for any kind of sonogram. And while some women with the condition delivered healthy babies, there was no guarantee birth defects wouldn’t occur. To the contrary, they were at least four times more likely.

  “But you want to hear about any alternatives,” Christine continued, seemingly undeterred by Olivia’s tone as she steadily held her gaze.

  Glancing at Christine’s own distended belly, Olivia said nothing. She swallowed. Started to tear up. Clasped her hands between her knees as though her legs could hold her steady.

  The child Christine was carrying was biologically hers. But William wasn’t. He’d been conceived in a test tube, with the egg and sperm of a married couple who’d planned to have it implanted in the woman’s womb. Tragically the wife had died in an accident before that could happen. Two years later, the husband, Jamison Howe, hired Christine as a surrogate to have his baby. And they fell in love.

  It was all so...romantic movie-ish.

  Olivia, however, had to stay firmly grounded in real life. Was about to tell Christine so, when her friend started to speak again.