A Cold Creek Baby

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She really wanted to fall in love with him—but the reason why she had been forced to try so hard at it suddenly walked through the waiting room doors.

  Cisco looked slightly better than he had going in, although his complexion was still pale despite his light olive skin and his eyes looked tired.

  Somehow he managed to look dangerous and disreputable, with his shaggy hair and his few-days-old stubble—especially when Easton compared him to Trace in his law enforcement uniform with his square jaw, sun-streaked brown hair and all-American good looks.

  Belle gurgled and clapped her pudgy little hands when she saw him. Easton wanted to hold her close, to warn her to keep her little heart safe from men like him.

  She realized she was standing a little closer than necessary to Trace and she eased back a step, but not before she thought she saw something flicker in Cisco’s eyes for just a moment, then flit away.

  He turned to Trace with a polite smile. “Hey, Bowman.”

  Trace didn’t look any happier to see Cisco. A muscle jumped in his jaw and his eyes clouded. “Del Norte.” His voice was as cool as his eyes. “Last I heard, you were in some jail cell in Guatemala.”

  Guatemala? Jail cell? She hadn’t heard about that one and she wondered, briefly, why Trace knew and she didn’t.

  “They let me out,” Cisco answered with a small, slightly bitter smile. “Good behavior and all that.”

  A startling animosity crackled between the two men and even Belle must have sensed it. She fretted a little and Easton shifted her to her other hip.

  Cisco turned to her. “I’m done here, East. You ready to head home?”

  Why did he deliberately emphasize the last word there?

  “I…yes. I just need to grab Belle’s things.”

  “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  He turned rather abruptly and pushed through the double doors to the parking lot. Even though he seemed to walk at his normal pace, she thought his movements were more precise than normal.

  Trace frowned at his receding figure, then turned back to Easton with one eyebrow raised. “You weren’t kidding about the long story. Anything that involves del Norte must be as tangled as a rope ladder in a windstorm.”

  “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know exactly what she was apologizing for—breaking their date or the harsh reality that some corner of her heart would never be completely free to give to him or anyone else because she had loved Cisco del Norte for most of her life.

  Unfortunately for her.

  Because that was just the kind of guy he was, he picked up Belle’s car seat the moment Easton buckled her into it to carry her out to the car.

  He opened the door for her and she picked up the diaper bag and Belle’s blanket and walked outside. She wasn’t quite sure where the morning had gone, but it was after lunchtime and the afternoon air was sweet with spring and smelled of lilacs and the early climbing roses that grew along the fence line around the medical clinic’s parking lot.

  “Be careful with him, East,” Trace spoke before they reached their parking space, his eyes an uncharacteristically hard green glitter. “He’s always been trouble.”

  Yeah, she’d heard that today. Since she didn’t feel like arguing—and probably couldn’t come up with any kind of valid evidence to the contrary, even if she wanted to—she opted to keep her mouth shut.

  “Is he staying at the ranch?”

  “Only for a few days. He’s…healing from an injury and then he’s going to be taking Isabella here to her family members in Boise. I’m sure he won’t be here more than a week. He never is.”

  That muscle worked in his jaw again. “Why does he have to stay at Winder Ranch? Isn’t there anywhere else he could go?”

  “It’s his home. Jo and Guff left him a share of the ranch, just as they did Quinn and Brant and me.”

  Easton inherited the majority share, fifty-one percent, since a portion of that had been passed to her from her parents. Quinn, Brant and Cisco split the remaining forty-nine percent, although since Jo’s death, they had left all decisions to her and had refused to take any profit from the operation.

  “Maybe you ought to try buying him out. I’m sure a guy like him can always use some ready cash.”

  She had thought of the same idea before but never acted on it, something that shamed her because she knew exactly why she hadn’t made the suggestion. If she bought his share, he would have no reason to come back.

  What did it say about her that she tried to convince herself she didn’t want him to come back but she wouldn’t take the one step that would be sure to keep him away? Even after everything that had come between them, she couldn’t take that final leap to ensure he maintained the safe distance she thought she wanted.

  “I really am sorry about breaking our date.” She quickly changed the subject. “I’ll make it up to you when things settle down a little, I swear.”

  She could see from the look in his eyes that he wanted to say more, but to her vast relief, he held his tongue. Instead, he pulled her into a quick one-armed hug since he was holding Belle’s car seat in the other.

  Before she quite realized his intention, he leaned down to kiss her.

  He had kissed her before but never with this quite apparent stamp of possession. His mouth was hard, determined on hers and she held her breath, desperate to feel something more than this warm, comfortable stirring in her stomach.

  Again, what did it say about how messed up she was that she just about imploded from Cisco’s half-delirious kiss this morning but couldn’t seem to sum up more than a mildly pleasant reaction when she was kissing the man she wanted so fiercely to care about?

  She finally pulled away, uncomfortably aware that Cisco was inside the car watching them out of those brooding dark eyes.

  “I better get this young lady buckled in,” she said.

  “Sure. Let me know when things settle a bit,” he said with that easy smile of his. “I’ll be looking forward to our date. Meantime, call me anytime. I mean it. I can be at Winder Ranch in a heartbeat.”

  What did he think was going to happen? Did he expect Cisco to bring in a gang of outlaws to camp out in Jo’s vegetable garden?

  “Thanks, Trace.”

  He watched while she fastened the car seat into the back of the car, then waved them off and headed back to the clinic.

  When she had checked and rechecked the seatbelt and she knew she couldn’t put off facing Cisco another moment, she slid into the driver’s seat.

  His features were veiled, his expression inscrutable as she started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. Only after they drove through town and headed up Cold Creek Canyon did he speak.

  “So are you and Bowman a thing now?”

  Her fingers clutched the steering wheel. “I don’t know if I’d call it a thing, exactly. We’ve dated a few times, that’s all. I like him.”

  “He sure looked like a dog marking his turf.”

  “A lovely picture,” she muttered. “Regardless, you’re imagining things.”

  “Am I?”

  “I’m no one’s turf.”

  She belonged to herself—all except for that stupid little piece of her heart that would always be Cisco’s.

  Chapter Four

  This must be heaven.

  He was riding his favorite gelding, a sure-footed roan named Russ, up a gorgeous trail into the Tetons. The mountains soared up ahead, sharp and angular and breathtakingly beautiful. The sky beamed on his shoulders and the air was delicious, the citrusy tang of pine mingling with the sweet scent of early wildflowers.

  Of Easton.

  She rode behind him on her sturdy little gray Lucky Star and when he turned around to watch her, she beamed at him, her waterfall of honey-blond hair rippling in the breeze.

  She looked young and sweet and so damn happy. He hadn’t seen her like that since, well, too long.

  A perfect day. He wanted it to go on forever.

  But nothing lasted. Suddenly
the sun slid behind a cloud and the trail turned dark and hazardous. Easton’s horse slowed and the distance grew between them.

  He had to keep going. Just a little farther and they could find shelter, out of what was now punishing rain.

  But the trail criss-crossed a treacherous scree. His horse barely made it past the danger spot before part of the trail gave way in a shower of rocks and mud—and suddenly he could see Easton’s horse step onto the thin trail through the rockfall.

  “No. Stop. Go back,” he yelled, waving his arms, but suddenly the wind seethed and churned around them and his voice was lost.

  Easton smiled at him again, just before her horse slid down the mountainside.

  He cried out in anguish…and his own voice must have awakened him.

  He woke in an instant, already reaching for the 9 mm he kept under his pillow. In that instant between sleep and complete wakefulness, he scanned the room, muscles tensed and ready for any threat.

  No. Just a dream. He was in his old bedroom at the ranch. There were the curtains Jo sewed for him and the light fixture with the wrought-iron brands around the base.

  He put the safety back on the gun and slipped it under his pillow again while he waited for his heartbeat to slow, for the relief to course through him.

  It was just a dream. Easton was safe. She hadn’t followed him into a nightmare. This time anyway.

  About the time his breathing started to slow and his pulse settle, he heard a tiny mewling sound. It took a moment for him to realize it was coming from the intercom.

  Belle. That must have been the sound that awakened him.

  He slid from the bed, ignoring the screech of pain, and made his way through the darkness to her bedroom next door.

  Easton’s bedroom was dark and he hoped it stayed that way. Belle was his responsibility. He had already pawned her off on Easton enough through the last two days. To his chagrin, he’d mostly been out of it since yesterday when he’d visited Jake Dalton’s office, when he had teased Maggiee and seen Trace Bowman give Easton that deliberately possessive kiss.

  After they returned to the ranch house, he had barely managed to make it upstairs to crash in his bedroom, where he was embarrassed to have slept round the clock. This damn fever and the heavy-duty antibiotics had completely wiped him out. Today he’d slept most of the day as well, waking up only a few times to eat and for a couple hours in the evening to play with Belle and help at bedtime as much as he was able—which wasn’t much.

  The moment she was asleep, he crashed again, though he had to wonder if all his dreams were as tortured as that one.

  Yeah, he got it. He was bad news for Easton and she was much safer when he kept his distance from her. He really didn’t need some shrink mumbo-jumbo dream analysis to figure it all out.

  He moved closer to the crib. From the glow of the nightlight and the moonbeams streaming in through soft green-and-yellow curtains, he could see Belle wasn’t completely awake, mostly whimpering in her sleep.

  Whether she was giving a full-fledged tantrum or a tiny peep, it still made him break out in a cold sweat. He had no idea what he was doing with her. The week since Soqui’s death had been one of the hardest of his life and he still couldn’t believe he’d somehow managed to stumble through it.

  She had rolled to her side and he pressed a hand on her back and hummed snatches of a half-remembered song. He didn’t know where the lullaby came from. His mother, he supposed, though he could scarcely remember her since she drowned when he was three.

  He didn’t remember much of that either, but he’d heard the story often enough from his father that the events seemed vivid in his mind.

  His parents had been migrant farmworkers traveling the country with whatever crop was ready for harvest. Lettuce, strawberries, cranberries, apples. Wherever their green cards would take them.

  It hadn’t been an easy existence. The pay was subsistence wages and their housing had usually been lousy, dilapidated shacks, tumbledown fifth wheels.

  He had been born somewhere in Texas and his parents had always taken him along with them while they sought work. According to Papi, usually Cisco had been a good boy and stayed close to his mother out in the field, but one day he had wandered away while they were working the Gilroy, California, garlic harvest.

  When she noticed him gone, Mariana had rushed to find him—and spied him just as he slipped over the edge of a wide concrete irrigation canal, running heavy and high from a recent storm.

  She had rushed in after him, even though she didn’t know how to swim. Somehow she had managed to grab him in the water and boost him to a flow control grate, where by some miracle he was able to cling until help arrived, but Mariana had been swept away.

  He scrubbed at his eyes. He didn’t remember much about that day. If he tried hard, he could dredge up a memory of the breathtaking cold and his fear and then the confusion when his mother never came back.

  His father had never blamed him for causing his mother’s death—and, he would later learn, the death of his unborn sister. Not in words anyway. When Cisco grew old enough to understand, he blamed himself, though. What kid wouldn’t?

  When he got a little older, he used to imagine he had been the one to rescue his mother, at immense danger to himself. Somehow he had swept in and plucked her from the waters just in the nick of time.

  Again, he didn’t need some high-priced shrink to point out that he had an overdeveloped Messiah complex that carried over into other areas of his life.

  For all the good it did him. He had been helpless to save his mother, just as he was helpless to save Soqui. He was bad news for any woman stupid enough to let her life brush against his.

  Especially Easton.

  He rubbed a hand at the sudden ache in his chest. After a moment, he stepped away from the bed, satisfied that Belle was sound asleep.

  He wasn’t quite ready to go back to bed, so he walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. This room had basically the same view as his did next door—a view that had changed little since he lived here a few dozen lifetimes ago.

  Same breathtaking soaring mountains, a vast black shadow in the moonlight, same comforting red-painted barn, same neat, straight fence lines. Being here in Cold Creek Canyon always managed to settle him somehow, to ease some nameless, restless ache he wasn’t even aware of most of the time.

  He loved the ranch, the only place he’d lived longer than a few weeks. Really, his first and only home.

  When Jo and Guff first brought him here, he had been sure it was too good to last. Why would they want the skinny, smartass kid of a couple of migrant workers? He never expected to stay. In the back of his mind, he thought maybe with all the wide open spaces, he might have an easier time running away. He’d even stolen a tent out of the attic those first few days, just in case he had to escape into the mountains again.

  He could still remember the day he arrived. Sure, he remembered Guff, who’d picked him up from the social worker’s office in Idaho Falls. Tall and white-haired, his face leathery from years of working the land. And Jo, as skinny and petite as a kid, with snapping brown eyes and that wide, welcoming smile.

  Yeah, he remembered the other boys. Quinn and Brant had both been here a while already and they were older and he’d been desperate for them to like him.

  But mostly he remembered Easton. Blond braids flying under her little straw cowboy hat, the whitest, straightest teeth he’d ever seen, freckles across her soft, clean-scrubbed skin.

  He had already lived twelve hard years on the planet and she was just about the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. Nothing much had changed about that, after more than twenty years. She still was the most beautiful woman he knew, made even more lovely by her utter obliviousness to that fact.

  Sometimes he wondered if it was the ranch that filled him with this sweet sense of peace or if it was Easton.

  He let the curtain fall and turned back to the darkened nursery. Pain radiated from his wound. He could ignor
e it, but he knew it was going to keep him awake unless he took something for it. If he didn’t sleep, he wouldn’t be able to take care of Belle in the morning and he wasn’t about to hand that responsibility off to Easton any more than he had to.

  He had a bottle of pain pills on his bedside table, but he hated that woozy, not-quite-in-control feeling.

  He would just grab a couple of ibuprofen, he decided. After a careful check at the crib to make sure Belle was still sleeping, he eased out into the dark hallway. A few more memories rushed back as he moved toward the stairs, other nights when he and Brant and Quinn had tried to sneak out for some mischief or other.

  Quinn had usually been the ringleader, although Cisco had certainly contributed his share of lousy ideas. Brant, being the good, upstanding Dudley Do-Right that he still was, had usually tried like hell to talk them out of whatever trouble they were cooking up, but he rarely succeeded. The combined incendiary, seditious force of Quinn Southerland and Cisco del Norte was no match for somebody who always played by the rules.

  Brant usually still came along, although Cisco had a feeling he was there more for damage control.

  He moved gingerly down the stairs now, the damn stitches Jake Dalton had stuck in him pulling with every step. Even so, he forgot about the tricky stair and winced when it squawked loudly in the still night.

  That stupid stair had caused them no end of problems. He and Brant and Quinn had done their best to avoid it and had finally resorted to climbing out his bedroom window for their nocturnal wanderings.

  Fat lot of good that did them. He smiled as he remembered one particular time they tried to sneak out for some midnight fishing on a school night. They had tried to sneak out his window—only to have the daylights scared out of them when Guff stepped out of the shadows by the old birch tree on the other side of the porch.

  Cisco had only been at the ranch a few months at the time and he had been sure they were done for, but Guff had just grinned, loaded them up on horseback and taken them all up to the lake himself to show off his favorite fishing holes.