Daughter on His Doorstep

by Janis Reams Hudson

  “They’re about half-wild,” Trey cautioned. “I doubt they’ll let you pet them. And if they do, those baby rules of yours might come in handy.”

  “So we won’t hurt them and they won’t scratch us?”

  Trey couldn’t help but smile at little Amy’s earnest face. “That’s right.”

  He halfway expected Laurie to issue some warning or caution about staying away from the cats. He could see it on her face. But to her credit, all she said was, “You girls be careful around the cats, and don’t chase them. Instead of catching them you’ll only manage to scare them. You don’t want to scare the kitties, do you?”

  “Oh, no, Mama,” Carrie offered. “We won’t chase them. Right, Amy?”

  “That’s right. We won’t chase the kitties.”

  Then Trey had to tell them that, while it was all right to go into the barn to see the cats, they were to stay out of the sheds and other outbuildings unless he or their mother was with them, because there was equipment in there that could hurt them. And they weren’t to go across the road, because that was the neighbor’s property, and there was a mean ol’ bull over there that would just love to trample little girls.

  “Wonderful,” Laurie muttered. Just what had she gotten herself and her daughters into? Scratching cats, dangerous equipment and mean bulls?

  Well, if she looked on the bright side, her daughters were not likely to be kidnapped right out of their yard, or hit by a car by some drunk veering up over the curb and plowing into them. That had almost happened to her parents’ next-door neighbor last month.

  No, all in all, rural Wyoming would be fine for them. This short stay would give the girls a chance to stretch their legs and play in the sun.

  She couldn’t wait for tomorrow, for her new job to begin for real.

  Chapter Four

  During the next few days, Trey and Laurie and the girls established a routine that seemed to be working for all of them. Gradually they were getting used to each other.

  Trey had known the minute Katy entered his world that his life would never be the same. Day by day he was learning just how true that was. But Laurie and her daughters made the adjustment from bachelor household to a houseful of females if not a breeze, then easier than it could have been.

  He took it in stride that first morning when he walked into the kitchen to find an attractive woman cooking his breakfast.

  In stride, hell. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven. The smell of coffee that had lured him from bed hadn’t hurt anything, either.

  Carrie and Amy had still been asleep, which was expected. Not even the sun was up at that hour.

  “Smells good,” he told Laurie. “How’s Katy?”

  “Still sleeping.”

  They’d argued the night before about who would take the baby monitor to bed. Trey was used to doing it. Katy was his daughter, after all. He didn’t plan to give up all responsibility for her, only her daytime care while he was working.

  “Besides,” he’d told Laurie. “I’m blessed, or so they tell me. She usually sleeps through the night.”

  “Then it won’t matter if I take the monitor, will it? It’s what you’re paying me to do.”

  She’d worn a look of pure stubbornness on her face. Trey had given in, but it hadn’t been much of a concession, really. If Katy had cried, he was certain he would have heard her, monitor or not. Her room was right next to his.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to ask. “Did she wake you up during the night?”

  “She never made a peep, the little darling. I changed and fed her when I got up, then she went right back to sleep.”

  It felt odd knowing someone else had been up and tending to his baby and he hadn’t known it. Hadn’t heard a thing. “You’ve been up awhile, then.”

  “About an hour. How do you want your eggs?”

  And so it began, the new routine.

  He came in for lunch at noon, and it was a pure pleasure to get to hold Katy after he washed up and to have someone else prepare his meal. And sharing that meal with Laurie and her daughters had been no hardship, either. If he wasn’t careful, those two young Oliver ladies were going to steal his heart. And if he wasn’t more careful, their mother was going to stir things in him he had no place feeling for the hired help.

  That night when he came in to supper, he stepped through the backdoor into the kitchen and something odd happened. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known Laurie and the girls would be there. Of course he had. He’d hired her, hadn’t he? Seen her at breakfast and lunch.

  But something about walking through the door at the end of the day and finding a roomful of females laughing and talking and carrying food to the table hit him somewhere deep inside. The only word he could think of to describe what he felt was yearning.

  Was this what had been missing from his life? This feeling of family?

  But aside from Katy, lying on her back waving her arms in the air in her playpen in the corner, this wasn’t his family.

  “There you are.” Laurie smiled warmly at him. “Supper will be ready in fifteen minutes, so you’ve got time to clean up if you want.”

  He looked down at the dirt covering his jeans. “You think I need it?”

  “Not on my account,” she answered. “The only thing I care about is that your face and hands are clean. The rest of you is fine as far as I’m concerned.”

  “With an attitude like that, I can’t believe some man hasn’t grabbed you up.”

  Glancing around to find the girls sitting on the floor beside the playpen, Laurie looked back at Trey. “Some man did. It didn’t take him long before he decided to ungrab me.”

  “She means we’re divorced,” Amy piped up cheerfully. “Our home is broken.”

  “Amy.” Laurie whirled toward her daughter. “Where on earth did you hear a thing like that?”

  Amy shrugged, unconcerned. “From you.”

  “I’ve never said we have a broken home, because we don’t.”

  “You said we were divorced. Grandma said we were poor little lambs and came from a broken home.”

  “Excuse me a minute,” Laurie said to Trey, a muscle tensing along her jaw. “I need to clear this up.”

  Unless Trey missed his guess, that was murder he read in her eyes before she blanked it out, and it was directed at Grandma.

  The decent thing for him to do in that moment would be to make himself scarce and give Laurie the privacy to talk to her daughters. But he knew he might never have another opportunity to learn about little girls and how to deal with them once he found a permanent housekeeper and Laurie and her girls went home. He was staying, and he was taking notes.

  But he could at least act as if he wasn’t eavesdropping. He went to the sink and started washing his hands.

  Laurie crossed to her daughters and knelt down between them. She smoothed a hand over Amy’s golden hair. “Honey, Daddy didn’t divorce you and Carrie.”

  “He just divorced you?” Amy asked, her eyes big.

  “Or did you divorce him?” Leave it to Carrie to ask that one.

  Laurie placed her other arm around Carrie’s shoulders. “It’s like I told you before, he and I divorced each other.”

  Carrie nodded. “Because you were both happier apart.”

  At the sink Trey was afraid to turn off the water, afraid the sudden quiet would remind them he was standing there. God, how did Laurie do it, raise those girls on her own, answer questions that must tear her apart.

  What kind of man would leave a family like this to fend for themselves?

  A lowlife, that’s who, Trey thought with sudden anger on Laurie and her girls’ behalf.

  “And Grandma was wrong about our house,” Laurie told them. “Broken home is an expression some people use when there’s a divorce in the family. But it’s not a very nice thing to say.”

  “When something’s broken,” Carrie said, her small face lined in concentration, “you have to fix it, or you have to throw it away, because it’s no goo
d anymore.”

  “That’s right. And we’re not broken, are we?” Laurie hugged both girls to her sides. “Nothing about us needs fixing. We’re doing just fine, don’t you think?” She finished by slipping a hand down to each girl’s ribs and tickling them, making them break out in giggles.

  Trey’s admiration for Laurie Oliver rose about a hundred notches.

  “My hat is off to you, lady,” he murmured to her a moment later when she joined him at the sink. “You were brilliant.”

  “I was sick to my stomach,” she confessed. “Just wait until I get my hands on my mother. Broken home, indeed,” she added with a hiss. “Is matricide a word?”

  “I think it is.”

  That night after the girls and Katy were in bed Trey had another new experience. Sharing the sudden quiet with someone.

  While he sat in his recliner, Laurie lowered herself to the sofa with a sigh. “You hear that?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” he said.

  She smiled and closed her eyes. “Yeah. First time all day. Nice, isn’t it?”

  Trey chuckled. “What, one day on the job and you’re already done in?”

  “Not done in.” With her eyes still closed, her smile widened. “Just pleasantly tired.”

  Trey watched her for a long moment as she leaned back on the sofa and propped her feet on the ottoman. He couldn’t recall ever having shared such a peaceful moment with another woman. Outside of bed, at least.

  Something about this woman tugged at him. He began to understand that she stirred up that long-buried yearning in him for a woman of his own. A family of his own.

  On a long breath, he leaned his head back and raised the footrest on his chair. Might as well get that idea right out of his head where this woman was concerned. She was temporary. She had plans, a life to return to in a few weeks.

  Beside the fact that she was damn good-looking and he felt a strong, heathy attraction to her, he figured his biggest problem was proximity. She was here, in his home, sharing his daily life.

  That, and the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman in months.

  Yeah, right, pal. Who was he kidding? He could have had his way with an entire harem for the past month and Laurie Oliver would still attract him.

  But he knew better than to hit on her. She was his employee. She trusted him to treat her with respect. And that meant hands off, bub.

  So, hands off it would be.

  But he wished, desperately, that when he looked at her again, he hadn’t caught her staring at him with a look of curiosity in her eyes.

  She looked away instantly, but a telltale blush stained her cheeks.

  Laurie couldn’t sleep that night. She lay awake and scolded herself for getting caught staring at Trey like some teenager going ga-ga over a rock star.

  Trey Wilder was no rock star. He was a down-to-earth—literally, she thought with a snicker—farmer. It was just that he was so pleasurable to look at, with those cobalt blue eyes and that raven-black hair.

  And that voice. She had yet to get used to the way the muscles in her shoulders and the backs of her legs went slack whenever he spoke, while other, more private muscles tensed.

  Get a grip, girl.

  He was her boss, for heaven’s sake. He was part of the family that employed her aunt. And Laurie was here only for a few weeks, to look after his daughter and his house, because he’d been careless enough to get some girl pregnant, and the girl wanted nothing to do with him or the baby.

  Whoever she was, the woman must have been out of her mind to come to a decision like that.

  Then again, Jimmy was a handsome devil and charming when he wanted to be. He had certainly charmed her. The only good things to come of that were Carrie and Amy. Laurie wouldn’t trade her daughters for the world, so she couldn’t regret having fallen for Jimmy.

  So maybe Katy’s mother had her reasons for not wanting anything to do with Trey. After all, what did Laurie really know about him other than what Donna told her? Besides, Donna loved him like a son, so she wasn’t exactly objective.

  But, according to Donna, Katy’s mother tried to give the baby up for adoption without even letting Trey know he was a father.

  That, in Laurie’s book, was wrong, any way she looked at it. There was no excuse to deny a man that knowledge. Laurie was just glad, for Trey’s and Katy’s sakes, that the woman’s plans had fallen through. It was more than obvious that Trey and Katy belonged together.

  Laurie spent the next couple of days giving the house a thorough cleaning, front to back, top to bottom. She washed and ironed curtains, vacuumed beneath and behind furniture and declared war on the soap scum, hard-water deposits and mildew in Trey’s shower.

  If from time to time she found herself looking out a window with the hope of catching a glimpse of her employer, well, no one but her knew it. And after all, she wasn’t dead, was she? She could appreciate the sight of a tall, lean man in snug-fitting jeans.

  This afternoon, however, she couldn’t see him at all. He had driven off across the ranch in his pickup after lunch, muttering something about irrigation. She thought maybe he meant to work on the watering system for his crops, but, city girl that she was, that was only a guess.

  In the backyard, Carrie and Amy were playing with their dolls in the shade of a big elm. They had taken to outdoor play like a couple of ducks to a pond. If nothing else, Laurie would always be grateful for this chance her daughters had to experience the outdoors without so many of the worries and problems prevalent in a big city.

  With Katy in her arms, Laurie turned away from the kitchen window and placed the empty nurser on the counter. “How about it, young lady? Are you ready to give me another big burp?” After placing a cloth over her shoulder, she positioned the baby and gently rubbed and patted her back.

  From outside came the crunching sound of tires on gravel.

  “Donna.” Laurie rushed out the door to greet her aunt. They had spoken on the phone a couple of times but had yet to see each other since Laurie’s arrival.

  “I couldn’t stand it another minute,” Donna declared. “I escaped the chicken pox so I could get over here and see you.”

  “Aunt Donna!” Carrie and Amy barreled around the corner of the house and into Donna’s widespread arms.

  “Oh, my, how you girls have grown since Christmas.”

  “Come on inside,” Laurie invited. “I just made a fresh pitcher of iced tea.”

  “You sold me, but I can’t stay long. I left Belinda manning the fort alone.”

  They gathered around the kitchen table with glasses of iced tea and a plate of cookies.

  “How are you three getting along here?” Donna asked. “Is Trey giving you any trouble?”

  “Mr. Trey is cool,” Amy announced. “He’s got kitties in his barn, but they won’t let us pet them ’cause they’re mostly wild.”

  “Well, now.” Donna looked suitably impressed. “In a few days you’ll have to come over to headquarters for a visit. The boys can show you around. They’ve got some barn cats, too, and they have a dog, and horses and cows.”

  The ever-practical Carrie’s eyes widened. She’d been drawing pictures of horses for the past six months in hopes of convincing her mother to buy her one. “Can we go there, Mama? Can we?”

  “When the boys are over their chicken pox, and when it’s convenient for Aunt Donna and Mrs. Wilder. Now, you can each take one more cookie and go outside again.”

  Donna stayed a few more minutes, but then had to get back to her duties. She made Laurie promise to bring the girls for a visit as soon as the boys were well.

  Laurie chuckled. “Since they’ve got horses, I don’t think I’m going to have a choice.”

  When Trey returned home shortly before supper, he was pulling a horse trailer behind his pickup. With Katy strapped to her chest, Laurie took Carrie and Amy outside to watch him unload a beautiful gray gelding into the corral beside the barn.

  Coming as it did on the heels of Donna’s m
ention of horses, Laurie knew she was going to be in for a hard time. Carrie was already beside herself, and Amy would start drooling any minute, she was so excited.

  “It’s a horse,” Carrie cried, forgetting completely that she was the sober sister. “Mr. Trey, you have a horse.”

  Trey had just backed the horse out of the trailer. Holding on to the lead, he turned and saw them approaching.

  The girls dashed forward.

  “Not too close,” Laurie called.

  Trey’s heart took a leap behind his ribs. Countless times he’d trailered a horse home, but never to the excitement of little girls. God, look at them, he thought, running to meet him, their eyes bright and shining and glued to the horse. He didn’t need a crystal ball to know a love affair was in the making. Two love affairs. The girls were instantly in love with the horse, and Trey was falling hard for two little sweethearts.

  “Hey, ladies,” he said.

  They giggled. They always giggled when he called them ladies.

  “This is Soldier,” he told them. “Don’t get near his hind legs. He likes to kick, and he can kick real hard.”

  A little more cautious now, but no less excited, the girls moved away from the horse’s hindquarters and toward Trey.

  “Golly, Mr. Trey.” Amy’s eyes were about to pop out of her head. “Is he yours?”

  “When I need him, he’s mine.”

  Carrie gaped up at the horse, then at Trey. “Does that mean you’re a cowboy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Huh?” Amy scrunched up her sweet little face. “How can you be a cowboy only sometimes?”

  “When I’m working cows, I’m a cowboy. When I work the fields,” he said, waving toward the acres of alfalfa, “I’m more of a farmer. When we have a family meeting to take care of business, I’m a rancher.”

  “Golly.” Clearly impressed, Amy looked at him in awe. “Are you gonna ride him?”

  “Tomorrow. I have to go fix some downed fence, and I can’t get there in the pickup or the Blazer, so Soldier’s going to take me there.”

  “Will you be a cowboy then?”