“Ignore what?” Connor asked innocently. “I’m agreeing with you.”
“I know that uh-huh. That’s the sound you make when you’re humoring me.”
Connor finished off his coffee. “You’re letting your imagination get the better of you.” He cocked his head, studying his brother. “Or is that just a guilty conscience?”
Cole’s eyes darted toward his brother. Did he know? Had Connor somehow guessed that he had spent the night with Stacy?
Since Connor wasn’t saying anything specific, Cole decided to go with denial. “I don’t have anything to be guilty about.”
“Good to hear. Glad we’re on the same page,” Connor said, clapping his brother on the shoulder as he put his empty coffee cup in the sink. “It should be a pretty light workday today. You can check in at the Healing Ranch to see if they need you, or—” a whimsical smile playing along his lips “—you can stay here to spell Stacy and take over taking care of the twins. Sounded like she wore herself out yesterday.”
Cole avoided making eye contact with his brother. “I think she got some sleep when the twins fell asleep,” he said evasively.
The bottles were warm enough and he picked them up to take to Stacy.
“Did she, now?” Connor asked, turning to walk out the front door.
Was he that transparent? Cole wondered. Could Connor guess at and predict his every move even before he made it, at least, when it came to Stacy? Or was Connor just reading things into everything he said, again, because of Stacy?
Cole decided that was a riddle for another time. He had things to do.
Walking back into the twins’ bedroom, Cole announced, “Breakfast is served. Why don’t you go downstairs and get yourself some while I take care of these guys?”
“My breakfast will keep,” she told him. “I want to make sure these little people stay on some sort of a regular schedule, and right now, it’s time to feed them.”
Cole handed her one of the bottles and held on to the other one himself. “Might as well help you out,” he told Stacy.
She tried to take the second bottle from him, but he continued to hold it. Stacy gave up. Nevertheless, she asked, “Don’t you have something to do?”
Cole feigned being hurt. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
She shrugged as she picked up one of the twins and sat down in the rocking chair.
“I just don’t want to take you away from what you normally do.”
“Stop being so noble,” he chided. “You’re confusing me.”
“Meaning I’m not normally noble?” Stacy asked, a slight edge in her voice.
Cole grinned the moment he heard her tone. “There’s that fire I know so well,” he told her with a laugh.
Stacy sighed and shook her head. In her arms, Mike greedily went at the bottle she held to his lips. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“Highly possible,” Cole agreed. He turned toward the remaining twin in the crib. “Okay, Mikey, time for one of your many feedings,” he said, picking the baby up in his arms.
Amused, Stacy corrected him. “That’s Katie you just picked up.”
He was certain he could tell them apart. “No, it’s not.”
Stacy merely smiled. “I just changed them before you came in. That’s Katie. Trust me.”
Well, he couldn’t very well argue with anatomy. “Okay, Katie,” he began again amicably, “time for one of your many feedings.”
Stacy laughed softly, shaking her head. She liked the way that Cole rolled with the punches. He was a lot more adaptable than she was, she’d give him that.
Sitting down on the edge of the nightstand to feed Katie, Cole glanced in Stacy’s direction. “Something funny?” he asked.
“No, not really.” She didn’t really want to tell him she was giving him marks for his amicable behavior.
Stacy fell silent for a few minutes as they both sat there, feeding the twins. Despite the fact that Cole was actually perched on the edge of the nightstand, it struck her as an incredibly tranquil moment. The kind that every parent looked forward to and relished in the midst of a day filled with small and large chores, surrounded by chaos and organized disorder.
She could get used to this.
“Why do you think she did it?” she asked suddenly, turning toward Cole.
The question came out of the blue and caught him totally off guard. “Who?”
“Their mother.” Stacy nodded at the twin in her arms. “Why do you think she abandoned them?” She just couldn’t wrap her head around the concept, not after being with them, holding them, taking care of them. “What would make a mother just walk away from her child? Especially two of them?”
Cole shrugged. Although he felt the same way, he tried to put himself in the twins’ mother’s shoes. “Maybe she felt that she couldn’t provide for them. It is possible, you know. Or maybe she felt she was too young to be a mother. One night of passion and suddenly, she’s faced with this huge responsibility for the next eighteen years. It was too much for her.”
He looked at Stacy. “At least she had the presence of mind to leave them on someone’s doorstep, in this case, mine. If she’d been completely self-centered, she could have just left them out in the desert.”
Stacy shivered, refusing to even go there in her mind. “Don’t even say that.”
“What I’m saying is that at least she wanted to give the twins a fighting chance. A chance at a decent life.”
Stacy pressed her lips together, thinking.
“I’m going to adopt them,” Stacy said after a very long pause.
“You’re going to what?”
“I’m going to adopt them,” Stacy repeated very deliberately. “If their mother doesn’t turn up—and it’s beginning to look like that’s highly likely—I’m going to adopt these twins.”
That was just her emotions talking, Cole thought. Stacy couldn’t possibly know what she was thinking of taking on.
“Stacy...”
She pretended that he wasn’t trying to interrupt. He was undoubtedly going to try to shoot her down with logic and she was in no mood to hear it.
Instead, she laid out the plan she’d just come up with. “I have some money that my aunt left me and I can get a job at Olivia’s law firm before that runs out. I can be an administrative assistant. And if that doesn’t work out, Miss Joan would give me a job. So would Rebecca,” she recalled.
His jaw all but dropped open. “You want to be a waitress or a desk clerk?”
It was important to her that she make Cole understand she was serious about this.
“I want to do and be whatever it takes to take care of these little people. They deserve a chance at a life,” she insisted. “They deserve to grow up feeling loved, and I do love them.”
She looked at Katie and she could feel her heart swelling. This was her purpose. This was what she was meant to do and why she had come home.
“Stacy, you’d be taking on a really huge responsibility.” He didn’t want to shoot Stacy down, but at the same time, he wanted her to think about what she was getting into.
“I can do it,” she assured him without any hesitation.
There was one more point that she was overlooking. “You also need to have a judge approve you adopting the twins,” he reminded her. “You’re a twenty-five-year-old single woman.”
Stacey raised her chin defiantly. The more he argued against it, the more determined she became. “So? Twenty-five-year-old single women have twins,” she insisted.
“That they gave birth to. There’s a difference if you’re trying to adopt them,” Cole pointed out. Didn’t she see that?
“I’ll just have to convince the judge, then.” She said that as if it was just a small bump in the road she was going to have to negotiate.
He could see that talking her out of it was out of the question. She had her heart set on this, so he needed to help her.
And himself.
“You’d stand a better chance of adopting them if you were married.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” she said with a toss of her head. “So I’ll just have to work harder at convincing the judge—”
“What if you were?”
“What if I were what?” she asked, distracted.
Putting down Mikey’s bottle, she placed him against her shoulder and slowly began patting his back, trying to coax a burp out of him so that he would be comfortable.
“What if you were married,” he said, wondering if Stacy was paying attention to him at all, or if she was preoccupied trying to find a way to con a judge into letting her adopt the twins.
“Well, I’m not married,” she reminded him, irritated that he was harping on that point.
Crossing over to her, with Katie against his shoulder, he stood in front of Stacy and asked again, “But what if you could be?”
She stopped patting Mikey’s back and looked up at Cole. Confusion gave way to utter surprise as his question sank in.
“Are you asking me to marry you?” she asked in a disbelieving whisper.
“Yes,” he said simply, “I am.”
“So I can adopt the twins?”
“Well, that would be part of it,” Cole admitted, “but—”
“No,” Stacy answered firmly. “I can’t have you making that sort of a sacrifice. It wouldn’t be—”
Damn, but she made it hard to get a word in edgewise. “For once in your life, will you stop talking and let me finish what I have to say?”
Stunned, Stacy stared at him. And then, when she found her voice, she said, “Go ahead.”
“I said that you adopting the twins was only part of the reason I’m asking you to marry me. The main reason is because I want to marry you. Now that you’re finally back and we’ve cleared up that ridiculous misunderstanding about why you left—which was totally my fault,” he quickly interjected lest she went off on another tangent again, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I love you, I’m pretty sure you love me and I can’t think of any better way to add meaning to my life than to help you raise these twins.”
Having said everything that he wanted to say, he paused, waiting for Stacy to answer him.
The pause stretched out, making him feel progressively more uncertain with each second that passed by.
Was she going to turn him down?
Finally, when the silence was close to deafening, Stacy asked, “Are you finished?”
He drew in a breath, bracing himself. She was going to say no. He could see by the expression on her face. But if that was the case, if she was going to turn him down, then he had to face up to it. Better sooner than later.
“Yes,” he told her.
“And I can talk now?”
“Yes,” he said a little more forcefully.
“Okay, then my answer is—”
Just then, a loud, urgent knock coming from downstairs disrupted everything.
Someone was at the front door.
Chapter Seventeen
The next moment, they could hear Rita responding to whoever was knocking on the door.
“I am coming. I am coming. Have a little patience!” It was more of an order than a request.
Cole exchanged looks with Stacy. Much as he wanted to hear her answer to his question, he could see that her attention had temporarily refocused on the commotion downstairs.
“I’d better go see what’s going on,” he told Stacy. “I’ll be right back.”
Stacy felt that she was part of the family now, at least for the time being, and there was no way she was about to just hang back and ignore whoever was knocking on the door so hard.
Maybe she was being paranoid, but she had an uneasy feeling that this wasn’t some rancher looking for advice from one of the McCullough brothers.
The knocking had had an ominous sound.
“I’m going with you,” she informed Cole before he could leave the room. “Grab a twin,” she said, picking up Katie.
Cole frowned. He had not intended to go downstairs to discover what all this noise was about with a baby in his arms. However, since Stacy was obviously coming with him and taking one of the twins, he couldn’t very well just leave the other one behind. It didn’t seem right.
Scooping Mikey up from the crib, he wound up following Stacy to the stairs.
Apparently, having opened the door and seen who was on the doorstep, Rita had simmered down. Stepping back, she opened the door even wider, allowing Sheriff Rick Santiago to walk into the house.
“Is there something wrong, Sheriff?” Rita asked the man just as Cole and Stacy reached the bottom of the stairs with the twins.
Instead of answering her one way or another, Rick made a request. “I’d like to see Cole or Connor if they’re home. Ms. Rowe, too, if she’s still staying here.”
“Oh, yes, she is still here,” Rita assured him as she closed the door again. “She is helping to take care of the babies, you know.”
Rick removed his hat. “No, I didn’t know. To be honest, I thought she was just helping Cole out with the infants when he stopped at my office.”
Rita was not one to waste time with unnecessary dialogue. “You have news?” she asked pointedly.
That was when he saw Stacy and Cole walking into the living room. Each of them was holding an infant.
“I have news,” Rick answered, addressing his words to the two younger people rather than to the woman who had let him in.
“What kind of news?” Stacy asked, her voice strained and hollow. She could feel her fingertips instantly turn icy. Her heart racing, she held on to Katie a little tighter. Katie whimpered. Realizing she was gripping the baby too tightly, Stacy loosened her hold a little. She could control that, control her hold. But she couldn’t control the way her heart was pounding. If it hammered any harder, it was going to start breaking ribs.
“Is it bad?” Stacy asked, her eyes holding the sheriff’s.
Again, he didn’t answer the question. Instead, he told them, “Joe Lone Wolf found out who the twins’ mother is.”
Stacy stopped breathing. She looked at Cole, mutely asking him for help. She couldn’t make herself ask the question.
Cole got the message. “Who is their mother?” he asked.
Rick gave them the background information first. “For the last six months, the girl was staying with her best friend, Ann Fox Fire. Ann lives with her older sister on the reservation. No one really noticed that the girl was expecting,” Rick explained delicately. “I gather that she didn’t put on much weight, even though she was carrying twins.
“According to everyone Joe talked to, on the reservation and in town, she really didn’t show.” Rick paused and then added, “And she worked right here in town.”
“Who is it?” Stacy asked impatiently, her nerves getting the better of her. She could just envision the twins’ mother being seized with regret and tearfully coming forward, saying it was all a huge mistake and that she wanted her babies back.
“It’s Elsie,” Rick said.
Stacy stared at the sheriff. “You mean the receptionist from the hotel? The one who was so excited about getting accepted into college that she quit right on the spot?” Stacy asked incredulously.
He had to have made a mistake. It couldn’t have been her. Elsie couldn’t be the twins’ mother. She was practically a baby herself.
“That’s the one,” Rick told her.
Stacy shook her head. “There has to be some mistake,” Stacy told the sheriff. “I was there when she opened her acceptance letter.”
“
Turns out that was for everyone else’s benefit.”
Stacy wasn’t sure that she understood what he was telling her. “Then she was lying? Elsie wasn’t accepted to college?”
“Oh, she was. But she knew about it before she came to work. A full day before, according to Ann.” There was no judgment in Rick’s voice as he went on to give them the details. “Elsie agonized over the letter and what she was going to do. According to Ann, Elsie felt that finding a really good home for the twins was the best thing she could do for them. And college was the best thing she could do for herself.”
Rick looked at Cole. “Your family’s getting quite a reputation as being a haven for babies.” To drive his point home, Rick elaborated. “Cody wound up taking in not just the baby he helped birth, but the baby’s mama, as well. And Cassidy took in that baby she and Will saved from the river.”
“So this Elsie decided that it was my turn to get a baby?” Cole asked in disbelief.
“Babies,” Rick corrected, nodding at the infants Cole and Stacy were holding. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”
So now she knew who the twins’ mother was, Stacy thought, but that still left a lot of questions unanswered—and she was far from at ease.
“Where is Elsie now?” Stacy asked.
“She took off,” Rick told her. “Most likely for college. At least, that’s what Ann hopes.”
That still didn’t eliminate possible complications. “What about the twins’ father?” Stacy asked. “Doesn’t he want them?”
She could just envision giving up her heart to the twins, thinking that they could form a family, only to have their father step out of the shadows and demand custody of the children.
“I really don’t think so,” Rick said. “According to what Ann said, he was a guest of the hotel for a couple of nights about ten months ago.” It was an old, all-too-familiar story. “You know the type, good-looking, sweet-talking. Elsie never stood a chance,” Rick concluded, shaking his head. “They spent the night together and then he was gone.
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