Just a Cowboy and His Baby

by Carolyn Brown

  When she looked down from her perch, she didn’t see a spider or a mouse but a small dog looking up at her with dark eyes. It wagged its tail as if to say that it was sorry.

  “Bet you always wondered if humans could fly, didn’t you?” she giggled nervously as she eased down off the vanity. Her flip-flops slapped back down on the tile, but the little dog didn’t move.

  She squatted down and reached out to touch the tiny critter and it didn’t growl or snap. The tag on the brown leather collar made introductions.

  “Hello, Sugar, where did you come from? Do you live here on the campgrounds?”

  The dog’s tail flipped back and forth even harder as she licked Gemma’s palm. She scratched its ears a few seconds before straightening up and heading for the door.

  Sugar followed her—tail still a blur of movement.

  “Did someone dump you?” Gemma asked.

  The dog was a slick-haired red Chihuahua with all the markings of pedigree. She had a sharp nose and big soulful dark eyes. Surely someone had lost the friendly little thing and would come looking for her.

  “Sugar,” a man’s deep voice whispered outside the door. “Are you in there?”

  Gemma stopped and the dog sat down at her feet. Gemma had heard that drawl before. Her imagination was playing tricks on her. That could not be Trace Coleman’s voice, could it?

  “Sugar,” he whispered again.

  Gemma rounded the privacy wall, flip-flops smacking on the already hot concrete with the dog right along beside her. The owner was searching behind a short hedge with his back to Gemma. He wore red-and-green plaid cotton pajama bottoms and a red tank top that hugged his muscular frame. His flip-flops were green and his dark hair hadn’t been brushed.

  “You lookin’ for a dog?” she asked.

  Trace Coleman turned and her heart thumped.

  He gave her a brilliant smile. “Good morning, Gemma. Yes, I am looking for a pesky little Chihuahua.”

  Sugar meandered out of the bathroom and sat down beside Gemma’s feet.

  “I’ll be damned,” Trace said.

  “This is your dog? I would have figured you to have a pit bull or maybe a Doberman.”

  “No, just that sassy little Chihuahua,” he said. “She usually doesn’t take to strangers.”

  “We aren’t strangers. We shared a bathroom.” Gemma was amazed that she could say two coherent words.

  Trace was a couple of inches over six feet tall. He weighed two hundred and ten pounds and it was all muscle with no spare fat giggling anywhere. His face was a study of angles covered with a full day’s dark scruff. Jet-black eyelashes and equally dark brows framed brown eyes that looked as if they could see to the bottom of her soul. That kind of cowboy surely did not have a Chihuahua named Sugar for a dog.

  He reached down and scooped Sugar up into his arms. “You going all the way into St. Paul tonight?”

  Gemma nodded. “I am. Don’t care if it’s midnight when I get there. I can sleep as late as I want in the morning and then check out the grounds. If I have to drive until noon tomorrow, it’s not the same. I like to wake up on the grounds on the day of the rodeo.”

  She would never admit that she was as superstitious as a football coach; that she always ate a hamburger from the rodeo grounds on the day before she rode that night; that she touched her lucky horseshoe hat pin just before she nodded for the gate to be opened; and that she would never think of wearing anything but her hot pink cowgirl boots. Or that the times when she hadn’t come out of the rodeo with the purse had been when she’d gotten there late and tired.

  “Me too.” He nodded. “Had breakfast?”

  “I’ll stop at a McDonald’s and grab something.” She turned and started walking toward the trailer.

  “I made pancakes and bacon. I haven’t eaten yet because Sugar decided to slip out the door when I opened it to look at the mountains. We could heat up the pancakes in the microwave. It’s the least I can do since you saved me from having to go into the ladies room to rescue my dog.”

  She hesitated.

  “Oh, come on! I’m not going to poison you so I’ll win at St. Paul. I can do that without any help,” he said.

  She stopped. “Don’t kid yourself, cowboy.”

  Trace’s face lit up in a sexy-as-hell smile. “I’ll take that as a yes. Sugar, we’ve got company for breakfast. It’s the first trailer you see over there. I guess that’d be yours beside me? I pulled in right after you did last night. Your lights were still on but they went out before I could walk Sugar and grab a late-night beer.”

  When they reached the trailer he opened the door for her and stood to one side. “It’s not much, but it’s home for the next few months.”

  “It’s bigger than mine.” Gemma looked at his feet and his big hands.

  Dear Lord, what am I doing? That old wives’ tale isn’t true, and what’s wrong with me? I say the word bigger and my mind goes to his body, not this trailer. I’ve got to get my mind out of the gutter. But he does have some big hands and some big feet, so I wonder. Stop it, Gemma! Right now!

  The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee and bacon met her. She dropped her bag inside the door and scanned the place. She was facing a booth-type table on a pedestal that could be lowered like hers used to back before she took it out and replaced it with a platform bed. At the other end of his trailer she could see a bed with tangled covers.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off those gold-colored sheets. He’d look like a hero on the cover of a romance book with his brown eyes and hair against all that gold. She could just see him with the sheet covering the bare essentials and a look in his eyes that invited her to join him. Would he be as good a lover as he was a bronc rider? The past had taught her that cowboys were sometimes better at riding bulls or broncs than they were at having sex. But there was something in the vision of him in that bed that said Trace Coleman would set those sheets on fire.

  Trace made sure the door was shut tightly before he set Sugar on the floor. The dog raced back to the bed, hopped up on a stool at the end, meandered across the bed like it was her personal domain, and finally snuggled down on a pillow.

  “Have a seat. Breakfast will be served as soon as I wash my hands.”

  Lucky dog! Fate is a bitch. And I’m telling Liz tonight that I don’t believe in her tarot cards or her fortune-telling. There hasn’t been a blond-haired cowboy that made my heart race since she told me I’d have my very own cowboy by Christmas. But just looking at the dark-haired one’s bare feet sets my underpants on fire. And he’s the worst cowboy in the lot because falling for him could jeopardize my whole dream.

  Trace motioned toward the table. “Anywhere over there is fine.”

  Gemma blushed and quickly slid to the back side of the booth. “I was watching Sugar. She sure knows how to get up on that bed.”

  “I tacked a little stool to the end of the bed frame at my house so she could get up and down on it. She was driving me crazy at night wanting up on the bed and then down to go outside, so I came up with that idea and then made a second one for the trailer.”

  Gemma nodded, but her thoughts weren’t on the dog or the steps.

  Trace went on. “On the ranch, she has a doggy door in the kitchen that opens out onto a screened porch, and there’s another one that goes down a ramp and outside to the yard which she owns. Even the big dogs let her think she’s queen.” He busied himself pouring coffee and reheating a stack of pancakes and bacon in the microwave as he talked. When they were done he set the plate before her and added a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee.

  “You sure don’t look like a Chihuahua man,” she said.

  He chuckled.

  Hell’s bells! He even chuckled in a sexy Southern drawl that made little goose bumps rise up on her arms.

  “You want to kno
w the story about how I bought a Chihuahua?” he asked.

  She poured warmed syrup on the pancakes. “I would love to hear that story. Did she stow away in your suitcase after a trip to Mexico?”

  “Butter is in the syrup, by the way. I melt it and then add syrup and warm them together. Now, about Sugar? You aren’t even close with the Mexico story. It’s like this. Not last Christmas but the one before that, about eighteen months ago, I was dating a woman from Goodnight, Texas.”

  “My sister lives close to there in the wintertime. I’ve heard her mention Goodnight. She lives between Claude and Amarillo. She and her husband are part of a carnival that winters there,” Gemma said between bites.

  “Blaze McIntire?”

  Gemma nodded.

  “Colleen is your sister?”

  Another nod.

  Trace chuckled again. “Small world! I know Blaze well. Only met your sister once, but I can see the resemblance.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. Blaze and I’ve—” He chuckled again. “Guess I’d best hush or I’ll get in trouble. Colleen doesn’t need to know about all the things in Blaze’s past.”

  “And your past?” Gemma asked.

  “Colorful. We’ll leave it at that. Now back to Sugar.” He changed the subject. “The woman I was dating was tall, blonde, pretty. And sometime in the fall, must’ve been about the middle of October, we started talking about taking a Christmas trip together.” He carried his plate to the table and sat down at the far end away from Gemma.

  “To Mexico?”

  Trace’s brows knit together and he tilted his head to one side. “Why would you say that? Oh! Sugar is a Chihuahua. But no, we were thinking about Florida to the beach. I asked her what she wanted for Christmas and she said something that would fit inside a stocking this big,” he held up his hands and measured about six inches, “and nothing bigger. So I figured she meant plane tickets to Florida and a long weekend in a fancy condo. I got them and they looked pretty small inside the red stocking and then I remembered that she’d thrown a fit over a Chihuahua in the pet store when we were in Amarillo at the mall. So I bought a six-week-old puppy and on Christmas Eve when we exchanged presents I stuffed the dog down into the stocking with the tickets.”

  Gemma finished her pancakes and sipped at the still hot coffee. “And?”

  “She was allergic to dogs. She hated the beach and she wanted an engagement ring. I asked her why she let me think she wanted to go to the beach with me and she said she thought I was joking to throw her off base with the engagement ring.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yep, I didn’t do too hot that Christmas. I got a refund on the plane tickets and only lost the price of one night on the condo, but the dog was not returnable.”

  “And the name?”

  Trace swallowed a gulp of coffee. “I took one look at the critter as she stormed out the door and sped out of my driveway and said, ‘I guess visions of sugar plums weren’t what was dancing in her head.’”

  Gemma giggled. “And Sugar Plum stuck? What happened to the woman?”

  “The dog’s name on the registration papers is Sugar Plum Ziva.”

  “After Ziva David on NCIS?”

  “You got it. Sugar might be small, but she’s a force just like Ziva,” Trace said.

  “And the woman?”

  “Oh, I run into the lady now and then at the café or in the grocery store. She’s engaged to a CEO of some company out of Amarillo these days. Guess he understands her a lot better than I did.”

  Gemma clamped her hand over her mouth to keep the giggle from growing, but it was useless. She could just see the woman peeling out of a driveway in her fancy car, all mad as hell because she got a dog instead of a ring. One bitch sure didn’t want another bitch in her house. The more she visualized the whole scene the funnier it got, and the giggle grew into a guffaw and that went to an infectious roar with Trace joining in.

  Finally, Trace wiped at his eyes with a paper napkin. “It is funny, isn’t it? I haven’t laughed that hard in years, but the look on your face was hilarious. What would you have done if it had been you?”

  “I bet it wasn’t funny then. Did you love her? I would have taken you to court for custody of the dog. I love all animals except spiders and mice. Dogs. Cats. Horses. Even donkeys.”

  “No, it wasn’t funny then, and I don’t know if I loved her. I doubt it. She wasn’t ranch material so there wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship. I’m a rancher and have no intentions of being anything else.”

  “And what makes a woman ranch material?” Gemma asked.

  “Not snarling her nose at a new baby calf or colt goes a long way,” Trace answered.

  Gemma understood perfectly. Her last relationship had ended in a hell of a bigger mess than what a Chihuahua dog could bring about. He’d been one of those pretty, spoiled rotten rich kids who didn’t know the south end of a northbound broodmare from a hole in the ground. The only thing they had in common was a couple of friends and a few months of wild sex. The friends fell by the wayside and the sex couldn’t hold the relationship together. She slid out of the booth and carried her dirty dishes to the sink where she washed them and set them in the trailer-sized drainer.

  She picked up her bag and opened the door and Sugar bounded off the bed. “Thanks for breakfast. See you in St. Paul. Grab Sugar. I wouldn’t want to have to chase her down.”

  He picked the dog up and held the door for Gemma. “Thanks for the conversation and for saving me from public humiliation. It could have been a mess if I’d been caught in the women’s bathroom. See you later and you are so welcome to breakfast. We’ll have to do it again.”

  ***

  Gemma was barely back out on I-90 when her cell phone rang. She put it on speakerphone and laid it beside her on the console before she even answered Liz’s call.

  Liz had been born and raised in a traveling carnival. The same one that Colleen and Blaze helped take care of nowadays. Liz had been the belly dancer and fortune-teller for the carnival, but when her Uncle Haskell left her a house and twenty acres she’d changed her lifestyle drastically. Every Christmas she’d asked Santa Claus for a house with no wheels and a sexy cowboy. Her Uncle Haskell took care of the house with no wheels and Gemma’s brother, Raylen, turned out to be the sexy cowboy. They’d been married for eighteen months and Liz had told Gemma’s fortune twice now. Once before she and Raylen married and once after. Both times there was a cowboy in her future and he was going to be hers by Christmas. But Christmas had come and gone the year before and no cowboy had dropped down on one knee to propose.

  “Hey, Liz, what are you doing up so early?” Gemma asked.

  “Early? We all don’t get to sleep until ten o’clock and only work eight seconds a day,” Liz teased.

  “Ten o’clock my naturally born cowgirl ass! I rode that demon of a horse last night and didn’t even stick around for the after-party and drove until two this morning, so don’t be giving me any sass at this time of day,” Gemma said.

  Liz giggled. “Woke you up, didn’t I? Congratulations on another win. Met a blond-haired cowboy yet?”

  “Hell, no! I’m going to buy one of those signs to hang on my wall that says ‘I believe’ and write don’t in big red letters between the two words. I think you used up all your magic chasing my brother down and roping him for your own. All the rest of the cowboys worth their salt are done gone.”

  “How about Trace Coleman? I hear he’s giving you a run for your money.”

  “He’s got dark hair, dark eyes, and a damn Chihuahua dog. What cowboy rides into a rodeo with a Chihuahua dog? There’s something wrong with the picture even if he does make fantastic pancakes and—” She paused for a breath.

  “Whoa!” Liz interrupted. “Back up and talk to me. When did you have breakfa
st with him? Did you do more than eat pancakes with him and his dog? And FYI, I think those little critters are precious.”

  “Hell no, I didn’t do more than eat pancakes with him. And I will not. It would be a definite conflict of interest. He’s giving me the stiffest …”

  Liz giggled before Gemma could complete the sentence.

  “Okay, get your mind out of the gutter and let me finish. He’s giving me the stiffest competition I’ve ever been up against. I swear it’s going to take all my energy and concentration to beat him out enough for a place in the playoffs, Liz.”

  “Okay, then tell me more about the pretty eyes and the dog,” Liz asked.

  By the time Gemma had finished the story of the dog and perching on the vanity like an owl, Liz was giggling. When she could catch a breath she said, “Now tell me what happens when that cowboy touches you?”

  That caught Gemma off guard and she almost told her about the heat and the vibes, but she stopped before she spoke and said, “What in the hell makes you think he’s touched me?”

  “I can hear agitation in your voice. He’s kissed you, hasn’t he? But you haven’t had sex or you’d be all dreamy voiced instead of pissy,” Liz answered.

  “Don’t be getting your hopes up that your fortune-telling mojo is saved by this cowboy, lady! You are a scam. I’m not going to find a cowboy and I’m damn sure not going to have a baby by then. Last year you promised that I’d have my very own cowboy by Christmas and it would be a forever thing. When it didn’t happen, you said that the cards said Christmas and you assumed it was the next one coming around, but it must be this next one coming up. Are you fixing to tell me that it means the one next year and not this one again?”