He's Got His Daddy's Eyes

by Lois Faye Dyer

  Although George had assured her that the empty ranch house was cleaned on a regular basis, she decided to stop by and check the house before going on to the Hildebrandt spread to collect J.J.

  The well-oiled lock gave easily to her key. Inside, Sarah opened drapes and pulled off the sheets tossed over comfortable, well-worn furniture. A quick inspection of the kitchen further reassured her.

  “Thank goodness Mr. Ankrum is so meticutous,” she murmured with relief. The house wasn’t only habitable, it was obviously well maintained.

  She flipped a wall switch and was rewarded with the glow from an overhead light. George had told her he’d arranged a minimal basic fee with the electric company and used the electricity only during the winter months to keep the water pipes from freezing. The only utility not connected was the telephone; Sarah knew she had to make phone service her first priority so the hospital could contact her if necessary.

  Satisfied that she and J.J. could spend the night, she recrossed the living room and stepped out onto the porch.

  Her little red. car was precisely where she’d left it, but leaning against the near front fender was a tall, broad-shouldered man in boots, jeans and a cowboy hat.

  It was the same uniform of dusty, casual work clothes she’d often seen him wear five years before.

  The man was Josh Hightower.

  Sarah couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She’d thought she was prepared to see him again, but she had assumed it would be in town. Perhaps she’d pass him on the street. Perhaps she’d run into him at the post office or the grocery store. Sometime, somewhere—but not here, certainly not now. Not the first day she was back, and not when she was vulnerable, struggling to deal with the overload of emotions brought about by seeing her mother so ill.

  His eyes were still an intense, riveting turquoise, his hair the same coal black above his strong-boned, handsome face.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Even across the yards that separated them, she could feel the cold anger that surrounded him, could see it raging in the hard stare that met hers unflinchingly, and in the stony, unforgiving set of his features.

  He hates me.

  She’d always known he would. She hadn’t known how much it would hurt.

  “What are you doing here?” she countered. Over the past Ave years she’d become adept at concealing her emotions; still, it took every ounce of control to force her gaze to meet his without wavering, to keep her expression calm and unruffled.

  “I live here.” He bit out the words.

  “You live here?” Staggered, Sarah looked past him to the barn and corrals. “Where?”

  “In the foreman’s house.”

  “You can’t.” Sarah shook her head, dismay coloring her voice.

  “Oh, yes, I can. I pay good money to rent this place—and I don’t want you here. Leave.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. Go to your mother’s place in town. Why aren’t you there?”

  “It’s being remodeled.”

  “Then go to a hotel. You can’t stay here.”

  The shock of seeing him was beginning to give way to anger. Sarah frowned at him. “Oh, yes, I can. George gave me the key. He also told me that the outbuildings and the land were leased to a company called ZJ Enterprises. That lease doesn’t include the main house.”

  Josh glared at her and bit off a curse. “Well, I’m not leaving, and I damn sure don’t want you here. Why don’t you stay with Molly and Wes?”

  Sarah didn’t want to tell him why she couldn’t deal with her beloved uncle on a daily basis—or any man, for that matter. “We’ll be more comfortable here. There’s more room.”

  “We?” Josh stiffened, his jaw hardened, and a muscle jumped in response. “Someone’s with you?”

  “Yes,” Sarah replied. “He’s—”

  “Never mind.” His hand lifted to slice the air in a silencing gesture. “Just stay the hell out of my way while you’re here.”

  He pushed away from the car and turned abruptly, stalking away from her toward the barn. His big body radiated anger.

  A headache throbbed at Sarah’s temples. The extra-strength aspirin she’d taken before leaving Butte Creek had only begun to dull the hammering pain. Now it was back, stronger than ever, spurred on by the pressure of tears that burned behind her eyes. She refused to let them fall. She’d cried buckets of tears over Josh Hightower. She refused to cry any more.

  J.J. tugged on Sarah’s sleeve, his thick-lashed, emerald eyes vivid beneath the shock of blond hair that fell across his brow. “Are we going to Grandma’s house now?”

  His voice interrupted her thoughts, and Sarah glanced down to find him chewing on a licorice whip.

  “No, we’re going to Grandpa John’s house at the ranch,” Sarah answered, resting a hand on J.J.’s jeans-clad knee.

  “Who’s Grandpa John?” he asked, his words garbled by a mouthful of licorice.

  “Grandpa John was my daddy and Grandma Patricia’s husband. I told you about him, remember?”

  “Is he the grandpa that went to heaven?” J.J. asked.

  “Yes.” Sarah checked the wiggling little boy’s seat-belt latch before he returned to the subject of his grandpa John’s ranch.

  “Are there horses and cows at Grandpa John’s, Mommy?”

  “Mmmhhh,” Sarah said absentmindedly, her eyes narrowed against the rays from the setting sun slanting through the windshield. She’d been so preoccupied with the condition of the house and then stunned by her confrontation with Josh that she hadn’t noticed if the pastures and corrals held stock. “I think so, J.J. Mr. Ankrum said the trust, had leased the land and outbuildings to a horse-andcattle operation, so the corrals and barn are being used.”

  “Good.” J.J. nodded with satisfaction. “I like horses. What’s a trust?” he asked abruptly.

  Sarah glanced sideways at him, a rush of warm affection and delight filling her at the lively curiosity and intelligence in the bright look that met hers. “When Grandpa John died, he left the house in town to Grandma Patricia and the ranch to Aunt Margaret and me. But we were too young then to understand business and sign legal papers, so he asked Mr. Ankrum to do it for us. That’s called a trust”

  “Oh.” J.J. seemed to accept the simplified explanation at face value and began to hum along with the Garth Brooks song on the radio.

  J.J. was delighted once they reached the ranch. There were horses in the corrals, and more horses and cattle scattered across the pastures surrounding the Rocking D headquarters. Sarah had to collar the excited little boy to keep him from racing down the wide graveled driveway to the barn. She tugged her grumbling and protesting son beside her, then moved up the walkway and across the porch of the ranch house.

  “Did you live here when you were a little girl, Mommy?” J.J. asked as he raced through the front door and up the stairs.

  “Every summer until Grandpa John died,” she answered, following him to the second floor.

  “How come only summers?” His voice alternately faded and grew louder as he dashed in and out of the four bedrooms and the old-fashioned bathroom.

  “Because my mother made us live in town during the winter so we could go to school.”

  “Why didn’t you stay here and go to school?”

  “Because it’s a long way on a bus to get to the school in town, and she worried about us when the weather was snowy or icy in the wintertime.”

  J.J.’s questions continued through bathtime and being tucked into bed. He even interrupted the bedtime story Sarah was reading to him with new questions. J.J. was fascinated at how dramatically different the ranch was from the neat little duplex with its small fenced yard that they called home in Great Falls. By the time Sarah turned off his light, she was exhausted from the barrage of queries about Butte Creek, the ranch, his grandfather, and what she’d done as a little girl.

  She didn’t bother flicking on the light switch in the second-floor bedroom that had
been hers since she was born. Moonlight poured through the windowpanes, and she crossed the room to slide the sash upward. The white cotton curtains stirred in the light breeze, and she lifted her face into the warm current of air, closing her eyes to breathe in the scents carried through the night. The heavy scent of alfalfa and dried-grass hay was underlaid with the faint, pungent smell of horses and cattle from the barn and corrals; intermixed was the fragrance of wild sage from the pastures and flattopped buttes beyond the ranch buildings.

  Sarah opened her eyes and leaned against the window frame, resting her aching head against the cool glass. The aspirin had reduced the pain to a slow, dull throb.

  For five long years she’d alternately longed for and dreaded a return to Butte Creek and this land she’d loved since she was a child. After J.J. was born, when Patricia realized that she was adamant about keeping the baby instead of turning him over to an adoption agency, her mother had angrily demanded that she never embarrass her by returning to her hometown.

  Sarah and her mother had always had a difficult relationship, but J.J.’s existence had opened a canyon between them. Although the stroke had stolen Patricia’s ability to voice her displeasure, Sarah knew by the anger in her mother’s eyes that she was upset that her friends would now discover that her daughter had a child but no husband.

  But beyond her concerns about her mother, Sarah. had alternately longed for and dreaded seeing Josh Hightower. Five years was a long time, but not long enough to dull her memory of the cowboy who’d been her first and only love. Events beyond her control had altered her life forever and destroyed her dreams of marriage and family. Still, part of her yearned for Josh. But she knew all too well that a life with him was impossible.

  And after their confrontation this afternoon, she had no illusions about whether or not Josh remembered her with yearning or regrets for what might have been.

  He hated her.

  The quiet night was broken by the sound of a transmission downshifting, the rumbling purr of an engine growing louder as the vehicle neared the house.

  Sarah straightened, her fingers fisting over the edge of the curtain.

  The vehicle drew closer, rolling slowly past the front of the house. It was a ranch truck, four-wheel drive, dusty, the driver an indistinguishable black shape in the dark interior. The truck slowed, stopping just behind her little car where it was parked on the gravel outside the front yard gate. The pickup idled quietly for a long moment before it rolled forward, easing on past the house until it disappeared down the gravel lane, past the barn and corrals and beyond the edge of the grove of trees. The brake lights winked a bright red just before the engine shut off. Through the open window Sarah heard the distinctive, low sound of a truck door closing, and saw the dim glow of lights flicked on in the foreman’s house just visible on the far side of the grove.

  It didn’t matter that the walls of two houses, the grove of trees and yards of land separated her from Josh. Her body, blessedly numb and encased in ice for the past five years, was awakening and remembering his. Unbidden and unwanted, memories of the gentleness of his touch and the feel of his mouth and body against hers flooded back to taunt her. She’d struggled so hard to come to terms with and accept what was left of her life, and thought she’d resigned herself to living without love. It was shattering to learn that one brief, angry encounter with Josh could set all her locked-away emotions clamoring to be free and destroy her hard-won peace of mind so easily.

  Especially now that she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he hated her.

  With a heavy sigh, she forced her fingers to ease their punishing grip on the curtain. Weariness overwhelmed her and she turned away from the window, pulling off her clothes and tugging an oversize T-shirt over her head before she tumbled into bed. The long drive across Montana from Great Falls to Butte Creek the day before, the difficult meeting with her mother and the doctor, followed by the confrontation with Josh, had combined to exhaust her. She was asleep only seconds after her head hit the pillow.

  “What the hell is wrong with you this morning, Josh?” Murphy Redman slung a hand-tooled saddle into the bed of his pickup truck and slammed the tailgate shut.

  “Nothing,” Josh said flatly. He tossed a bridle on top of the saddle and turned back toward the open barn door.

  “Now, just a dang minute.” Murphy leaned his forearms on the top edge of the metal tailgate and fixed the younger man with a stern eye. “Don’t be runnin’ off. You know good and well I’m too old to chase you. Come back here.”

  Josh bit off a snarl and stalked back to the truck. Hands on hips, he glared at the white-haired man. “What do you want, Murphy?”

  “I want to know what’s got your tail in a twist this morning, that’s what I want” Murphy pushed the brim of his straw cowboy hat higher. Worry added another crease to his weathered brow, and his black eyes were bright with concern. “Is there somethin’ wrong with Baby?”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong with Baby.”

  Murphy was nonplussed. If Josh’s quarter horse stud was healthy, then he was at a loss as to what could have caused the simmering temper that edged the younger man’s tone and hazed the usual turquoise of his eyes to smoky blue. “One of the mares, then?”

  “No.”

  Murphy ran a keen gaze over Josh’s six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, muscled length. “You don’t look sick.”

  “I’m not sick,’ Josh said shortly.

  “Then what the hell—”

  “Hey, Josh.”

  Josh glanced over his shoulder to find his partner, Zach Colby, leading a sorrel mare toward him down the wide center aisle of the big horse barn.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did Walt say how long it would take him to weld the hitch on the horse trailer?”

  “A day or two.” Josh nodded toward the back bumper of his own truck. “He’ll straighten the bumper and reweld the truck hitch on Thursday. I’ll pick up the trailer then.”

  Murphy glanced at the dented bumper and the scratches in the tailgate’s paint. “Is that what’s got you in such a snit? Some danged fool rear-ended you on the way back from Colorado?”

  Josh glared at Murphy and refused to answer.

  Zach’s ice blue gaze narrowed over his partner’s taut features. “Something wrong, Josh?”

  “No,” Josh snapped.

  “Of course there’s somethin’ wrong,” Murphy declared. “He’s been cranky as a bear, snarlin’ and growlin’ ever since I got here.”

  Before Josh could respond, or Zach ask another question, the door to the ranch house burst open and a little boy dashed out onto the porch.

  Josh froze, his gaze narrowing as he stared at the boy. Zach half turned, and Murphy glanced over his shoulder at the unexpected interruption.

  The child jumped down the shallow steps and was halfway to the gate when a woman stepped onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind her.

  “J.J.!”

  Her voice carried clearly on the early-morning air. Josh registered the musical, feminine tones and a muscle jumped in his clenched jaw, a barely perceptible flinch jerking his big body.

  “Don’t go outside the fence.’

  “Hurry up, Mommy. The little boy climbed onto the bottom rung of the wooden gate and peered over the top, his eyes rounding as he spotted the men, trucks and horse in front of the barn. “Look, Mommy, a horse!”

  Sarah glanced up from her ring of keys and across the intervening space between the ranch house and barn. Three men stood there. One of them was Murphy Redman, a white-haired, bowlegged neighboring rancher, while the second, a tall blond man, Sarah recognized as Zach Colby, a friend of Josh’s.

  The third man was Josh Hightower.

  Chapter Two

  “Mommy, can I go pet the horse? Can I?”

  Sarah didn’t know how long she’d been standing frozen, staring at Josh’s rigid figure, before the repeated tugging on her arm brought her attention back to J.J.

  “I’m sorry, honey, w
hat did you say?” “The horse—can I go see the horse?” Impatiently he pointed across the yardlot to the barn, bouncing excitedly up and down.

  “No, J.J. You can’t.” She ignored his quick frown and took his hand in hers. “Aunt Molly is expecting you, and I have to go to the hospital to see Grandma Patricia.”

  “I’d rather pet the horse,” J.J. said stubbornly.

  “Maybe Uncle Wes will take you out to see his horses,” Sarah told him. She walked with him to the car, then pulled open the door and urged him firmly inside.

  She refused to look toward the barn again, but she could feel the weight of Josh’s unrelenting stare as she drove away from the house, the image of his broad shoulders and his long legs encased in faded tight jeans engraved on her memory.

  The three men stood silently, watching the woman and little boy until the car disappeared down the lane and turned onto the highway.

  Murphy whistled, the long, low expulsion of air a sound of disbelief. “If I’m not mistaken, that woman was Sarah Drummond.”

  Josh was silent. Murphy turned away from the now-empty lane and eyed him. “What’s she doin’ here, Josh?”

  Josh didn’t answer. A muscle ticked in his clenched jaw, his eyes burned with fury and his hands were curled into fists.

  “The postmistress told me Patricia Drummond is in the hospital,” Zach said when Josh didn’t answer. “Maybe Sarah is back because her mother’s sick.”

  “Umm,” Murphy grunted in acknowledgment “Makes sense, but that still doesn’t explain what she’s doin’ here. Why’s she stay in’ in the house?”

  “No reason why she can’t,” Zach said slowly. “It belongs to her.”

  “So what?” Murphy demanded. “You two leased this place.”

  “Not the house. We didn’t need it, and I didn’t want to be responsible if pipes froze or kids decided to break out windows in an empty house.”

  “Oh.”

  Josh was only half listening to the conversation. He’d thought he didn’t care if she was married— until last night when she’d said “we.” He’d wanted to put his fist through the nearest wall, just thinking about Sarah with another man. And now this morning, a little boy had run out of the house and called her “Mommy.” Living, breathing proof that she belonged to someone else. Had a child with someone else. The sharp sense of betrayal that filled him at the thought of Sarah with another man didn’t make sense, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with.