Rodeo Father

by Mary Sullivan

  When he threw open the door, the wind smacked him in the face. Why did this hyper-independent, ornery woman think it was all right to give birth alone in an empty trailer when she had a perfectly good friend right across the street who would do anything to help her out?

  Including helping her to give birth? His gut clenched.

  Yeah, including that.

  He’d think about the details once he had Rachel safe with him.

  He jumped down from the veranda and nearly ran into her.

  A sob escaped her. “I can’t do it, Travis. I can’t give birth alone. Help me. Please.”

  Thank God! He yanked her against his chest. She was safe! She’d changed her mind.

  Inside his house, he slammed the door behind her and threw his shearling jacket onto a hook. He turned to give her a piece of his mind, but halted. She looked miserable.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? For needing my help?”

  She reacted to his harshness by shaking her head. “No, for all of the nasty things I’ve said and thought about you lately.”

  “Aw, hell. Don’t worry about it. I understand.”

  He took her coat from her and hung it up. Gently, he took her arm to lead her into the living room when Rachel gasped.

  A great spurt of liquid gushed from her. Travis jumped out of the way. “What the he—”

  “My water’s broken. It won’t be long now.”

  His hands started to shake. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Get Tori into bed first, preferably behind a closed door.”

  “You got it.”

  “C’mon, munchkin.” Tori didn’t hear him. “She’s already out like a light.”

  “She’s a heavy sleeper.”

  He gathered her, Puss and Ghost into his arms and carried them upstairs to the bedroom he’d set up for the boys, gently placing her in one of the twin beds and covering her with ample blankets. He tucked Puss under her arm.

  Ghost circled and lay beside her.

  Travis closed the door.

  Back downstairs he ran to the kitchen and put on a huge pot of water to boil.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s what they do in the movies.”

  Her skin was pale and her cheeks flushed, but she smiled. “Get me some old rags and I’ll clean up my mess in the hallway.”

  Outrage filled him. “Stop that kind of talk. I’ll take care of it, but first, we need to get you settled in. Where? In my bed?”

  “No, birthing’s a messy business. I don’t want to ruin your new mattress.”

  “I don’t care,” he said harshly.

  She touched his arm. “I do. Do you have any extra blankets?”

  “The linen closet is full of old quilts. I haven’t touched them. They’re probably dusty.”

  “Those will be Abigail’s homemade quilts. She will have taken good care of them over the years. Let me see them.”

  She chose three large thick ones and a whole bunch of old towels.

  Without warning, she leaned against him and breathed heavily. Panted. Moaned. “God,” she said.

  “Contraction?” he asked.

  She rode it out and nodded. “Bring all of that to the living room. We need to get me settled in. Quickly.”

  He followed her, asking, “How can you be so calm?”

  “Because I’ve done it before. If this were my first, it would be different.”

  He started to spread the quilts on the sofa, but she shook her head.

  “No, here.”

  “On the floor? Are you out of your mind?”

  “The floor can be cleaned up easily.”

  “I’m not letting you give birth on the floor.”

  “Travis, honestly, this is the way I’m most comfortable doing it, okay?”

  He would have argued, but she started to keen. The pain on her face was unbearable to him.

  When she came through on the other side, she ordered him to pile up the quilts and cover them with all the towels from the closet.

  He did what she asked, doubling the quilts. The pile added a buffer against the hard floor in front of the fireplace.

  Travis built it up. “Good?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s good.” She took his hand in hers. “Travis, you need to get up close and personal with me right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need to check me out, make sure everything’s okay.”

  “You mean...” He tried to swallow, but came up dry. “You mean check down there?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d never looked at a woman down there in any way but sexually. “I’m not a doctor. How will I know if anything’s wrong?”

  “You won’t. Or maybe you will. I don’t know. I just need you to look.”

  “Is there any way around it?”

  “None.”

  His harsh breathing filled the room, but he helped Rachel to lie down. She bent her knees, and he lifted up her dress.

  Her underpants were damp and stained pink from her accident in the hallway. Correction, not an accident, but a natural part of childbirth.

  “I can’t take my undies off. Can you do it for me?”

  Before he could respond, she let out a groan that seemed to come from the depths of her soul. She gritted her teeth and arched her back.

  When she finished, she was panting. “They’re coming closer.”

  “That seemed like a bad one.”

  “Yeah. They’ll get worse.”

  Worse?

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “That’s okay.” She arched with pain again. She panted, “My body does. The birthing will take its course.”

  “What if something goes wrong?” He was scared shitless. He knew nothing about this. He was a capable guy and wasn’t used to feeling useless.

  “Everything will be fine. Things feel fine.”

  This torture was fine?

  He wiped her forehead where sweat dripped in what seemed like an unending torrent.

  Sure, this was a natural occurrence that had been happening since the dawn of time, but did women have to suffer so damn much?

  During the next contraction, with Rachel’s back bowed and her hips off the floor, he managed to get her underpants down to her knees. While she relaxed to rest and wait for the next one, he hauled them off.

  He checked, even though he didn’t know what he was looking for. Not seeing any obvious problems, he focused on trying to keep Rachel calm.

  He held her hand, tiny in his, but she squeezed until he thought she would break his fingers. As small as it was in his big palm, why weren’t her own fingers breaking?

  He knelt between Rachel’s legs while her body worked to birth her baby. He marveled when the head started to show...and even more when the baby’s body turned to allow the shoulders to come through.

  Travis was there to catch Beth.

  A sense of wonder flooded him. He’d never known anything to feel so good in his life.

  In the second it took to ease her from Rachel’s body and hold her, he lost his heart.

  This little girl had been talking to him before she was born, and now he held her for real. She in her tiny, red newness had a power over him that he’d never imagined.

  She was real. Awesome. Amazing.

  Travis held the tiny, as-yet-unspoiled creature in his hands and thought, I could get used to you. I could get used to holding you. I could certainly spoil the daylights out of you. I could love you, almost as much as I love your moth—

  He halted that thought with the veritable screeching of tires. No way would he go there. Not true. Not true at all.
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  This was a temporary aberration, this business of having a woman and kids in his home.

  Even once Sammy, Jason and Colt got here, he’d be moving on.

  This house might be the beginning of Sammy’s dream, but it wasn’t his dream. They were the reason he’d bought it. Without them, he would still be a wandering cowboy looking for the next job and the next bunk.

  His priority, his sole purpose in being in this town, was them—not the widow who lived across the road, even if she did give birth to splendid creatures on his living-room floor.

  He used one of the towels to wipe Beth clean.

  “You’re one tough cookie, Rachel.”

  “No. Just determined to have healthy babies.”

  “This one’s healthy, all right. Her lungs are, at any rate.”

  “Give her to me, Travis.” She raised her arms to him, but she looked tired.

  “Are you sure you’re strong enough?”

  “Travis, you can seriously ask me that after what I just went through? Give me my daughter.”

  He rested the baby on her chest. “You look all done in.”

  “I’m exhausted, but I want to get to know my baby. Can you unbutton my top and my bra? I want her skin to skin. It’s good for her to get to know her mama.”

  He did as she asked, revealing breasts that were heavy and blue-veined. He’d never seen anything more beautiful in his life than this red, wizened baby on her mother’s pregnancy-ravaged, perfect body.

  Rachel reached her hand to him. He took it. She squeezed, though not as hard as when she was giving birth, thank God.

  “Thank you, Travis. I was terrified.”

  “You didn’t seem it.”

  “I was. I’ve never been happier than when you came out of your house to get me so I wouldn’t have to do this alone.”

  “I was scared, too.”

  “I know, but you rose to the occasion.”

  “I didn’t do anything. You did all the work.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

  “Thank you, Rachel. This was a gift. Something special. I’ll never forget tonight.”

  He touched Beth’s hand. She curled tiny, perfect fingers around his thumb, or tried to. His fingers were huge and clumsy compared to hers.

  “Imagine,” he said. “Five minutes ago, she didn’t exist. It’s a wonder.”

  “Yep. The best wonder on earth.”

  “What about that?” He pointed to the umbilical extending from her body and still attached to the baby.

  “The afterbirth will come out in a minute.” She winced. “Soon, I think.”

  He swallowed hard. “Is it going to be bad? Please tell me you don’t have to go through that again.”

  She closed her eyes, briefly, then said, “No, it won’t be that bad. It’ll be sort of like aftershocks following an earthquake.”

  “So we survived the earthquake. Now, your body finishes up for you.”

  “Yes. You’ll have to cut the cord. Wash some scissors in that water you put on to boil, okay?”

  “The water!” He raced to the kitchen to find it full of steam. Fortunately, the pot he’d put on was huge and had been filled to the brim. It was still half full.

  He dropped his scissors into it and retrieved tongs from a drawer to fish them back out of the boiling water.

  Back in the living room, he crouched beside Rachel.

  “You have any string?” she asked, her exhaustion clear in her reed-thin voice.

  “Should I boil it?”

  “No.”

  He got it from a drawer in the kitchen. By the time he returned to Rachel, the afterbirth lay on the towels between her legs.

  He’d seen plenty of farm animals being born and had a rough idea of what needed to be done now. He used the string and scissors to sever the connection between mother and daughter.

  He put it into a garbage bag beside the back door. He’d deal with it in the morning. He wasn’t going out in this snowstorm.

  The howling wind still rattled the old house.

  After helping Rachel tidy herself as much as possible, he built the fire back up.

  “You warm enough?” he asked into the silence of the room.

  She didn’t answer. He glanced at her. In the few moments that his back had been turned, she’d fallen asleep. He pulled the quilt up more securely over the baby and the sleeping woman’s shoulders.

  He stood to pick the two of them up to carry them to his bed when the lights went out.

  “Damn. Power outage.” In truth, given the severity of the wind, he was surprised it hadn’t happened earlier. He lit the kerosene lamps he had ready and waiting on the mantel.

  He nudged Rachel’s shoulder. “We need to get you off these wet towels and quilts,” he whispered.

  The whiskey highlights in her eyes that fascinated him were dimmed by fatigue, but her spirit flashed. “Why?”

  “Because the power just went out, and it’s too cold to put you in my bedroom. I need to make up a bunk for you down here.”

  Her gaze flitted around the room. “Tori?”

  “I’ll take care of her, no worries. First, I’ll get the bedding from my room.”

  He dragged the king-size duvet from his bed along with his pillows.

  Back downstairs, he said, “Hang on to Beth.”

  He lifted both of them onto the sofa, then checked out the state of the blankets that had been underneath her. The towels were drenched along with the top two quilts. The bottom quilt could be salvaged.

  He left it where it was and spread his duvet on top of it a couple of feet from the fire.

  “Hold on tight.” Picking them back up, he put them onto the side of the duvet closest to the fireplace and folded the other half over them.

  Getting his sheepskin from the hallway, he covered them with it.

  “Travis, we’ll die of heat.”

  “If the power stays out, it will be frigid in here by morning. I’m going to get Tori.”

  He put the child onto the armchair he’d moved close to the fire earlier. Ghost followed and curled next to her again. He covered her with the duvet from one of the twin beds. She slept through the whole thing.

  He lay down fully clothed on the sofa with the duvet from the other single bed and settled in for the night, the only sounds the popping of logs in the fire and the howling of the wind around the old house.

  The house had felt empty since he’d moved in. Tonight it was full of loved ones and joy.

  Travis had never been happier.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, Travis got up several times to stoke the fire and add logs.

  He’d never had more precious cargo to protect.

  In the morning, through bleary eyes, he noted that the storm seemed to have abated outside.

  A thin wail tore at his heart.

  “Rachel,” he whispered. “What does she need? To be fed?”

  “Already working on it, Travis,” Rachel whispered back, and he was engulfed by such a powerful wave of intimacy he wanted the moment to last forever.

  He’d never, not once in his life, not even through everything he’d shared with Samantha, felt this close to another person.

  He saw her hands move beneath the quilt and then the baby quieted.

  In the armchair, Tori still slept, curled up like a kitten under her duvet.

  Peace, and a profound sense of happiness, washed through Travis. He loved these girls.

  He got up and stoked the fire. Just about to return to his bed on the sofa, he stopped. Whoa. Go back to that last thought.

  I love these girls.

  He returned to his bed on the sofa, laying down with the stunning realization tha
t here in Rodeo, Montana, was a treasure worth more than anything in the world.

  He’d traveled all over the western states and up into Canada, not knowing that all the while he’d been searching for this. For them.

  You sure? Maybe it was Beth’s birth, Read. Maybe this is only leftover emotion from last night’s drama.

  He searched his heart. His soul. The feeling was deep. True. Since he’d arrived in Rodeo, he’d been steadily falling in love with Rachel.

  He’d found paradise and perfection here in Rodeo. But how did Rachel feel about him?

  He fell asleep pondering that all-important question.

  An hour later, he awoke again to hear Tori stirring.

  “Mommy? Where are you?” she asked with a hint of uncertainty in her voice.

  She sat up in the chair and rubbed her eyes.

  “Easy, Tori,” he said gently. “You’re okay. You came to my house last night. Remember?”

  She nodded. “I’m cold.”

  Travis stood to stoke the fire yet again. He’d be doing this particular chore for the rest of the day. He doubted crews would get out too early this morning to get fallen wires repaired and power restored.

  Rachel shifted gingerly. She poked her head out of her blankets.

  “Good morning.” She sounded sleepy and happy, if a tad weary.

  “How’re you doing?”

  She peeked under the blanket. “We’re good. I should get Tori and me home, though.”

  His expression flattened. Last thing he wanted was for them to leave. Ever. “Why? What’s over there that you need?”

  She took a moment to respond and then said, “Absolutely nothing.” She looked at her two girls and then at him. She smiled sweetly. “I guess the power’s off over there, too?”

  “I would imagine.”

  “I’m still cold, Travis,” Tori piped up.

  “Take this.” Rachel tried to haul the sheepskin off herself. “I’m hot.”

  “Okay. Here, Tori.” He covered her with part of the coat. It dwarfed her. She giggled.

  “If we’re going to visit for a while, we’ll have to put together a makeshift bassinet for Beth.”

  Tori perked up. “Beth? She’s here? Where?”

  “Right here,” Rachel murmured. “Come on down and meet your baby sister.”