Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family)

by Pade, Victoria

  Danny merely frowned at Ash and then at the arrowhead lying in his palm.

  Ash picked it up between two fingers and held it out to him in a way that it could be taken without there being any contact between them. “Just carrying it around with you makes you strong. See, I wear one all the time,” he added, pulling his from inside his shirt.

  That seemed to interest the little boy, who carefully reached for the arrowhead, comparing the polished stone to Ash’s burnished copper.

  “What do you say?” Beth urged gently.

  “Thanks,” Danny muttered. Then he let go of Beth’s leg and made a beeline down the hallway that led to the kitchen, shouting for his father.

  Kansas appeared at the doorway through which Danny had gone, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Come on in,” she said, before noticing the wedding gown Beth carried. When she did, she hurried to them instead. “Oh, I don’t want Linc to see the dress. Let me take it upstairs.”

  She did just that, sending Beth and Ash into the kitchen, where they found Linc studying the arrowhead Danny seemed very impressed with in spite of his leeriness of the man who had given it to him.

  Linc sent him out to play then and turned his attentions to Beth and Ash, and the evening got under way.

  Danny’s wariness didn’t lessen through most of the dinner they ate on the picnic table in the backyard to escape the heat of the house. The little boy kept a close eye on Ash, warming up to him only at a snail’s pace.

  But by the time Linc rounded his son up to be put to bed in Kansas’s guest room, the three-year-old had overcome his trepidation enough to make a muscle to show Ash the arrowhead was already working its magic.

  While Linc was gone, Kansas, Beth and even Ash did the dishes. Then Linc came back and the four of them had dessert outside, too, settling into more of the easy conversation that was making it a pleasant visit.

  It was after eleven before Beth knew it, and though she hadn’t had much of a chance to prove to Ash directly that she intended to be nicer, things between them had eased her in that direction.

  Linc and Kansas walked them out, their arms wrapped around the small of each other’s backs, and Beth knew a sharp tug of regret that she and Ash didn’t share that kind of closeness and affection. But she reminded herself that it was only the hormones causing her to envy them, probably coupled with the weariness that came with the late hour, and she forced the feelings away as they all went out onto the front porch.

  “Jackson tells me you’re having trouble finding a roofer,” Ash said to Linc just as they were winding up for good-nights.

  “The guy who was going to do it for me broke his leg,” Linc confirmed.

  “I’ve done some roofing. Between you and Jackson and me I think we could handle it.”

  “No kidding? That’d be great. It would save me losing two months or having to get somebody in from Cheyenne at double the expense.”

  While they went on to arrange a time to do the work, Kansas was thanking Beth for making her wedding dress, but Beth heard only a portion of either conversation as she stared at Ash in her second surprise of the day.

  He was a roofer, too?

  She was still having trouble believing it when they finally got around to saying good-night and went out to his car.

  This time it was Beth who studied Ash as they headed for the ranch.

  “Okay, who are you, and what have you done with Asher Blackwolf?”

  He frowned at her as if she’d lost her mind. “What?”

  “I was married to you for five years, remember? You didn’t polish your own shoes, let alone make them for a horse. And I didn’t think you knew which end of a hammer hit the nail. But here you are claiming you can roof the honky-tonk.”

  His frown turned into a slow, satisfied smile. “Did you think I was born in a three-piece suit?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  “So how come you always hired other people to do everything?”

  “Because I was also fortunate enough to find myself in a position that afforded it, and hiring other people helped spread some of that around.”

  Of course that sounded like him. He’d put a number of Native American men and kids to work. And here she’d always just thought of him as too much of a desk jockey to dirty his hands.

  Once again she was ashamed of herself.

  “Where did these hidden skills come from?” she asked in a quiet voice that was the best she could do to convey her admiration of what he’d done while she’d been giving him less credit than he was due.

  “Where else? My grandfathers.”

  “Your Grandfather Blackwolf was a sculptor,” she reminded.

  “He didn’t start out there, though. He was a blacksmith and welder by trade before that.”

  “And he taught you?”

  Ash nodded. “The Indian way is to pass things down. Stories, customs, skills. I knew my way around a forge and an acetylene torch by the time I was nine. But I preferred the construction work Pap did. Or maybe it was just that being around Pap was a better time,” he added pointedly, tossing her a sidelong glance.

  Since she’d already blown an apology for that earlier comment, she didn’t think she ought to try a second. Instead she said, “I knew Robert worked in construction before he retired, but I didn’t know you did, too.”

  “It paid my way through college.”

  For a moment Beth was lost in the image of Ash in completely different scenarios than she had ever pictured before. She was aware that his two grandfathers had shared in raising him after both his parents were killed in a drunk-driving accident when he was seven—his father having been the drunk driver, his mother the drunk passenger. Each of them had had serious alcohol problems. But he’d never said much else about his growing-up years.

  “Amazing,” she muttered to herself for the second time that day.

  “What? That I can actually work with my hands and back, along with my brain?” he asked as if he expected another insult from her.

  “No. That I could be married to you for five years and actually know so little about you.”

  He pulled up in front of the ranch house just then, but he left the motor running. Even so, Beth didn’t move to get out and neither did he. Instead he turned toward her much the way he had when they’d begun the evening; this time, though, he stretched his arm across the back of the seat, close enough to her neck for her to feel the heat of him.

  She looked up into the dark shadows of his eyes. “What else don’t I know?”

  He shrugged as if he weren’t sure what to tell her.

  “Were you a bed wetter? Did you suck your thumb until you were twelve? Were you an unruly teenager who got arrested a dozen times before you settled down? Did you lead a madcap college life? Do you knit?”

  He laughed at her suggestions, and the deep, rich sound seeped in through her pores to sluice along her nerve endings like warm honey.

  “I was not a bed wetter or a thumb sucker, but yes, I was a pretty bad teenager. I smoked and drank and gave my grandfathers fits. I never got arrested, but there were a few times that the cops brought me home or showed up on the doorstep. Either they were warning me to stop drag racing or they had a pretty good hunch I’d been a part of a bunch of kids who’d vandalized mailboxes in a drunken spree. And college—well, that started out as one big party, but by my senior year I cleaned up my act.”

  Beth blew a wry sigh and shook her head. “I can’t even imagine you like that. Especially the drinking part. You rarely even have wine or a beer, and I’ve always thought that because of your parents’ problem you had an aversion to it.”

  “More like because of my parents’ weakness to booze, I was drawn to try it, too. I don’t know. As a kid maybe drinking and being as wild as I’d heard they were was my way of feeling connected to them. It proved I was their son.”

  “What straightened you out?”

  “Not what. Who. Pap. My other grandf
ather died just before the end of my junior year in college and I was about to inherit everything he had. I thought it meant life from then on was going to be one big party. Or one big drunken brawl, which was what the parties always turned into.”

  “So why didn’t it mean that for you?”

  “Pap kicked my butt, to be blunt. And then he met with the elders of the tribe—a number of men in key positions in the community who Pap happens to be close to—and they devised a plan for how I was going to spend my summer vacation that year.”

  “Not as a kids’ camp counselor, I take it.”

  “Hardly. They managed to temporarily delay my getting my hands on any of the inheritance. I couldn’t get a soul on the reservation to hire me, and Pap refused to let me live with him, turned his back on me completely. All of a sudden I was on the streets, literally, forced to sleep with the derelicts, eat at the soup kitchen, clean toilets at the bathhouse in exchange for an occasional shower. And more than once I was picked up by a cop friend of my grandfather’s so I could get a firsthand look at a drunk driving accident or the corpse who came out of it.”

  Having lived on the reservation herself, Beth understood enough about the Native American community to believe this closing-of-ranks to scare one of their own and save him if they could.

  “Sounds awful,” she said. “But it turned you around?”

  Ash nodded. “I really saw how tough life could be. And how easy I’d had it. It lit a fire under my conscience. Plus, having Pap turn his back on me was terrible. I knew it was only a matter of time before the inheritance had to be released to me, but I also knew that if I didn’t stop drinking, he’d disown me for good.”

  “So you stopped.”

  “I did. Luckily I wasn’t to the point yet where it was an addiction. And then I decided to do what I could with my other grandfather’s money, to help out where I’d witnessed the need for that help. And that’s how I turned into this boring guy you see before you.”

  Beth knew it was another reference to her earlier comment and this time she thought she’d better address it. “I didn’t say you were boring—”

  “Just no fun. And maybe you’re right. You know what they say about all work and no play...”

  But at that moment his overworking wasn’t what was on her mind. It was still difficult for her to believe that she was hearing so much about him that she’d never known before. It was as if they’d just met.

  “Amazing,” she repeated.

  “That I was once a wild man?”

  “That you didn’t tell me about it when we were married.”

  “Talking was not what we did best together,” he reminded her, in a voice with a husky, sensuous intonation that alluded to what they had been good at.

  But that Beth knew all too well. Their sexual attraction to each other had been so intense right from the start that apparently they’d skipped a lot of important aspects that normally happened early in a relationship—such as just plain getting to know each other.

  “This earthier side of you—it’s nice—for a change,” she ventured.

  Only one corner of his mouth tilted upward. “Is this Beth Heller trying to say there’s something she might actually like about me?”

  “It’s just good to know what went into making you the man you are.”

  “Is it?” he asked, but in a way that made it seem more than an offhand comment. A way that seemed to wonder, just as she did, if there were more good things happening between them at that moment, for the air seemed charged with a new closeness that hadn’t been there before.

  A closeness that weakened her resistance to him.

  His eyes were holding hers, searching them in the dimness of dashboard light, maybe for signs of what was going on here.

  But he couldn’t have found an answer, because Beth didn’t know herself.

  She knew only that she wanted more than anything for this man, who had just revealed such personal things to her, to close the gap between his arm and her shoulders, to pull her to him, to—

  And then he did.

  He leaned forward, wrapping his arm around her and bringing her to him so that he could cover her mouth with his in a kiss that held considerably more heat than the one they’d shared the previous night.

  His lips parted over hers and his tongue traced the uneven edge of her teeth just before coming inside to play, to assert himself.

  And Beth welcomed him. Welcomed the mingling of his breath with hers, the circling of their tongues, the thrust and parry.

  His arm tightened around her, bringing her up against his chest, forcing her to circle the breadth of his shoulders with her own arms and giving her the opportunity to splay her hands against that hard back. Visions of those muscles working just beneath the taut, sweat-dampened skin she’d watched most of the afternoon danced through her mind and lit new sparks inside of her.

  She had feelings for this man that she shouldn’t have. That she didn’t want to have.

  And the longer that kiss went on, the more they sprang to life, until they scared her nearly to death and shoved her out of his embrace.

  “I don’t want this to happen!” she told him in a near panic.

  And if she’d struck a blow earlier in the evening with her comment about his not being like Robert, she saw that she’d struck a much greater one with this.

  Ash drew away as far as he could go, leaning his back against the door, taking his glorious arms with him.

  “Then it won’t,” he said, in a tone she hated, for it told her he’d given his word and once he’d given his word, he didn’t break it.

  She closed her eyes and let her head fall against the window on her side as she fought the urge to make him take it back right then, to fling herself into his arms again and show him she didn’t mean it.

  But she did mean it.

  She had to mean it.

  She dropped her chin and opened her eyes to look at his again. “This is what we did when we met. We let ourselves get carried away and we never really got to know each other. So of course the marriage failed. But we’re not married anymore. And the relationship we need to form now certainly can’t be like this. If you’re going to stick around—even for just a little while—we have to try to be friends, or at least courteous acquaintances, for the baby’s sake. But we can’t do this.”

  For a moment he just stared at her, and she thought that he really must have wanted to strangle her, because his eyes were so cold, so hard.

  But then he nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Good,” she said, though she hadn’t intended it to sound as halfhearted or as disappointed as it did, any more than she had intended to feel as disappointed as she did.

  But once again she tamped down on it. “I have to go in.”

  He repeated his slow, solemn nod.

  “Good night,” she said, opening the door.

  Once more his only response was the nod.

  But she couldn’t wonder about it, wonder what was going through his mind, wonder if he was mad at her because she’d stopped the kiss or mad at himself for starting it. She had to just get away from him before she began it all over again.

  She closed the car door after herself and went up to the house, feeling his eyes boring into her as if they were laser beams. But she let herself in without so much as glancing back at him.

  And once she was inside and the door closed her off from him, she fell against it as if the starch had gone out of her.

  Hormones, she told herself. Crazy, intense hormones—that was the reason tears were flooding her eyes.

  It didn’t have anything to do with Ash.

  Or wishes that, somewhere along the way, things could have been different between them.

  Chapter Five

  Elk Creek’s medical facility was across the street from the park square at the north end of town. Originally it had been the old Molner mansion—a three-level, red brick, Georgian-style building, its flat front interrupted by a big whitewashed
porch.

  The first floor was divided into a reception and waiting area, offices and examining rooms. The second floor was a small hospital, complete with two surgical suites for minor procedures and three rooms for inpatients, though it was rare that anyone stayed over. And the third floor held a lab, X-ray equipment and a rudimentary physical therapy section.

  The entire staff was comprised of a doctor, a dentist—a coup for the small town—one nurse, one dental assistant, and Janet Gaultbien, who was receptionist, bookkeeper and administrator and just generally ran the whole shebang.

  Beth’s appointment with the doctor was at nine o’clock. She’d changed it since Ash had arrived and begun following her around, thinking that if she chose the earliest one, it would allow her to go before he showed up to tag along.

  But Ash, Jackson and Linc were roofing the honky-tonk today and had begun at dawn, so she needn’t have worried.

  And as she climbed the porch steps, she wished she’d kept her afternoon appointment so she could be in bed still, catching up on the sleep she’d missed during the night. She promised herself that when she’d finished here she’d go home to her nice, air-conditioned house and take a nap.

  That was what she was thinking about as she went in the front door, expecting to find the receptionist alone in the waiting room.

  But the tall, boxy woman was not the only one there. Ash was, too, intent on a book Janet was showing him while she explained the development of the fetus at five months. Neither of them looked up.

  “What are you doing here?” Beth blurted out, forgetting her vow to be nicer to her former husband.

  He was leaning on the counter, his rear end jutting out at her from inside a pair of Jackson’s oldest, rattiest jeans. His biceps bulged from the ragged armholes of a work shirt that had had sleeves once upon a time, before her brother had ripped them out, and he bore absolutely no resemblance to a businessman.

  Her question drew Janet’s attention, but it was a moment before Ash slowly straightened up and turned to look at her.