Rodeo Daddy: Book 3 in the Stubborn Texas Siblings Trilogy

by Faith Loveright

  Unable to speak, her eyes half-mast; she nodded her head weakly. He began to move towards her and she had to shake her head to try to gather her composure long enough to remember that their daughter was sleeping on the couch. When he arched his single eyebrow at her in question she raised her arm pointing at where Alexis still lay. Catching the hint, Jeff swooped the child up into his arms and carried her quickly back to her room. He bent and kissed her brow before quietly exiting her room and going to find Dana.

  He found her lying sprawled out on her bed as naked as she had been before they'd been interrupted. His mouth went dry as he recalled the hundreds of times he’d seen her like this before. As he ripped his pants from his body Jeff recalled just how addicted to her he had become and no matter how many times he’d seen other women naked since, none of them had been able to compare to Dana.

  His heart hammered in his chest as he climbed onto the bed and wrapped his big muscled arm around her torso. The kiss he planted on her lips as he nudged her legs apart with his knee was full of equal parts reverence, greed, desire and promise. He hadn’t meant for the promise to be there but it was nonetheless. His intention had never been to promise more than what he knew he could give her. But with every touch and caress, even he could not deny the promise of at least one more time… One more day… Perhaps even more, but he wasn’t willing to admit even to himself that that might be the case. All he knew in that moment was that what they were about to share would not be a one of.

  When their bodies fused as one Dana gasped and clutched at his shoulders, her knuckles going white from the grip she had on his skin. Her mouth fell open as she sighed his name welcoming him home. Jeff groaned and closed his eyes as he pressed further into her body. His voice was husky and full of grit when he spoke. “God, I missed you…”

  “I missed you too,” she admitted breathlessly as she rotated her pelvis to take him more fully into her body. When he reverently touched her sweat dappled midriff with the palm of his hand and picked up the pace, she moaned again. “So much Jeff… There were times I thought I might die from missing you.” The words had come out as if ripped from her very soul and Jeff grabbed both of her hands with his own and held on tight as he began to make love to her in earnest.

  When it was all said and done, Jeff held Dana close to his chest; a wide grin covering his face as he lazily dragged his fingers down over the skin of her arm. “Now that I have you back where I want you, perhaps I can get a full night’s sleep for a change. Lord only knows I haven’t had one since that first rodeo you missed.”

  Dana rolled her head over to look him in the eyes. “You really missed me that much?” she asked, blinking sleepily. “I got the impression from what you said that you could easily replace me in your bed.”

  “Oh, there were other women,” he told her, not wanting to admit how much time he had really spent thinking about her. “It was as easy to get them into my bed as you were… but after spending a year with only you and no closure, I spent entirely too many hours awake and thinking about why you’d taken off without bothering to say goodbye.”

  When Dana sighed and started to get out of the bed, Jeff grabbed her by the waist; his hands settling on her bare hips. “Don’t go. I said it before and I’ll say it again. I need to get you out of my system, and we’re nowhere near there.”

  She blinked up at him, swallowed hard and lay back down with her head resting on his chest. She knew that she was asking for trouble, giving in to her desire and need to be with Jeff, but she couldn’t help it. She loved the rascal, despite all the reasons there were why she shouldn’t.

  Chapter 8

  Jeff’s phone rang and he carefully extracted himself from Dana’s bed. “Yo,” he whispered softly as he crept out of the room. His brother’s booming voice was on the other end of the line and he sighed sitting down on the couch with a flourish.

  “What do you want, Eric?” he asked, glancing back down the hall, wishing he could climb back into the bed and wake Dana up by making love to her again. She’d always been long gone by the time he woke up the morning after they’d slept together in the past. It had been a serious turn on to open his eyes to find her beautiful face laying on the pillow beside him, her hair spread out over the white pillowcase looking like a sunrise.

  “What explanation can you possibly have for skipping out on our sister when you knew she was in labor? Why is it that our nephew has been in this world for well over twelve hours now and still, you’ve yet to even call to make sure Laurie is alright? I happen to know you aren’t allowed to ride, what with your bum leg, so what could possibly be so important that I had to call you in order to find you?”

  “I have my reasons,” Jeff snapped back at his brother. Eric was the king of guilt-trips; nobody could hand them out with quite the ease that his big brother did. “Look… It’s a really long story, and clearly, you haven’t spent much time talking to our sister yourself, or you’d already know at least the largest part of my reason for being A.W.O.L. Give a guy a break, will you? I’ve got my own mess I’m trying to work through right now. I knew that Laurie had both you and Travis. She didn’t need me, and I was definitely needed somewhere else.”

  He heard a noise coming from the nursery and cursed under his breath as he realized that Alexis had woken up. Any moment now, she’d start crying. Knowing he had to get off the phone before Eric heard it and started asking questions, Jeff cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his head in agitation. “I can’t talk right now. It’s technically still the middle of the night for me, since unlike you, I don’t have a herd of animals waiting for me to go take care of them. Come around mid-day sometime, I give you my word; I’ll come down to the hospital to see our sister and our new nephew. Until then, I’ll just say goodnight.”

  Having said that, he hung up the phone and ran down the hall towards the nursery. With any luck, Dana was still sound asleep and it would be a chance to spend a little time with his daughter without having someone looking at him as if he was incapable of being a good parent.

  He may have never intended to be part of the lives of any children he may inadvertently father through the sperm donor program he had actively donated to for well over twelve years now, but that had nothing to do with Alexis. She was the result of an ongoing affair with a beautiful woman who Jeff still had yet to get out of his system. Most likely because of a broken condom, but who knew… there might have been a time or two when they’d gotten too carried away to think twice about donning protection before they’d fallen into each other’s arms. Lord knew they’d been hot enough for each other for that sort of thing to have happened.

  His eyes grew wide as he realized he’d just had exactly that happen. Protecting her from possible pregnancy had been the furthest thing from his mind when he’d claimed her the night before. A colorful curse word popped into his head and he had to bite his tongue to keep it from escaping his lips. The last thing he needed was to say it in front of Alexis. His kind of luck, it would end up being one of the things she would latch onto and parrot later on. Dana would have ammunition to get him away from his daughter, and that wasn’t something he was about to hand her. Not willingly. Especially not when there was a very good possibility he could have just knocked her up for the second time.

  Alexis was standing up in the middle of her toddler bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with her tiny fists when Jeff opened her bedroom door. She looked up at him and a broad smile played across her face as she lifted her arms up in the air saying “Up me,” in the cutest tiny little voice he could remember ever having heard in his life.

  Jeff happily lifted his daughter up into his arms and carried her over to the white dresser with the miniature pink roses painted all over it, tugging a drawer open with the hand that wasn’t holding onto the very excited little girl. She babbled incoherently as he showed her several different outfits asking her which one she wanted to wear. He knew that women thought a lot about what they wore, and since Alexis was a girl, he
felt the need to empower her at an early age by giving her the option to wear whatever she liked.

  She pointed at a cute little pink pair of overalls and a cuddly soft pale yellow shirt. Jeff didn’t think they went together very well but he didn’t want to stifle his daughter’s creativity so he shrugged his shoulders and helped her put the clothes on before carrying her out to the kitchen to see about getting them all something to eat.

  Dana entered the kitchen yawning widely as she stretched her arms high over her head. Jeff’s jaw just about hit the floor when he spotted her as he was setting a bowl of oatmeal in front of Alexis. The only thing she had on other than her underwear was his shirt and the top three buttons were undone revealing her ample cleavage. The garment barely hung past her rounded butt … just far enough to make his mouth water from the sight. His blue jeans suddenly felt ten times tighter than they had a second before and he had to shift himself to keep the blood circulation from being cut off by his rapidly rising erection.

  He cleared his throat and pointedly looked away from her enticing body. “I made us some oatmeal … I hope maple and brown sugar is okay… It’s what Ma used to make for us when we were little.”

  Dana smiled over at him, her lips curving just slightly as her left eyebrow lifted; her deep green eyes sparkling mischievously, leaving a very naughty look on her beautiful face that gave him all kinds of ideas that had nothing to do with his appetite for food. Jeff groaned at the sight and busied himself placing the full bowls onto the table along with spoons and a couple of tall glasses of milk.

  They were finished eating and Dana was stacking the dishes into the dishwasher as Jeff washed Alexis’ face and hands clean of the messy breakfast when he brought up his promise to his brother. “I gave my word that I’d go down to the hospital later today to check in on my sister… She gave birth to a baby boy yesterday…”

  “Oh? That’s good,” Dana said absently, thinking that she would happily use that time to think about how she was going to manage to find the strength to walk away from this man a second time when her heart was so much more involved this time around.

  “I thought perhaps now’s a good of time as any to introduce my siblings to Alexis…” the words were said as he concentrated on his squirming daughter and he struggled to keep from looking over at Dana to see her reaction. “It’s high time my daughter met her Aunt Laurie and Uncle Eric.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit soon?” Dana asked as panic filled her to the point that it felt like a lead weight in her belly.

  “No. Actually, I’m going to catch Hell about the fact that they‘re just now meeting my daughter when she’s damn near two years old,” he said pointedly, glaring at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m going to be ridiculed by the entire town for not stepping up and doing the gentlemanly thing when I got you pregnant, and not one of them is going to give two figs about the fact that I didn’t know I even HAD a daughter. As far as they’re all concerned, I am lower than the scum of the Earth just for sleeping with you when we weren’t married. It’s just how things are done around these parts.”

  “Isn’t that an even better reason to hold off on telling the world?” Dana asked desperately. Once Jeff’s family knew that he had a child, they would also have a claim on her daughter’s life. Getting the playboy rodeo champion out of the picture would have been hard enough, given the way she felt about him, but two married couples with kids of their own was an entirely different scenario altogether.

  Jeff gave up ignoring her and turned his head to face her after setting Alexis down on the floor so she could toddle off to go play with her toys. “No, it’s no reason to wait. What’s the point in putting off the inevitable? They’re all going to find out sooner or later, and if it comes out down the line that I knew about Alexis when I want to go see Laurie … or Eric for that matter, and failed to tell them about her; I’ll never hear the end of it. They’ll both accuse me of being secretive as well as calloused and irresponsible regarding you. Thanks, but no thanks. I have no intention of giving them any more ammo against me where Alexis is concerned. They find out today… and they’ll be meeting her today as well. If you’d like to go and meet them; that would definitely be expedient, because I have an inkling one or both of them are going to demand to meet you anyways.”

  Not wanting to spend any more time with him than she had to, wasn’t a good enough reason to say no and Dana knew it so she reluctantly nodded her head in acceptance. “Very well. I’ll just go get cleaned up and put some clothes on. Then I’ll need to get Alexis bathed. If we’re both about to be scrutinized by your family, we’ll need to look our best. I still think you’re nuts if you honestly believe they’re going to lay into you for not stepping up to the plate as a father. More likely than not, what’ll actually happen is they’ll call me every name in the book for keeping your child from you and they’ll end up trying to take Alexis from me. I’m letting you know right now; I won’t let them do it… or you either, if that was what you were thinking. I’m her mother. Technically, since the birth certificate says father unknown, you have no legal rights where my daughter is

  concerned…”

  Jeff rolled his eyes at her and nodded towards the bathroom. “Just go get cleaned up already… There will be plenty of time later on to lob custody threats regarding our daughter back and forth. Do me a favor though, will you? Try to keep them to yourself while we’re around my family, because if they so much as get wind of even a thought of keeping her from me, you WILL be dealing with a fight… one you can’t possibly win; and it won’t even be me that started it. My sister will be emotional, as she just gave birth, so I’m not so much worried about what Laurie will say… but where my brother is concerned… Eric is a wild card and when he feels that a family member is being threatened in any way, he tends to act first and think about the repercussions after the fact.”

  Dana nodded her head and gulped, spinning on her heal and running for the bathroom without saying another word. Jeff was sorry he’d frightened her, but she’d needed to hear the truth before she said or did something to bring out Eric’s protective side. She was right… his brother wouldn’t take kindly to hearing that she’d never bothered to even try to inform him of his impending fatherhood. If she would have compounded that error by mentioning a custody battle, Jeff was in no doubt whatsoever that his brother would have let her have it with both barrels.

  Chapter 9

  Laurie was sitting up in the bed, holding onto a bald baby, swaddled in a soft blue blanket, looking happier than Jeff could remember ever seeing her. Her husband Travis stood at her side, looking down at them both with a look of such love and devotion it almost hurt to glance his way, since it reminded Jeff of the fact that he’d missed out on this moment with Alexis.

  Eric was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room with his boots propped up on a stack of magazines that Madeline had brought for him to look through since he refused to leave the room and go back home until his sister was released to go home. Swallowing the lump of emotion in his throat, Jeff made his way over to the bedside; Alexis clutched in his arms as he walked with Dana following behind him. Her head was bent and her shoulders slumped as she walked. If Jeff had bothered to look back at her, he would have seen the expectation of rejection coming her way, written clearly over her expressive features.

  He only had eyes for his sister and the precious baby boy she held in her arms though and Dana was thankful for the brief reprieve. It was only a matter of time before Jeff figured out that her emotions where he was concerned were stronger than ever and that her biggest fear was losing both him and their daughter. The longer she could put that eventuality off, the better.

  Laurie looked up at Jeff, beaming with happiness and then her eyes landed on the little girl in his arms and they widened in shock. He’d told her about having a child, but with his past opinions on fatherhood, she hadn’t expected to ever see him with his daughter; let alone carrying her to meet the rest of his family.
Then she saw the woman walk in behind him and her eyes grew even larger. She handed her son over to Travis and held her arms out towards Jeff.

  “Let me get a good look at that little peanut,” she demanded with a tear sliding down her cheek. Eric sat forward on the edge of his seat and watched as Jeff carefully transferred the tiny little girl over to their sister. The child had red hair that hung in adorable ringlets down to her shoulders. Her eyes seemed too big for her face and her cute little button nose looked so much like his brothers’ there was no doubt in his mind that Jeff had fathered the tyke.

  He narrowed his eyes as he examin ed his brother’s features. Jeff was watching Laurie with the little girl as he wrapped his arm proprietarily around the red-head at his side. Surprise filled Eric as realization dawned that not only was his brother a father, he was actually involved with the mother… It wasn’t just one of the children born from one of Jeff’s many sperm donations to some anonymous recipient. His brother had enjoyed an affair with what looked like a rather normal looking woman, and a child had been born of the affair. For Jeff to bring both the woman and child to meet both their sister and himself was a huge statement of intention that Eric wasn’t even sure Jeff was quite aware he was making.

  Laurie’s voice shook with emotion as she looked into the toddler’s eyes. “What’s your name, Princess?”

  Dana answered for her since her daughter was acting the part of her usual shy self. “Her name is Alexis.” “How old is she?” Eric asked from the other side of the room, unable to hold his tongue any longer. Jeff looked over at him and offered a half smile. “Not quite two years old,” he said, holding his head up high, daring his brother to say something about the fact that he was just now meeting his niece for the first time.

  When Eric opened his mouth to say something, Laurie cast him a glare that was sharp enough to make their normally unflappable big brother snap it back closed again. She turned her attention back to Alexis and offered her a finger to hold onto. The little girl searched her face for a moment or two and then smiled widely, showing off her pearly white teeth before turning around and pointing at Dana. “Mommy…”