by Maisey Yates
A wife who was probably sexually confident and not frigid and buried under years and years of issues.
She took a deep breath, and the conveyor belt on the carousel began to turn. People crowded in, collecting their bags. She wasn’t expecting hers to show up anytime soon. It was her own little Murphy’s Law that her bag was always last off the plane. She wasn’t quite sure how.
Not that she had traveled very much. She’d gone on a few little trips before her marriage. A post-graduation excursion to Disney World with some friends, a couple of spring breaks where she had been fully out of her element and had spent most of the time in the hotel room sober and trying to pretend she didn’t know her friends were hooking up with strangers a floor above her.
Then she had met Darren and they’d taken that first trip to Colorado to meet his parents, and then had moved to his hometown to be surrounded by his family. A family that had, at first, seemed like a dream to her, given her own parents. She’d settled into a life that had slowly grown more and more confining in ways that Savannah hadn’t totally realized until she had been free of it.
Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t realized the baggage carousel had emptied out, and her flowery, purple bag was going by. She grabbed hold of it, happy that the cheerful color and pattern made it easy to spot. Always being the last bag helped, too.
She hefted it off the carousel and turned around, and her eyes collided with his.
Oh, it was definitely him.
“Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.
“I think I’m waiting for you,” she said, looking down meaningfully at the little pink bundle.
“Savannah Sturm?”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
His eyes landed on her suitcase. “I suppose your description of the bag was true enough.”
She blinked, looking up at him, and wondered if he had been thrown off because she had characterized herself as tall. Well, at nearly six feet, she was. But then, Jackson had to be nearing six-five, so it was entirely possible he didn’t see tall the same way that she did.
“Sorry. I guess tall is subjective.”
His scorching brown gaze moved over her, and for an instant she thought she was going to be singed alive. She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he simply turned. She moved to follow him, and he stopped to take the bag from her hand without asking if she wanted him to.
“You’re holding the baby,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, well, Lily doesn’t weigh fifty pounds, and I assume the suitcase does. Either way, I can handle both just fine.”
She had no trouble believing that. Still shamefully taking a visual tour of his muscles, she watched the way he maneuvered both baby and bag easily outside to where his truck was parked against the curb. There was an old security guard standing right next to it, looking officious, like he was about to make a proclamation. Jackson zeroed that gaze onto the guard. “I’m leaving.”
“It’s for loading and unloading only,” the guard pointed out, tapping the sign with his forefinger to illustrate the point.
“And I’m loading,” Jackson returned, his voice and glare as hard as steel.
Well. He was a whole thing.
Savannah gave an apologetic wave and got into the passenger side of the truck. Jackson hefted her suitcase into the bed, and then opened up his door, gently installing Lily’s car seat in the small bench seat behind the driver side. Then he got in and started the engine, pulling them both away from the airport.
“How was the flight?” he asked.
“Quick,” she responded. “It’s only a couple hours from Colorado.”
“It’s going to take half that time to Gold Valley,” he said. “Near enough.”
“So there’s no airport in Gold Valley.”
“Nothing beyond a tiny municipal airfield. Not for commercial flights.”
“I figured as much when you told me to fly into Tolowa.”
“Our ranch is a bit out of town. Hope that doesn’t bother you.”
“Who’s... I thought you were... I didn’t think Lily’s mother was in the picture.”
“She isn’t,” Jackson said. “But I live on a family spread with my brothers and my stepsister. Lily and I live in our own cabin, and you’ll stay there with us.”
The idea of living in a cabin, which sounded cozy to the point of being tiny, seemed almost impossible now that she had actually laid eyes on the man. He was so large. He would fill up so much...space. It was impossible that he wouldn’t.
She didn’t say that out loud, though, and hid any discomfort. She’d been looking for a change. Looking for a new job in child care, because that was what she did, and when she had run across the ad from Jackson it had seemed like a godsend. Because wherever she ultimately landed, this job would provide her with the means to get away. And she desperately needed to get away.
Living in a small community where her ex-husband was a hometown legend, where his family owned half of everything, was impossible. She’d been choking on the mile-high air in her old life. A clawing desperation to be anywhere else taking over her every thought, as her options in her little town had been eliminated little by little. But moving was expensive, and it required a hell of a lot more credit than she had at this point in her life. Everything being linked to Darren had been fine when she had assumed that it would be forever. But when her marriage collapsed, she’d been left with nothing.
Jackson’s ad seeking a live-in nanny had seemed perfect, and their back-and-forth conversation online had been effortless, making the decision to take the job even easier. But she hadn’t considered the stark reality of being in such close quarters with a stranger.
“What do you do on the ranch?” she asked. She was desperate to fill the silence. If she didn’t, she would be left with her thoughts, and her thoughts were perplexing her at this point.
“Cattle ranch,” he said. “We supply USDA-approved beef to a large distributor.”
“It keeps you pretty busy?”
He chuckled. “You could say that. In fact, I’d say my life was packed full before I found out I had a kid.”
He hadn’t given her the full story of why he was a single dad, but his choice of words just now was odd. She didn’t know if he was divorced, but it had been pretty clear based on the tone of his messages that there was no one else involved. Maybe his wife had died. But then, he hadn’t mentioned that. He hadn’t mentioned a woman at all. It was like...
Like he had just found a baby on his doorstep.
“I see,” she said, not really seeing all that clearly.
Neither of them said anything else for a while, and Savannah turned her focus to the scenery. It wasn’t completely unlike Colorado. Mountainous and full of pine trees. She liked that. She loved the mountains. Compared to the exceedingly tame neighborhood she’d grown up in on the East Coast, she really liked the way that things were out West. She hadn’t wanted to leave Colorado, per se. She had just needed to escape a town dominated by her ex, where he was still making choices about her life even when he wasn’t directly in it. The way he manipulated things in town...
She’d had to get out.
She had thought that Oregon might be a natural place to get to. It had either been that or Montana, maybe Wyoming. But Oregon was where the opportunity had arisen, and she was also attracted to the idea that she would be able to drive out to the beach. Something she hadn’t been able to do living in Colorado.
They drove through the small town of Gold Valley, all redbrick buildings and Wild West aesthetic, which burned a bright spot inside of her soul. Made her feel like—in spite of the initial awkwardness—she had made the right choice.
They continued on out of town, down a winding two-lane highway lined with thick trees, ferns and thickly carpeting the floor of the forest encroaching over the side, nearly to the r
oad.
He was right, the ranch was quite a ways outside of the town itself, and if not for the two wooden posts holding up a sign over a narrow driveway that said Box R, she wouldn’t have known there was even a ranch there at all.
They turned onto that dirt road. The trees cleared and revealed pastures, several empty, and one with a herd of cattle, before the road narrowed and the pines thickened again. It was just remote enough, just isolated enough that a jolt of adrenaline shot through her. Maybe she’d been stupid to come out here. Maybe there was no cabin and she was just on a dirt highway to murder.
But then they came to the end of the drive and she saw a little cabin. It was rustic and rough, but then it was what she’d expected a cabin to be, she supposed. She sat there while he got out, watched as he tended to his daughter. As strange as it all was, the way that those large, battered hands cradled the tiny infant when he took her out of her car seat made her feel...
A whole jumble of things. Most of them centered down deep in the pit of her stomach.
“I’ll just get Lily laid down in her crib, and then I’ll show you to your room and get your things,” he said.
She nodded and watched as he walked up the steps to the front porch and disappeared inside the cabin.
She climbed out of the car. She supposed she could follow him in, but he hadn’t said to, so she just stood there out in the gravel drive, turning a half circle and looking around the isolated place. What in hell had she gotten herself into? She realized it didn’t much matter. She didn’t have anywhere to go back to. She had no real friends left to speak of, no family that wanted anything to do with her.
For better or for worse, this was the place from which she was starting over.
So she had to make it work.
At least for a while.
CHAPTER TWO
PLAIN AND TALL.
Jackson played those words over and over in his head as he prepared his coffee and breakfast the next morning.
After he and Savannah had arrived at the cabin, he’d given her a quick rundown on Lily’s schedule and where everything was. He’d shown her to her room—which was across the house from his, and next to its own bathroom—and he’d told her not to worry about taking care of Lily that night, because while he was an ogre sometimes, he wasn’t enough of one to make her interrupt her sleep on a night when she’d been traveling all day.
She’d gone to bed early, early enough that he was pretty sure she was avoiding spending time in his company. Not that he minded. But he didn’t think she’d eaten at all. Which meant he was making up a double portion of bacon this morning.
He hoped she wasn’t a vegetarian, because everything was cooked in the bacon grease, and it was too late for him to do anything about that.
Probably would have been a good idea to ask.
There were some aspects to having a stranger in his house that he hadn’t fully considered. He had just been desperate for the help. And since he needed round-the-clock help, offering room and board had seemed like the smartest thing to do. Of course, that meant sharing his space. Which he didn’t like to do. But then, he was already sharing it with a woman, a bigger diva than he’d ever encountered before in his life.
Apparently, the tinier the female, the more willing a man was to submit to her whims. He couldn’t explain the way that having Lily made him feel. He didn’t like babies. He didn’t like kids. He’d never wanted any of his own. He wasn’t sure he did now. But the fact of the matter was he had a child, and he would die for her. Hell, he’d kill for her.
He didn’t know what exactly the feeling was that had invaded his chest, but it was intense. He wasn’t...content or happy, necessarily. No, the kind of feeling that Lily gave him wasn’t settled in the least. It was entirely opposite to the way he had always imagined domestic life would go. Which he had imagined as death by monotonous inches.
The appearance of Lily in his life had taken everything he thought he’d known about himself, and about what he wanted, and turned it all on its side. He was sleep deprived, his chest ached when he looked at her, and every damned morning when his feet hit the floor, he had no idea what he was doing.
He’d been a rancher all of his life. When it came to working the land he knew what he was about. Backward and forward. He’d lost his virginity at fifteen to a pretty, older teenage girl who’d shown him exactly what to do, and hadn’t been shy about demanding he do it better. Since then, he’d considered himself something of an expert on women. Everything he did in his life, he had a firm handle on.
Until now.
Feeling like a greenhorn was a total mind fuck, and apparently caused him to make decisions he might not have otherwise made. Like inviting this so-called plain, tall nanny to come live with him.
That was a far cry from reality. She was... She was stunning. It was a problem. Leggy and blonde, with sea-green eyes and full, gorgeous lips.
He hadn’t been with a woman in quite some time. And that was playing havoc with him. The messed-up thing was he hadn’t even thought about it. Not since Lily. He hadn’t had the energy to even consider that kind of thing. He’d been so busy coping with the new life he found himself with he hadn’t spared a thought to his old life.
But then the nanny had shown up, and he wanted to fuck her, which told him everything he needed to know about what kind of asshole he would be in a more conventional life. Because wasn’t it only asshole husbands who wanted the nanny? Yeah, he knew that it was.
He wondered why she thought of herself as plain. Maybe because she wasn’t fussy. She didn’t have any makeup on when he picked her up at the airport. She had been wearing a T-shirt and a pair of leggings, but that seemed par for the course for travel. Maybe that was how she was all the time.
But if that’s what she thought made her plain... Well, he wondered what kind of men she’d had in her life before.
Doesn’t matter. You’re not a man in her life.
He needed help with Lily. At least until she was old enough to go to a daycare or preschool part-time. He and Savannah had discussed that over email. And if he went and messed with the only help he’d been able to find, and earn himself a shady reputation on top of it, he was going to be more screwed than he already was.
It was getting late, and he shouldn’t waste any more time standing around in his kitchen. He had work to do, but seeing as he didn’t have to strap Lily to his chest this morning and go about his work, trading her off between his siblings as they went through different tasks, he was going to hang around the house for a while. He needed to get Savannah established in her new role.
As if on cue her bedroom door cracked open and she appeared. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail, a gray T-shirt molding over her slight, but perfect curves. She was wearing similar black leggings to the ones she’d had on yesterday.
“Good morning,” he said. “Bacon?”
“Coffee before anything,” she mumbled, stepping into the small kitchen, her gaze avoiding his a little bit too neatly.
As if it was intentional.
“How did you sleep?” he asked.
Her green eyes collided with his and he wondered if he had overstepped. Honest to God, he didn’t know how to talk to her. Three months out of the game and he was this bad at communicating with women? Or maybe the problem was he didn’t know how to communicate with a woman he was attracted to that he couldn’t touch.
He hadn’t exactly lived a life of restraint.
“I slept fine,” she said. “I feel bad that I didn’t help with Lily. Tonight I’ll be ready to take the baby monitors.”
“I might be a little bit of a tyrant,” Jackson said, “but I wanted you to start out with a good night’s sleep. No sense in us both being sleep deprived from the get-go, right?”
“Right,” she agreed.
He poured her a mug of coffee and set it in
front of her. “Cream and sugar?”
“Please,” she said.
“All the food in the house is yours,” he said. “My stepsister, Chloe, grocery shops once a week, and she does delivery. So if there’s anything you like, be sure to get it to me and I will put it on the list.”
“I can get my own groceries,” she said. “I don’t mind taking Lily to the grocery store.”
“Food is part of your pay,” he said. “It’s fine if you want the outing, but you don’t have to buy your own.”
“I appreciate that. I...I need to figure out getting a car. I have the money. I sold my car in Colorado.”
“We can work on that, too.”
“Are you a good cook?” she asked.
“I’m terrible,” he said. “Which is another thing. Chloe cooks for us sometimes, but often we fend for ourselves, and you may not like that. So, while I did not hire you to be a chef...”
“If I want to enjoy my dinner I might have to cook for both of us?”
“Just a fact,” he said.
“Good to know.”
“I’m happy to eat frozen pizza. And a lot of garlic bread. Throw a steak in a pan with some butter. I’m not picky.”
“That’s going to catch up with you someday,” she commented, eyeballing his midsection.
“Hasn’t yet,” he said. “Other things have, obviously, but not my eating habits.”
She hesitated for a moment, taking two very pointed sips of coffee. Then she put her mug down and looked at him. “By other things do you mean...Lily?”
He sighed heavily, rubbing the back of his neck. He supposed there was no way around having this conversation.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m the last guy on earth that should be raising a baby by himself. I don’t know a damn thing about kids. And I was not exactly in a white picket fence place. But here I am. When I say I don’t know anything about babies and fatherhood, I mean it.”
“Who is her mother?”
“I know her name, but beyond that, I don’t know much,” he said, shame sliding over him when he said that.