High Country Baby

by Joanna Sims

  Clint listened to Taylor as he’d agreed to do. While she was talking, he rubbed his hand over his beard; his ears were tuned in to her voice, but his eyes were focused on his left boot, which had been duct taped on the bottom to cover a deep crack in the sole. He’d needed new boots for a year now.

  There were a lot of things he needed, including making back payments on his truck and fifth-wheel trailer. He’d been living on the edge for so long, barely making it, that his latest injury, broken ribs, had taken him out of the game. He’d burned through what little savings he had paying doctor’s bills; he was seriously delinquent on his truck and his fifth wheel. If he lost his fifth wheel, he lost his home.

  Taylor’s idea was flat-out nuts, but he’d be flat-out lying if he told her he wasn’t tempted.

  Clint didn’t respond for a minute or two; he took his hat off and raked his fingers through his thick, wavy hair several times before he put the hat back on. It was a stalling tactic—she knew it and he knew it.

  “Why...” Clint started to formulate his thought into speech. He stopped and then restarted a moment later. “Why would someone like you ever want to have a kid by someone like me?”

  “Why do you keep saying that? What do you mean someone like me?” Taylor asked defensively.

  “Educated, classy—rich,” the cowboy clarified.

  “Oh.” Her tone changed. “I thought...whatever...it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

  The only sound between them was the crackling of the fire. Taylor tried to put words to the comfort she felt with this man sitting across from her. How could she explain to him that she had always been nervous around men, even though her job demanded that she hide those nerves? How could she tell him that she didn’t feel nervous around him; that he felt familiar and comfortable, in a way she had rarely experienced before?

  When she was brutally honest with herself, she had to admit that she’d married Christopher because she was too uneasy with men to date regularly. Was she ever truly comfortable with Christopher? Had she ever revealed her true self to him? Or had she always held a part of herself separate?

  “You’re a good man.” She finally found the words. “You’re intelligent, you’re protective...you have kind eyes.”

  If she was being truthful with him, those were the nicest words anyone had ever said to him. He wasn’t used to it, and he didn’t trust it. The harsh words were easier to believe.

  “I’m not that guy.”

  “Yes, you are,” Taylor said. “You’re a better man than you think you are.”

  He tipped his head down so she couldn’t see his eyes and she knew she had lost him. “Well—that’s real sweet of you. And I hope you get what you want. But...”

  “You can’t help me.” She saved him the trouble of finishing his sentence.

  “No, ma’am. I can’t.”

  * * *

  The day they returned to the spot where the boundary of her uncle’s ranch intersected the CDT, Taylor had to fight off tears. They were mere days away from the end of the trip and she had yet to figure out what she was going to do with her life next. She had believed that the mountains and time without being connected electronically would have cleared her head enough to decide on a direction, but it hadn’t. Her friends wanted her to move to Seattle and her sister wanted her to move back to Chicago, but neither of those options seemed like the right one for her.

  “A couple of weeks without service and I have two hundred emails.” Taylor sighed. “I’m not ready for real life.”

  She decided to ignore the emails and listen to her voice mail, instead. Most of the messages were from friends, several were from her mother and one was from her uncle Hank. The message from her uncle wasn’t for her—it was a message for Clint. And it wasn’t good news.

  Taylor walked over to where Clint was staking his horse nearby for grazing. She extended her phone to him.

  “There’s a message for you on my phone,” she explained. “Uncle Hank didn’t know how else to get ahold of you.”

  Clint took the phone and listened to the message. She watched his face, looking for some reaction. She saw the smallest flicker of anger in his eyes, a tensing of his mouth, but he said nothing as he handed the phone back to her.

  She had heard, unintentionally, personal information regarding Clint’s financial predicament. He had intimated a couple of times that he had some money problems, but he’d never been specific.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Clint had his head down. He didn’t look up at her. “Ain’t nothin’ for you to worry about, Taylor.”

  Arms crossed over her chest, Taylor walked away from him. He hadn’t meant to be so harsh with her—she was just the messenger once removed. Honestly, he was embarrassed that she had heard that his truck and his fifth wheel had been repossessed. If he’d been able to pay his cell phone bill, then Hank wouldn’t have had to resort to using his niece as a go-between.

  “Damn it,” Clint said under his breath. What in the hell was he going to do now?

  Taylor didn’t join him at the fire that night. He could only surmise that she was giving him space to lick his wounds. The last of the tequila was downed quickly, and his craving for a cigarette was stronger now than it had been since he ran out. A couple of hours mulling by the fire hadn’t dredged up a solution to his most urgent problem from the depths of his mind.

  His ribs were healed, but now he had lost his only two possessions in the world. Without his truck, without his fifth wheel, he was dead in the water. He’d already tried to take out a loan—his credit was wrecked. The money he was earning now wasn’t enough to get him even with his creditors. He’d already exhausted all of his resources and he’d borrowed money from family and friends—as far as he could figure, he had only one avenue open to him: Taylor.

  She was inside of her tent scrolling through the pictures on her camera when she heard Clint quietly call her name. Unless it was inclement weather, Clint never came to her tent. It was her private space, and he had always respected that. For a quick second she froze while her heart raced wildly in her chest. She took in a deep, deep breath, let it out slowly and then unzipped the entrance of her tent.

  “You got a minute?” Clint asked her.

  When she nodded her head, he held out his hand. She took it, and for the first time she felt sweat on his palms. He wasn’t showing it on his face, mostly hidden by the shadows of night, but the cowboy was nervous. That made her stomach flip-flop.

  Clint waited for her to sit down before he started the conversation. “A smart business woman like you—you probably think I’m a bad risk.”

  “I’m not one of your creditors.”

  The cowboy snapped a branch and tossed it onto the fire. “I broke my ribs six months back—no more bulls, no more money.”

  She nodded, so he knew she was listening to him as he continued.

  “My whole life’s tied up in that truck.” Clint took his hat off, wiped the sweat from his brow while he built the will to say what he needed to say next. “You still want to make a deal?”

  Taylor took a sharp intake of breath. He changed direction so quickly, got to the point so quickly, that it took her a moment to catch up with him.

  She cleared her throat to make sure that he could hear her when she said, “I do.”

  “Aren’t there places you could buy...?” He stopped short of saying the word.

  “Sperm?”

  He nodded.

  “I could go to a sperm bank. I’ve thought about it—I even looked into it once. But I want to know the man who fathers my child. I want to respect him. You can be impressed by a donor’s profile, but you can’t respect it.”

  “You’d pay me?”

  “We’d have to settle on an amount, yes. Either way, I’d have to pay.”

 
; “And I wouldn’t be on the hook?”

  “No.” Taylor was quick to assure him. “I’d have my attorney draw up a contract—we could work out all of the details—you would be absolved of all future financial commitments for the child.”

  Clint gave a nod of his head as if he were seriously considering the deal. “Would you want it in a cup or the natural way?”

  The look on his face when he asked that question was comical. Taylor started to laugh, even though Clint didn’t join her. The one good thing that had come out of her pot experimentation was that her brain had hatched this plan. They both had something the other needed, so it truly could be a win-win if they played their hand correctly.

  “I’d prefer...” She couldn’t believe she was about to say this. “Natural.”

  She was tired of fertility shots and doctors and scheduling and waiting rooms; she was tired of dealing with Christopher’s unmotivated sperm and her slow eggs. She just wanted a man to knock her up the old-fashioned way. Was that too much to ask for?

  “Would you have any...objection to that?”

  “No.” Clint’s response was direct. “I wanted to take you to bed the first time I saw you.”

  * * *

  Her plan was to leave the next morning and ride to the last campsite before they returned to Bent Tree. But when she awakened the next morning, having hardly slept throughout the night, she couldn’t imagine spending the day in the saddle. And she couldn’t stomach the idea of being only one day away from the end of her adventure. Particularly after what had happened the night before with Clint. She had tossed and turned all night, only nodding off every now and again, because she couldn’t believe that the cowboy had actually agreed to give her the one thing she wanted in this world: a child.

  Everything she had done leading up to this moment had been to build a stable life for a child—her career, financial stability, emotional maturity. It had all been for a child that had never arrived. When she left her old life, she had given up the idea of being a mother. But, now, with Clint’s help, she might just have a shot at fulfilling another dream. And, it wasn’t just a dream—it was the most important dream.

  “Good morning.” She smiled at Clint, feeling a little shy about seeing him after their discussion the night before.

  Clint, as was usual, had already started the fire and made coffee. He poured her a cup of the thick, grainy liquid.

  “Mornin’.”

  The hot liquid burned her tongue and the roof of her mouth; she had learned to drink the strong, bitter coffee black over the past couple of weeks, and even picking coffee grounds off her tongue didn’t seem unusual.

  “You gotta be lookin’ forward to a decent cup of coffee.” The cowboy said to her.

  She laughed. “Nah. I like a cup of coffee you can stand on.”

  After several weeks of growing more comfortable with Clint, the discussion, the agreement, they had made the night before had erased almost all of it. She tried to relax her shoulders and her neck, but the minute she stopped focusing her attention on relaxing, her entire upper body tensed up. And Clint looked just as tight as she felt. Her biggest fear, all night, had been that in the light of day Clint would come to his senses.

  “You excited about headin’ out today?”

  “No.” Her single-word response, gloomy in tone, spoke volumes.

  Clint looked at her carefully. “No?”

  “Uh-uh.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “I’d rather stick around here for a day. Or two. Would you be okay with that?”

  “I was thinkin’ the same thing.”

  “You were?”

  Clint, who was pouring himself more coffee, nodded his response. He held out the pot and offered to pour her more; she put her hand over her cup. Clint put the coffee pot off to the side and sat back.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night.” Clint told her.

  “Neither did I,” she admitted. There was an uncomfortable knot in her stomach, much like the knot she’d had the morning Christopher and she had agreed that their marriage was too far gone to salvage.

  “I couldn’t stop thinkin’ about what we talked about...”

  She nodded. Their discussion was all she could think about, too. Was she crazy to even be entertaining the idea? What would her family say? What if, what if, what if? So many—too many—what-ifs to think about.

  “Are you sure about this thing?”

  “I’m sure that I want a baby,” she said firmly. “And I’m sure I’m running out of time.”

  “Are you sure you want me to give you that baby?” Clint was staring at her so strangely, as if he’d never really seen her before.

  Taylor felt queasy in her stomach; acid from the coffee had shot up to the back of her throat and she swallowed it.

  “Look—if you want to back out, I understand. No hard feelings.”

  “I don’t wanna back out,” Clint said with odd tension in his voice. “I want to get started.”

  “Wait...” This man was always tacking left when she thought he was going to tack right. “What?”

  “Ever since last night I’ve been thinkin’ about us being together...” Clint told her bluntly. “I can either take care of some things on my own—or I can start giving you what you want now. Do you know what I’m trying to say here, Taylor?”

  She knew what he was saying, but she wasn’t sure how she should respond. For the past several years she had lived by her ovulation cycle. She knew all of the signs and symptoms of ovulation—a slight headache, breast tenderness, her stomach feeling a little bloated. When she was clearing out her house, packing everything to be put in storage, she had thrown away a stockpile of ovulation kits. She certainly hadn’t thought to pack one to ride the CDT. So she couldn’t be certain. But she was pretty sure that she was ovulating now.

  “We haven’t even discussed the terms of the agreement,” she reminded him.

  “You want a child and I want to be able to get right side up with my creditors.” It sounded so simple when he said it so matter-of-factly.

  “How do you know I won’t change my mind and sue you for child support? Or get what I want before I’ve paid you and then not pay you a dime?”

  Clint didn’t hesitate. “You’re not that kind of woman.”

  Taylor wrapped her arms around her bent knees. “How do I know you don’t have a disease? I was going to ask you to get tested. And I was going to get tested, too—for your peace of mind.”

  “I protect myself. And I get tested every year.” Clint said. “But you’re just gonna have to trust that I wouldn’t do somethin’ deliberately to hurt you.”

  Clint had been protecting her since day one, even when he didn’t want to have any part of being her bodyguard. Her gut was telling her that she could trust him in this, and her gut was usually on point.

  “How do you know I don’t have something I could give you?” She was searching for anything to get to the word no and they both knew it.

  “Do you?”

  Taylor shook her head. “No. I got myself tested right after the divorce. Just in case...well...you know...”

  She hugged her knees tightly, wishing she could ignore the yellow caution light blinking in her brain.

  “How much do you need to get current with your truck and fifth wheel?” she asked, feeling more comfortable with the business side of this transaction.

  When he told her the figure, she realized that, even though it wasn’t a small amount, it was a small price to pay for the chance to have a child of her own.

  “Should we shake on it?” Taylor finally asked.

  Clint stood up and crossed to her side of the fire. He held out his hand; she took it and let him help her to her feet. He moved his hands to her shoulders—he was going to kiss her and she was going to let him. The kiss
was light and quick, but it held a promise of things yet to come.

  “Sealed with a kiss,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  Clint’s response was to kiss her again; his right hand slid down her arm to her hand. When he ended the kiss, and she didn’t want him to end the kiss, he took her hand and led her to the tent. She knew that he wasn’t planning to wish her goodnight—he was taking her to the tent and he had every intention of following her inside. He wanted to take her to bed, and she wasn’t going to object.

  She was at her sexual peak, she suspected she was ovulating and she hadn’t had sex in so long that she literally couldn’t remember the month or year. Christopher had been her only lover since she was in her early twenties, and she wanted to know what it felt like to be with a man other than her ex-husband. And, bonus—it wasn’t likely, but it was possible that she could be pregnant by the time she returned to Bent Tree Ranch.

  Chapter Seven

  “Damn.” Clint rolled onto his back, his right thigh pressed tightly against hers. “Damn.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  The cowboy crossed his arms over his face. “What the hell happened?”

  Taylor stared up at the roof of her tent. This wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she imagined her first postmarital encounter. It had started out like a scene out of a movie—here she was, play-by-the-rules Taylor Brand, sharing a one-person sleeping bag with a younger bull-riding cowboy—and it felt great.

  He kissed her nice and slow and she liked the feel of his lips on hers—she liked the weight of his body pressing her down into the hard ground beneath the tent floor. The cowboy’s body was long and lean, his muscles so hard to the touch. She wanted to run her fingers through that thick, wavy hair, but she hadn’t had time to build up the nerve. He wanted her, and she didn’t want to ruin it.

  Not all that many men had wanted her. She had always been too chubby, too serious, too smart. But she’d been able to feel that Clint wanted her as he lay between her thighs and she’d wondered—how different would he feel once he was inside of her? It had only been Christopher for so long.