by Cara Colter
“Why don’t you put that down?” he suggested. “Your arms are starting to shake. We both know I could take it from you if I had a mind to.”
“Just try it,” she warned him.
It was a little bit like an ant challenging an aardvark, but somehow he didn’t think pointing that out to her was going to help the situation, and he reluctantly admired her spunk.
Something yanked on the hem of his coat. He looked down. The baby had crawled over and had grabbed a fistful of the wet oilskin of Ty’s jacket. He was pulling himself up on it.
“Papa!” he crowed.
“Don’t touch him!”
“Believe me, I’m not going to.”
In a flash, she had set down the lamp, crossed the room, pried her baby’s fist loose of his jacket and scooped him up into her arms.
This close he could smell them both. Her scent was subtle. Some flower. Lilac? No. Lavendar. It was mingled with baby powder. He wasn’t sure how he recognized either of those scents, not common to his world, but he did, and it felt as if they were enveloping him.
She took a step back, eyeing him warily.
“You’re in the wrong place,” he said. “This really is my house. I’m cold and I’m wet and I’m dead tired, so let’s get this sorted out so you can move on and I can go to bed.”
Apparently the fact that he wanted to get rid of her rather than steal either her baby or her virtue reassured her in some way.
She pondered him. “If this is really your house, what’s in the top drawer in the kitchen?”
“Knives and spoons and forks.”
“That’s in the top drawer of every kitchen!”
“You asked the question,” he reminded her.
“Okay, second drawer.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m losing patience,” he warned her, but then gave in. The sooner he got that scared look off her face, the sooner she would realize her error and get on her way.
“Tea towels, once white, now the color of weak tea. One red oven glove with a hole burned right through it. Next drawer—potato masher, soup ladle, rolling pin, hammer for beating the tough out of rough cuts of beef.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
“How long have you been here that you know what’s in my drawers?”
Her eyes shifted guiltily and made him wonder exactly what other drawers she had been investigating.
He swore softly. “Have you made it as far as my bedroom?”
“Oh, God,” she said again.
The fear drained out of her, leaving her looking pale and shaky. She actually wobbled on her feet.
“Don’t faint,” he said. “I don’t want to have to catch the kid.”
“Oh,” she said sharply, drawing herself up, annoyed, “I am not going to faint. What kind of weak ninny do you take me for?”
“Weak ninny? How about the kind that reads Jane Eyre? How about the kind who is lost in the country, setting up housekeeping in someone else’s house?” he said smoothly.
The truth was he liked her annoyance better than the pale, shaky look. He decided it would be good, from a tactical standpoint, to encourage annoyance.
“You don’t look like you would know the first thing about Jane Eyre,” she said.
“That’s right. Things are primitive out here in the sticks. We don’t read and can barely write. When we do, we use a tablet and a chisel.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking hard. “Now I’ve insulted you. I’ve moved in to the wrong house and I’ve insulted you. But I’m not going to faint. I promise. I’m not the fainting kind.”
“Reassuring,” he said drily. “And just for the record, I’m not easily insulted. It would take a lot more than the insinuation that I’m not up on my literary classics.”
She sucked in a deep, steadying breath. “This isn’t the McFinley residence, is it?”
Her face was crumpling, all the wariness and defiance seeping out of it. It was worse than pale and shaky.
He had the most ridiculous notion of wanting to comfort her, to move closer to her, pat her on the shoulder, tell her it would be all right.
But of course, he had no way of knowing if it would be all right, and he already knew if you moved too fast around a nervous colt, that little tiny bit of trust you had earned went out the window a whole lot faster than it had come in.
“But you know the McFinleys?” she asked, the desperation deepening in her voice. “I’m housesitting for them. For six months. They’ve left for Australia. They had to leave a few days before I could get away....”
He shook his head. He had the horrible feeling she was within a hairsbreadth of crying. Nervous colts were one thing. Crying women were a totally different thing. Totally.
The baby had sensed the change in his mother’s tone. His happy babbling had ceased. He was eyeing his mother, his face scrunched up alarmingly, waiting for his cue.
One false move, Ty warned himself, and they would both be crying.
Ty checked the calendar in his mind. It was six days before Christmas. Why did a woman take her baby and find a new place to live six days before Christmas?
Running.
From what, or from whom, he told himself firmly, fell strictly into the none-of-his-business category.
“Mona and Ron?” Her voice faded as she correctly read his expression.
He was silent.
“You’ve never heard of them,” she deduced. She sucked in another deep breath, assessing him.
Ty watched, trying not to let amusement tug at his mouth, as she apparently decided he was not an ax murderer, and made the decision to be brave.
She moved the baby onto her hip and wiped her hand—she’d been scared enough to sweat?—on slacks that weren’t made for riding horses. Like the shirt, the slacks emphasized the surprising lushness of such a slight figure.
All the defiance, all the I’ll-lay-my-life-down-for-my-baby drained out of her. She looked wildly embarrassed at having been found making herself at home in someone else’s house. Still, blushing, she tried for dignity as she extended her hand.
“I’m Amy Mitchell.”
The blush made her look pretty. And vulnerable. He didn’t want to take her hand, because despite her effort to be brave she still looked a breath away from crying, and the baby was still watching her intently, waiting.
“Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, even though she wore no wedding band. He took her hand.
Ty knew instantly why he had resisted taking it. Amy Mitchell’s hand in his felt tiny, soft beyond soft. The touch of her hand, his closeness to her, made him aware of his bleak world in ways that made him uncomfortable.
Her eyes were not brown, as he had initially thought from across the room, but a kaleidoscope of greens and golds, shot through with rich, dark hints of coffee color.
Now that she didn’t feel she had her back against the wall, with a home invader coming at her, her eyes were soft and worried. Her honey-in-a-jar hair was scattered about her face in a wild disarray of curls that made him want to right it, to feel its texture beneath his fingertips.
Ty Halliday’s world was a hard place. There was no softness in it, and no room for softness, either. There was no room in his world for the tears that shone, unshed, behind the astounding loveliness of her eyes; there was no room in his world for the bright, hopeful lights of the Christmas tree.
The baby, eyes shifting from him to his mother and back again, suddenly relaxed. “Papa,” he cooed, and leaned away from his mommy, reaching for Ty.
Ty took a defensive step backward.
There was no room in his world for such innocence or trust. All these things were as foreign to Ty as an exotic, unvisited land.
He realized he was still holding Amy Mitchell’s hand. She
realized it, too, and with a deepening blush, slipped it from his.
“I can’t believe this,” she muttered. “I have GPS.”
She said that as if her faulty system or reading of it was the cause of the stain moving up her cheeks, instead of her awareness of him.
And maybe it was.
But he didn’t think so.
Still, he focused on the GPS, too, something safe in a room that suddenly seemed fraught with dangers of a kind he had never considered before.
The faith city folk put in their gadgets never failed to astound him, but aware she was still terrifyingly close to the tear stage, he tried to think of a way to phrase it that wouldn’t wound her.
“It wouldn’t be the first time GPS got people into trouble in this country,” he said after some thought.
“Really?”
Obviously, she was pleased that hers was not an isolated case of being misled by her global positioning system, and he could have left it at that.
Instead, he found the worry lines dissolving on her forehead encouraging enough to want to make them—and the possibility of tears—disappear altogether.
“One of the neighbors found an old couple stranded in George’s Pass last year. They’d been on the news. Missing for a week.”
But instead of being further reassured that her mistake was not all that uncommon, Amy looked aghast. He remembered the locked doors and saw her considering other scenarios. Disastrous possibilities flashed through her eyes as she considered what could have happened to her if she had followed her GPS instructions somewhere other than his driveway.
Which just served as a reminder that he could not really be trusted with soft things or a woman so frightened of life she locked everything all the time and was ready to defend herself with a lamp if need be.
She marshaled herself and turned away from him. She plunked the baby down on his padded rear and began to whip around the room, picking up baby things, putting them in a pile. Given the short amount of time she had been here, the pile grew to a mountain with astonishing swiftness.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Halliday. We’ll go right away. I’m so embarrassed.”
If he had thought she was blushing before, that had only been a hint of the main event.
Amy Mitchell was turning a shade of red that matched some of the lights on the tree. Was that a smile tickling around the edges of his mouth? He tried to remember the last time he had smiled.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town had made him smile, he decided. He’d reread that a week or so ago.
No doubt his current good cheer was because his visitor was so intent on leaving. There was no need to tell her to pack her baby and get the hell out of his house. She was doing it all on her own.
“It will take me a minute to gather my things,” she said, all business and flurrying activity. “I’ll leave the groceries.”
“Groceries?”
“Oh, I stocked the fridge. I thought I was going to be living here, after all.”
“You’re not leaving the groceries,” he said.
“Oh, no, really. You didn’t have a thing in your fridge. That’s part of why I thought I was in the right place. Nothing in the fridge, no tree up, no socks on the floor.”
She had been in his bedroom.
“Really, I didn’t think anyone had lived here recently.” She shot him a look that was faintly accusing and faintly sympathetic. “It certainly didn’t look as though anyone lived here.”
“I don’t need your groceries,” he said a bit more tightly than he intended. He was so hungry, and whatever she had in the fridge would be better than the tin of stew he had planned on opening. But to admit that might invite more sympathy, and he definitely didn’t need her sympathy.
So his place looked unlived in. So it wasn’t going to be the featured house on Cozy Country Homes. So what? It was a place to hang his hat and lay his head. He didn’t need more than that.
Or at least he hadn’t felt as if he had for a long, long time. But there it was again, unwanted, uninvited emotion whispering along his spine.
Yearning. A wish he had managed to bury deep to have something that he did not have.
“I started to unpack. I’ve got some things in the bedroom,” she explained as she scurried around the room, the remnants of her embarrassment making her awkward. She dropped a baby puzzle on the floor, and the wooden pieces scattered.
He just knew she had been in there, in his bedroom. And he knew, suddenly, why it bothered him, too. That could move yearning in a whole other direction if he let it, which he wasn’t going to.
He hadn’t allowed himself feelings for a long, long time. It must be the Christmas tree, the baby, the scents, the astonishing discovery of a woman in his house, his own exhaustion, making him oddly vulnerable, making him aware of a hole a mile deep where his soul should be.
He watched Amy Mitchell, on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces of the puzzle, stuffing them into a box. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the baby roll off his rear end onto all fours.
With startling speed and unsettling determination, he crawled across the floor, making a beeline for Ty.
Ty stepped out of his way. The baby followed like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.
“Papa!” he yelled.
“Where is his papa?” he asked, deftly sidestepping the baby one more time.
CHAPTER TWO
“SO, that’s what they call the Texas two-step,” Amy said, rocking back on her heels to watch, after something in Ty’s tone had made her look up from where she was gathering the puzzle pieces.
“It’s not funny. Tell him to stop it.”
But it was funny, watching the big cowboy trying, not without desperation, to evade the determined baby. She giggled.
The cowboy glanced at her, glared, shifted away from the baby. “Don’t laugh,” he warned her.
“I’m sorry. It just looks as if you’d be completely unfazed by almost anything life threw at you. And you’re running from a baby!”
“I am not running,” he said tersely. “Call him off.”
She did laugh then. Ty glared at her, stepped away from the baby. He had waltzed around half the living room.
“Just stop and pick him up,” Amy managed to advise between snorts of laughter. “He thinks it’s a game.”
Oh, it felt good to laugh. She knew it was partly reaction to the situation she found herself in, a release from the fear she had felt when she had been startled by the big cowboy appearing in a home she’d already been busy making hers. But life had been such a serious affair for far too long.
The tall cowboy glaring at her warningly only seemed to make it more impossible to control her rising mirth.
“Now you want me to pick him up? Before you were going to hit me with a lamp if I even looked at him.”
“That was when I thought you were the intruder,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Now I know it’s me who is the intruder. If you pick him up and cuddle him for a few seconds, he’ll lose interest.”
“Cuddle?”
“You mustn’t say that as if I’m asking you to get friendly with a rattlesnake!”
“It was the word cuddle that I took offense to!”
“A threat to your masculinity, is it?”
“I’m wet. I’m dirty.”
“You’re scared.”
He looked at her darkly, and then heaved a sigh.
“Terrified,” he admitted, and the laughter, recently tamed, burst free again. It still felt good to release the tension that had been building in her since Ty Halliday had set her world upside down by coming in the back door of the house she had been assuming was going to be all hers for the next six months.
The tiniest smile tugged at the edges of t
hat hard mouth, and her laughter died. Nothing in her entire existence—she’d lived all over the world, gone to university, married into a well-to-do society family—had prepared her for a man like Ty Halliday.
In a world filled with illusions, the man was absolutely, one hundred per cent real. He had physical power and presence. He was as big as an oak tree, and just as solid. He had seemed to fill the room, to charge the air in it with a subtle hiss of dark sensuality. There was something about him standing there, all cowboy, that was equal parts menace and romance.
There was toughness in the chiseled angles of his dark whisker-shadowed face, something uncompromising about the set of his chin, the muscle that jerked along his jawline, the hard lack of humor around the line of his lips.
He was handsome—Amy was not sure she had ever seen eyes that color, a flinty blue sapphire—almost beyond words, but his good looks were of the untouchable variety. He wore solitude, self-reliance, as comfortably as he wore that past-his-knees, dark, dripping Australian-style riding coat that emphasized the broadness of his shoulders and the impossible length of his legs.
“If you pick him up, the chasing-papa game will be over,” she said, though suddenly she was not at all sure she wanted to see her baby in those strong arms.
She needn’t have worried. Ty Halliday was not picking up anyone’s baby. He stepped away, Jamey followed, crowing demandingly.
“At least stop and pat him on the head and say hello to him. His name is Jamey, with a Y.”
“The Y part is important?”
“Very important,” she said solemnly. It marked one of the few occasions she had stood up to her husband and her in-laws. They had wanted James. She had not. She had thought Jamey was a wonderful compromise. They had not. But for once, she had stood firm.
“Just try it,” she said encouragingly.
Ty stopped, contemplated the situation. Jamey pitched himself into the hesitation, grabbed the hem of the wet coat and pulled himself up.
“Papa.”
Looking very much as if he was reaching out to a full-grown tiger, Ty rested a reluctant hand on Jamey’s nest of red curls.