by Cara Colter
And he held her, and then, something in him surrendered. He did what he realized he had wanted to do since the moment he had first seen her peeking at him from behind his tree.
He ran his fingers through her hair, and felt the tangles dissolve under his touch. She pulled back from him slightly, looked him in the face, and then leaned forward and kissed him lightly on his lips.
“Thank you,” she said huskily.
For what? All he’d managed to do, so far, was break his vow to himself to keep his distance, to keep them all safe from the treachery of attachment.
He reeled back from her, scrambled to his feet. She looked as though she was going to cry even harder, of course. She was probably realizing she’d just done something really dumb.
He resisted the urge to wipe his lips. It wouldn’t do what he wanted anyway. It wouldn’t remove the sweet, clean taste of her.
That was branded on his mind as surely as the frying pan had left a mark on her delicate skin.
In the guest bedroom, the baby started to cry. If someone had told him yesterday he would welcome a baby crying, Ty would have scoffed.
But now it was just the diversion from all this intensity that he needed.
“I’ll get him,” he said.
“No, I can—”
“No, you can’t.” He sounded really stern and cold, which was a good thing. Rebuilding his fences. “I don’t want you to touch anything until I’ve got a dressing on the burn. When you are in a remote location like this, the wound generally isn’t the problem. It’s infection. Think of Lonesome Dove.”
Yeah, he ordered himself, think of Lonesome Dove. Not her lips.
“Lonesome Dove?”
“On my top twenty list of good books.” Why had he said that? She did not need to know he had a top twenty list. She did not need to know one more thing about him! He was pretty sure that’s how attachments were formed, these little bits of information knitting together into a chain.
Kissing didn’t help, either.
“I only have the vaguest notion what you are talking about.” Was she staring at his lips? With longing?
Buck up, cowboy.
“It’s not the arrow that finishes the main character, it’s infection. I’ll get the baby.”
“Yesterday, you didn’t even want to pick him up!” she reminded him. “You could barely give him a pat on the head.”
“Well, yesterday I didn’t have to. Today, I do.”
Ty left her, shrugged off his coat and boots in the porch, and then went to the bedroom door and looked in at the baby.
Jamey had hauled himself up on the rails of the playpen, and was jumping up and down, howling his outrage at being imprisoned.
“Hey, that’s enough out of you.”
Jamey stopped jumping up and down and stopped howling. He smiled, and made a little goo-goo sound, instantly charming.
“Papa Odam,” he declared. His arms shot out. “Up.”
Ty went in. This was how old he had been when his mother had walked out the door and scarcely looked back. Or at least that was what he had believed. Until the letters.
Is this what his father had felt that day?
Terrified? As if he’d been left in charge of something breakable and didn’t have a clue what to do?
“Up.” It wasn’t a request, the charm dissolving. It was a command.
“Are you always so bossy?” he said to the baby.
Ty felt a nudge of sympathy for his dad, just like he had felt last night when he’d heard Amy reading stories and wondered if his dad had wanted to read to him.
Funny that he would feel sympathy when the letters had resurfaced. Rationally, that should make him angry all over again.
He thought of Amy singing last night, and seeing the tree, and putting the blanket on her this morning. He thought of her tears and his hands in her hair. He thought of the exquisite softness of her lips taking his.
“Up!”
“All right, already.”
Taking a deep breath, he leaned over and picked up the baby.
It was not a tender moment. The baby stank to high heaven.
And yet as that stinky baby snuggled into him, Ty was aware for the first time that that long ago girl who had accused him of not having a heart, had not been right after all.
Because he did have a heart. He could feel it beating as Jamey pressed deeper against him, sighed happily, as if it were a homecoming.
It was that he had built walls around it, an impenetrable fortress.
It was obviously Amy’s fault, even before the complication of her lips touching his, that the walls were being compromised, the fortress being threatened. Softness was flowing through the barriers like water onto parched earth. Allowing that softness in was why, without warning, he felt sympathy for a man he had barely spoken to for years.
And he didn’t know how, in the end, any of this could possibly be a good thing.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHAT had she done?
Amy sank back in her chair, listened to the gruff masculine melody of Ty talking to Jamey down the hallway in the guest bedroom.
She had kissed him. She had kissed Ty Halliday. That’s what she had done. There were excuses of course: the pain of the burn had knocked down her normal quota of reserve. Still, she waited for regret to swim around her like a shark sensing blood. Giving in to the temptation to taste his lips was just more evidence of her stupidity.
But the regret did not come.
How could she regret that? Taking his lips in hers had felt like a conscious decision, entirely empowering. And she could still feel the shiver of pure sensation. She thought she might remember it as long as she lived.
She was leaving, anyway. As soon as the roads were passable, she would be gone. So what did it matter that, when he had put his arms around her, she had felt for the first time in a long, long time as if she had fallen and there had been a net waiting to catch her?
That’s what the kiss had been about.
Pure gratitude.
Instead of agreeing with her that she had indeed been stupid about burning herself, about winding up here when she needed to be somewhere else, his voice had been deep and calm and reassuring.
Hey, it’s going to be okay.
Instead of pointing out to her all the different ways she could have avoided the situation, and all the trouble she had caused, he had just said, simply, I’ll fix it.
If something other than gratitude had shivered to life in that brief second when her lips had touched his and her world had tilted crazily, so what? Again, she was leaving. Whatever else had been there—some primal awareness, some wrenching hunger—would have no opportunity to blossom to life.
Whatever that had been, he had felt it, too. Right down to the toes of his wet cowboy boots. He’d pulled away from her as if he’d got a jolt form a cattle prod.
Amy chided herself. She should have the decency at least to be embarrassed. But she did not feel embarrassed.
She felt, again, oddly and delightfully empowered. That big, self-assured cowboy was just a little bit afraid of what had happened between them. He had built a world where he had absolute control, and it could be nothing but a good thing for that attitude to be challenged now and then!
Ty came back into the kitchen with Jamey. The baby looked ridiculously happy to find himself in Ty’s arms.
There was something terrifyingly beautiful about seeing a tiny child in the arms of such a man.
It was a study in contrasts. The man’s skin etched by sun and wind and a hint of rough, dark whisker, the baby’s skin as tender as the fuzzy inside of a creamy rose petal. The man had easy certainty in his own rugged strength, the baby was like a melting puddle of skin and bone. The man’s eyes held shadows, th
e baby’s innocence. The man’s mouth was a stern line of cynicism, the baby’s a curve of pure joy.
And of course, the man was totally self-reliant, the baby totally the opposite. And in this moment, Ty had assumed the mantle of responsibility for the baby’s reliance.
It surprised her that, given his reluctance to hold the baby yesterday, Ty looked relatively comfortable with his little charge. He dodged the pudgy finger trying to insert itself in his nose with the ease and grace of a bullfighter who had done it all a thousand times.
Then Amy caught a whiff of her charming offspring. She was amazed that Ty had him in the crook of his arm, nestled against his chest, that Jamey wasn’t being held at arm’s length like a bomb about to go off.
“I don’t expect you to deal with that,” she said.
“Oh, really?” He raised that dark slash of a brow at her. “Who do you expect to deal with it?”
That silenced her. Who did she expect to deal with it? Her hand felt as if it was on fire. It actually hurt so bad that she felt nauseous. She was not sure she could do a one-handed diaper change, even if she could fight through the haze of physical pain. And then there was the question of infection.
Ty set Jamey down on the baby blanket, still spread out on the kitchen floor. “Where’s his stuff? You’ll have to give me step-by-step instructions.”
She directed Ty to the diaper bag, watched him set it down on the floor and get down on his knees between the baby and the bag.
“Prepare yourself,” she said. “This is not going to be pretty.”
Ty leveled a look at her. “Lady, I’ve been up to my knees in all kinds of crap since I was old enough to walk. I’ve watched animals being born, and I’ve watched them die. And I’ve seen plenty of stuff in between that wasn’t anything close to pretty. So if you think there’s anything about what’s about to happen that would faze me, you’re about as wrong as you can get.”
“I’m just saying men aren’t good at this.”
“Look, there are things a man wants to be good at.”
Did his eyes actually linger on her lips as he said that before he turned his attention to the diaper bag?
“In my world,” he informed her, digging through the bag, “a man wants to be good at throwing a rope. He wants to be good at riding anything that has four legs. He wants to be good at turning a green colt into a reliable cow horse.”
His words were drawing rather enticing pictures in her mind.
“He wants to be good at starting a fire with no matches and wet wood. He wants to be good with his fists if he’s backed into a corner and there is no other way out. He wants to be good at tying a fly that will call a trout out of a brook.”
“This—” he gestured at her son, lying down, legs flaying the air and releasing clouds of odor “—is not something any man aspires to be good at. The question is, can he get the job done?”
“I may have stated it wrong. I simply meant it’s not something men do well.”
“Are you going to be grading me on this?”
Suddenly, Amy needed to share it, as if it was a secret burden she had carried alone for too long. She suddenly needed another person’s perspective.
“My late husband, Edwin, changed Jamey’s diaper twice. Twice. Both times it was a production. Clothes peg on the nose, gagging, brown blotches on the walls, the floor, the baby and his Hugo Boss shirt. The diaper was finally on inside out and backward to the declaration of ‘good enough.’”
Edwin’s efforts, she remembered, had always been good enough. Hers, not so much. She had asked him to do less and less. Amy had hoped for something else. In her marriage. And especially with the baby. Shared trials. Magical moments. Much laughter.
The pain of the remembered disappointment felt nearly as bad as the pain in her hand.
Ty glanced at her sharply, as if he was seeing something she had not intended for him to see.
“Twice?” he said. “And the baby was three months old when he died?”
She nodded.
“And he managed to be put out both times?”
She nodded again. “But he was a CEO of a corporation,” she said. “Strictly white collar.”
“I got that at the Hugo Boss part,” he said drily. “And you know what? His perception of his own importance is a damn poor excuse.”
She had wanted this perspective. Needed desperately to know it wasn’t her, expecting too much, being unreasonably demanding.
But now that she had it, she felt a guilty need to defend her husband.
“He was a busy, important man. I’m afraid he had better things to do than change a diaper.”
She remembered asking Edwin to do it. Insisting. Getting that look. All she had wanted was for him to empathize with her life. She had wanted him to be more hands-on with the baby. She had wanted him to appreciate what she did every day. Maybe she wasn’t even sure what she had wanted.
But whatever it was, Edwin’s annoyed look down at his shirt, and his Are you happy now? had not been it.
Ty rocked back on his heels and looked at her hard. She felt as if every lonely night she had spent in her marriage was visible for him to see.
“You know what?” he said, his voice a growl of pure disgust, “I’m beginning to really dislike Edwin.”
Her sense of guilt deepened. Why had she brought this up? “He was not a bad person because he didn’t like changing diapers,” she said. “That would make a huge percentage of the world’s population bad people.”
“It’s not about the diapers,” he said quietly. “It’s about what you said earlier, too. As if you having an accident and burning your hand made you stupid. It’s about him making you feel like you were less than him.”
She was stunned by that. Her relationship with Edwin had never been defined quite so succinctly.
She had been so alone with her feeling of deficiency, questioning herself.
“He’s dead,” she reminded Ty primly, the only defense left that she could think of.
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t automatically elevate him to sainthood.”
She thought of the shrine being built in his parents’ living room. In conversation, the new and improved version of Edwin was what her in-laws insisted on remembering and immortalizing.
And her guilt intensified at how relieved she was that someone—anyone—could see something else.
She changed the subject abruptly, feeling as if she was going to throw herself at him all over again. It was just wrong to be feeling this much kinship over a diaper change, of all things.
He rummaged through the bag, held up a diaper for her inspection. At her nod, he said, “Check.”
He laid out her whole checklist of items in a neat line on the blanket: baby wipes, petroleum jelly, baby powder and the diaper.
“Isn’t that how soldiers take apart weapons?” she asked.
“Precisely,” he said, pleased by the analogy.
“Okay. Now you lay him down and take off his pajamas. They’re Onesies—
“Whatsies?”
“Onesies, one-piece jumpers, so you undo all the snaps down the front and right down his leg and slip him out.”
“Like slipping a banana out of a peel,” he said. “It’s even yellow.”
“Well, yes, kind of—”
“Except bananas don’t leak, uh, brown blotches.” He grimaced, but there was no gagging, no drama.
In one swift movement he had plump limbs out of the pajamas, and had them off. In another move, he slipped off the soiled diaper. He dispensed with both items with nary a flinch.
Jamey kicked wildly, and Ty caught the little feet easily in one hand.
“Hey,” he warned, “cut it out.” But it was a mild warning. He also did not flinch from cleaning Jamey up. He was methodical an
d thorough, and as he had promised, unfazed by the task. The minefield of petroleum jelly and diaper tabs did not claim him as a victim.
In fact, in short order, the baby was in a new diaper, gurgling happily and kicking his legs.
Ty picked up the messy items and disappeared. The diaper went out the back door, and then she heard him washing his hands in the bathroom.
When he came back, he had a new Onesies and had snitched one of the cookies off the tree. He slipped the baby into the new jammies, and handed the cookie to him.
“That should keep him busy while I look at your hand. I put the banana peel in the sink to soak the brown blotches until we have time to run a load of laundry.”
She wasn’t running a load of laundry. She was leaving. The need to go was feeling increasingly urgent.
Because watching him, and the apparent ease with which he adapted to what life threw at him—a baby and a woman invading his bachelor cave and the woman now nearly completely incapacitated—she felt sudden awareness of the tall self-assured cowboy shiver up her spine.
As he came and sat in the chair opposite her, and then pulled it so close their knees were touching, she was totally aware of Ty Halliday as pure man.
“Let me see your hand again.”
This time she just gave it to him willingly, watched as he took it and steadied it on his own knee. He bent his head over it, and she felt a deep thrill at his physical closeness. His scent filled her world—clean, mysterious, masculine. The overhead kitchen light danced in the rich, pure gold of his hair.
His touch was exquisite.
After inspecting the damage thoroughly, he surrendered her hand back to her and got up. She followed him with her eyes as he reached up above his fridge and retrieved a first-aid kit.
Amy felt as if she was in a lovely altered state of awareness where she could appreciate the broadness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, the slight swell of his rear under the snug fit of his jeans, the impossible length of his legs.
He turned back to her, his expression one of complete calm and utter confidence.
He knew what to do. And he was not the least bit afraid or hesitant to do it.