“Yeah,” Jake said. “This could be a long night.”
“We’ll stay for a while longer,” Dustin said, wishing Kate wasn’t standing so close to him. How in hell was he supposed to carry on a conversation when all he wanted to do was kiss her again? “I’ll give Gert a call and fill her in.”
“Wish Elizabeth good luck for us,” Kate said, giving Jake a hug. “Can we get you anything? Coffee? Something cold?”
He shook his head and released her. “Thanks, hon, but we’re all set. The nurses are taking good care of everything and Beth’s real comfortable—except for the contractions. They’re still three minutes apart, so the doctor said nothing is going to happen right away.”
A lot had happened already, Dustin figured, remembering a very willing woman in the front seat of the Lincoln. Kissing her hadn’t been in his plans—not even close—but she’d leaned over to turn the key and suddenly she was so close…and it was so easy to touch her, kiss her, taste her.
And so damn dangerous.
Dustin shoved his hands in his pockets and watched Jake hurry out of the waiting room and head back to his wife. They were alone in the small room; its walls were decorated with framed southwestern prints and worn blue-cushioned chairs sat at the edges of a blue-and-green rug.
“I’ll call home,” Kate said. “If you want to go home to Danny, just take the car. My mother can always pick me up later.”
“The boy will be fine with Gert,” Dustin said. “For a while longer, anyway.” He watched her pull the cell phone out of her purse. “You can’t use that in here,” he said, pointing to a small sign by the door.
“I’ll take it outside.”
“I’ll go with you.” Dustin didn’t question why he didn’t want to let her out of his sight, but that’s the way it was. He should be running from this woman he used to know, a city woman now with a life he could only imagine, and with men and love affairs of which he was immediately and irrationally jealous. He’d always hoped he’d see her again, but for some reason he’d pictured rescuing her—coming upon her while she stood on the side of the road with a flat tire or a broken fan belt, smoke pouring out from under the hood of her car.
And he would, of course, help her. She would be grateful. And he would, as the song played constantly on the radio this spring, ask, “How do you like me now?”
But he hadn’t counted on being angry, either. Angry with her for believing the worst of him, for not even asking him if what she’d heard about Lisa was true.
And he was angry with himself, too, for having told her “no strings” and then fallen in love with her. Served him right, too, for being such a cocky bastard.
“Dustin?” He looked over to see her by the door of the room. She looked beautiful and uncertain and a little bit shy, as if she wasn’t sure of him. Good. No reason why both of them shouldn’t be uncomfortable.
“Coming,” he said, wishing he could haul her out of this hospital and to the airport, where she would board a plane to New York and never return. He didn’t need Kate McIntosh messing up his life now, not when he was trying to make a life for himself and the boy. He should be running like hell back to the ranch, back to his empty double bed with the cheap sheets and the faded blankets. Back to hard work and dreams of someday owning a piece of the Lazy K.
If he kept his mind on work, he would be fine. If he started remembering nights with Kate, he would get more than a little sidetracked.
He followed Kate down the hall, oblivious to the smell of medicine and the glances of the nurses. Instead he noticed that Kate still had the nicest little body he’d ever had the privilege of getting his hands on. She wore a simple T-shirt and a pair of black shorts, but he’d bet they cost more than a week’s pay. She was the elegant type now, and maybe she always had been. When they stepped outside to the portico and she leaned against the wall, Dustin stood a respectable distance away. He watched her dial the phone, talk to Gert and then to her mother while he stood there, hands in his pockets to keep from touching her.
“Just a sec,” Kate said, and held out the phone to him. “Gert wants to know if Danny can sleep at the house.” He took it from her, brushing her fingers with his own.
“Gert? That would be fine,” he told his boss. “Just let him fall asleep on the couch and I’ll get him when I come home. Thanks.” He handed the phone back to Kate, who spoke for another minute or so, trying to talk Martha out of coming to the hospital, and then tucked the phone away in her purse.
“My mother wants to be here,” she said. “She’s always been close to Jake.”
“She’s his aunt, right?”
“Yes, but her best friend is—was—his mother. I think she thinks his mother would want her to look out for him.”
Dustin couldn’t picture anyone worrying about Jake Johnson. The man was virtually unflappable, and those years on the Dead Horse with Bobby proved that Jake could deal with just about anything. Except childbirth, he thought, remembering the panicked expression in Jake’s eyes when they’d arrived at the hospital. The man had looked as if he was going to drop to the pavement in a dead faint. “I worked at the Dead Horse when Elizabeth and her niece came to visit,” he said. “I’ve never seen a man fall so hard so fast.”
“So you met the niece from Paris?”
Dustin smiled. “Amy Lou. She caused quite a commotion at the ranch last summer. She and Bobby Calhoun were supposed to get married on the Fourth of July, but Amy went to cooking school in France and Elizabeth ended up marrying a cowboy instead.”
“She and Jake are lucky.” Kate moved to the door. “I guess we should go back in and see if there’s any news.”
“Lucky?” He shook his head and followed her, holding the door open so she could pass through. “Not lucky. Smart. They were smart enough to know what they wanted—marriage, family, a place of their own. And they got all three.”
She hesitated. “And what about you? Didn’t you have all that, too?”
“No,” he said, heading toward the stairs. “But I have a boy to raise and, if I work hard and cattle prices don’t drop, I’ll have some money to invest in the Lazy K. Two out of three ain’t bad.”
SHE SPENT TIME jotting ideas in the small spiral notebook she kept in her purse. Harry’s baby would be stolen, and its mother would disappear. Christian would discover that he was sterile and he couldn’t have fathered Harley’s twins. A hospital scene where, while waiting for her mother to come out of a coma, Isabel would fall in love with a handsome stranger in the waiting room. He would turn out to be a serial killer, a mental patient or a Texas cowboy about to discover oil on his property. Or he was the reincarnation of the man Isabel used to be in love with and—
“Kate?” She looked up to see Dustin holding out a cup of coffee. “I thought we could use some,” he said, handing her the cup.
“Where did you find more coffee?”
“The cafeteria was still open. I checked in with Jake, but he said there’s still no baby. You look beat.”
“Baby-sitting the Bennett kids will do that to a person.” She moved the papers off her lap and opened the lid on the coffee. “I should check again and see if Emily’s here, too.”
“I’ll ask this time,” he said, and left the room as quietly as he’d entered it. Kate watched him, wondering if there was a woman in town who loved him. Wondering if Lisa, wherever she was, had deserved him. Surely she hadn’t, though Kate didn’t know why she was so sure of that. Her grandmother trusted him, Jake liked and respected him, his son worshipped him and she herself was, as she had been nine years before, attracted to him to the point of forgetting that she was the kind of woman who usually had more sense than to make love to a man in the back seat of a car.
She was also the kind of woman who sure wouldn’t mind doing it again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“IT’S A GIRL,” Jake announced. He entered the waiting room and accepted Kate’s hug and Dustin’s handshake and congratulations. “We’re calling her Nancy, afte
r my mother.”
Kate blinked back tears. “That’s so wonderful, Jake. My mother will be so thrilled.”
“Her middle name is Comstock, Beth’s middle name,” he added, smiling broadly. “She weighs seven pounds, nine ounces and she’s twenty-one inches long. Do either of you know what time it is in Paris?”
Dustin chuckled. “Seven or eight hours ahead of us, I think. Does this mean Amy Lou is going to return to Beauville?”
Kate hoped the niece would visit so she could meet her. Her mother alluded to Amy Lou as “the crazy niece who cooks.” “She’ll want to know she has a new cousin.”
Jake nodded. “Beth is the only family the girl has, so she’s been worried that something might happen. I’m supposed to call her because Elizabeth has gone to sleep.”
“She’s all right?”
“Yeah. Just worn out.” He looked at his watch. “Not bad. We were only here for four hours. I passed George Bennett in the hall. It turns out Emily barely made it to the hospital also. I guess the poor guy thought he’d be delivering his baby himself.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yes, and George told me to tell you he’d be—” He turned as Emily’s husband stuck his head in.
“It’s a girl,” he said, beaming. “Healthy and screaming her lungs out. Em’s fine and says she’ll see you tomorrow for lunch.”
“That’s a joke, right?” There was no way to know, not with Emily.
“Yep,” her husband, a beefy ex-high school football player, said. “Go home. You all look exhausted.”
“Congratulations,” Dustin told him, walking over to shake his hand. “Four kids. I don’t know how you do it.”
“We’re crazy, that’s all,” he said, still grinning. “You know what it’s like raising kids.”
“Yeah,” Dustin said. “They keep you busy.”
“Hey, Kate,” George called, on his way out the door. “Thanks again for taking the kids to the ranch today.”
“Any time,” she answered, wishing for a moment that she lived in town and could spend more than a few hours a year with her best friend. Jake turned to follow him.
“I’d better get back, just in case Beth wakes up and needs something. Do you want to see little Nancy?”
“How do we do that?”
“Follow me,” Jake said, his voice ringing with pride. “She’s in the nursery so Beth can sleep.” Kate grabbed the empty thermos and her purse, then hurried to catch up with him as they headed down the hall. Sure enough, the baby Jake pointed to was being held by a nurse. “That’s her.”
“She’s beautiful,” Kate said, completely awed by the appearance of this new person into the family.
“Are you sure you don’t want a ride home? You look like you could use some sleep,” Dustin said.
“I’m fine. One of the nurses said there was a cot I could use, so I’ll sleep later.” He grinned. “I’m too excited to close my eyes. I’ll see you two tomorrow. Thanks for everything.”
Kate wrenched her gaze from the baby and turned to her cousin. He looked tired, but triumphant. “Should I call Mom and Gran or will you?”
“I’ll call them right now,” Jake promised, “if you think they’re still awake.”
“Mom will be. She’s staying at the ranch tonight.”
“Sure.”
“And Jake? Congratulations,” Kate said, tearing up. “That little girl is very lucky to have you for a father.”
“A father,” he repeated. “I’m going to be the kind of father I wish I’d had.”
“Yeah,” Dustin said. “I know what you mean.”
“COME ON,” DUSTIN SAID, tugging Kate away from the glass. Eight little babies, in various moods, lay in their bassinets or in a nurse’s arms. And they seemed to have the oddest effect on Miss New York City standing beside him. She made smiley faces and waved and even talked baby talk when George lifted his new daughter to show her off. The newest Bennett was already plump and pink, with a strange shock of red hair sticking up from the top of her head. They’d caught another brief glimpse of little Nancy—a tiny round face peering out of a pink blanket—as she was taken into her mother’s room.
“Just a minute,” Kate said, pointing for George to come over to the door. “What’s her name?” she mouthed, before the nurse opened the door to let her speak.
George shrugged. “Emily’s still thinking. She said she was too tired to make a decision.”
“Oh. Well, tell her I’ll stop in tomorrow and find out.”
“Sure. Hey, make that cowboy take you home,” he called before the nurse shut the nursery door.
“There,” Dustin said, figuring he needed to take her arm and remove her physically from the building. “You’ve had your orders.”
“Okay,” she said, but with great reluctance.
“I didn’t know you liked babies so much.”
“Why wouldn’t I like babies?”
He shrugged, figuring he should have kept his mouth shut, and headed for the stairs. “I don’t know. You have the fancy career and all.” He didn’t feel like talking about babies and he sure didn’t feel like waiting for an elevator to go down one floor. He wanted to get out into the fresh air and away from those excited fathers. Fatherhood was tough enough with an eight-year-old; he didn’t know how Jake and George could be so excited about starting from scratch.
“What about you?” she asked, keeping up with him as they hurried down the stairs to the lobby.
“What about me?” He crossed the antiseptic-smelling area in quick strides and pushed the door open for Kate to go through first.
“Do you want more children?”
“Hell, no.” He hadn’t really wanted the one he had, but he couldn’t say that. Danny was a decent boy, but it wasn’t easy trying to build a home for him. And a future. Life had been a lot easier when he’d been alone, during the years he’d left Beauville and worked on other ranches. He’d returned to the Dead Horse a few years back and stayed away from his brother’s troubles for as long as he could. And then he’d done what he had to do for the sake of the boy. Danny was family, after all. “I’m not figuring on getting married real soon.”
“Does Danny see his mother at all?”
“Not if he’s lucky.” He was too tired to worry about what Kate thought, he realized. He’d been up since four, trying to get a lot of the heavier work done before the heat of the day. He didn’t like to work the horses in this heat unless it was the crack of dawn.
“She’s that bad?”
“Yeah,” he said, knowing that Kate, with her perfect parents and perfect childhood would never be able to understand. “That bad.” She had that look on her face as if she wanted to ask a lot of questions, so Dustin braced himself to withstand the onslaught.
“Want me to drive?” She held out her hand for the keys. “You look beat.”
“I’m not that tired,” he said. “We’ll stop at the truck stop and get breakfast before we head home. It’s after two already and I just realized how hungry I am.”
“We used to do that after the movies.” And then she blushed, remembering, as he did, exactly how they had worked up an appetite.
“Yeah. There were a lot of things we used to do.” He unlocked the doors, held the passenger door open for her and went around to the driver’s side of the car. She still had a great set of legs. And a great rear end, too. And since he’d never been accused of being brilliant, here he was fantasizing about making love to this woman. Again.
He’d started up the car and was halfway out of the parking lot before she spoke again.
“Remember the time the sheriff almost caught us?” Kate asked, turning toward him with a wry smile on her face. “We hadn’t known the movie was over and everyone else had left.”
“He figured I was up to no good, all right.”
“I talked him out of arresting you and not telling my dad.”
“Your father would have come after me,” Dustin said.
“No, he wouldn
’t,” she said. “I think he liked you. It was my mother we would have had to worry about.”
“She’s still someone I don’t want to tangle with,” he admitted, and Kate smiled at him.
“I know what you mean. She’s probably worried about us being together right now, in the middle of the night, without Jake and Elizabeth to chaperone.”
“I have an idea,” he said, stepping on the gas. “We’ll get breakfast, if you can wait another twenty or thirty minutes.”
“Sure, but why—”
“For old time’s sake,” he said. “And because I’m starving.” And also because he didn’t know when or how he would have the chance to be alone with her again. He didn’t want to think about making love to her, but there was something about Kate that made him think of nothing else. Maybe it was time to get it out of his system once and for all. And from all indications, Kate would agree.
“WE’RE TRESPASSING,” Kate whispered, holding the bag filled with fast-food breakfast items on her lap. The coffee, sitting in the cup holders, smelled delicious. She was suddenly ravenous, she realized as she peered out the window at the Good Night Villas construction site.
“You don’t have to whisper,” he said, guiding the car past the building toward the back of the property. “There’s no one around.”
That was true. She felt a little more at ease when Dustin found the spot off to the side in back, where the original parking area hadn’t been disturbed, and shut off the car engine and lights. He switched the interior light on so Kate could distribute the food, but turned it off again when they had their breakfast sandwiches on their laps.
“This is very strange,” Kate said, after she’d eaten half of an egg- and cheese-filled croissant.
“Why?”
“You and me. Here. With our clothes on.”
“You can take your shirt off,” he offered, “if it would make you feel better.”
“No, thanks.” She hoped he was only joking. “We’ll just stay dressed and act like adults,” Kate said, though the temptation to toss the uneaten food back into the bag and climb into the back seat was certainly unsettling. “What would you have done if it was me who had gotten pregnant that summer instead of Lisa?”
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