The Rancher's Christmas Promise

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  With the dishwasher already full, Greer set herself to the enormous stack of dishes still waiting on the counter and in the sink. She moved them aside, fit the stopper in the drain, squirted dish soap under the running water and got to work.

  Overhead, she could hear laughter from the bath and she smiled to herself.

  It hadn’t been a bad two months since she and Ryder signed their name on that marriage certificate. Moments like this—even elbow-deep in dish water and dirty dishes—were pretty sweet. Ryder had been able to catch up on his nonstop chores and Greer hadn’t even missed the PD’s office too badly. Particularly once the scandal broke that Michael Towers really was sleeping with their most notorious client, Stormy Santiago. From what Greer had been hearing, nobody from the office was escaping entirely unscathed. There were rumors that a new supervising attorney was going to be brought in from Cheyenne.

  Most important of all, though, Layla was thriving.

  Greer let out a long breath and turned on the tap to rinse the stockpot she’d just washed.

  “That’s a big sigh.”

  She startled, looking over to see Grant closing the kitchen door. “Decide one cow looks pretty much like the next?” she asked.

  A smile touched his aquamarine-colored eyes. “Something like that.”

  She hesitated, wanting to say something, but not knowing what. Instead, she turned back to the stockpot and tipped it upside down on the towel she’d spread on the counter for the clean dishes. “Ali’s upstairs. I’m sure Layla and Liam have both had plenty of time in the tub by now.”

  He didn’t head upstairs to retrieve his wife, though. He stopped next to Greer, picked up one of the towels from the pile she’d pulled from the drawer and lifted the stockpot.

  “Thanks.”

  “That was good chili you made. Reminded me of my mom’s cooking.”

  She shoved her hands back into the water. The suds were all but gone. “Thank Adelaide. She supervised. On top of all the other stuff she’s done, she wrote a cookbook more than twenty years ago. There are a few used copies still out there. Selling for a ridiculous amount of money online.”

  “She’s something, that aunt of his.” He didn’t look at her as he ran the towel over the pot. “Whatever comes into her head seems to go right out her mouth.”

  “At broadcast decibels,” Greer added wryly. “I thought at first that maybe she was hard of hearing, but she’s not. I think she could hear a pin drop from a mile away. It’s just her way.”

  “Ali says you must be pretty cozy here, all three of you. There are only two bedrooms?”

  “Yeah.” She rinsed the last pot and handed it to him, then let out the water so she could start with fresh. She had all of the glassware yet to wash. “We’ve got Layla’s crib in with us.” More often than not, the toddler ended up in bed with them, usually sprawled sideways and somehow taking up the lion’s share of the mattress. Fortunately, Ryder had drawn the line at Brutus coming into the room. Adelaide’s rotund pug seemed to think he owned the place now and he’d have been up with them for sure.

  “I’m surprised Adelaide didn’t take up Vivian’s offer to stay with her in Weaver. She’s got a lot more space.”

  “Ryder would sleep on the floor before he’d let Adelaide stay somewhere else. I know she’s a bit of a character, but she means a great deal to him. Her coming here at all is major. She doesn’t travel.” She chanced a quick glance at Grant’s profile as she stoppered the sink again and waited for it to fill once more. She knew he’d had a troubled early childhood until he’d been adopted as an adolescent by the same family who’d adopted his sister. “He lost his mother when he was young, too.”

  “Ali told me.”

  She turned off the faucet and set a few glasses in the water. “Oh, stuff it,” she said under her breath, and angled sideways to look straight at him. “He blames himself, too, Grant. For what happened. Daisy, Karen, whatever name she went by, she was his wife. She didn’t turn to him any more than she turned to you when she chose to leave her baby with someone else.”

  He cleared his throat. His jaw looked tight. “I was her big brother a lot longer than she was his wife,” he said in a low voice.

  “So that means his self-blame is misdemeanor level but yours is felony grade?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, Grant. You must know that. Time is not the measure. You’ve been married less than a year to my sister. If—God forbid—something happened to her, would your loss be less devastating than mine or Maddie’s? We shared our mother’s womb.”

  Heedless of the water still on her hands, she closed her fingers over his arm. “You and Ryder knew your sister in different ways. She didn’t tell you everything. She certainly didn’t tell him everything. She married him entirely under false pretenses. Whatever your childhoods were like, as an adult, Daisy did some things that were terribly wrong. I get that she was troubled. I do. But she abandoned her child when she had other options she could have taken! Maybe she regretted it but didn’t know how to make it right before it was too late. I know that’s what Ali says you believe. And maybe she didn’t regret what she’d done at all. Regardless, what she did was what she did. What she did not do, she did not do. Neither you nor Ryder was her keeper. And you’re both losing out, because out of all the people Layla has in her life, the two of you were the ones closest to her real mother!”

  Greer’s eyes were suddenly burning. “I’m adopting your niece. I don’t see how I can possibly love her more than I already do. We can give her an official birthday and a new birth certificate. But one day Layla is going to want to know about her biological mother. Who else is going to be able to give her the answers she needs besides you and Ryder? Seems to me that would be a lot easier if the two of you would stop acting like adversaries and start acting like what you are! Two men who cared deeply for the same woman who deeply hurt you both!”

  She huffed out a breath and turned to plunge her hands back in the suds. “I’m sorry.” The glasses clinked as she grabbed one and started scrubbing it with her dishrag. “I’m sure Ali won’t appreciate me sticking my nose into your business.”

  “As you’ve just eloquently put it, Karen wasn’t only my business.” He gently pulled the glass away from her furious scrubbing. “That’s quite a closing argument you give.” His hand lingered on the glistening glass after he’d rinsed it and turned it upside down onto the cloth. “I just wish things had been different,” he said after a moment.

  “I’m sure you do.” Her eyes were still burning. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she wished things had been different, too.

  Because if they were different, she believed Ryder would still be with Daisy. Because that was the kind of man he was.

  The kind of man who did what was right.

  Her stomach suddenly churning, she pulled her hands from the water and hastily dried them. “I’m just going to run up and see what’s going on with bath time. The babies must be prunes by now.” She hurried out of the kitchen, but instead of heading up the stairs, she bolted for the bathroom behind them and slammed the door shut. She barely made it to the commode in time to lose all of the dinner she’d eaten.

  Afterward, feeling breathless and weak, she just sat there on the wood-tiled floor, her head resting against the wall.

  It had been two months since she and Ryder had stood in front of Judge Stokes and repeated those simple vows.

  It had also been two months since she’d had a period. And this was the fourth time in as many days that she’d lost her cookies after supper.

  That little implant in her arm had proven itself to truly be pointless.

  She hadn’t taken a test. But she knew the truth, anyway.

  She was pregnant.

  * * *

  The house had been quiet for hours since the party when Ryder quietly stepped into the dark bedroom and slid the heavy door
shut.

  He didn’t need a light to see. The moonlight shining through the windows gave him plenty.

  He expected to see Layla’s crib empty. But there was a bump in one corner: her diapered fanny sticking up in the air.

  There was also a bump visible on the far edge of the bed. The sheet and blanket were pulled up high, only leaving visible Greer’s gleaming brown hair spread out against the stark white pillow.

  He turned away from the sight and exchanged his flannel shirt and jeans for the ragged sweatpants that he’d taken to wearing to bed ever since he’d gotten himself a wife.

  The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  He could say he’d gotten into the habit because his aunt was right there under their roof, snoring away in the second bedroom. He could say it was because they had a toddler in the room.

  He could say it.

  Couldn’t make himself believe it.

  He went into the bathroom and quietly closed the door before turning on the light. He brushed his teeth and when he was finished, rubbed his hand down his unshaven jaw. The beard was part laziness, part convenience. It helped keep his face warmer when he was out on horseback gathering cows and the wind was cold and whipping over him.

  Mostly, though, it was just his way of being able to face himself in the mirror every morning.

  He tossed the soft, plush hand towel over the hook next to the sink. Somewhere along the way since he’d married Greer, things like threadbare towels and wrinkled bedding had been replaced by thick terry cloth and smooth, crisp sheets. There were clean clothes in his drawers and sprigs of fresh flowers stuck inside glass jars on the dinner table. And though Greer claimed not to be much of a cook, Layla had learned there were good things to eat besides Cow Pie Surprise. Greer hadn’t just kept to the inside of the house, either. The picnic table he’d intended to sand and repaint had gotten sanded, all right. Just not by him. And the daisies he’d thought to cover with red paint, she’d sealed with shellac instead.

  Greer’s mark was everywhere. Even when it meant preserving something he hadn’t really cared to preserve.

  He went back into the bedroom and lowered himself to his edge of the bed.

  It had been two months of nights lying on his side, one pillow jammed under his neck. Watching her in the moonlight as she slept on the other edge.

  As always, she wore striped pajamas. The kind with the buttoned top and the pull-on pants. She had them in yellow. And blue. And red and purple and pink.

  The few months that Daisy had been there, she’d worn slippery satiny lace things or nothing at all. The bed he’d had then had been smaller. There hadn’t been so much space between them.

  He’d gotten rid of the bed.

  Gotten rid of the slippery satiny lace things, along with every other item she’d left behind, except the picnic table. And he’d only kept that because it was practical.

  He’d never figured striped two-piece pajamas were a particularly sexy thing to wear to bed.

  Until he’d spent two months of nights thinking about reaching across the great divide to unbutton that buttoned top. To slide those pull-on pants off.

  Thoughts like that tended to make a long night even longer. So he’d started earlier in the morning with chores. Gone later at night before finishing.

  Every square foot of his ranch was benefiting from the extra hours of attention.

  Except for the 150 square feet right here in his own bedroom.

  He could have made things easier on himself. Could have refrained from insisting Adelaide stay with them even though she’d clearly been interested in taking Vivian up on her offer to stay at her place. The two women couldn’t be more different; the one thing they had in common was that they both were uniquely eccentric. Yet they’d hit it off. Ryder knew that big house Vivian had built on the edge of Weaver had more than enough space for a half dozen Adelaides and their pain-in-the-butt pugs.

  Yeah, Ryder could have let Adelaide accept Vivian’s invitation. If he had, Layla’s crib wouldn’t be blocking half his dresser drawers. He wouldn’t be waking up six nights out of seven to her toddler feet kicking him as she rolled around in her sleep, unfettered in the space between Ryder’s edge of the bed and Greer’s because she wasn’t even sleeping in her crib.

  It was his own fault.

  The night of their courtroom wedding, he should have pulled Greer across the mattress. Should have met her halfway.

  He should have started as he meant to continue. Should have given her his grandmother’s wedding ring that Adelaide had produced when she’d shown up so unexpectedly on their wedding day. Should have made love with her on their wedding night.

  But he hadn’t. And he was damned if he knew why.

  The ring was sitting in its box inside the dresser half-blocked by Layla’s crib.

  And here they were.

  As far apart as humanly possible on a king-size bed.

  He lifted his head, rebunched the pillow and turned to face the saddle propped on the saddletree. If he moved the damn thing to the tack room where it belonged, there’d be room for the crib there instead.

  But he was proud of that saddle. He’d won it at the National Finals the last year he’d competed. The same year he’d won the money that he’d kept so carefully in savings because ranching was never a sure thing and he’d wanted to be certain he had enough to carry him when times were lean.

  The money that he was dipping into now just to make sure his wife from the other edge of the bed had a place to hang her legal shingle that didn’t have rotting floorboards and dicey electrical wiring.

  Two minutes later, cursing inside his head, he turned over again to stare at his sleeping wife’s back.

  Only she’d turned, too.

  And she wasn’t asleep.

  And so there they lay. Facing each other across the great divide. Her eyes were dark pools of mystery.

  Finally, she whispered, “What are you thinking?”

  He cast around for something to say. “It was a nice party.”

  “Mm.” She shifted a little. “Even after Brutus jumped on the counter to eat the leftover cake.” She tucked her hands beneath her cheek in the same manner as Adelaide’s angels from her ceramic phase. “Can I ask you a question?”

  She was still whispering. Probably didn’t need to. At least not for Layla’s sake. Lately, the baby had been able to sleep through anything. Not even Adelaide’s booming voice disturbed her anymore.

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you want to do the paternity test?”

  Of all the things she might have asked, that was the last thing he expected.

  She shifted again, and for half a moment, he thought maybe she was shifting closer. An inch. Even two.

  But no. Nearly an entire mattress still lay between them.

  “What purpose would it have served? Soon as I learned her name, I knew I was going to take her.”

  “But don’t you want to know?”

  “Have it confirmed that on top of everything, she cheated on me?”

  “It might confirm that she didn’t.”

  “And which is worse?”

  Greer didn’t respond to that. She turned her head slightly and he knew she was looking toward the crib. At Layla inside it. “Are you afraid it will change how you feel about her?”

  “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  He thought about not answering. But there was enough distance between them just from the gulf of mattress. “Maybe.” He wasn’t proud of it. “She’s mine. Ours,” he corrected before she could. The adoption wasn’t yet final, but it might as well have been. “I don’t want what the DNA test says to matter, and that is more about Layla’s mother than it is about Layla.”

  Greer was silent for so long, he thought maybe she was simply going to turn over once more. Turn he
r back to him. But she didn’t. “Do you still love her?” she finally asked in her hushed voice.

  “No. And you don’t have to ask if I’m lying. The answer’s no.” On that his head was clear. He wished it were as clear when it came to the woman lying across from him.

  “There might come a day when Layla wants to know.”

  He knew she meant about the DNA. “That’s another matter.” He’d given it some thought. “I already have a DNA profile. If it ever comes time to use it, it’ll be waiting.”

  She pushed up onto her elbow, obviously surprised. Her hair had grown since they’d said “I do.” It curled around her shoulders now. Softer. Lusher. It was almost as unfamiliar as his beard. “You do?”

  “That last year I was bronc bustin’.” He pushed up onto his elbow, too, and nodded his head toward the saddle behind him. “When I won that. I was served with a paternity suit. The girl was looking for a piece of my winnings. She thought I’d just let her take it. But I knew it was bull. I’d slept with her, but that baby wasn’t mine. Test proved it.”

  “But Layla’s different?”

  “Layla had no one else. She was my wife’s child.”

  She lowered herself back down off her elbow with her hands tucked beneath her chin. “So it was the right thing to do,” she whispered.

  He lay back down, too. Bunched the pillow beneath his neck. There was no need to answer, but he did. “Yes.”

  She exhaled softly. Leaving him wondering what she was thinking.

  All he had to do was ask.

  All he had to do was stretch his arm toward her. Offer his hand.

  It wasn’t too late to break the habit of two months of long nights. The great divide could be breached. Could be destroyed.

  All it would take was a step.

  He shifted and in the moonlight he could see the way she tensed.