Morning Comes Softly

by Debbie Macomber

  Debbie Macomber

  Morning Comes Softly

  For Karen Solem,

  for giving me my first chance. Twice.

  Contents

  One

  It isn’t a housekeeper you need, Mr. Thompson, it’s a wife.”

  Two

  “Did you see it?”

  Three

  The afternoon Travis’s letter arrived was incredible. For no reason…

  Four

  Mousy. It was the only word Travis could think to…

  Five

  Travis impatiently paced the living room, glancing at his watch…

  Six

  Mary was so outraged that she could hardly think. Marching…

  Seven

  The first rays of dawn banked the horizon as Travis…

  Eight

  Here?” Travis asked, looking at Scotty. “You want me to…

  Nine

  “Bed,” Travis repeated.

  Ten

  The last thing Travis expected when he walked into the…

  Eleven

  “Tilly, damn it, I know you’re in there. For the…

  Twelve

  Mary’s sewing machine had recently arrived and she’d set it…

  Thirteen

  I want to go on the hammer,” Scotty said excitedly…

  Fourteen

  Travis couldn’t sleep. Over and over again his mind replayed…

  Fifteen

  Travis needed Mary again. No more than a few hours…

  Sixteen

  Mary couldn’t recall a time she’d been more outraged. Her…

  Seventeen

  Logan was waiting for Tilly inside her apartment when she…

  Eighteen

  Mary fretted all night. The slightest sound, a rustle of…

  Nineteen

  Logan slipped into the booth at Martha’s and waited. Tilly…

  Twenty

  Mary stood naked in front of the fog-smudged bathroom mirror…

  Twenty-one

  “Get behind me,” Travis instructed, doing his best to jockey…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Debbie Macomber

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  “It isn’t a housekeeper you need, Mr. Thompson, it’s a wife.”

  “A wife.” The word went through Travis like a bullet, and he soared to his feet. He slammed his Stetson back on his head, shoving it down so far it shadowed the starkly etched planes of his jaw and cheekbones. He paled beneath the weathered, sun-beaten tan.

  It had been two months since his brother and sister-in-law’s funeral, and he’d barely stepped outside the ranch house since he’d been appointed the guardian of their three children. He might as well forget thirty-six years of ranch life and take up being a full-time mother. All he seemed to do was cook, wash clothes, and read bedtime stories.

  The worst of it was that according to five-year-old Beth Ann and the two boys, Jim and Scotty, he wasn’t doing any of those jobs worth a damn.

  “Mommy wouldn’t like you saying the ‘s’ word,” Beth Ann announced each and every time the four-letter word slipped from his mouth. The kid made it sound as though his sister-in-law would leap straight out of the grave to reprimand him. Hell, she probably would if it were possible.

  “Mom used to say ‘yogurt’ instead,” Beth Ann announced, her eyes a soft cornflower blue. Janice’s eyes. Everything about the bundle-size youngster reminded Travis of his petite sister-in-law. The thick blond hair, the gentle laugh, and the narrowed, disapproving look. The look that spoke a hundred words without uttering a one of them. Janice had had a way about her that could cut straight through an argument and silence him as no one else had ever done. Travis stared at Beth Ann, and his heart clenched. Godalmighty, he missed Janice. Nearly as much as he did Lee.

  “Your mother used to say ‘yogurt’?” Travis had asked, confident he hadn’t heard her correctly.

  Jim nodded. “Mom said yogurt was a much better word than the ‘s’ word.”

  “I think yogurt’s a fine word,” Beth Ann added.

  “If one of us got into something we shouldn’t,” Scotty, who was eight, was quick to clarify, “Mom would say we were in deep yogurt.”

  That was supposed to have explained everything, Travis guessed.

  His language, Travis learned soon enough, was only the tip of the iceberg. Within a week he discovered that washing little girls’ clothes with boys’ clothes damn near ruined the girl things. Hell, he didn’t know any different. Okay, so Beth Ann wore a pink dress, one that had once been white, to church on Sunday. It could have been worse.

  Church was another thing, Travis mused darkly. Generally he attended services when the mood struck him, which he freely admitted was only about once every other year, if then. Now it seemed he was expected to show up every week in time for Sunday school with three grade-school children neatly in tow. It was less trouble to wrestle a hundred head of cattle than to get those youngsters dressed and to church on time.

  Raising God-fearing children was what Janice would have wanted, Clara Morgan had primly informed him on the first of her proven-to-be-weekly visits. Dear Lord save him from interfering old women.

  God, however, had given up listening to Travis a good long time ago. No doubt it was because he swore with such unfailing regularity.

  Everything had come to a head the day before. Heaven knew Travis was trying as hard as he could to do right by Lee and Janice’s children. He’d damn near given up the management of his ranch to his hired hands. Instead he was dealing with do-good state social workers, old biddies from the local Grange, and three grieving children.

  The final straw came when he’d arrived home with a truckload of groceries a few days earlier. The boys, Jim and Scotty, were helping him carry in the badly needed supplies.

  “You didn’t buy any more of those frozen diet dinners, did you?” Jim demanded, hauling a twenty-five-pound bag of flour toward the kitchen, helped by his younger brother.

  “No. I told you boys before, that was a mistake.”

  “It tasted like…”

  “Yogurt,” Travis supplied testily.

  Scotty nodded, and Beth Ann looked on approvingly.

  Travis dealt with the fencing material he’d picked up in town and left the three children to finish with the groceries. That was his second mistake in what proved to be a long list.

  When he entered the house, it was like walking into a San Francisco fog. A thin layer of flour circled the room like a raging dust storm. Beth Ann, looking small and defeated, held on to a broom and was swinging madly.

  “What the hell happened in here?” Travis demanded.

  “It’s Scotty’s fault,” Jim shouted. “He dropped his end of the flour sack.”

  “It was heavy,” Scotty said. “It caught on the nail.”

  The nail. No one needed to tell Travis which nail. The blunt end of one had been protruding from the floorboard for the last couple of days…all right, a week or more. He’d meant to pound it down; would have if it had been a real hazard, but like so many other things, he’d put it off.

  “I tried to sweep up the flour,” Beth Ann explained, coughing.

  Travis waved his hand in front of his face and watched as a perfectly good bag of flour settled like a dusting of snow on every possible crevice of the kitchen. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking the broom out of her hand. He leaned it against the wall and surveyed the damage.

  “If Scotty wasn’t such a wimp, none of this would have happened,” Jim said.

  “I’m not a wimp,” Scotty yelled, and leaped for his brother
. Before Travis could stop them, the two were rolling on the floor, wrestling like bear cubs, stirring up the recently settled cloud. Travis broke the two of them up, ordered Jim out to the barn to do his chores, and did what he could to clean up the mess in the kitchen.

  Dirty dishes lined the porcelain sink. Dinner dishes from the night before, breakfast dishes from the morning. The dishwasher was filled with clean dishes, or had been, but they were mixed with dirty ones, too. Pans, crusted with dried food, soaked on the stove, but he’d run out of burners. It seemed every piece of cookware he owned was strung out across the kitchen counter.

  Added to the unappetizing scene was the scent of burned macaroni and cheese that lingered in the air like something that had died and had yet to be buried. It had been lunch, and he’d overcooked it in the microwave. The stuff smelled worse than the brownies he’d attempted the week before. He’d made one small mistake. The package had said to bake the brownies twenty minutes, and he’d set the microwave for that amount of time. It wasn’t until he removed the rock-hard substance from the microwave that he realized his mistake. Twenty minutes had been the baking time for a regular oven. The brownies weren’t the only thing ruined. He’d ended up tossing the pan, too.

  A glass baking dish, however, was the least of his worries.

  Jim returned from the barn a few minutes later, much too soon to have completed his chores. When Travis asked the twelve-year-old about them, he’d gotten defensive. Jim’s bitterness ate like acid at Travis’s pride. It took all the strength of will he possessed not to take that boy by the shoulders and give him a hard shake. He wanted to shout at Jim that he didn’t like this arrangement either. They had to make the best of it. Work together. They were family.

  But how do you say that to a grieving kid who just lost both parents? As with so many other things about parenting, Travis was at a loss.

  He didn’t know the answer to that any more than he knew what he was going to do about raising his brother’s children. It was then that he’d decided he needed help. He’d driven into Miles City to find himself a housekeeper.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thompson,” the matronly woman from the employment agency continued, breaking into his heavy thoughts, her brown eyes sympathetic, “but there isn’t anyone in our files who’d be willing to live on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere for those kinds of wages.”

  “I can’t afford anything more.” As it was, Travis was having a hard time making ends meet. Adding three extra mouths to feed and bodies to clothe hadn’t helped matters any. Once the funeral bills had been paid, there was nothing left of Lee and Janice’s estate, and the Social Security he collected didn’t begin to cover the expenses.

  He gave himself a moment to calm down. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “What I said in the beginning. Find yourself a wife.”

  “A wife,” Travis repeated, his face tightening with a frown.

  He cringed, almost hearing Beth Ann chastise him.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you,” she continued, closing the file.

  A sense of panic rose in Travis like floodwaters over the banks of a creek bed. “All right,” he muttered, “I’ll do it.”

  “Very good,” she replied with a dignified nod of her head. “I believe it’s the best solution to your problem. I imagine you have someone in mind?”

  “No,” Travis answered brusquely, honestly. “Do you know of anyone who’d marry me and take on a passel o’ kids?”

  Her laugh was polite and mildly shocked. “Oh, hardly, Mr. Thompson. Our agency did its best to locate a housekeeper for you, which is a stretch for us. We’re certainly not in the matchmaking business.”

  Travis thanked her and left abruptly. His truck was parked outside, with its dented fender and rusted tailgate, looking as beaten and old as he felt. A wife. Damnation, he didn’t know anyone in Grandview who’d marry him, and even if he did, where the hell was he supposed to find the time to date?

  Sitting in the pickup, his arms braced against the steering wheel, Travis did his level best to size up the situation. If something didn’t change soon, he knew exactly what would happen. The state agency had already sent out a social worker to check on matters. Shirley Miller was helpful enough, or at least she tried to be. After her most recent visit, she’d suggested he hire a housekeeper. Although she hadn’t issued any warnings, her message was rainwater clear. If things didn’t work out for Jim, Scotty, and Beth Ann at the Triple T, then she’d have no other choice but to place them in foster homes. The unspoken threat hung over his head like a three-month-late mortgage payment.

  Having to part with Lee and Janice’s children was more unpalatable to Travis than the thought of marrying. The children were the only family he had left, and he wasn’t about to let his brother and sister-in-law down.

  A wife.

  Travis just couldn’t see himself as a husband. He’d never intended to marry. From everything he’d seen, women were nothing but troubles, always wanting things, never leaving well enough alone. From experience he knew they were constantly meddling in matters that were none of their damn business.

  On the other hand, there were advantages to having a woman around. Travis certainly wouldn’t be opposed to regular bouts of sex, for instance.

  His infrequent trips into Billings usually netted him a night of pleasure with a waitress friend. Travis didn’t flatter himself into thinking Carla’s words of undying love were anything close to sincere. He was rugged and tough and some said a little dangerous. Carla claimed he was a real man, whatever the hell that meant. He assumed it had something to do with the way he liked his sex. Hot and frequent.

  If he was marrying a woman to keep him content in bed, he’d choose Carla, but it wasn’t his carnal appetite he was looking to gratify. He needed a woman decent enough to be a mother to Lee and Janice’s kids.

  He sighed and rubbed his hand over his face, trying to think. One thing was certain, finding her wasn’t going to be so easy.

  On the long drive from Miles City back to Grandview, Travis stopped in at the Logger, the local watering hole. The kids weren’t due to be out of school for another hour, and he needed a beer to help settle his mind.

  He slipped onto a seat at the bar and set his Stetson on the polished mahogany top.

  “Travis,” Larry Martin greeted casually, claiming the stool next to him. “I haven’t seen you around lately.”

  “Been busy.” Travis tipped back the ice-cold beer and drank three huge gulps. Once his parched throat was relieved, he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and turned his attention to his nearest neighbor. He liked Larry and counted him as near to a friend as he got. The two of them had a good deal in common. They spent more time on the back of a horse than they ever did in any bed. There was nothing soft in either of them. Neither of them would back away from a challenge, especially when their indignation had been fortified with a few beers. Sometimes it was each other they fought.

  Neither one of them was much of a talker, either.

  Larry lowered his gaze to the glass of beer between his hands. “How’s it going?”

  Travis shrugged. “Fine.”

  “I understand you’ve got your brother’s three kids with you.”

  Travis replied with an abrupt nod.

  “I was sorry to hear about Lee and Janice.”

  Travis’s jaw tightened. He didn’t like talking about the car accident that had claimed the lives of his brother and sister-in-law because it reminded him the person responsible for driving them off the road had yet to be found. If there was anything to be grateful about in this situation, it was the fact none of the children had been riding with them that night.

  Travis took another long swallow of beer. He had problems enough without dwelling on the deaths of the two people he loved most in the world.

  “Trouble?” Larry asked.

  Travis nodded, thinking of the unspoken warning he’d gotten from the state social worker. “Looks like I�
�m going to have to find myself a wife.”

  Larry’s gaze swung to him so fast it was a wonder he didn’t put his neck out of joint. “A wife?”

  “Trouble is, I don’t know how I’m going to come up with one. There isn’t a woman in town that would have me.”

  “What about Betty?”

  The hairdresser lived in Pine Bluff, thirty miles south. She was pretty enough, as Travis recalled, but a little on the bony side. “She’s divorced and has a kid or two of her own, doesn’t she?” He already had three to worry about, and he didn’t want to add to the problem.

  “Tilly?”

  Now there was a thought. Tilly worked as a waitress at the local cafe. A pretty thing, gentle as a kitten and all soft and tender.

  “She’s sweet on Doc’s son,” Travis muttered, and drank his beer. “Can you think of anyone else?” By this time he was growing downright worried. If he couldn’t think of a woman he wanted to marry and if Larry couldn’t come up with someone, then he didn’t know what he was going to do.

  It took a moment for Larry to shake his head. “I never thought I’d see the day you’d want a wife.”

  “I’m not all that happy about it,” Travis admitted grimly. The beer bottle hovered close to his lips as he analyzed the situation, seeing the flaws in this plan as clear as cracked glass. “Hell if I know how it’ll work out. I’m used to living my life as I damn well please. No woman’s going to want to let me do that.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Travis didn’t need to. He knew. Larry knew it, too.

  “Women like to talk,” Travis mumbled contemptuously, thinking of his times with Carla. “They don’t say it’s talking, though, did you ever notice that? They’re much too sophisticated for something as simple as that. Oh, no, they say they’re ‘communicating.’”