Maverick Christmas Surprise

by Brenda Harlen

  “Me, my brothers and our dad,” he said, handing her a ready-made bottle for the baby.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I would have mixed up his formula.”

  “I just followed the instructions on the label.”

  She nibbled on her bottom lip, not wanting to appear ungrateful but needing to ask, “Did you use previously boiled water?”

  “That’s what the instructions said to do,” he pointed out. “Plus Hunter, one of my brothers, gave me a crash course on basic childcare.”

  “He has kids?” Beth guessed, testing the temperature of the formula by shaking a few drops onto the inside of her wrist.

  “One. A six-and-a-half-year-old daughter.”

  “There’s no better teacher than experience,” Beth said. “But in the absence of experience, there are some good childcare books that help. Leighton had about half a dozen beside her bed when she was pregnant.”

  She didn’t tell him that she’d bought the books for her sister, or admit that Leighton hadn’t cracked the covers on most of them. Because her sister had never been a fan of book learning—preferring to figure things out as she went along.

  “I have to admit, that surprises me a little,” he told her. “The Leighton I knew wasn’t really the maternal type.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, either,” she admitted, as she settled into a chair at the table to give Cody his bottle. “But everything changed when she found out she was pregnant.”

  Wilder grabbed a mug from the cupboard and filled it from the carafe on a warming burner. “Are you a coffee drinker?” he asked.

  “Only on days ending in a ‘y,’” she told him.

  He chuckled at that as he reached for another mug, then filled it with the steaming brew.

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Cream, please.”

  He opened the fridge to retrieve the carton, then added a splash to her cup and set it in front of her.

  “Thanks.” She lifted the mug to her lips and sipped. “That’s good and strong.”

  “It’s the only way my dad knows how to make it.”

  “So this is his house?” she guessed.

  Wilder nodded. “When we first moved to Rust Creek Falls, in the summer, Xander and Finn lived here, too. But Xander and Lily have their own place closer to town now, and Finn and Avery renovated a cabin on the far side of the property, so it’s just me and my dad left.”

  “So you’ve got three brothers?” She wasn’t just making conversation; she was genuinely curious to learn more about his family, who might prove to be her nephew’s family, too.

  “No, I’ve got five brothers.”

  “Five?”

  He nodded.

  “Wow. Six boys. Your mom obviously had her hands full,” she remarked.

  “Maybe that’s why she took off before my first birthday,” he noted.

  Chapter Four

  Beth winced. “I’m sorry.”

  Wilder immediately waved off her apology. “No reason to be. You couldn’t know.”

  “All the more reason not to speak without thinking.” Then, in an apparent effort to smooth over the awkwardness, she quickly changed the subject. “Tell me about your brothers.”

  He responded readily, happy not to delve any deeper into the details of his mother’s abandonment—especially when he honestly didn’t know most of them. “Logan, the oldest, is married to Sarah. Hunter’s a year younger, the one with the six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and now engaged to Merry—that’s with a capital ‘M’ followed by an ‘e,’” he clarified. “Although I suppose it’s also accurate the other way, too.

  “Anyway, next after Hunter is Xander, who’s married to Lily. Then there’s Finn, who’s married to Avery and expecting a baby in the spring, and finally Knox, who’s married to Gen.”

  “So all of your brothers are married or engaged,” she mused.

  He nodded.

  “You’re not feeling any pressure to follow in their footsteps?”

  “Not at all. I’m perfectly happy with my life the way it is,” he assured her.

  Then his gaze slid in Cody’s direction, and when it shifted back again, the look on Beth’s face told him she knew that what he really meant was that he’d been perfectly happy with his life the way it was.

  He turned to the fridge, away from her knowing expression. “I promised you food,” he said. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Oh, um, just some toast would be fine,” she said, as she settled into a chair at the table and positioned the bottle close to the baby’s mouth. Cody immediately latched onto the nipple and began sucking.

  “How about a sandwich?” he suggested.

  “That sounds even better,” she agreed.

  “Do you like turkey?”

  “Almost as much as coffee.”

  He pulled a cellophane-covered platter from the refrigerator.

  “That’s a lot of turkey,” she noted.

  “We had a full house for the Christmas meal, so my dad insisted on two birds to ensure we’d have leftover for sandwiches,” he explained.

  “I’d love a turkey sandwich—if you’re sure he wouldn’t mind sharing,” Beth said.

  “There’s plenty.” He pulled the plastic wrap off the meat. “I guess you didn’t get to enjoy Christmas dinner, did you?”

  She shook her head. “I mostly fueled myself on coffee and doughnuts.”

  More coffee than doughnuts, Wilder guessed, with a glance at her thin frame. He generally preferred the women he dated to look like women, with curves rather than angles. Beth was all angles, and yet, there was something about her—an innate warmth and sweetness that appealed to him.

  The observation made him frown. Because while he appreciated the female form in various shapes and sizes, Beth wasn’t a female to be ogled—she was Cody’s aunt. Leighton’s sister.

  And definitely not his type.

  “White or dark meat?” he asked, turning his attention back to his task.

  “Either or,” she said. “And I can make my own sandwich.”

  “You’re feeding the baby,” he noted. “And that’s something I’m not so good at.”

  “Your brother didn’t give you a tutorial?” she teased.

  “Apparently I’m not a very quick learner.”

  Beth smiled at that. “You’re lucky your family is so supportive.”

  “Is ‘supportive’ another word for ‘nosy and interfering?’”

  “When it comes to family relationships, there’s often some overlap,” she acknowledged.

  “Is your family supportive?”

  “There’s just me and Leighton—and Cody—now,” she told him. “Our parents were killed during a bank robbery gone wrong almost ten years ago. Innocent bystanders.”

  Though the words were spoken matter-of-factly, the flatness of her tone suggested that the passage of time had done little to dull the heartache. As someone who’d grown up without a mother, he understood how the pain of loss could linger and wished he could take back the question.

  “I’m sorry,” he said instead, sounding and feeling awkward.

  “Thanks.” She eased the nipple of the already empty bottle from the baby’s mouth and turned him onto her shoulder, gently rubbing his back.

  Was it a maternal instinct that allowed women to anticipate and respond to an infant’s needs? Or was it, as his brother had suggested, a parenting instinct? In which case, it was an instinct that Wilder obviously lacked.

  “He was hungry,” he noted.

  “He always is,” Beth remarked.

  “And so are you,” he remembered, refocusing on his task. “Cranberry or mayo?”

  “Both.”

  Wilder made a face but retrieved the condiments from the fridge.

  “Coleslaw?” h
e asked, when he’d cut the sandwiches and set them on two plates.

  Her stomach grumbled a response before she did. “Sure.”

  He spooned some onto the plate beside her sandwich and set it on the table. After Cody had burped, she put him in his car seat and picked up her sandwich.

  Wilder expected her to nibble around the crust, pretending more than eating, so he was surprised to see her take a hearty bite. And even more so when she closed her eyes and let out a blissful sigh that he was more accustomed to hearing in the bedroom than the kitchen.

  “Oh. My. Goodness.” She chewed slowly, swallowed. “You make a really good turkey sandwich.”

  It wasn’t the only thing he did really well. In fact, sandwich-making didn’t even crack the top ten list of things he did to please a woman, but he’d be happy to show her—

  No. He immediately cut off his wayward thought, unwilling to go there with Beth, who wasn’t just a guest under his roof but the baby’s aunt.

  He cleared his throat along with his mind. “I only assembled the ingredients,” he told her. “Lily worked her magic with the bird.”

  “Lily is...married to Knox?”

  He shook his head. “Xander. She runs her own business—Lily’s Home Cookin’—now, but she used to be a cook at Maverick Manor.”

  “What’s Maverick Manor?”

  “The only decent hotel between here and Kalispell. It was originally an enormous house, nicknamed Bledsoe’s Folly in honor of the man who built it. When he died, it stood dark and empty for a lot of years until Nate Crawford bought it and turned it into a hotel.”

  “A relative of yours?” she guessed.

  “Apparently.”

  “Do you have a lot of family in Rust Creek Falls?” she asked.

  “You can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford—or two or three,” he told her. “I thought I’d miss the anonymity of living in a big city, but there’s something about this place that makes it feel like home already.”

  “Maybe the fact that you can’t walk down Sawmill Street without bumping into a Crawford,” she said, echoing his own words.

  He chuckled. “That might be part of it.”

  She picked up the second half of her sandwich. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I had turkey,” she told him. “But I’m sure I don’t remember it tasting this good.”

  He popped the last bite of his own sandwich into his mouth. “Last Christmas?”

  “What?”

  “You said you couldn’t remember the last time you had turkey,” he reminded her. “I suggested that it was probably last Christmas.”

  She shook her head. “I cooked a ham. Leighton isn’t a fan of turkey.”

  “Do you always cater to your sister’s preferences?”

  “Not always,” she denied. “But I probably do give in to her more often than I should.”

  “And I’ll bet the more you indulge her, the more she takes advantage.”

  Beth frowned at his blunt assessment, but she didn’t contradict it.

  Aware that he was edging toward sensitive territory, he shifted the topic of conversation again. “Do you want anything else to eat?”

  She shook her head as she pushed her now empty plate aside. “No, that was more than enough, thanks.”

  “Are you sure? Because I’m going to have a piece of leftover apple pie.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Although if you’d said pumpkin, I might have been tempted.”

  “We have that, too,” he told her. “And bourbon whipped cream.”

  “You’re the devil, aren’t you?”

  “‘A handsome devil’ is what the ladies usually say,” he replied, with a flirtatious wink.

  Beth didn’t respond to Wilder’s comment, not even with a hint of a smile. If anything, she looked...disapproving.

  Well, perhaps his teasing remark hadn’t been entirely appropriate considering that she was the sister of one of his former lovers who believed that he was the father of her nephew.

  “Was that a ‘yes’ to the bourbon whipped cream?” he asked, as he plated a slice of pumpkin pie.

  “That was a ‘yes, please,’” she confirmed, rising from the table to retrieve the coffee carafe from the warmer.

  He opened the lid of the container and scooped a generous spoonful of the creamy topping onto the pie. Then he cut a wedge of apple for himself, grabbed two forks from the drawer and carried the plates and cutlery to the table.

  “Thanks,” she said, topping up his mug with coffee before refilling her own.

  He nodded and straddled the seat across from her.

  “Are you older or younger than Leighton?” he asked, when she sat down again.

  “Older, by twenty-two months,” she said, picking up her fork.

  His lips curved as he popped the first bite of pie into his mouth.

  “What?” she asked, though he hadn’t spoken a single word.

  “Just the way you said ‘twenty-two months,’” he remarked. “I’ll bet you held that over her head when you were growing up together.”

  “I did not,” she immediately denied, dipping her fork into her pie.

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “As the older sibling, you probably couldn’t help yourself. I know my brothers always held their maturity over me.”

  She seemed to consider this comment as she chewed, then slowly nodded. “Maybe I did,” she acknowledged. “Of course, that completely backfired on me a few years ago, after my twenty-fifth birthday, when she started to take pleasure in pointing out that she was twenty-two months younger.”

  He chuckled. “Just like I refer to my brothers as ‘old men’ now. ‘Old’ and ‘married’ if I’m talking about Logan, Finn, Xander or Knox—because that’s two nails in the coffin.”

  She frowned at that. “Not everyone looks at marriage as a death sentence.”

  “It was a joke,” he told her.

  “Was it?” she countered.

  “You know, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I do recall Leighton mentioning a sister...and referring to her as a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “That would be me,” Beth agreed.

  Now he frowned. “It’s no fun to take a shot at someone who doesn’t shoot back.”

  “Why would you expect anything different from a stick-in-the-mud?” she asked him. “And, for the record, she’s also referred to me as a worrywart, a spoilsport and a killjoy.”

  “And the one who always does the right thing,” he added.

  “What?”

  “I forgot that,” he said, speaking almost to himself. “I guess she talked about you more than I realized, because I can remember her telling me that you were the one who always did the right thing. ‘Little Miss Perfect’—cleaning up the messes she made.”

  “Not a term of endearment,” she acknowledged wryly.

  “I’m not so sure,” he mused. “I think she really looks up to you, her older-by-twenty-two-months sister.”

  That earned him a hint of a smile. And he couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was when she smiled.

  But apparently she’d said everything she intended to on the subject of her sister, because the next time Beth spoke, it was to ask a completely random question.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be ranching?”

  The vagueness and broadness of the question proved to Wilder that she was as unfamiliar with the responsibilities of a rancher as he was those of a parent.

  “I wish,” he said.

  At her lifted brow, he shrugged. “Although ranching is a year-round job, things slow down a little in winter. Aside from feeding the cattle and livestock every day, we mostly focus on maintenance of buildings and equipment and perimeter fence checks, cutting and collecting firewood, and clearing snow.”

  “That
sounds busy enough to me,” she remarked.

  “It is,” he agreed. “But my dad assured me that he had plenty of hands to do the chores that needed to be done and that my hands should be taking care of the baby.”

  “Obviously he hasn’t seen you try to change a diaper,” she teased.

  “Kids aren’t really my thing,” he acknowledged. Not that there was any chance she might have assumed otherwise.

  “You know there’s an easy way out of your dilemma,” she said. “You could let me take Cody back to Dallas and pretend the last forty-eight hours never happened.”

  “Don’t think I’m not tempted, but I don’t walk away from my mistakes.”

  Beth bristled. “Cody is not a mistake.”

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said, immediately regretting his unthinking response.

  “Then what did you mean?” she challenged.

  “Let me just say that I wasn’t thrilled to learn that I might be a father to a baby I didn’t know anything about,” Wilder told her. “And your questions about his paternity make me wonder how many other men Leighton was dating while we were together.”

  “I don’t know,” Beth admitted. “She didn’t share those kinds of details with me.”

  Except to point out that Leighton, unlike Beth, had a personal life. Or remark that Beth was such a killjoy no one would ever be interested in her.

  Beth never let her sister know how much those comments hurt. Because as much as Leighton could be kind and generous at times, she could also be hard and cruel, and—like a shark scenting blood—any sign of weakness could escalate her attack.

  Beth pushed those uncomfortable memories aside to refocus on her conversation with Wilder. “And I didn’t mean to suggest that there were others...during the time that she was with you. She didn’t juggle men like that.”

  “That’s a relief, I guess,” he noted.

  But the glance he sent in the direction of the now sleeping baby suggested to Beth that he was still more wary than reassured.

  “My dad seems convinced that he’s a Crawford, but I’m not quite willing to let myself be put on the hook on the basis of his gut feeling.”

  “If that’s your attitude, then I really hope you’re not Cody’s father,” she said.