Rancher's Double Dilemma

by Pamela Browning

  “I’ll run Michele upstairs—”

  “Let me take a look at her,” he said, thinking to be polite.

  “I’d better see to Ashley,” Lacey said all in a rush, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand her reluctance to show off her baby. Most parents, including him, jumped at every chance.

  He came around to the side of Lacey, blocking her exit to the stairs. Her baby looked up at him, a pacifier in her mouth. It was the funniest-looking pacifier he’d ever seen. The outside of it consisted of adult-sized plastic lips that looked as if they belonged to the baby. He couldn’t help laughing at what was so obviously a joke.

  “Cute baby,” he said. “Funny binky.”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t resist this one.” She turned to go.

  He called after her. “You can put your baby in Ashley’s playpen if you like.”

  “Sure.”

  “You gonna cook breakfast?” Cody asked hopefully.

  She half turned. “How about flapjacks? Or I could fry up some cornmeal mush.”

  “Flapjacks,” the two men said in unison.

  “I’ll be back down in a few minutes.”

  They both watched her as she climbed the stairs, her hips inside those red pants putting Garth in mind of two cats fighting in a gunny sack.

  He and Cody exchanged glances. “An ocean of motion,” Cody muttered under his breath, which was when Garth noticed that Cody had, like him, shaved this morning.

  Garth punched him on the arm. “You’re engaged to be married to Kim,” he said when he was sure Lacey couldn’t hear.

  “Don’t mean I can’t look. Anyway, does it seem to you that this new nanny of yours is sexier than the usual ones you hire?”

  “She’s, um, okay. Let’s not forget, Cody, we want this one to work out. Don’t go putting any moves on her, hear?”

  Cody adopted an aggrieved expression. “Hey, I’ve got my hands full with a fiancée and all. You’re the one we’ve got to worry about.”

  Garth didn’t much like admitting it, but he thought this might be true.

  UPSTAIRS IN THE NURSERY, Lacey sat Michele on the floor, handed her a set of graduated blocks to play with and, at long last, gathered Ashley into her arms. It seemed like a hole in her heart had been filled, like she had found the missing piece of her that she’d needed for the past ten months. She melted with emotion as she pressed the little body, so strange and yet so familiar, to her chest.

  For a minute she couldn’t speak past the lump in her throat. But she couldn’t remain silent for long.

  “Oh, my dear Ashley,” she crooned. “Oh, my baby. What happened? How did we end up apart?” Lacey could hardly take her eyes off this child’s face, could hardly bear the joy of holding her at last. She’d never believed she was dead. Never, never, never.

  Ashley blew a set of bubbles at her, seemingly not at all frightened of a person who was a stranger to her. As tears stung the back of her throat, Lacey buried her face in the pale fuzzy hair crowning Ashley’s head and inhaled the smell of her daughter. Ashley not only looked like Michele, she smelled exactly like her, too. Lacey thought that if she had been blindfolded, she would have known her babies anywhere, just from that smell.

  Still cradling Ashley close, she sat down beside Michele. The two babies, one on the floor and one in her lap, both with the exact same coloring and features, stared at each other curiously.

  “Michele,” she whispered, because she didn’t know how well words carried in this house, “this is your sister, Ashley. Can you tell she looks exactly like you?”

  Michele reached toward Ashley and chortled. Ashley seemed taken aback at first, but then she giggled. They even sounded alike, marveled Lacey.

  “Lacey? You going to fix breakfast pretty soon? Cody and I have to get to work.” Garth sounded impatient.

  She forced sweetness into her voice. “Be right down,” she called. She kissed Michele on the cheek, set her in the playpen where the baby brightened at the sight of so many new toys to play with, checked to make sure the baby monitor was on, and carried Ashley downstairs with her. This baby fitted the curve of her hip exactly the way Michele did and seemed totally at ease there.

  “Maybe you know I’m your mama,” she whispered, but Ashley only grinned widely, showing off the same four teeth that Michele had.

  “There’s a packet of sausage in the refrigerator,” Garth said, looking up from the charts and graphs he was studying at the kitchen table.

  Lacey set Ashley in her high chair, trying to act normal, trying to put the thought out of her mind that this man could be responsible for her separation from her first-born child.

  “Are there any cookies for her to eat?” she asked. Like Michele, Ashley was teething.

  “You’ll find that kind of thing in the pantry.” Garth indicated folding doors to the right of the table.

  Lacey looked and found, though the pantry was a mess with everything on the shelves all jumbled. Ashley’s eyes lit up when she saw the cookies, and she grabbed one out of Lacey’s hand. Lacey laughed out loud at the expression on her face.

  “Where’s your baby?”

  “Upstairs in the playpen.” She wished he wouldn’t ask about Michele. She had an idea that this deception of hers wouldn’t last long. And, she thought darkly, if Garth Colquitt had a deception of his own to account for, that wouldn’t last long, either.

  “Want me to go get the playpen and carry it downstairs?”

  “No! I mean, Michele is perfectly happy exploring Ashley’s toys. I’ll go back up as soon as I’ve fixed breakfast.” She tried not to show how flustered she was, and she forced herself to look like the picture of efficiency as she bustled around assembling ingredients. The sooner she cooked breakfast, the sooner Garth and Cody would leave the house.

  Garth continued with his paperwork, but at the moment, surreptitiously watching how much Lacey was enjoying Ashley, he dared to feel hopeful that this new nanny might actually work out. So hopeful, in fact, that he decided that he didn’t have to watch her every movement, though that was pleasant enough. He made himself concentrate on his work until she slid a plate stacked with flapjacks across the table. Butter and syrup followed, and he noted with approval that she’d poured the syrup into a small pitcher and warmed it in the microwave.

  He shoved aside his papers and sauntered to the back door. Cody was outside tinkering with the pickup’s engine.

  “Cody! Breakfast,” he said without ceremony.

  Cody wiped his hands on a rag. “Be right there.”

  Garth went back and sat down at the table. Lacey was scouring the sink. “Do you mind if I throw out that pile of newspapers over there?” she asked, glancing at the ones heaped on the kitchen chair next to him.

  “Nope,” he said. “Get rid of anything you need to.” He dug into the flapjacks. They were good, real good, nice and light.

  “And the clothes scattered around on the floor here and in the living room?” She wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something nasty.

  He shot her a blank look. He had grown so accustomed to unwashed dishes, clothes that lay where he’d stepped out of them and piles of yellowed newspapers, that he honestly didn’t think any of those things were a problem.

  “I mean, I guess you want me to wash those clothes?”

  “Well, sure. Can’t you do it when Ashley is asleep or something?”

  “Hmm,” she said over the water she was running noisily in the sink. “That depends. How much does she sleep exactly? And what time does she nap?”

  He took his time chewing and swallowing. “She sleeps when she sleeps. She naps when I put her in her crib.” How could he tell this woman what it was like to take care of a baby when you had computer accounting programs to run and cows that got sick and steers that hung themselves up on barbed wire? Who could put a baby on a schedule and stick to it with that kind of thing going on?

  “I take it you’ve been feeding Ashley when she cries and putting her to bed at any old time?
She’s not used to any kind of schedule?”

  “Right.” He scarfed a whole sausage link, chewed it and washed it down with a gulp of strong coffee.

  “I guess what I’m saying is that it would be good if I could get Ashley and Michele on the same schedule, and any input you give me would be right helpful. Now Michele, she always likes breakfast kind of early, with juice in midmorning. I’ve been teaching her to drink out of one of those cups that doesn’t tip over, the kind with a spout on top. If Ashley doesn’t have such a cup, we should get her one. I notice that she doesn’t use a pacifier, she sucks her thumb. Have you ever thought about getting a pacifier for her? I don’t know what thumb-sucking does to a baby’s permanent teeth, but I don’t think it’s anything good. And as for naps, Michele’s about given up her midmorning one unless she’s cranky, and—”

  Lacey went on at length about feeding and sleeping, which Garth had already made up his mind he didn’t want to hear any more about. He downed the last of his coffee as Cody came in. Lacey interrupted her discussion when Cody opened the door, removing a stack of flapjacks from the microwave oven where she’d been keeping them warm.

  Suddenly restless, Garth shoved his plate aside. “Cody, you can join me in the barn when you’re through eating.”

  “Sure,” Cody said.

  “You gonna let me steal some sugar?” he said to Ashley, who was drooling and gnawing on a cookie. He swooped in and kissed her cheek, which made her giggle. “See you later, princess,” he said. That was his nickname for her.

  When he left, Lacey was starting in on Cody, talking a mile a minute, asking questions to beat the band.

  Well, better Cody than him. Garth had more important things to do, like whipping his long-neglected ranch back into shape and getting ready for that conference in Austin.

  SHE TALKED to cover her confusion. She talked to cover her grief. She talked because it was a way to avoid the certain knowledge that she was going to visit yet another tragedy upon Garth Colquitt, a man who, anyone could tell, cared deeply about the people in his life.

  As she inquired into the habits of the household, Lacey found Cody to be a wealth of lore, though the things he told her weren’t exactly what she really wanted to know. Still, it was useful to learn that the Colquitts habitually kept the blender inside the old woodburning stove that they never used for heating anymore, that they didn’t have the right bags to fit their old vacuum and thus had to modify some that Cody had picked up on sale someplace, and that Garth might be sweet on Ashley’s pediatrician.

  All this gave her a view into the workings of the Colquitt Ranch. Studying the haphazard way in which the Colquitts ran their lives, it began to seem unlikely that they would have been able to engineer the stealing of her baby ten months ago. Unless Joan was responsible, but Joan was gone now, and if she were the culprit—but Lacey couldn’t believe anything ill of Joan Colquitt, whose picture revealed a gentle character and a kindliness that, to Lacey’s way of thinking, more than likely wouldn’t have allowed her to do something so hurtful as to steal a child.

  It seemed to Lacey that Cody would never finish eating those flapjacks. After he complimented her on the meal and finally headed toward the barn, she snatched Ashley up from her high chair and ran lickety-split upstairs. When they arrived in the nursery, Michele was lying on her back in the playpen and holding a stuffed lamb over her head, gurgling at it.

  “Time to get you out of there,” she said, putting Ashley down on the changing table and securing her with the belt before lifting Michele out of the playpen and setting her on the floor. Michele immediately chugged along toward Ashley’s swing, the stuffed lamb in her mouth.

  Keeping one eye on Michele, Lacey unfastened Ashley’s clothes preparatory to changing her diaper. She was amazed to see that Ashley had a small strawberry-colored birthmark on the right side of her abdomen. Michele had one, too, but hers was on the left side.

  “Mirror twins,” Lacey said to them. “That’s what you are.” Lacey had heard of such twins, whose features mirrored each other, sometimes right down to birthmarks like this one.

  If there had been any doubt in her mind that Ashley was her baby, any at all, the twin birthmarks banished it.

  After she’d changed both their diapers, she put them on the floor to let them play together. Then she went looking, searching the house for some evidence that would give her a clue as to how the Colquitts had ended up with her baby.

  GARTH WAS RIDING RACKS, his bay gelding, along the east fence line when he saw Donna Faber’s white GMC Jimmy tooling along Old Grange Road at a fast clip. He nudged Racks forward and waved Donna down.

  She slowed the Jimmy to a stop on the road shoulder and rolled down the window. “Hey, Garth. Long time no see.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve finally found a new nanny for Ashley. Maybe when I get back from Austin in a couple of weeks, you and I can get together.”

  Donna’s face brightened. “That sounds like a great idea,” she said.

  “I’ll give you a call, okay?”

  “I’ll look forward to it.” She rolled her window up, waved happily and barreled off toward town.

  He liked Donna, and he knew she was waiting patiently for him to get over his grief about Joan. Donna was Ashley’s pediatrician and had been a tremendous help to him. Tall and lanky, wholesome and smart, Donna was fantastic with kids. He knew he should care about her more than he did, but the truth was that Donna didn’t appeal to him all that much. He was well aware that soon he wouldn’t be able to hide behind his image as a grieving widower any longer where Donna was concerned.

  For some reason, as he watched Donna’s vehicle disappear over the hill, all he could think about was Lacey in her brightly colored clothes as she mounted the stairs this morning, her baby in her arms, her hips swaying enticingly.

  My kind of woman, he thought to himself.

  Stop it, he warned himself sternly. He had no business lusting after Lacey Shaw.

  Anyway, she talked too much.

  WHILE BOTH BABIES were napping that afternoon, Lacey found Ashley’s baby book in the bottom drawer of a small painted chest at the end of the upstairs hall. The book was white, with an angel outlined in silver on the front. She’d bought Michele a baby book with an angel on the front, too, only Michele’s angel was in pastels.

  Settling down with her back against the wall, Lacey opened the book. The first page had a picture of Joan proudly holding a baby in her arms. The picture was labeled, presumably in Joan’s neat handwriting, “Ashley Anne and Joan. Ashley is two days old.”

  Joan looked a little peaked, Lacey thought. Worn out. But then, who didn’t after giving birth? And Joan hadn’t been well to begin with. The baby in her arms had a slightly misshapen head like so many newborns did, so it was hard to tell if she looked anything like Michele at that age.

  On the next page there was another picture, this one of Garth with the baby. He looked proud and happy. There were other pictures, too. One was of Joan getting out of a car in front of the ranch house with Ashley in her arms. “Coming home to the ranch,” it said. “July fourteenth. Ashley was happy to see where she would live.” It was clear that Joan had doted on her new baby.

  The most interesting thing about this picture was that it had been taken four days after Lacey’s twins had been born on July tenth. Lacey remembered that after her difficult delivery, she had wanted to stay at the hospital for a couple of days, but Bunny had insisted that he needed to ride in some rodeo near Waco, which was where they’d been headed when Lacey unexpectedly went into labor. Bunny had checked Lacey and Michele out of Sweiger County Hospital only a few hours after the babies were born. Lacey had been too weak to go to the burial of the baby who died, and Bunny had gone but never spoken of it. As they’d ridden out of town, Bunny had been grim at the wheel of the Winnebago, and Lacey was sobbing quietly into her hands. The newborn Michele, perhaps sensing the tragedy in their lives, had cried, too. That had been one of the worst days Lacey had ever
experienced in all of her twenty-eight years.

  Lacey turned to the next page, which had a birth announcement taped to it. The announcement had been custom-printed in elaborate, raised script on a heavy vellum card tied with pink ribbon. It wasn’t the kind of announcement that you bought in a store and filled in the blanks, like the ones she and Bunny had sent.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Garth Colquitt joyfully announce the birth of a daughter, Ashley Anne Colquitt, five pounds, one ounce, on July tenth at Sweiger County Hospital,” she read out loud. By the time she finished reading it, she had commenced to trembling. This was additional proof, as if she had needed any. The babies had been born on the exact same day. They had even weighed the same.

  So what should she do next? Take Ashley? Disappear? Or what?

  Chapter Three

  The whole time Garth was in Austin attending the governor’s conference, he couldn’t stop thinking about how things were going at the ranch. For some reason he felt uneasy. He couldn’t pinpoint his reason for feeling that way other than the fact that Lacey was new at the job of taking care of Ashley. It wasn’t that he had any doubts about Lacey’s ability. And Ashley had taken to her immediately. No, it was something else that gnawed at him, something that he couldn’t define.

  When he’d left the ranch, things were going well. It especially pleased Garth that Lacey’s little girl played nicely with Ashley. Not that he was around when the two of them were together. Before he’d left for Austin, he’d been absorbed by problems with two of the hands who’d been feuding. Ashley was usually sound asleep when he came home after a hard day, and Lacey claimed that she hadn’t been able to get the two girls on the same schedule yet, so if he stopped in during the day to check on things, she’d say that her baby Michele was napping upstairs in the attic room. Lacey had put a crib in there for Michele, and he’d had no objection. It was important to keep Lacey happy. He sure didn’t want her to leave.

  Now, at the conference, when he called from Austin to make sure things were going okay between Lacey and Ashley, Lacey would run on about making baby food in the blender, whether or not to put Ashley’s playpen out on the porch so the babies could play there while Lacey worked in the kitchen, and so on. She hardly ever gave him a chance to ask the questions he wanted to ask about Ashley and how his daughter had reacted to his absence or if Ashley missed him. Maybe he was wrong, but it seemed like Lacey was talking in an effort to cover up something. Or to keep him from asking questions. Or whatever.