Rancher's Double Dilemma

by Pamela Browning

  Lacey sat down on the floor and rubbed her forehead. She handed the bottle up to him.

  “No harm done,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” He looked concerned. He reached over and gave her a hand up. His hand was callused and firm. Lacey let go of it as soon as she was steady on her feet.

  “No, really, I’m fine. If you’d like, I’ll put Ashley in for her nap. She looks tired,” she said.

  “No, I’ll do it.” He stood up.

  “Garth?” Now she had to look up at him, way up.

  “Hmm?” He slid Ashley up over his shoulder, where she rested her head, gazing down at Lacey.

  “Ashley missed you. She really did. She’d start looking toward the back door every night at the time you usually show up for supper.”

  “She did?” He looked pleased.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad to know that.”

  “I thought you would be.”

  “Lacey, I really meant what I said. I want you to like it here. I want you to stay.”

  But since talking with Kim, and since the argument between her and Cody, Lacey knew that if she were to stay, Cody would be under even more pressure from Kim to leave the ranch. And, too, she knew what Garth didn’t know—that he and Lacey were going to have a real problem as soon as he found out that Ashley and Michele were twins.

  How long she was going to be able to keep him from learning that particular bit of information she had no idea.

  THAT EVENING as Lacey was cleaning up the kitchen after supper, which had been some of the best chicken-fried steak he’d ever had the pleasure to eat, Garth thought he should probably go into his office and boot up his laptop, check his e-mail. But the truth was that he was tired of business, tired of technology. There came a time every once in a while when a man wanted to enjoy the simple things. Like a few minutes on the porch swing as dusk settled in and the fireflies came out. Like someone to share those minutes with, and since Cody was staying at Kim’s place most nights, there wasn’t anyone. Or hadn’t been, before Lacey.

  Through the screen door he saw Lacey sitting at the kitchen table shelling butter beans into a blue bowl. She was always busy, always crackling with a kind of nervous energy, and he fairly hadn’t recognized his own home when he’d walked into it after coming back from Austin. You could see the top of the dining room table because she’d cleared away and sorted all the reports, stacking them neatly in his office. The kitchen floor shone with multiple coats of wax. She’d scrubbed layers of dust off the windows, and everything was neatly vacuumed. He supposed this was a good thing, but he felt a little uncomfortable, as if this were a stranger’s house and not a place that had been in his family for over a hundred years.

  He used to sit right here on the porch like he was doing now and wait for Joan in the evenings after supper, and he felt a sharp stab of loneliness at the memory. When Joan had finished in the kitchen, she would come out and sit in the swing next to him, and they’d talk over the things that had happened during the day. It was a way of staying close, connected. He missed that very much.

  Well, Lacey wasn’t at all like Joan. She talked more and she worked harder. Lacey’s hair was light, putting him in mind of an angel’s hair, and Joan’s had been short and dark. Joan had been sort of rounded, and she’d worn glasses. Lacey wore way too much makeup, in his opinion, and—but he caught himself up short. He was thinking about her figure. He didn’t want to think about it. All too often, in the days before he’d left for Austin, he’d had the urge to cup a hand around one of her lush breasts when he walked up behind her while she was standing at the sink. Once he’d almost done it unthinkingly, drawing back just in time.

  Lacey finished with the butter beans and went to throw the newspaper with the hulls into the garbage. He watched her through the door. He couldn’t figure out if all the clothes she owned were sexy or if they only looked that way because Lacey herself was sexy. He loved the bright colors that she chose, the blouses that often showed a bit of cleavage. Today she wore a pair of white shorts, and the faint outline of her bikini panties showed underneath. He shifted in the swing; it creaked.

  “Lacey?”

  “What?” He watched as she shot a glance toward the stairs as if she couldn’t wait to get up there and check on the two babies. Well, that was good. He’d wanted someone who was conscientious. But right now he also wanted her out on the porch with him.

  “Could you come out here, please?”

  She moved to the door, her curves outlined by the golden light behind her. “I’m still putting away the pots and pans.”

  “Forget the pots and pans.” He patted the swing beside him and edged over a bit so she could sit beside him.

  She untied the apron that she wore when she tackled some of the more burdensome chores. “Is anything wrong?” A worried note had crept into her tone.

  “No, not at all. I could use—I could use a rundown on what you’ve accomplished around here. Cody has been bragging on you.”

  “Just a minute. I want to hang my apron up.”

  She was so neat, this Lacey. He liked that about her, too.

  She stepped out onto the porch, and the freshening breeze from down by the creek wafted the scent of her toward him. She had her own natural fragrance, and he realized that while he’d been at the conference, he had missed it. Her scent was a faint lemony smell with overtones of something sweet, like honey or maybe wildflowers. He was pretty sure it wasn’t perfume.

  “I’ll just sit on one of the rockers if you don’t mind,” Lacey said. She picked out the one closest to where he sat on the swing, and he felt a little foolish. The swing now swung lopsided because it wasn’t balanced. He could either stay where he was and try to ignore the off-balance thing or he could slide back to the middle of the seat. He didn’t like either option.

  “Why did you call me out here?” she asked bluntly.

  He hadn’t expected to be questioned. “Because I thought we needed to catch up on what happened while I was gone.” He could have said, Because I was lonely for the company of another adult human being, but he didn’t.

  “I thought Cody filled you in.”

  “He said you rearranged the pantry,” he said, thinking this a safe topic.

  “Yes, I did. It seemed to me that it needed it. Now I’ve put all the baby food on the middle shelf, and it’s alphabetized. You know, applesauce, beans, carrots. You sure do have a lot of carrots. Then I put the big heavy bags of rice and cornmeal on the bottom shelf. I mean, it’s easier to scoop the contents out if all you have to do is bend over. When those bags were on the top shelf, I had to get a step stool to reach them. Lordy, I thought I was going to strain a shoulder muscle every time. And then I found a bread machine way in the back, in a box that wasn’t ever opened. I might make us some homebaked bread—”

  He didn’t know how to stop the flow of words, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He listened in rapt fascination as Lacey outlined the breadmaking process and then returned to every aspect of rearranging the pantry contents. Now if he had been the one who had lit into that pantry and shuffled everything around, he would have said to her, “Switched a few things around in the pantry. Take a look and see what you think.”

  She was still talking, fanning herself a little with a copy of the Texas Rancher’s Journal, which made her bracelets jangle like wind chimes. A thin sheen of perspiration gleamed on the skin above her neckline. “And then, after I finished, there wasn’t much room left, so I threw all those old empty Mason jars away.”

  This caught his attention, and he sat up straight. The swing wobbled. “You what?” He was sure he hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “The Mason jars in that ratty old straw tote bag on the top shelf. They were old and cloudy and the tops were corroded. Didn’t look like any Mason jars I’d ever seen, I wouldn’t use them if I were going to can any vegetables or even make jam, which I probably won’t do because those two babies keep me mighty busy, and—”

&nb
sp; The Mason jars had been in the family for a long time, and Joan had been happy to find them in the cellar. She’d often told him of her plans for them. It was sad that she’d never gotten around to the project she had in mind. And now Lacey had thrown them away.

  He stood. He glared. “You threw away those old Mason jars?” It irked him that she had thrown away things that reminded him of Joan.

  She gazed up at him blankly, her eyes all innocence and confusion. “I sure did. Ashley and Michele and I took a little ride over to the dump and left those and some other things that nobody is ever going to want again.”

  He couldn’t believe it. He had been away only a matter of days, and sure Lacey was supposed to neaten things up, but he had not given his permission to start tossing out genuine antiques.

  “Those Mason jars belonged to my mother. They might have belonged to her mother. Joan said they were worth some money. She was going to make a chandelier out of them or some fool thing. You had no right to toss them out without asking first.”

  She jumped to her feet. Two spots of color flamed high on her cheekbones, and her hands were clenched at her sides.

  “You told me I could clean up any old way I want as long as I cleaned up! You said I could get rid of things as needed!”

  “I didn’t mean you could throw away antiques. There’s a difference between antiques and junk,” he said, surprised to hear himself sounding so gritty. The truth was, he was angry. He expected her to consult him about certain things. Besides, Ashley smiled at her too damn much. Ashley was getting awfully attached to her, and that tore at his heart even as he didn’t understand why it bothered him. He’d wanted a nanny who would take good care of his princess, and he had found one. He didn’t want Lacey to become the numero uno person in his daughter’s life, that’s all.

  Not that the attachment problem had anything to do with the Mason jar problem. But it made it more galling, that’s for sure.

  Lacey tossed her head. The pale wisps falling around her face caught the glow from the kitchen lights and shimmered like moonbeams. “If you want, I’ll go down to the dump right now and see if I can get them back. It shouldn’t be too hard to find that straw satchel they were in. It was ugly as all get-out, as I recall.”

  “Joan and I brought that back from our honeymoon,” he said tightly.

  Lacey dramatically struck her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Well, great God almighty, I should have known. How could I not have understood the sacred nature of that straw tote bag with its handles half torn off and pieces of straw sticking out everywhere? How could I not have known that it wasn’t junk? I’ll get a flashlight right now and go to the dump, that’s what I’ll do. If you’ll keep an eye on the girls, that is.” Her eyes flared with a fury unlike any he could have imagined.

  Oh, hell. This had gotten out of hand somehow. He hadn’t meant to get Lacey this upset, and all over those Mason jars.

  He lifted his hands and let them fall helplessly. In that moment he wanted to slide his arms around her and pull her to his chest so that he wouldn’t have to look at her when she was in this perturbed mood. To be honest, he wouldn’t have minded in the least holding her in his arms, period.

  She charged past him, looking like a mad bull. He went after her and caught up with her at the door to the pantry, which, he had to admit, looked neater than it ever had in his lifetime.

  Lacey grabbed a flashlight off a hook beside the door and waved it in his direction. “I’ll take the Honda and be right back. The babies are sleeping. I’ll find those stupid Mason jars if it’s the last thing I do, but don’t expect me to make a chandelier out of them. Chandelier making is not something I’m too good at, at least not that I know of.”

  “Lacey,” he said, scrambling his brain in all directions hoping to come up with a mollifying remark.

  But there was no stopping her. She was out the door, down the porch steps and into the car before he could prevent her going. She could move faster than any woman he’d ever met.

  When the car had disappeared up the driveway, leaving a cloud of dust to settle around the porch, the two dogs appeared from somewhere and barked a few times, then crawled under the porch where it was cool. Garth realized that his jaw was stuck in the open position and clamped it shut.

  He never should have gotten so upset about those jars. It was stupid, silly. If he hadn’t been a man, he might have suspected that he had PMS.

  But he recognized that the situation was worse than that. PMS would have been a whole sight better than what he did have, which was the hots for Lacey Shaw.

  LACEY SAT ON AN OLD STUMP at the edge of the dump outside Mosquito, stared into the darkness, and contemplated what had happened. She didn’t know why Garth had triggered over those old jars, and she didn’t care. All she knew is that she had been working her butt off for the Colquitts, and she didn’t think she should have to put up with sudden snits on the part of either one of them.

  For a moment she regretted not acting on her impulse to take Ashley and run while Garth was away at the conference. It would have been so easy! But through her regret, she felt the certain knowledge that it would have been absolutely wrong to steal Ashley. Never mind that Ashley had been taken from her—two wrongs didn’t make a right, as her mother had so often said. Consequently Lacey felt the imperative to do the right thing, and taking no action had been the right thing to do in this case.

  So she was committed to staying until she figured things out. And the ranch was a safe place for her and for Michele. One thing she knew—if Garth flew into a rage over a mess of old jars, he was going to have a pure-tee heart attack when he found out the considerable rest of the story.

  She slapped at the mosquito humming near her left ear, and then she wearily stood up and beamed the flashlight over the rubble. There it was, sure enough. With the aid of the beams of the headlights from the car, she spotted the straw bag partly hidden behind a disemboweled clothes dryer and the front half of an old bicycle, but it was there all right. She wended her way through the town’s discards and picked the bag up by its handles. Something jumped out. A rat! Lacey dropped the straw bag, heard breaking glass, and screamed. The rat scurried away into the darkness.

  Lacey told herself to remain calm. She told her heart to stop thudding against her ribs. She told herself that it was unlike her to be afraid of rats. Bunny, her ex-husband, was as much a rat as anything else, and she had stood up to him.

  Gingerly she bent down and picked up the bag. Broken glass jingled inside, and she felt sick. She’d ridden all the way over to the dump, had sacrificed her blood to who knew how many mosquitoes, had been frightened by a rat, and she’d broken those dumb Mason jars besides.

  For a moment she considered leaving the bag with its jars inside lying right there at the dump. She could tell Garth that she hadn’t been able to find it.

  But she didn’t want to lie. She was sick of the lying and subterfuge going on in her life right now, and she didn’t want to add to it. So she hoisted the bag and made her way slowly back to the car.

  As she drove back to the ranch house, she decided that as soon as she got there, she’d take Michele and go back to the Winnebago. And then she’d figure out how to do what she should have done as soon as she’d found out—tell Garth that Ashley was her baby and that she wanted her back.

  Lacey pulled the car under the elm tree at the curve in the drive and inhaled a deep breath. Lordy, it seemed like this had been a long night. A long day, in fact, considering that Michele had been so grumpy all day long.

  She heard the baby crying as soon as she switched off the car engine. It was Michele who was doing the crying, and at an unusually high pitch, too. Lacey had learned to distinguish the two babies’ cries from each other.

  She jumped out of the car and set off for the back door at a trot. Before she even reached the porch, Ashley’s cry chimed in.

  She burst through the door, and then her jaw fell and she stopped dead in her tracks. The world seemed
to tilt, to take on a gray tint. Garth was standing at the doorway to the den, holding Ashley in one arm and Michele in the other. The girls were both squalling their heads off.

  When he saw Lacey, her boss stopped looking from one baby to the other in amazement and said to her in outright fury, “What the hell is this all about, anyway?”

  “You tell me,” she fired back, discombobulated by the sight of both her daughters within Garth’s embrace.

  “These babies are exactly alike. You knew it when you came here, didn’t you?”

  “No, I came here because you advertised for a nanny. You needed someone.”

  Garth couldn’t seem to stop looking at the babies. When he did look at Lacey, his eyes were as black as jet.

  “Lacey, you’re fired,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  It wasn’t exactly the kind of Kodak moment that families are supposed to dream about. Lacey wanted to sag onto a kitchen chair and pull herself together. But that’s not what she did. It was clear to her from their flushed faces, their glassy eyes, that both babies were sick.

  “You don’t mean that,” she said, and, pointedly ignoring Garth’s wrath, she reached for the closest baby, which happened to be Michele. Michele obligingly held her arms out and collapsed into Lacey’s arms, still crying, still miserable. And she was hot, so hot. Lacey brushed a hand across the baby’s forehead, then reached over and did the same thing to Ashley. They were burning up.

  “Michele was fussy today, I told you that,” she said to Garth over the crying of the children. “Now I understand why—she was coming down with something.”

  “Wait a minute! I fired you!”

  “You can’t,” she said. “You need me.”

  Garth uttered an expletive that one normally didn’t say in polite company. “Ashley didn’t seem sick earlier. What have you done to her?”

  “Done? You think I did something? Kids get sick, Garth. It goes with the territory.” Michele stopped wailing and went to whimpering, but Ashley kept on crying.