The More Mavericks, the Merrier!

by Brenda Harlen

  “So maybe it’s not unreasonable for my parents to worry about the fact that I’m spending the night here,” she mused aloud.

  “Why would they worry about you spending the night here?”

  She felt her cheeks flush as she spelled it out for him. “Because you’re a man...and I’m a woman.”

  “But they know me,” he said. “And they know I would never take advantage of our friendship in that way.”

  “Thanks,” she said dryly. “You sure do know how to boost a girl’s ego.”

  “I didn’t mean—” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m going to go out and shovel off the porch and walkway, so that when Bella makes her way home in the morning, she’ll hopefully be able to find her way to the door.”

  Fallon just nodded.

  She knew that she had no right to be upset with him for saying aloud what she’d always suspected—that he didn’t see her as a woman. But she was upset and frustrated, and now she was trapped under the same roof with him for the night.

  After checking on the babies to make sure they were content and secure in their play yard, she headed upstairs to borrow a pair of pajamas from Bella’s drawer. Poking through the cupboard of her friend’s bathroom, she also found a new toothbrush that she appropriated for her own use. She hurriedly changed and cleaned her teeth, then headed back downstairs.

  Since the power wasn’t out yet, she decided to turn on the Christmas tree lights. And because she suspected that Jamie would want something to warm him up when he came inside—and because she couldn’t seem to stop taking care of him even though she knew it was a habit she needed to break—she put on a pot of decaf coffee.

  When Jamie returned, she was on the sofa with the babies beside her, reading a story to them. Though they rarely sat still for long, Fallon believed it was important to teach children an appreciation of books at an early age. Recently, she’d been reading them stories about Christmas—particularly books with pictures of Santa Claus so that he wouldn’t seem like a complete stranger when they went to the mall in Kalispell to have their photo taken with him.

  After a quick shower, Jamie came back downstairs wearing a pair of flannel lounge pants and a long-sleeve thermal tee that hugged his torso in a way that made her mouth go dry. Because no matter how many times she tried to tell herself that he was a friend, she couldn’t stop seeing him as a man.

  The only man she’d ever wanted.

  * * *

  Despite the storm still raging outside, it was undeniably cozy inside the house. Carrying a mug of the coffee that Fallon had brewed for him, Jamie paused in the arched entranceway of the living room, a fist squeezing his heart when his gaze settled on the Christmas card-worthy scene in front of him.

  A brightly lit Christmas tree topped with a sparkling star beside the stone fireplace with flames flickering in the hearth, a beautiful woman sitting cross-legged on the sofa with one baby in her lap and another on either side of her, reading aloud to them a story about Santa and a snowman. Looking at Fallon with Henry, Jared and Katie, he was overwhelmed by gratitude to her, for everything she’d done for his babies.

  He felt a glimmer of something else, too—an awareness of Fallon as more than a childhood pal and favorite caregiver to his children, an appreciation of her as a beautiful and captivating woman. But he wasn’t ready to acknowledge those feelings. He didn’t want to see her as anything more than the steady and true friend she had always been.

  Instead, he focused on the crucial role she’d played in the baby chain. He knew there was no way he would have made it through the past ten months without the community volunteers—and Fallon in particular. She’d gone above and beyond for him and his babies, taking care not just of their basic needs but lavishing them with attention and affection, loving them as easily and naturally as he would expect a mother to do. It didn’t surprise him that Henry, Jared and Katie absolutely lit up whenever she was around, greeting her with big smiles and outstretched arms, vying for her attention. It did surprise him that her presence had the same effect on him, though he was careful not to show it.

  Fallon finished the last page of the book and closed the cover.

  “Now that’s what I call a successful bedtime story,” he told her.

  She glanced at the babies cuddled against her and discovered they were asleep. “One of these days, they’ll stay awake until the end.”

  He set his coffee down on the table and picked up Jared and Henry, one in each arm. Fallon stood up with Katie in her arms and followed him up the stairs. Taking care of the babies was—if not easy, at least natural for her, and he knew that she would be a great mother someday. The kind of mother he’d always hoped his children would have.

  When the babies were settled in their cribs, he stayed in their room for another minute, just watching them sleep. “I used to do this all the time when I first brought them home from the hospital,” he confessed to Fallon. “Stand here watching them sleep and listening to them breathe, alternately thanking God for giving me three perfect babies and cursing Him for taking away their mother.”

  Fallon stood beside him, not saying anything, just listening to him talk.

  “But it wasn’t anyone’s fault except Paula’s,” he admitted. “If she’d gone to her doctor’s appointments, the preeclampsia would have been diagnosed, arrangements made for the safe delivery of the babies, and she would have lived.” He shook his head. “I’ll never understand why she skipped those appointments and jeopardized not just her life but our babies’ lives, too.”

  “She didn’t do it on purpose,” Fallon said to him now. “Whatever her reasons for not having regular checkups, I don’t think she truly understood the risk she was taking. If she had, if she’d even suspected how dangerous the consequences could be, she never would have done so.”

  “I wish I could believe that was true, but in those last few months, she was so angry with me.”

  “With you? Why?”

  He only shook his head, because he couldn’t repeat her words aloud. Not even to Fallon.

  Thankfully, she didn’t press him for a response. Instead, she laid her hand on top of his, curled over the side rail of Katie’s crib, and squeezed it reassuringly. “Maybe you need to stop looking back and focus on the future and your babies.”

  “They’re the reason I get up at way-too-early o’clock every morning,” he admitted. “I need to make this ranch a success so I can provide for them. And yet, I spend so much time working, I feel as if I’m missing out on their childhood.”

  “You’ve mostly just missed out on a lot of dirty diapers,” she teased.

  He felt a smile tug at his lips, for just a moment. “I wouldn’t have been able to keep them if I hadn’t had the baby chain volunteers helping out every day.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.”

  “No one in this town would have let you lose your family.”

  Again, Jamie thought, but he didn’t say the word aloud.

  He didn’t need to.

  * * *

  He sat up for a while with Fallon, talking about the upcoming holidays. She again hassled him about all the “great Christmas ideas” she’d enumerated on her list, such as visiting Santa, baking cookies, singing carols and taking part in the Candlelight Walk. Although he liked to tease her about her obsession with the holidays, he couldn’t deny that she had a way of making everything fun. She found pleasure in the simplest things, and her pleasure was infectious. Over the past ten months, he hadn’t found many reasons—aside from his babies—to smile. Being with Fallon made him smile.

  When he finally headed upstairs to his bed, leaving her on the sofa with a pile of blankets, he found sleep elusive. Maybe it was because he’d been talking to Fallon about Paula earlier that thoughts of his ex-wife continued to linger in his mind. But Fallon was th
e only person he could talk to about so many things. As a result, she knew almost all of his secrets. She certainly knew more about the problems in his marriage than anyone else, but even she didn’t know everything...

  Moving to rural Montana had been a major adjustment for his Seattle-born wife, but during her first summer in Rust Creek Falls, she’d made an effort to meet people and fit into the community. During that time, he was working almost from sunup to sundown, trying to take care of the ranch without relying too much on outside help he couldn’t really afford.

  But after they’d been married almost a year, he’d broached the idea of starting a family. They hadn’t talked about children before they were married, because he hadn’t thought such a discussion was necessary. In his mind, a wedding was a natural prelude to a family.

  But when he suggested that they could stop using birth control, Paula balked. As far as she was concerned, their life was perfect and adding a child to the mix could mess up everything. Besides, she wasn’t really the maternal type, anyway.

  Jamie had been stunned. How could she possibly think that a baby would mess up anything? And why would she question her motherly instincts? Rather than actually answer any of his questions, Paula agreed to stop taking her birth control pills to “see what happens.”

  And Jamie, excited by the prospect of having a child with his wife, didn’t push for answers because he believed that, when they finally had a baby together, she would see that all of her worries and concerns had been for naught.

  Except that another six months went by and nothing happened. He’d always envisioned himself having a house full of children—like the loving home his parents had provided before their deaths—and he wasn’t prepared to give up on that dream. Instead, he suggested that they make an appointment with a fertility specialist. Paula agreed, albeit with obvious reluctance.

  By that time, he’d realized there was more going on than his wife was telling him, but he still believed they could work through whatever was bothering her. Until a few days before the wedding of Braden Traub and Jennifer MacCallum, when he was searching for a pair of tweezers to remove a splinter from his thumb and found a package of birth control pills hidden in a zippered compartment in his wife’s makeup case.

  “I shouldn’t have lied to you,” she admitted, swiping at her tears with the back of her hand. “But I was afraid that, if I got pregnant and fat, you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

  He was sincerely baffled by her response. “Why would you ever think any such thing?”

  “Because that’s what happened in my parents’ marriage, when my mom got pregnant with me.”

  “Whatever problems your parents had, had nothing to do with you,” he assured her.

  But she shook her head. “Everything was fine, until I came along. They were happy and in love, and then her body started to grow and change, and my dad lost interest. That’s when he started looking at other women—and sleeping with other women. And I didn’t want to risk the same thing happening to us.”

  Jamie’s heart ached for her: the little girl who had felt responsible for the problems in her parents’ marriage, and the woman who believed that he would ever be unfaithful to her. And though he felt he understood her better now, he wasn’t sure he could forgive her actions. She’d lied to him—for more than a year, every time they’d made love, every time he’d asked about her cycle, she’d deliberately and continuously lied to him.

  “When I promised to love, honor and cherish you, I meant every word of it,” he said, then dropped the package of pills on the desk and turned away.

  She pushed away from the desk and rushed toward him. “Please, Jamie. Give us another chance to be a family.”

  Of course, those words wrapped around his heart like a lasso over the head of an errant calf, and yanked him right back into line.

  And then Paula took his hand and led him to the bathroom, where she dumped the pills into the toilet and flushed them all away.

  Jamie knew that the issues between them couldn’t be solved that easily, but he let himself believe that it was the first step toward getting their life back on track.

  And when they attended Braden and Jennifer’s wedding a few days later, he couldn’t help but remember their wedding day, when they were head over heels in love and confident in their future together. Listening to the exchange of vows reminded him of the promises that he and Paula had made to one another, and he knew that he owed them a second chance.

  When they went home after the wedding, they were both drunk on love and intoxicated by joy, and they made love all through the night. It wasn’t until several weeks later that he heard about the spiked wedding punch and realized they might have been drunk on more than love. Regardless of the reasons, that night signaled a turning point in their relationship—the new start they both claimed to want.

  Four weeks after the wedding, after Paula had been feeling dizzy and sick for about a week, Jamie encouraged her to take a pregnancy test.

  The test was positive, and he was ecstatic. His wife was a little less so, but she seemed willing to believe his promises that they would have a wonderful life together with their baby. Then she found out that there wasn’t just one baby—there were three.

  And the bigger Paula’s belly grew, the more miserable she became. She refused to let him accompany her to her monthly check-ups, insisting that he’d done enough. Maybe he should have insisted, but the truth was, by that time, he was weary of the arguing and bickering, so he relented and let her go to the doctor’s appointments on her own. Because it never occurred to him that she wasn’t going.

  And she never missed out on an opportunity to remind him that having three babies was his choice not hers.

  He’d wanted to believe that as soon as their babies were born and she held them in her arms, she would love them as much as he did.

  Unfortunately, she’d never had that chance.

  Chapter Eight

  Fallon hadn’t slept very well. Despite the fact that it was late when Jamie said good-night and finally turned out the lights, she’d had trouble falling asleep. Because as soon as she closed her eyes, she pictured Jamie upstairs in his bedroom. Alone in his big bed. And though she would never dare tiptoe up the stairs and crawl beneath the covers with him, there was no denying that she wanted to. The tantalizing thought teased her mind and stirred her body, and when she finally did sleep, she dreamed of him.

  And then she’d awakened twice in the night to howling winds that rattled the windows and urged her to add more wood to the fire. So far, the power had not been lost, but better safe than sorry. She’d awakened three more times to put the puppies outside.

  Jamie had lined a laundry basket with a towel for them to sleep in, and Fallon had set the basket close by so that they wouldn’t feel abandoned and alone. As a result, she’d heard every soft cry and whimper and, worried that every little sound might be an indication of a full bladder, she’d scooped them up, shoved her feet into her boots, and taken them out onto the porch.

  The last time she’d ventured out into the frigid air, the first light of dawn was just starting to shimmer on the horizon.

  She’d obviously fallen into a deeper sleep after that, because she didn’t hear anything else until a warm, masculine voice whispered close to her ear.

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

  And she did—jolting awake and abruptly upward, the top of her head smacking Jamie in the chin.

  She winced, he swore.

  “Ohmygod. I’m so sorry.”

  He dropped to his knees beside the sofa and rubbed his chin. “I don’t think you broke anything, but damn, you have a hard head.”

  “And you have a hard jaw,” she told him, rubbing the top of her head.

  He carefully wiggled the disparaged part of his anatomy.

  “Are you okay?�
�� she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think you might need to kiss it better.”

  She blinked, certain that she hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”

  “When Jared fell down and banged his knee yesterday, you kissed it better.”

  “Well, yes,” she admitted. “Because he’s a baby.”

  “I bet my jaw hurts more than his knee,” he told her.

  Fallon rolled her eyes but leaned closer to brush her lips gently to his jaw, telling herself that it would be just like kissing Jared’s knee. Except it was nothing like kissing Jared’s soft, chubby knee. Jamie’s jaw was hard and strong and rough with stubble that made her lips tingle, and he smelled like fresh hay and clean soap with an underlying hint of something that she recognized as uniquely his scent. Apparently he’d been out to the barn already, as he was every morning before the kids were even awake.

  “Better?”

  She drew back, but he was still close. Close enough that his lips were mere inches from her own. His gaze dropped to her mouth, lingered. She held her breath, waited.

  “I think so,” he finally said, and wiggled his jaw again.

  Then he lifted a hand to her head, his fingers gently sifting through her hair in search of a possible bump. “How’s the noggin?”

  “I don’t think I’m concussed,” she said, trying to make light of the situation when just his nearness was making her heart race and her knees weak. Or maybe those were effects from the knock on her head.

  “You’re a dangerous woman,” he teased.

  “That’s what all the guys say,” she quipped back.

  Despite the casual tone of their banter, there was something else in the air, something exciting and new and—

  “It’s like a Winter Wonderland out there,” Bella announced, striding into the room.

  It was a testament to how mesmerized Fallon had been by Jamie’s nearness that she didn’t hear any of the telltale signs of her friend’s arrival. Apparently he’d been equally oblivious, because he quickly dropped his hand away and rose to his feet.