Home on the Ranch--The Colorado Cowboy's Triplets

by Laura Marie Altom

  The man ignored him in favor of closing the back doors, then climbing behind the wheel.

  Before Jed made it off the porch, the ambulance sped away, lights flashing.

  Dust rose from the dirt drive, swirling in the pale porch lights.

  Rubbing his tearing eyes with his thumb and forefingers, Jed barely recalled earlier that afternoon when Ollie and Camille had helped him into the passenger seat of his sister’s SUV. He’d sat there in a daze while they’d loaded his nieces and their gear.

  There was a vague recollection of the girls squalling while Camille shuffled him inside the too-still house, leaving him on the sofa while she must’ve gotten the triplets squared away.

  Now, he eased upright, wincing at the sharp pain in his forehead.

  “Take it easy...” Camille perched on the sofa’s end, lifting his feet onto her lap.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten in the morning. You slept through the rest of yesterday and through the night. I just put your nieces down for a nap.”

  He groaned. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have let me sleep that long.”

  “You obviously needed the rest. Coffee?”

  “Please.” He should get it himself, but the trek to the kitchen struck him as insurmountable.

  “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed.

  Directly across from his position on the sofa was the fireplace. A fire crackled and popped, lacing the air with sweet wood smoke. Since his arrival a few days earlier, making the fire had been one of his chores. Emily had always loved a cheery fire. Had. Seemed inconceivable that he think of his little sister in the past tense.

  “Hungry?” Camille asked, after handing him a steaming mug.

  “No, thank you.”

  She settled in the armchair across from him, drawing her legs alongside her. He’d forgotten how tiny she was. How beautiful. How sunlight caught honey gold strands in her long, chestnut hair. How her hazel eyes turned darker or lighter depending on her mood. He used to tease that she was his lil’ snack. She’d claimed the endearment drove her nuts, but he’d also caught her grinning about it on more than one occasion.

  “Now that you’re alert...” Clasping her hands around her own steaming coffee mug, she said, “We have stuff to discuss. Along with a lot of concerned friends, your mom called last night, but she’s too far into the bush to easily get a charter flight. She didn’t want me to wake you, but asked that we hold off on Emily’s memorial service until she gets home.”

  “Of course.”

  “While you were out, there was a steady stream of Emily and Chase’s friends. They brought casseroles and cakes and three hams.”

  Jed’s head swam. His chest ached as if he couldn’t drag in enough air. The fact that he’d lost his brother-in-law hadn’t even fully sunk in. How could his sister now be gone, too?

  He was beyond grateful to Camille for dealing with the well-wishing visitors. They would have been one more issue he couldn’t have handled.

  “I know this is probably the last thing you want to think about,” she said, “but when you were here—with your sister—did she have any tricks for how to tell the girls apart?”

  “Yeah, they’re color coded.” A wistful smile toyed with the corners of his lips. “Allie is pink. Callie is yellow. Sallie is pistachio—not that I know what that is?”

  “Greenish, but pale.”

  “Got it.”

  “Funny,” she said with a sad smile of her own, “I was thinking we could write their names on their feet bottoms with a Sharpie, but the whole color thing makes more sense. This is probably why I’ll never be a mom.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Way I remember it, every horse, goat, dog and kitten on this mountain adored you.”

  She bowed her head.

  “For what it’s worth, I am sorry about how things went down between us.”

  “You already said that. Besides, water under the bridge.”

  Only he got the feeling it wasn’t—for either of them.

  From the nursery came the faint sound of crying.

  “Break time’s over,” she said with false cheer.

  “I’ll help.” He pushed himself upright, at first unsteady, but he soon regained his balance.

  The babies were so young, Emily hadn’t yet trusted them with a sitter, meaning that if he and Camille couldn’t figure out how to handle the rowdy crew, he didn’t even have numbers to call.

  The only living soul on this mountain besides him and the girls, and now Camille, was cantankerous Ollie. Back when Jed lived out here and Camille’s grandmother had died, the grizzled old goat had displayed the charm of a stomach flu combined with the manners of a pissed-off rattler. Still, his granddaughter had turned out great, which meant he at least knew enough about kids to have raised one to adulthood. That automatically put him ahead of Jed in the parenting department.

  Jed passed Camille on the stairs to find all three babies screaming in the nursery. “This is how they earned their nicknames. I call them the three tenors.”

  “Fitting.”

  “I’m here,” he said to the huffy princesses in their pink palace of a sun-flooded room. Pink floral walls served as the backdrop for big paned windows with pink curtains and white trim. A fluffy white area rug covered hundred-year-old pine floors. “What’s the problem?”

  He picked up Callie, to find her diaper dry. The instant he held her, she quieted, aside from a few offended huffs over having waited so long.

  Picking up Sallie went the same. Dry diaper. Highly offended by the wait time between start of tears and service.

  Allie was another story. Wet and poopy diaper.

  Sigh. He wiped her down and wrapped her in a fresh diaper as efficiently as if he was packing a parachute—at least that was the plan. But his big fingers always made a mess of the sticky tabs and he ended up gluing one to the baby’s belly, resulting in more screams when he removed it as gently as possible.

  She was still huffing with pouty-faced fury when he lifted her into his arms, then scooped up the other two again. Though holding all three at once was a challenge, until they grew, it was doable.

  “You’re seriously good at this.” Arms crossed, rubbing her hands along her upper arms, Camille asked, “Did you and your wife have kids?”

  “Nope.”

  “Totally none of my business, but why not?”

  “Long story.” He had plenty of time to tell her everything, but the whole miserable failure was too humiliating.

  He could ask her why, in the years they’d been apart, she’d never married, but this didn’t seem like the right time.

  “Want to pack up this crew and get out of here?” he suggested.

  “Like, go to town?”

  “I was thinking more of a hike. I need to clear my head. None of this makes sense. Your being here instead of my sister. The two of us not having seen each other for a decade, yet here we are changing diapers.”

  “I know what you mean.” She took Allie from him, cradling her close. “This is crazy. How we both always talked about having kids, but never did. Yet here we are, years later, with more babies than anyone could possibly handle.”

  “True...”

  He plopped the other two tenors into Sallie’s crib, then grabbed diaper bags, loading them with supplies. Holy hell, he’d packed gear for a six-month stint in Mogadishu that hadn’t taken this long.

  Faster and faster he shoved diapers and onesies and stuffed animals into a pink-striped bag until Camille placed her hand on his forearm.

  “Stop.”

  He froze upon the realization that her touch hit him like an electrical jolt.

  “You’re acting possessed by demons you can’t fix. Emily and Chase are gone. No amount of baby paraphernalia you cram into t
hat bag will change the fact.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t stay in this house.” With the backs of his hands he swiped stupid tears from the sides of his eyes. “Everywhere I look, I see Chase helping Emily hang the giraffe mobile. I see the mantel photo of all five of them visiting the giraffes at the Denver Zoo—the babies so small they probably couldn’t even see the animals from their stroller. Em and Chase hanging this god-awful pink-striped wallpaper—both of them with paste in their hair. How could this have happened? Even worse, I can’t stop wondering if my sister actually missed Chase to such a degree that she chose to check out.”

  “You mean take her own life?” Camille gulped.

  He nodded.

  “No. I have to believe her death was accidental. Anything else is unthinkable. She wouldn’t purposely have left her babies.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  She took half as much out of the diaper bags as he’d placed in. “Gramps gifted Chase and your sister with an off-road stroller that has chunky, all-terrain tires. The girls love it, so they won’t need toys. We’ll take a few diapers and wipes, toss in formula, then be off, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Hey...” Not thinking, just acting on pure instinct when she turned to leave the room, he cupped his hand around her upper arm. “Thanks. For everything. Not just being here and helping, but—” he bowed his head “—for talking me down.”

  “No worries,” she said. “I told you I’d be here for the duration and I will. All we have to do is care for the girls till your mom gets back, and then we’re home free, right?”

  Chapter 4

  Famous last words.

  For Camille, settling three screaming infants into the stroller wasn’t a simple task but a siege. Allie had been quiet and smiley but then soiled her diaper and needed to be cleaned before being placed back in her spot at the stroller’s rear. Sallie sat in the center, apparently screaming just to be screaming. She wasn’t hungry, her diaper was clean, she didn’t need burping—just apparently wanted a good, long cry.

  Join the club.

  Could the infant be missing her mom?

  Callie screamed so loudly her cheeks turned splotchy and swollen and red enough that Camille worried they may need to phone the pediatrician’s number that Emily had kept on a magnet mounted to the side of the fridge. But then Jed found the oversize lip-shaped pacifier she’d dropped to the stroller’s net floor, brushed it off, popped it back in her mouth, then voilà, only one screaming infant to go.

  “What do you think’s wrong with her?” Camille asked.

  “Hard to say. Could be anything from gas to hunger to missing her parents.” He plucked her from the stroller. “Chase had a baby backpack sling contraption. How about I hold her in that, and you push the other two?”

  “Sure. Anything to help.”

  Fifteen minutes and another diaper change later, they were off.

  Camille encouraged Jed to take the lead down the rugged path. It was plenty wide enough for the stroller, but rocky and steep in spots, which he helped her and her charges to pass. Douglas fir and ponderosa pine towered over them, smelling pungent and fresh and far from what she’d imagined had been the scents Jed had been subjected to at the hospital.

  They wound higher and higher up the mountain, over a meandering stream and around car-sized boulders and switchbacks with drop-offs steep enough that she wasn’t sure it was such a great idea to even have the girls along for the ride.

  Even worse, dark clouds rolled in from the west.

  Jed climbed as if driven by forces she couldn’t begin to understand.

  But then maybe she did?

  Her entire reason for escaping Miami for this mountain was to elude her own demons. They might not revolve around the death of her loved ones—though she did grieve for Emily and Chase—but in her own way, she’d loved each and every child whose case she’d fought so hard to solve.

  The steeper the climb, the thinner the oxygen, the more her lungs burned and chest heaved. She wasn’t yet used to the altitude.

  All three babies howled, but then grew eerily silent.

  “Jed, we have to have gained three or four thousand feet in elevation. For the girls’ safety, we should head down.”

  He kept climbing. “I have to get to the top.”

  “Why?” She stopped, folding over to catch her breath while bracing her hands on her knees.

  “I just do!” His tone was harsh enough to startle Sallie from her eerie sleep into a full-blown wail.

  “Then give me Sallie and you go self-destruct on your own.”

  “I’m not self-destructing.”

  “Whatever the hell label you’d like to put on it, this mountainside isn’t safe in a storm.”

  Lightning cracked and thunder boomed.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Finish this mission—or death wish—on your own.” She took Sallie from him then tucked her into the stroller and fastened her safety harness. “We’ll hopefully see you back at the house.”

  She’d already gone a good fifty feet down the trail when he called, “Camille, hold up!”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re right.”

  Once again, she froze. Or was that hell freezing over? Had the great Jed Monroe just admitted he was wrong?

  Lightning again cracked.

  Back to her, hands on his hips, he looked to the sky. “I thought if I climbed high enough, far enough, I could escape this pain. Why do people I love keep dying? Em and Chase. Both of our dads. Your grandmother. So many of my SEAL brothers. Sometimes it feels like I’m the last man standing.”

  “But you’re not...” Her voice fell soft enough to barely reach him. “You have me.” At least for a little while.

  “But I don’t deserve you—never did.”

  A few cold raindrops fell and then more and more, until they were under a full-on deluge. Good thing the stroller had a cover.

  “Take this.” He shrugged off the backpack, then took the stroller from her, heading down the mountain in record time.

  Once they’d reached the two-story ranch house, the rain had turned to snow and they were all shivering. The poor babies had turned pale.

  “We need to get them in warm water,” Camille said.

  “Agreed.”

  He took Sallie and Callie, charging to the upstairs hall bathroom. He set them on their backs on the thick white rug, then turned the tub’s taps, testing the lukewarm water on his wrist.

  Camille had followed.

  “I’m such a screwup,” he mumbled. “My first official day as an uncle-turned-temporary-dad and I almost killed them. And for what? A misguided attempt to literally run from old problems, and the new ones that aren’t going anywhere for a good eighteen years. And my nieces aren’t problems, but Emily’s most cherished possessions.”

  “You have to stop beating yourself up.” Camille removed the trio’s hats, sweaters and onesies before tucking three baby bathtubs into the rising water. Once she’d retested it with her wrist, she removed diapers and settled the babies in the pleasantly warm water.

  “You’re not a dad, but an uncle. There’s a huge difference. Once your mom gets home, she’ll take over. Until then, all we can do is the best we can do. Playing devil’s advocate, since this is spring in the Rockies, next time we venture out with newborns in tow, we need to pack for all weather contingencies, from a blizzard to a heat wave.”

  “Good call.” He sat back on his haunches and sighed. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” She used a plastic cup on the edge of the tub to scoop water for wetting the babies’ hair. Pink had already returned to their cheeks. Allie and Sallie closed their eyes, sporting tiny grins. Callie scrunched her mouth into a frown that threatened tears. “Your meltdown?”

  “Yeah. It was stupid. Reckless. Thanks for bringing back my sanity
.”

  “Anyone with you would have done the same.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and caught him shrugging.

  “Do you think Emily did it on purpose?” he asked. “Killed herself?”

  “Absolutely not.” Camille lied because she sensed he needed the reassurance. She’d seen horrible, unthinkable acts committed for far less meaningful reasons. Emily and Chase had shared the sort of love Camille had never believed possible—at least not after her breakup with Jed. It wasn’t too far of a stretch to believe Emily literally hadn’t been able to live without her husband.

  “Good. I don’t think so, either.”

  Since the babies were already in the tub, Camille washed their hair and tiny bodies. The darker Callie’s expression grew, the faster Camille finished the infant’s scrub. Done, she said to Jed, “I’ve got a customer for your drying station.”

  Thick towel in hand, he rose onto his knees, reaching past and around her to grab the squirming, crying baby. In the process, Camille’s shoulder brushed against his. After all this time apart, why was the old electric spark still there? Why did she crave his taste more than chocolate?

  It wasn’t fair.

  They could have had it all until he’d thrown it—them—away.

  “Shh...” he soothed, wrapping the infant, then holding her, rocking her, cooing to her with a tenderness Camille wouldn’t have believed if she weren’t seeing it with her own eyes. “I miss your momma, too.”

  Now that the two formerly smiley babies heard their sister crying, they followed suit. Camille had always dreamed of having children—even gone so far as to wish for Jed’s sons or daughters—but one at a time would have been preferable. Caring for three newborns was madness. Could Emily have been suffering from not only grief, but postpartum depression?

  With all three ladies wailing, there was no more time for thought—only action.

  Camille and Jed formed an assembly line, drying, lotioning, diapering, then dressing the girls in their color-coded onesies.

  With the trio warm and dry, but still unhappy, Camille asked, “Think we should feed them?”

  “It’s early, but worth a try.”