A Baby on the Ranch: A Baby on the RanchRamona and the Renegade

by Marie Ferrarella

  “You’re making fun of me,” she protested.

  “No, I’m not,” Eli was quick to assure her. “What I am doing is still wondering how I managed to get so damn lucky.”

  She looked up at him, wondering why she’d never realized before what a knight in shining armor Eli was. Or how really handsome he was. Hollis had been a golden boy, all flash and fire. But Eli had substance. More important than his good looks, he made a woman feel safe.

  “Why waste time wondering when you could be doing something about it?” she asked in a husky whisper that rippled all through him. Exciting him.

  He wasn’t sure if he lowered his mouth to hers, or if she pulled him down to her, but the logistics didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the fireworks were going off again, in full force, accompanied by anticipation and heat.

  In the end, they made love a total of three times before they lay, completely exhausted and utterly satisfied, huddled into one another in her bed.

  And Wayne had come through like a trouper. The little guy had been complicit in his mother’s sensual awakening by doing his part. He’d slept all through the night without so much as one whimper.

  As for Eli, while Kasey might have been stunned and surprised by what she’d experienced, he hadn’t been. In his heart, he’d always known it would be like this. Making love with Kasey had been every bit as incredible as his fantasies. She’d filled his soul with light, with music.

  Again he wondered how Hollis could have willingly walked away from this, how he could have sacrificed exquisite nights like this because he didn’t have the willpower to man up—to grow up. He would have crawled over glass on his knees for this, and Hollis had just thrown it all away.

  One man’s adversity was another man’s good fortune, he couldn’t help thinking, secretly grateful that Hollis had been so selfish.

  Kasey finally broke the silence. “You’re awfully quiet,” she observed.

  “That’s because I’m too exhausted to talk,” he told her with a self-mocking laugh. “You’re a hard woman to keep up with.”

  Kasey pressed her lips together, knowing she shouldn’t comment, shouldn’t push this. But she had to know.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You being tired,” she added, just in case she’d rambled a little too much again.

  He turned to her and she could actually feel his smile. It undulated all through her.

  “A good thing,” he told her. “A very good thing.” He paused, savoring her closeness, content just to fall asleep holding her like this. But there was still something he needed to get out of the way, a question that he needed to ask, because he’d gotten so carried away so quickly. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked. “It was just that—”

  He stopped himself, wondering if his admission would push her away. Telling her that he’d loved her all this time, that he’d yearned for her even before she’d run off with Hollis, well, that could very well spook her. That was the very last thing he wanted. After finally having found her, after having her willingly become a part of his life, he couldn’t just lose her again. He didn’t think that he could bear that.

  “Just that what?” she queried when he didn’t finish his sentence.

  “Just that I got so carried away, so caught up in the act, I was afraid that I might have hurt you. I’d completely forgotten that you had just given birth and all,” he reminded her.

  “Five weeks ago,” she pointed out. Had he forgotten about taking her, as well as Wayne, to the doctor the other day for a dual checkup? The doctor had been pleased to proclaim that they were both the very picture of health. “And according to Dr. Davenport, I’ve bounced back incredibly well.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me about the ‘incredible’ part,” Eli told her. If his grin had been any broader, it would have come close to cracking his face.

  “Good,” she murmured. “Because I’m much too exhausted to argue,” she told him with what felt like her very last bit of available energy. The very next moment, she drifted off to sleep.

  The sound of her even breathing was like music to his ears. Lulling music. Eli drifted off to sleep, himself, within minutes of Kasey.

  * * *

  WITH THE SHARP RAYS of daylight came even sharper rays of guilt. After having just had the greatest night of his life, Eli woke to the feeling of oppressive guilt. As wondrous as making love with Kasey had been, it didn’t negate the fact that he had taken advantage of her at an extremely vulnerable time.

  He should have been strong enough to resist his urges, strong enough to hold her at arm’s length rather than closer than a breath.

  But he hadn’t been.

  Even now, he wasn’t.

  Looking at her now, he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and make love with her all over again. And keep making love with her until he completely expired.

  But that would be indulging himself again and not being mindful of her.

  Dammit, he wasn’t some stallion in heat. He was supposed to have willpower. That was what separated him from the horses he was training.

  Or at least it was supposed to.

  Holding his breath, Eli slowly got out of bed, then silently made his way across the floor and out of the room. He first eased the door open, then eased it closed again, moving so painfully slow he was certain she’d wake before he made good his escape.

  Once out of the room, he hurried quickly to his own room. Throwing on the first clothes he laid his hands on, he was gone in less than fifteen minutes after he’d opened his eyes.

  * * *

  WORKING, HE PUT IN A full day and more, all on an empty stomach. After a bit, it ceased complaining, resigning itself to the fact that a meal wasn’t in its future anytime soon. Eventually, after he’d done every single conceivable chore he could think of and had brought his horses back to their stalls, putting them away for the night, he ran out of excuses to stay away from the house. And her.

  It was time to go home and face the music. Or, in this case, the recriminations.

  Bracing himself, he opened the front door, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t see the look of betrayal in Kasey’s eyes when he walked in.

  The first thing he saw when he shut the door behind him was not the look of betrayal—or worse—in Kasey’s eyes. What he saw was a suitcase. Her suitcase. Kasey had left it standing right by the door and he’d accidentally knocked it over as he came in.

  Righting it, Eli felt its weight. It wasn’t there by accident. She’d packed it.

  She was leaving him.

  The moment he realized that, he could feel his stomach curling into itself so hard it pinched him. Badly. And it definitely wasn’t caused by a lack of food.

  A feeling of panic and desperation instantly sprang up within him.

  He knew he should just let her leave, that he shouldn’t stand in the way of her choice. But another part of him wasn’t nearly that reasonable or selfless. That part urged him to fight this. To fight to keep Kasey in his life now that he had finally discovered what loving her was like.

  Kasey instantly tensed as she heard him come in. She’d been listening for him all day, literally straining to hear so much that her nerves were all stretched to their limit, ready to snap in two at the slightest provocation.

  “You’re leaving.” It wasn’t really a question at this point. Why else would a packed suitcase be left right by the door?

  She needed to get through this as fast as possible. She should have actually been gone by now. Why she’d waited for him to come home, she really didn’t know. Ordinarily, she avoided confrontations and scenes, and this could be both.

  Maybe she’d waited because she’d wanted Eli to talk her out of leaving. She’d wanted him to explain why he’d bolted the way he had this morning. And, more than anything, she wanted him to tell her that he didn’t regret what had happened between them.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t have to drive me.” If her mouth had been any drie
r, there would have been sand spilling out when she spoke. “I’ll call Miss Joan.” It was the first name she could think of.

  “Why?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  She wanted to cry, to double up her hands into fists and beat on him in sheer frustration. She did neither. Instead, in a voice deliberately stripped of any emotions, she said, “Because I thought she might let me stay with the baby at her place.”

  “No.” His eyes all but bore into her. “Why are you leaving?”

  Why was he torturing her this way? What was it he wanted from her? “Because you want me to,” she cried, her voice breaking.

  He stared at her incredulously. Had she lost her mind? “Why the hell would you think that?” he demanded, stunned.

  “The bed was empty when I woke up,” she told him. “The house was empty when I woke up.”

  She was shouting now, unable to harness her emotions. She felt completely betrayed by him. She’d thought that last night had meant something to him, other than a way of easing his tension, or whatever it was that men told themselves when they slept with a woman and then completely erased her existence from their minds the next morning.

  “You didn’t even want to talk to me. What else am I supposed to think?” she cried heatedly, then struggled to get hold of herself. She couldn’t have a complete meltdown like this, if for no other reason than because Wayne needed a functioning mother. “Look, I get it. You don’t owe me anything. You’ve been more than kind, giving me somewhere to stay, being my friend. Last night was incredible, but I don’t want to lose your friendship, so I thought that it might be best if I got out of your sight for a while.” She went to pick up the suitcase.

  He pushed it out of the way with his foot. “You thought wrong.”

  He’d said it so low, she wasn’t sure if she heard him correctly. “What?”

  “You thought wrong,” he repeated, this time with more conviction. “I left before you woke up because I needed some time to try to figure out a way to save our friendship.”

  “Save it?” she repeated, completely confused. Why would he possibly think that their friendship would be in jeopardy because they had made lyrical love together?

  “I didn’t want you worrying every time you turned around that I would suddenly pounce on you without warning.”

  “‘Pounce,’” she repeated. As she said the word, an image of Eli “pouncing” materialized in her head. This time there was no confusion evident in her voice. But there was a hint of a smile.

  “Pounce,” he said again.

  All things considered, “pouncing” had definite merits, she thought, relieved. Maybe she’d been worried for no reason.

  “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’d actually want you to pounce on me?” she asked Eli.

  “What are you saying?”

  She tried again, aware that she’d been more coherent in her time. “I’m saying that while I don’t expect any promises—we’re both in brand-new territory here—I would like to have something to look forward to once in a while.” Was that really her, actually asking him to say that making love with her wasn’t totally out of the picture? Wow was all she could think to say. “Or at least think it was a possibility.”

  “Then, just to be perfectly clear,” he qualified, more for himself than for her, “what happened last night, that didn’t offend you? Didn’t make you feel uneasy about having me hanging around?”

  “Eli, you’re my best friend. How could I be uneasy about having you around? And, for the record, when have you ever just been ‘hanging around’? You’re running an entire ranch by yourself, helping me with Wayne and I know that you get up to tend to him when he starts to cry in the middle of the night.”

  She’d caught his attention with the first line. He was having trouble getting past that. “A best friend who slept with you,” he pointed out.

  Her smile expanded. “I don’t recall much sleeping going on until a lot later,” she reminded him. “Eli, if you think that you took advantage of me, let me put your mind at ease. You didn’t. What you did do was make me feel alive again.

  “You made me feel like a desirable woman instead of an unattractive, discarded one whose husband didn’t even think enough of her to tell her face-to-face he was leaving. If anything,” she said quietly, “I took advantage of you.”

  That was an out-and-out lie and it wasn’t just his male pride that said so. But he didn’t want to argue about it. Or about anything else. “Then I guess we could call it a draw.”

  Her eyes crinkled as she nodded. “Works for me.”

  Relief settled in.

  “Me, too.” And then, because his stomach decided to speak up again, voicing a very loud complaint, he asked, “What are my chances of getting some dinner tonight? Actually, it doesn’t have to qualify as dinner. At this point, anything’ll do. If you have some boiled cardboard lying around, I can make do with that.”

  “‘Boiled cardboard,’” she repeated.

  He raised his shoulders in a careless shrug, then let them drop again. “What can I say? I’m easy.”

  “There’s easy, and then there’s just selling yourself too cheap. Cheap isn’t good,” she said, pretending that they were having an actual sensible conversation.

  “I’ll have to keep that in mind,” he said.

  “You do that.” She hooked her arm in his as she led him to the kitchen. “In the meantime, why don’t I see what I can come up with to satisfy that stomach of yours so it can stop whimpering like that.”

  “My stomach doesn’t whimper, it rumbles.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “It does,” he protested. As if on cue, his stomach made a noise. “See, there it goes again.”

  She managed to keep a straight face. “All I hear is whimpering,” Kasey said as she opened the refrigerator door.

  Eli knew better than to argue. Besides, he was too busy making love to her with his eyes even to consider arguing with this woman who made his world spin off its axis.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the evenings, if Eli wasn’t with her, Kasey always knew just where to find him. With Wayne. He’d either be playing peekaboo with the baby, reveling in the gleeful, infectious laughter that emerged from her son, or he’d be attending to the boy’s needs. Eli had gotten better at changing Wayne than she was.

  If Wayne was already in his room for the night, Eli could be found in the rocking chair, holding Wayne and reading a bedtime story to the boy. Once the boy was asleep, Eli would often just stand over the crib and watch him breathe rhythmically.

  It was a scene to wrap her heart around.

  That was the way she found him tonight. Staring down at Wayne as if mesmerized by the very sight of the boy sleeping.

  “There you are,” she whispered, coming up behind Eli. “Dinner’s ready.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he promised, but he made no effort to move away from the crib.

  She couldn’t help herself—she had to ask. “You’re looking at him so intently, Eli. What is it that you think you see?”

  Eli’s smile deepened at her question—she noticed that he always smiled around Wayne. “That he has a world of endless possibilities in front of him. Right now, he could be anything, do anything, dream anything. He could even grow up to have the most beautiful girl in town fall in love with him.” A whole beat passed before he realized what he’d just said and the kind of interpretation she was liable to put to it: that he thought she was in love with him. He knew better than to assume that. “That is, I didn’t mean to imply that I thought—”

  His tongue just kept getting thicker and more unmanageable as he tried to quickly dig his way out of his mistake.

  But if he was afraid what he’d said would push her away again, he could have saved himself the grief. She had focused on something entirely different in his sentence.

  “You think I’m beautiful?”

  He slowly—and quietly—released a sigh of relief, even as he w
ondered why she looked so surprised. The woman had to own a mirror. “Of course you are.”

  “The most beautiful girl in town?” she questioned in wonder, repeating the words he’d used. She looked at him as if she hadn’t seen him before. And maybe she hadn’t. Not in this light. It put everything in a brand-new perspective.

  “Absolutely,” he affirmed, then added, “And you always have been to me.”

  Gently touching his face, she leaned into him and lightly brushed her lips against his. Not like a vain woman rewarding someone for giving her praise, but like a woman whose heart had been deeply moved by what she’d just heard him say.

  “Dinner,” she reminded him.

  He nodded, remembering. “Dinner,” he repeated, following her out of the room and into the hall.

  Turning, he eased the door closed behind him. His sister, in keeping with her practice of always being one step ahead, had bought them a baby monitor. One of the four receivers was set up in the kitchen so that there was no need to be concerned that something might happen to the infant while they were busy elsewhere. They were able to hear every sound the baby made. Having the monitor definitely eased the fear that they wouldn’t know if Wayne suddenly became distressed for some reason. It allowed them to have some time with one another without guilt and without involving diapers and spit-up.

  Eli had had one of those days that seemed as if it was going to go on indefinitely. He felt completely wiped out and bone-tired as he sank into his chair in the kitchen.

  “Need help?” he asked automatically.

  “Sit there,” she instructed. “You look like you just might fall over on your face if I have you doing anything.”

  Was there something she needed him to do? He tried his best to look like he was rallying.

  “No, I’m good, really,” he protested, going through the motions of getting up, even though somehow, he remained sitting where he was, his torso all but glued to the chair.

  She turned to glance at him for a second, a smile playing on her lips that went a long way toward banishing the exhaustion from his body—at least temporarily.