The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby

by Carolyn Brown

  “You got to keep him on the ranch if he’s going to be a cowboy. And a cowgirl won’t fall for anything other than a real, bona fide cowboy, so bring him home where he belongs. He can’t grow up to be a cowboy at Leah’s place. Lord, that yard ain’t no bigger than a postage stamp. If you aren’t home by Christmas, I’m sending your brothers to get you,” Debra said.

  They said a few more things about the baby and then Natalie snapped her phone shut and laid it aside. Being raised on a ranch did not necessarily produce a cowboy. Drew was proof of that. He hated cotton farming, hated cattle raisin’, and most of all he hated Silverton. That’s why he joined the army in December of their senior hear of high school. Two days after they’d graduated he was on a bus headed for Lawton, Oklahoma. He finished basic training the same week that she started college.

  She looked down at the two-month-old baby in her arms. “Granny says you are going to be a cowboy. I hope so, Joshua. I don’t want you to be a soldier. The war took my best friend and your daddy. I couldn’t bear for it to take you away from me.” She hugged him close and hummed an old country music tune. The clock said that it was time for the morning sunrise, which was her favorite part of the day, but the view out the bedroom window presented a solid gray sky spitting sleet, snow, and freezing rain.

  Not totally unlike the feeling in her heart.

  She carried him up the hall in one arm with his infant seat in the other hand. Lucas ignored the baby and made his way across the kitchen to the utility room. He pulled on a work coat, removed the gloves from the pockets, and shoved his hands down into them.

  “I’m going to see Hazel,” he said.

  He opened the door and three puppies bounded into the room, stuck their noses to the ground like they were following the scent of a coyote or a coon, and headed straight for Joshua. The runt of the litter even threw back his head and howled at the ceiling when they found the baby. The biggest one licked the baby’s cheek and Joshua smiled like he had in the bedroom. The runt crawled right up in the carrier with him and laid down, head on the baby’s lap. Joshua wiggled his legs and smiled even bigger. The middle-sized hound settled down on one side of the carrier as if he was guarding Joshua.

  “Well, would you look at that? Guess they’re afraid that a coyote might get at him,” Jack said.

  “Bluetick hounds don’t belong in the house.” Lucas gathered them up, but the runt squirmed out of his arms and took off running down the hall.

  “Help me,” he said.

  “I’m still eating,” Jack said. “You was big enough to fight a war and you can’t control three little old hounds?”

  With a pup under each arm, Lucas set his jaw and headed down the hall. He stopped at the open bedroom door. That was Natalie’s private space as long as she stayed at the ranch, and he hadn’t been invited inside. Still yet, there was that pesky pup, chewing on one of the baby’s teething rings.

  Natalie brushed past him and picked up the puppy. “You can keep it, sweetheart. You need something to teethe on too.”

  When they reached the kitchen, Grady held out his arms. “I’ll take him and help Lucas shore up the pen. You don’t need to be gettin’ out in the cold unless you have to.”

  ***

  Hazel looked up from the hospital bed and held out both arms.

  Lucas crossed the room in a few long, easy strides and hugged her. “I missed you most of all this past year,” he whispered.

  “Bullshit!” Hazel laughed.

  He kissed her on the forehead and sat down in a chair beside her bed. “I did! Why are you laid up in this bed anyway? If that hip ain’t broke, then you could hobble around in the kitchen and rustle up food.”

  Her black eyes twinkled. “I told you not to join that reserve shit. I told you that the wars would just keep coming. Now you got three choices. You can cook in my kitchen, which means you’ll all four starve to death. You can go out to the bunkhouse and eat with the hired hands, which means you’ll bitch yourselves to death. Or you can keep that woman you been flirtin’ with all year.”

  She was just over five feet tall and her dark hair had just begun to sport a sprinkling of gray. Her eyes were black as coal and set into a round face that did not look like it could have been barking out orders for more than sixty years. She was eighty-five on her last birthday and she’d helped raise Jack and Grady along with Willa Ruth and her son that had died in Vietnam. When it came to Lucas there was one rule and he could recite it from the time he was three years old: what Gramps or Jack said was to be obeyed without question, but what Hazel said was the law.

  That was the year that his mother left the ranch in her rearview mirror and never returned. Hazel stepped into the maternal role and they’d formed a bond made of pure steel. The world would have come to an end if she hadn’t met him on the porch every day when he got out of the school bus. Joining the Army Reserve unit had been their compromise. He’d wanted a few years off the ranch right out of high school and had talked to a recruiter. Hazel threw a hissy. She’d given one son to the damned war and she wasn’t giving up another one. So he’d joined the reserves and gone to vet school.

  “So did you talk her into staying on, or did you take one look at that baby and start backpedaling?” Hazel asked.

  “Did you know she had a baby?”

  “Hell, no! I only knew what you told me. I was so happy when she come bringing that baby in that I almost did a dance right there in front of God and everyone. It was like buying a heifer at the sale and finding out when you got her home that a calf came with her.”

  “Natalie is not a cow,” he protested.

  “I didn’t say she was.” Hazel giggled.

  “That child can’t be very old, which means she was pregnant most of the time we were getting to know each other,” he said.

  “So?”

  “She should have told me.”

  Hazel reached through the bars on the side of the bed and touched his arm. “Tell me about your first impression of her. What did you feel when you first laid eyes on her for real?”

  His forehead drew down in a frown as he told Hazel about the dead coyote, the pups, and the pink gun. “She saved those three pups by shooting the coyote, I’m sure, but there she was with a baby in her arms. How much of what we shared was lies and what was the truth?”

  “You aren’t stupid, Lucas. You did intelligence work for the guards.”

  “What’s that got to do with Natalie and that baby?”

  “Can you tell if one of them prisoners is lying?”

  He nodded.

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? You wouldn’t have fallen for her if she’d been a lyin’ bitch, now would you?”

  Lucas’s first knee-jerk reaction was to take up for Natalie and tell Hazel not to call her a bitch or a cow. Then he realized that Hazel had played him into the position where she wanted him.

  “But why didn’t she tell me?”

  “She’s got her reasons. Get to know her for real. Damned old computers anyway. They’ll be the death of the country, I swear they will. Some things is private but them damned things has opened up the lives of everyone to the whole damned world. Internet dating. Don’t even get me started on that shit. Man needs to go out in the world and find a wife, not look at some picture on the Internet and fall in love.”

  “I’m not in love. I just wanted to meet her in person,” he protested.

  Willa Ruth poked her head in the door. “Well, look who is here to see us off this morning. Doctor just released Momma and by the time the nurses get the paperwork all done, the plane will be here to take us home.”

  “You’ll be ready to bring her back in two days. A hurt hip didn’t take a bit of the cantankerous out of her.” He chuckled.

  Hazel narrowed her eyes at him. “Natalie leaves the ranch and I won’t come back, not even
for Christmas, and me and you only missed one Christmas together in your life. And that was because you wouldn’t listen to me. I told you not to join that shit.”

  “She hasn’t changed a bit, has she?” Lucas teased.

  “And I ain’t plannin’ on changing. You remember the rule.” Hazel raised a hand and pointed at him.

  “What Hazel says is the law,” he said.

  “That’s right! Did you bring everything Willa Ruth told you to put in my suitcase?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lucas said.

  “Okay, then you get on out of here and drive slow on the way home. The roads are slick.”

  Lucas shook the legs of his jeans down over his boots when he stood up. He kissed Hazel on the forehead once more and hugged Willa Ruth. When he reached the door, he looked over his shoulder and said, “See you around, crocodile.”

  Hazel smiled. “Later, gator.”

  They’d never said good-bye in their lives. Not his first day of school when she put him on the bus and waved from the porch. Not when he left to go to college or when he went to Kuwait.

  Hazel hated good-byes.

  Besides, this wasn’t good-bye. It was just until Christmas. Hazel wouldn’t be away from the ranch at the holidays. Lucas just had to be patient.

  Chapter 3

  The chickens had enough sense in their pea-sized brains to stay inside the coop and not venture out into the sleet and cold wind. But somehow the eggs wouldn’t grow legs and walk up to the back door, and Natalie needed an even dozen to make a pound cake for dinner. There were four in the egg basket inside the refrigerator. She could make a chocolate sheet cake instead, but Lucas liked almond cream cheese pound cake.

  She shouldn’t want to make his favorite food after the way he’d acted, but Hazel had called earlier that morning and told her exactly what she was going to cook for dinner the first day he was home. Roast, cooked long and slow in the oven, not the Crock-Pot. Noodles made in the beef broth instead of potatoes. Lima beans, which were in the freezer in the utility room. Hot yeast bread and almond cream cheese pound cake for dessert. She could also thaw out a container of frozen peaches to serve with it.

  “And how is he adjusting now that he’s had time to sleep on the idea of a baby in the house?” Hazel asked.

  “Slowly,” Natalie had answered.

  She put on her mustard-colored canvas work coat and bundled Joshua up in a thick bunting with a snug-fitting hood. He gave her a big toothless grin when she slipped him into the sling that had been his home-away-from-home since the day he was born.

  “You like going outside, don’t you? Rain, sleet, hail, or boiling hot sunshine, a rancher has to take care of business, right, son?”

  He cooed and wiggled deeper into the folds of the sling.

  She picked up a galvanized milk bucket from the back porch, tossed the sleet pebbles out of it onto the ground, and started toward the hen house. Henry had taken her and Joshua on a very short walking tour of the backyard, pointing out the hen house, the dog pens, and the nearest barn after Jack left to follow the ambulance to the hospital. It wasn’t set up so very different than the farm she’d grown up on south of Silverton. There were more trees in north central Texas and fewer crops and more Black Angus cattle, but ranchin’ was pretty much the same no matter where it was located.

  “I’ll hurry so you don’t turn into a Popsicle,” she told Joshua.

  The bitter north wind stung her face, and her boots made a crunching sound with each step. The trees were covered in a thick layer of ice, and there wasn’t a single peep coming from the chicken house. Yes, sir, she should have made the sheet cake and not taken her baby boy out in the horrible weather. If he came down with a cold, she was going to blame Hazel.

  The door squeaked in protest when she opened it and a dozen beady little eyes looked up to see who the intruder was. Thank God they hadn’t all frozen to death. Two old speckled hens tucked their heads back under their wings when they realized it was a human and not a coyote.

  She removed a leather glove and tucked it up under her arm. The first hen didn’t even cluck when she shoved her hand under the warm feathers and found two eggs. The second one didn’t appreciate a cold hand and let out a high-pitched squeak.

  “Sorry, old girl, but thank you for the egg.” Natalie giggled.

  She had thirteen eggs in the bucket when she left the hen house and hurried across the yard. She was more than halfway back to the house when Lucas rounded the end of the house, stopped in his tracks, and crossed his arms over his chest. She stopped just as fast and almost dropped the bucket with the eggs inside.

  “You scared the bejesus out of me,” she snapped.

  “Well, you damn sure didn’t do anything for my blood pressure either,” he shot right back.

  He’d been sexy as hell as a soldier, but as a cowboy—Lord, women would stand in line just to get to gawk at him for five minutes. They’d pay good money for the privilege of touching the merchandise. Hell, she could probably get a thousand dollars a night from any blue-blooded woman if she could shuck her clothes and crawl into bed with him.

  ***

  Lucas wanted to take another step toward her, but his feet were glued to the ground just as surely as if every drop of sleet was coated in superglue. He opened his mouth to say something but then clamped it shut.

  He could see eggs in the galvanized bucket, but what was inside that plaid thing around her neck? Surely to God she didn’t carry around a baby in that thing. And why in the hell would she go gather eggs with a pink pistol strapped to one of her long, long legs?

  “What?” she asked without breaking stride.

  “Why would you take a pistol to the hen house?”

  “Varmints. Things like coyotes or snakes or rats the size of house cats. I don’t take too kindly to any of those things messin’ around the hen house.”

  He pointed to the sling. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a baby. He is not a thing. He’s a tiny human being. His name is Joshua and he’s two months old. And before you ask, there are thirteen eggs in the basket, the hens are all doing well, and there is a roast in the oven for dinner.”

  She breezed past him, leaving him still stuck to the ground.

  Warm air filled with the aroma of food in the oven, bread rising on the counter, and a crackling blaze in the fireplace met him when he opened the back door. He stomped the sleet from his boots, hung his hat and coat on hooks, and scanned the kitchen. The bucket of eggs was on the counter, but Natalie had disappeared. He poured a mug of coffee and held it in his hands to warm them.

  He had just taken the first sip when she was back in the kitchen. She wore a sweatshirt with Santa Claus riding a bull on the front, faded jeans, socks but no shoes or boots, and her hair was braided in two ropes that hung to her shoulders.

  He had to swallow fast to keep from spewing coffee all over the place. The hot liquid burned all the way from throat to stomach, but it wasn’t steaming coffee that set him on fire. It was the sexual attraction he’d had for Natalie from the first time he’d laid eyes on her smiling face on the computer screen.

  She’d put that ridiculous sling away and now the baby was in a conventional baby carrier. He looked cute in a green sweat suit with a basketball hoop on the front of the shirt. If he grew up to be as tall as his momma, he would probably make a good basketball player. With her coaching savvy, he might even go on to play some college ball.

  “I appreciate you sticking around until Hazel gets settled in Memphis. Once she’s there she won’t know if you are here or not,” he said.

  “You got more nerve than I’ve got if you are plannin’ to lie to Hazel. I told her that I’d stay until Christmas. You offered me a job and I set a price. You can’t fire me because if you do, I’m calling her.” She set the bucket on the kitchen table and talked to t
he baby. “There you go. You practice that new smile and I’ll get the pound cake in the oven.” She touched Joshua’s cheek and he graced her with his most brilliant grin yet.

  “He’s a good-lookin’ kid. Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant and seeing someone else?” Lucas asked.

  “I couldn’t. I wasn’t seeing anyone else,” she stammered.

  He sat down in a kitchen chair and looked at the baby. He looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a finger on why. “You want to explain that?”

  Natalie busied herself at the kitchen bar, measuring flour and then sugar, and putting ingredients into Hazel’s big crock mixing bowl. He thought she didn’t hear him and had his mouth open to ask again when she started to talk.

  “Drew and I were best friends before we could even remember. His daddy worked for my father on the ranch. They lived in one of the trailers out at the back of the property that Daddy brought in for hired help families. He was the baby and the only son after four daughters. They were all grown and married and had kids of their own when Drew was born. Looking back, I think his mother must have been over forty that year that he was born. I was the oldest with three little brothers. He was used to being bossed around with all those older sisters and his mom and dad and I was used to bossing.” She added baking powder to the stuff in the bowl and then brought out a sifter. It made a scratchy noise as she ran all the dry ingredients through it several times, from one bowl to the other.

  “I didn’t ask for your life story. I asked why you didn’t tell me you were sleeping with someone while we were talking online.” Lucas stuck his finger in the palm of Joshua’s hand and the baby grasped it tightly.

  “That’s what I’m telling you right now if you’ll be patient.”

  “You are bossy, aren’t you? Drew said that you were a firecracker, but I didn’t see that side of you this past year.”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not? And believe me, Drew knew me better than anyone in this world ever did or ever will. If he said I was a firecracker, he was paying me a compliment. I’m more like an overloaded stick of dynamite.”