The Rancher's Unexpected Family

by Myrna Mackenzie

  She should have let it drop there. Up until recently, Kathryn would have, but she was bolder now. She had to be bolder, and what he’d said...

  “So, what? You really do try to turn yourself to stone? Because you can’t tell me a man like you intends to go through life never kissing a woman or...anything.” She was mad that she stumbled over the ending, but still, she held her ground.

  “I never said I didn’t kiss women. I said I shouldn’t kiss you. You’re different, more serious. And we have that history. I’m going to try never to touch you again.”

  Kathryn felt as if cold water had been dashed over her, even though she knew he was right. He was too overpowering for her, and she saw things in him that might not be there. Maybe there was still a part of that younger Kathryn inside her and she still wanted him to be something he never would be.

  “I’ll help you,” she said.

  He looked confused.

  “I’ll help you keep your distance,” she clarified. “But we still have to finish what we’ve started.”

  “Agreed. Let’s do this right, get the town what it needs, get you what you want, wrap everything in a neat package and send you on your way. You’re just passing through, and that plan is best for everyone.”

  It was, wasn’t it?

  “All right. I’ll send you an entire layout of what will be happening at the ranch on the ‘Come Be a Cowboy Day,’ what will be needed, and I’ll divvy up the jobs. You can veto anything you don’t agree with, and then we’ll talk.”

  “We probably won’t need to do that. Unless you don’t give me enough work. Make it equitable, darlin’.”

  She blinked.

  “That’s not the first time you’ve used that term. Are you trying to get the upper hand by using a sexist endearment?”

  He looked mildly amused. “Just getting into character for the big do.”

  But his words had made her recall that she had been wild in his arms only moments before. “I’ll do it right this time,” she said, half to herself. She was referring to the list, not the kiss. Or was she? “The divvying up, I mean.”

  “Good.” He turned to go. A car drove by, the light hitting the house, just as Holt’s boots thumped against the creaky porch. In the background, bothered by the noise or the light or both, Izzy whimpered.

  Holt froze like a statue, his broad back stiff. Then he took a faltering step.

  “Was...was Lilith pregnant when you left her?”

  He dropped his head, rested his hands on his waist. “Leave it, Kathryn.”

  Okay, she would leave it.

  “No. Better yet, don’t leave it. This is how it was. You thought I was the dreamy football player. Well, I was a football player, but I was never a romantic guy. I don’t even want to be that guy, and I never did. But Lilith hated that I hadn’t lived up to her fantasy. Maybe she wanted to punish me for not being what she wanted in a husband or maybe she just didn’t want a baby. I don’t know. What I know is that she was pregnant, but she didn’t tell me. Instead, she made plans to give the baby away. Just like that. No chance for me to even claim my child. I only found out about any of it after a friend of hers confessed the whole thing to me. She and I had a huge argument. She said that I was too cold, too closed off, that I would be hell on a kid and that I was just like my father and any child of mine would probably be at least partly like me. She wanted no part of raising a child like that. Not long after that she told me she had a miscarriage. We were already done by then, but that put a period to everything. And you know what?”

  Kathryn waited.

  “She was right about me. I’m not ready for any of that and probably never will be. So no fantasy dreams, no romance, no babies,” he said. “You have the right plan. Go after your dreams, raise your child, spit in the eye of romance. That’s what you need. I need not to have anyone hope I’ll be that romantic, giving man. So yes, I kiss women...and things, as you say, but I don’t do more. When we’re done here, you run, darlin’. You skedaddle away from Larkville as fast as you can. Because I liked kissing you. A heck of a lot. But it would be a real bad idea for us to do that again. There’s just no future in it, and you need a future.”

  She stood there, silently, her mind protesting everything. And knowing he was right. He was dynamite. She needed to be careful around him.

  “Agreed?” he asked.

  The correct answer was yes. She knew that. She needed to say it, but it was a little-girl answer, a giving-in answer. And despite the fact that he was 100 percent correct in his estimation of what they needed to do, she just couldn’t let a man call all the shots anymore.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He swore.

  She shook her head. “Don’t swear around the baby. And, Holt?”

  “What?” The word was clipped, cold, angry.

  “Don’t worry. There’s not a chance in the world that I’ll fall in love with you or have romantic expectations of you. That’s not who I am anymore, that’s not where I’m headed. I might kiss you again before I leave town. But leave town I will. As soon as we’re done. So yes, let’s get done. Quickly. I have a life to get to.”

  Now she was done, she thought as he drove away. So why was she shaking? And why did her lips and her arms and her entire body ache?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AS IF that kiss had kicked everything into high gear, things began to take off in the weeks that followed. Kathryn received a request for more information from a company she had sent her résumé to. When the call came, her hands shook. No other company had contacted her, and there was a lot riding on her making the right response. If she did well it would mean leaving here soon.

  Her heart lurched suddenly and the world felt off-kilter. “I’m just excited,” she whispered. “And I’m concerned because I haven’t finished what I started yet.”

  Yes, that was it. She sat down right then and sent Holt an addendum to the list of activities for the cowboy day. A short time later, he sent back a few terse questions:

  This is getting big. You’re sure you want it to be this big? And where do you want things to happen? How many people do you need to run things? What do you mean by “ranch things”?

  “Well, there’s the problem,” she admitted. She wasn’t quite sure. She didn’t want to throw all of this off on Holt. She didn’t want to be like everyone else, taking advantage of him. Because just the other day, she had overheard someone in town saying that he was going to ask Holt to help him repair his SUV, and when Mr. Hurdle had been in the waiting room, he had told another patient that if the bank wouldn’t give him a loan, he might try Holt. Holt was frequently approached by people in the street. He wrote down their requests and lent a hand whenever he could. It was part of his life here. He was a good neighbor and friend.

  Still, unease filled her when she remembered how she had hounded Holt. She knew why he had put her off. It was because she had wanted him to ask for favors, not the other way around. He might be gruff and grumpy and frustrate a girl to death, until he kissed her, but Holt didn’t know how to say no to his neighbors. So, despite his insistence that he share the work of the fundraiser, she was reluctant to put herself back into that category. The truth was that she had pushed him into this whole project, and now he felt obligated.

  Kathryn sighed. She tried to think of another way, but Holt could probably tell if she was lying, and the truth was that she needed his help as much as everyone else did. As for his questions, she didn’t have all the answers yet, and she knew there was only one way to find those answers.

  “Come on, Izzy, sweetie. We have to go see a man about a horse. And a dog. And a bunch of stuff we know nothing about.’

  Izzy made one of those cute baby sounds that Kathryn loved.

  “I know. He doesn’t like you much. I’m sorry about that, love. But he has his reasons, and we’re not going to change his mind. Holt is a good man, but he’s got a hard-shell coating he doesn’t want anyone to penetrate.” Some men were just like that
. Holt might have better reasons than most. She couldn’t begin to understand what it must be like to father a child and find out that your child had been on the verge of being given away with no one even giving you a chance to lay claim. And then to lose that child anyway, lose the woman you loved, lose the future you’d planned, all in one fell swoop? All Kathryn knew was that it couldn’t be any of her concern. Not if she was smart.

  Her dealings with Holt would soon be over. Thank goodness, she thought as she made her way to the ranch. Now that she had been kissed full-on by Holt...she wanted to do it all over again.

  * * *

  Holt was wrestling with a calf, a bottle in one hand and the unhappy calf in the other, when a shadow fell over him. He looked up to see Kathryn standing there. She was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before, and he quickly realized that she’d never seen him this way before. He had always been in his big bad quarterback guise or his badass rancher guise whenever they’d met. At least when he hadn’t been losing control and kissing her. Or insulting her. That time when she’d been giving birth didn’t count, since she’d been out of her mind with pain.

  But he didn’t like to think about that day.

  Now she was looking at him as if he’d turned into a different person. He had a bottle in one hand as he fed the calf and the other hand resting on the calf’s furry neck.

  “That doesn’t look like something the ranch owner would be doing,” she said.

  He resisted smiling and shrugged. “A rancher can’t ask his people to do things he won’t do himself.”

  “Is that rule number one of ranching?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why are you giving that calf a bottle?”

  “His momma died, and he’s not old enough to wean yet. It happens. Calves lose their mothers or their mothers can’t provide them with enough milk and you have to make sure they get the milk they need. It’s easier when the calf is a newborn. Sometimes you can get another cow to take the calf on, or if you have to feed one by hand, they catch on to how it’s done in only a few days. This little guy is a bit older so it can take up to fourteen days. He and I are just getting started and he’s not real happy, but it’s necessary. In a very short time, he’s gonna come running for the bottle, no coaxing needed.”

  “I feel kind of dumb, having lived here but knowing so little about raising cattle.”

  “We all know what we need to know, I guess. You never had any need to know cattle.” And he had never needed to know anything about raising babies. “Where’s the baby?” he asked, as if he just couldn’t help it. He frowned.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t have her hidden on my body somewhere. Nancy’s got her. Now that she’s a few weeks old, they’re communicating.”

  “Nancy likes babies.” Holt wanted to swear. Everything he said seemed to shout, I don’t like babies! Which wasn’t true. He just hadn’t gotten over losing his. He still wanted his child. Maybe someday he’d get his act together, learn how to treat a baby right and have one of his own, but this one was spoken for. She wasn’t going to stay, and he couldn’t bear the loss of another baby. It was better not to get attached to things you had to give up. “You came about my questions?” he asked, trying to change the subject and forget about the unchangeable past.

  “I came to tell you that I never expected you to do so much. I wouldn’t have approached you at all if I’d had any connections to people who could help provide a doctor or if I had the kind of pull you do with the people of Larkville.”

  Holt scowled. “Has anyone here been treating you wrong?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I’ve been gifted with their largesse. Baby items keep appearing on my porch, and I’ve made friends I never had when I lived here before. I’m grateful, especially since people don’t really have any reason at all to be so darned sweet to me. I pretty much drifted through my teen years here without connecting.”

  “Not your fault. You told me your parents kept you apart from the rest of the town.”

  “Any ordinary teen would have rebelled.”

  He couldn’t help chuckling.

  “What?”

  “You sounded downright irritated that you bypassed the rebellious teen phase.”

  “Did you? Rebel, I mean?”

  He had tried to. “I did a few things. Raised some hell. Busted up a car or two. Got drunk.” Got a woman pregnant. But by then he’d left his teen years behind. It still galled him that he had messed up that way on so many levels. “Mostly, though, I had to walk the straight and narrow. If you don’t take care of your animals, well, ranching can be life or death. You have to time your hell-raising right or everyone suffers.”

  She laughed at that, and her laugh was soft, musical, enticing. He growled.

  “Don’t growl at me,” she said, surprising him.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were looking at me when you growled.”

  He wondered if her jerk of a husband had done stuff like that. “Why’d you marry a guy like that, anyway?”

  She blushed, her cheeks turning a pretty rose as she looked to the side. “When I was growing up and things were so bad, I couldn’t wait to get away and be on my own. I floated along for a while just enjoying college and my studies, but when I met James, well, he could be charming and complimentary. And when we got married, he was in grad school and I gave up my own plans in order to take any job I could get to support us. But when I started communicating with one of my former professors who suggested I might want to attend grad school myself when James finished, things got really ugly. James was jealous, he needed adoration, and when I got pregnant...well, I learned a lot about men who need to be in control. They don’t like having that control taken from them. My own fault for not seeing it sooner.”

  “Some men hide things well.” It was a warning. To her. To him.

  “Well, now I have better and more effective armor than I used to.” She met his challenge.

  “Do you now?” He looked at her the way a man looks at a woman he wants, and her blush deepened, but she didn’t look away.

  “You can’t scare me into thinking that you’re bad, you know,” she said. “You’re...you’re ornery at times, and we want different things from life, but I see what you do. You pretend to be mean, but you’re not mean. In fact, you’re rather a soft touch.”

  And she was digging into areas he didn’t want anyone to go. “What are you here for really, Kathryn? I’ve got work to do.”

  She blew out a breath. “I don’t even want to admit it, but you asked me some questions I don’t know the answers to. So I’m here to find out the answers.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You help show me what goes on at the ranch and then I’ll tell you what events I want to have. And I’m not letting you do all the work, either,” she said. “Thanks to you, I’m getting to know a whole lot more people in the town and I know how to get them to help out. I just need to decide what will work best. I’ll make some choices and run them by you. Will you... Can you find some time during this week to show me around? What would be good for you?”

  Never would be good for him. He liked looking at her and touching her and just listening to her talk far too much. And she had that cute little baby...

  He made his mind go blank for a second. “I can show you around today.” Best to get this over with.

  She looked at the calf who had finished the bottle. “What happened to having work to do and ranching being life or death?”

  “I do, and it is. But I run the ranch now. I hire good people and I have a crew of hands I can call on to moonlight for me when I need to.”

  “Okay. Just let me go check in on Izzy and talk to Nancy.”

  He started to tell her that he would just call Nancy on his phone, but he thought she might need to do some “momma” things like feed the baby, things he didn’t want to think about. And this would give him time to come up with a plan for the tour.

  Instead, he walked her up
to the house. Moving beside her, watching the sun catch the lighter streaks in her wheat hair, he breathed in her scent, and his body reacted instantly. That he could ignore...mostly. But when she turned to go inside, she gave him a brilliant smile. “I know showing off your ranch to city girls probably isn’t high on your list of things you want to do, but I trust you not to go easy on me.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  She nodded. Then her smile faded a bit and she got a serious, anxious look in her eyes. “Holt, I have a job interview.”

  Which meant she might be leaving soon. He tried to ignore the punch to his gut. “That’s great. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, but it does mean that I need to do as much as I can for the clinic quickly. I don’t want to leave this job half-finished. That wouldn’t be right.”

  He started to tell her that he would finish it for her, even though the thought of going on without her made him feel oddly empty, but as he opened his mouth, she spoke.

  “In spite of my degree, I’ve never done anything of this magnitude before and I need to do it right. I—I have something to prove to myself.”

  “Understood. But even the rancher needs help. Everyone does.”

  She studied him as if he had just lied to her.

  “Says the man who doesn’t like to ask people for help.”

  “I have employees.”

  “Exactly. They’re employees. You pay them. They’re not doing you a favor.”

  He gave her the evil eye he had perfected.

  She laughed and reached up and patted his cheek. “Just be aware that I may be running full tilt until this is done. While I’m forced to ask people to help with some things, I want to do as much as I can on my own.”

  “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  She smiled and turned away. “No. But I’ll do something important. I’ll help people and make a difference. I’ll secure my future. I hope.”

  What was a guy supposed to say to that? “Go talk to Nancy and do what you need to do with Izzy. I’ll give you the whirlwind tour when you’re done.”