The Cowboy and His Baby

by Sherryl Woods

  “No, and I wouldn’t be holding my breath for that if I were you. I am not inclined to marry a man who is as thoroughly, unrepentantly, exasperating as Cody is.”

  “Interesting,” Kelly murmured, a knowing twinkle in her eyes.

  “Don’t start with me. I’ve just been subjected to Harlan’s knowing looks for the past few hours.”

  “Not another word,” Kelly promised readily. “Nobody understands the perverse streak that runs in this family any better than I do.”

  After Kelly had gone, Melissa slowly put her comb into her purse and headed back to their table. She saw at once that Cody had been joined by Kelly’s precocious six-year-old, Dani.

  “I came to see the baby,” Dani announced when Melissa had joined them. “She’s cuter than my brother. I wanted a sister, but somebody got mixed up and gave me a brother instead.”

  Melissa grinned at her. “I bet you’ll be glad of that when you’re older. I always wished I had a brother who’d look out for me.” She shot a pointed look at Cody when she said it.

  Cody rolled his eyes. Clearly, he didn’t think Jordan had done such a terrific job of looking out for him when it counted.

  Dani stood closer to the table and leaned her elbows on it, propping her chin in her hands as she regarded her uncle. “You know, Uncle Cody, I was thinking.”

  He visibly contained a grin. “What were you thinking, you little con artist?”

  “Maybe Sharon Lynn should have a kitten of her own.”

  “Maybe she should.” He glanced at Melissa. “What do you think?”

  “I think you two were plotting this,” Melissa charged, trying not to chuckle at the guilty expressions. “Sharon Lynn does not need a kitten. More importantly, a kitten does not need Sharon Lynn. She’d probably scare it to death.”

  Dani’s brow knit as she considered the argument. “She’s probably right, Uncle Cody. Babies don’t understand about kittens. Francie thinks that my brother is a pest.”

  “A valid point,” Cody agreed. “Maybe after Sharon Lynn gets to know how to behave around those kittens you talked me into taking, she can have one of her own.”

  “Good idea,” Dani said. “Francie will probably have more by then.”

  “Over my dead body,” Jordan said, arriving to stand behind his stepdaughter. “Hello, Melissa.” He looked straight at Cody, who avoided his gaze. “Cody.”

  After a visible internal struggle, Cody nodded curtly.

  Jordan stood there, looking uncharacteristically indecisive for another minute before sighing and saying, “Come on, Dani. Your dinner’s getting cold.”

  When the pair of them were gone, Melissa said, “You were rude to him, Cody. He made an overture and you didn’t even say hello.”

  Cody closed his eyes. When he opened them, his stubborn resolve seemed to be firmly back in place. “I had nothing to say to him.”

  “Cody, I’m the one who betrayed you, not Jordan. I’m the one you thought had cheated on you. I’m the one who kept it a secret that I’d had your baby. You’re speaking to me. You’ve forgiven me.”

  She studied him intently. “Or have you? Are you taking all the anger you don’t dare express against me because of Sharon Lynn and projecting it on to Jordan?”

  She saw by the way his jaw worked and his gaze evaded hers that she’d hit the nail on the head. She sighed. “Don’t do this, Cody. Don’t let what happened between us come between you and Jordan. Please,” she pleaded.

  When he didn’t respond, she gave up. “Just promise you’ll think about what I said, okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said tersely. “I’ll think about it.”

  With great reluctance, Melissa finally conceded it was the best she could hope for. For now, anyway.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sometime well after midnight, Melissa woke to the sound of Sharon Lynn whimpering. She tumbled out of bed, flipped on the hall light and raced into the baby’s room.

  Sharon Lynn was tossing restlessly. Her skin was dry and burning up.

  “Oh, baby,” Melissa soothed as she scooped her up. “Are you feeling bad? Come with Mommy. I’ll get you some water and check your temperature.”

  She had barely made it into the kitchen and flipped that light on when the front door burst open, scaring her half to death. She grabbed the frying pan and peeked through the kitchen doorway, prepared to do battle with a lunatic. Instead it was Cody, his clothes rumpled, his hair tousled, who stood in the foyer.

  “Cody, what on earth?” she demanded, trying to slow the pounding of her heart. She set the frying pan down, though she wasn’t entirely convinced he couldn’t do with a good whop upside the head for scaring her so badly.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, casting worried looks from her to the baby and back. “I saw the lights come on. Are you okay?”

  She ignored the question and tried to figure out what he was doing at her house in the middle of the night. The last time she’d seen him he’d been sitting at the bar in Rosa’s. He’d declared his intention of starting his night on the town right there, clearly implying he intended it to end in someone’s arms. She’d choked back her fury and tried to exit with some dignity, when all she’d really wanted to do was have a knock-down, drag-’em-out brawl with him. She was still itching for a fight, as a matter of fact, but right now Sharon Lynn’s condition took precedence.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, pleased that she was able to sound so cool when she was seething inside.

  “On the porch,” he admitted, taking his feverish daughter from her arms. As soon as he touched her, alarm flared in his eyes. “Good heavens, she’s burning up. Have you taken her temperature?”

  “I was just about to.” She tried to remain calm in the face of his obvious panic and her own. She’d experienced rapidly spiking temperatures before and learned that it was a matter of course for children. Still, she’d never felt Sharon Lynn’s skin quite so hot.

  The thermometer registered one hundred and three degrees. Cody’s face blanched when she told him.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” he said at once, starting out of the kitchen.

  Melissa blocked his way. “Not yet,” she said far more calmly than she was feeling. There was no point in both of them panicking. “Let me give her a Tylenol and try bathing her with cool water to see if we can’t bring that temperature down. If there’s no change, then we’ll call the doctor.”

  Sharon Lynn patted Cody’s stubbled cheek weakly and murmured, “Da.” She sounded pitiful.

  Cody looked thoroughly shaken. “Melissa, I don’t think we should wait. Something’s really wrong with her.”

  “It’s probably nothing more than the start of a cold or a touch of flu,” she said. “Stuff like that reaches epidemic proportions this time of the year.”

  “Her temperature’s over a hundred,” he reminded her. “That can’t be good for her.”

  “Babies get high temperatures. It’s nothing to get crazy about,” she insisted, amending to herself, yet.

  She gave Sharon Lynn Tylenol, then ran cool water into the kitchen sink. “Bring her over here and let’s get her out of that nightgown. It’s soaking wet anyway. Why don’t you go back to her room and bring me a clean one, along with a fresh diaper. We’ll need those after I’ve sponged her off a bit with cool water.”

  Cody looked as if he might refuse to budge, but eventually he did as she’d asked. By the time he’d returned, Sharon Lynn was no longer whimpering. In fact she seemed to be relaxing and enjoying the cool water Melissa was gently splashing over her.

  “Are you sure that’s good for her?” Cody asked, worry etched on his face.

  “It’s exactly what the doctor and all the child-care books recommend. If you don’t believe me, there’s a book in the living room. Go read it.” Anything to get him out of the kitchen again before he wore a hole in the linoleum with his pacing. Worse, she was feeling crowded with all of his hovering.

  “No, no, I’ll take your word for
it,” he said, standing over her shoulder and watching every move she made. “Maybe we should take her temperature again.”

  Melissa sighed and stepped aside to allow him to put the fancy new thermometer in Sharon Lynn’s ear for a few seconds.

  “It’s a hundred and two,” he proclaimed. “That’s it. We’re going to the hospital.”

  “It’s down a whole degree,” Melissa observed, blocking him when he would have snatched Sharon Lynn out of the bathwater. “The Tylenol’s working.”

  “Not fast enough.”

  “Let’s give it another half hour,” she compromised.

  Cody hesitated, then finally conceded grudgingly, “A half hour. Not a minute more.”

  He sat down at the kitchen table and fixed his gaze on the clock over the sink. Apparently he intended to watch each of those thirty minutes tick by.

  “Da!” Sharon Lynn called out.

  Cody was on his feet in an instant. “What’s up, sweet pea? You feeling better?” he asked, caressing her cheek with fingers that shook visibly.

  A smile spread across his daughter’s face. “Da,” she repeated enthusiastically.

  A little color came back into Cody’s ashen complexion. “She feels a little cooler.”

  Melissa agreed. “I’m betting when we check her temperature again, it’ll be just about back to normal.”

  Twenty minutes later Sharon Lynn was no longer feverish. She was once again tucked into her crib. Cody, still looking shaken, stood over her.

  “How do you stand this?” he murmured to Melissa. “I’ve never been so terrified in my life.”

  Melissa patted his hand. “It gets easier after you’ve been through it once or twice and know what to expect,” she promised him, but he shook his head.

  “I can’t imagine it getting easier,” he said. “What if her temperature hadn’t gone down? What if you’d guessed wrong?”

  “Then we would have called the doctor or gotten her to the hospital.”

  “It might have been too late.”

  “Cody, stop that,” she ordered, not daring to admit that she’d been scared silly, too, that she always was, no matter what the books said. “It’s over. She’s going to be fine. It was just a little fever.”

  He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. Just a little fever.” He still sounded unconvinced. He definitely showed no inclination to budge from beside the crib.

  Melissa grinned at him. “Cody, everything really is fine. You don’t have to stand there and watch her all night.”

  “I am not leaving this house,” he said, his jaw jutting out belligerently.

  “Fine. You can sleep on the sofa.” She yawned. “Good night, Cody.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to bed.”

  “How can you possibly sleep?”

  “Because I’m exhausted. You must be, too.” In fact, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “I won’t sleep a wink,” he swore.

  “Whatever,” she murmured, and headed for her room. At the doorway she recalled that they’d never really talked about why he’d been on her front porch in the first place. “Cody, why were you here in the middle of the night?”

  A sheepish expression spread across his face. “I figured if you found me on your doorstep in the morning, you’d give me a lift home.”

  She grinned. “Couldn’t find another taker for that fabulous Adams charm, huh?”

  “Never even tried,” he admitted, then shrugged. “You’ve spoiled me for anyone else, Me…liss…a.”

  She studied his face intently, looking for signs that the comment was no more than a glib, charming lie. He appeared to be dead serious. A little flutter of excitement stirred deep inside her. Was it possible that Cody really did intend to stick around through thick and thin, through good times and bad?

  For the first time since he’d come home from Wyoming, she dared to hope that he really had changed. If he had…

  No, she cautioned herself at once. It was too soon to leap to any conclusions at all about the future.

  “Good night, Cody,” she whispered, her voice husky with a longing she would never have admitted.

  “Good night, darlin’.”

  * * *

  Cody felt as if he’d slept on an old washboard. Every muscle ached like the dickens. Every vertebra in his back had either been compressed, twisted or otherwise maimed by Melissa’s sofa. He suspected she’d made him sleep there on purpose, knowing what it would do to him.

  He also had the distinct impression that there was a tiny wanna-be drummer in his head flailing away without much sense of rhythm.

  He groaned and opened his eyes, blinking at the sunlight streaming into the living room. That was when he realized that the loud clanging wasn’t in his head. It was coming from Sharon Lynn’s room. If that was the case, it just might be something he could stop before his head exploded.

  Moving inch by careful inch, he eased to his feet and padded down the hall to the baby’s room. When he opened the door a crack, he found her bouncing in her crib, banging a wooden block on the railing. The instant she spied him, a smile spread across her face.

  “Da,” she enthused, and held out her arms.

  Cody wondered if he would ever get over the thrill that sweet, innocent gesture sent through him.

  “Morning, pumpkin. I take it from all the commotion in here that you’re feeling better.”

  “Ya…ya…ya.”

  “That must mean yes,” he decided as he plucked her out of the crib and took the toy block from her as a precaution. His head was feeling marginally better, but another round of Sharon Lynn’s musical skills would be a killer.

  Her temperature seemed to be gone. He quickly changed her, then carried her into the kitchen. Once there, he was stymied. Was she old enough for regular cereal? Or was there some sort of baby food she was supposed to have? He didn’t recall discussing breakfast when he and Melissa had shopped for groceries.

  He settled Sharon Lynn into her high chair, found a soft toy bear to entertain her, and searched through the cabinets. Nothing conclusive there beyond an assortment of frosted cereals that seemed more likely to appeal to a one-year-old than her mother. Then again, he didn’t know much about Melissa’s breakfast habits, either. On the rare occasions when they’d slept in the same bed before he’d left for Wyoming, breakfast had been the last thing on their minds first thing in the morning.

  A glance in the refrigerator suggested that juice might be a good place to start. He recalled buying an awful lot of apple juice at the store. He filled a bottle and handed it over. Sharon Lynn tossed her bear on the floor and accepted it eagerly.

  Scrambled eggs struck him as a safe bet. Besides, he and Melissa could eat them, as well. Fixing one meal for all of them appealed to him. It struck him as cozy; a family tradition of sorts. Their very first.

  He started the coffeemaker, popped four slices of bread into the toaster, put butter and jelly on the table, then broke half a dozen eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork until they were foamy. Suddenly he heard the faint sound of footsteps behind him. He pivoted around and discovered Melissa leaning against the doorjamb.

  “My goodness, you’ve been busy,” she murmured, yawning and bending over to pick up the bear Sharon Lynn had tossed aside in favor of her juice. “How long have you been awake?”

  Goose bumps chased down his spine at the sleepy sound of her voice and the sight of that cute little fanny draped in a very short, very revealing, silk robe.

  “Our daughter’s better than any rooster I ever heard. She woke me at the crack of dawn.”

  “Obviously she’s feeling better,” Melissa said, going over to touch her hand to the baby’s forehead. “No more temperature.”

  “Seemed that way to me, too.”

  “Did you take it?”

  He shook his head, drawing a grin.

  “Turning into an old hand already,” she teased. “No more panicking.
”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, shuddering at the memory of that icy fear that had washed through him in the wee hours of the morning. “But I am going to borrow that book of yours and read it from cover to cover.”

  He reached for Melissa’s hand and pulled her toward him. He was vaguely surprised that she didn’t put up a struggle. Maybe he hadn’t imagined the closeness between them the night before.

  When she was standing toe-to-toe with him, he had to resist the temptation to tug the belt of her robe free. Instead he brushed a strand of hair back from her face and gazed into her tired eyes.

  “You were wonderful last night,” he said softly. “Not only were you good with Sharon Lynn, but you kept me from freaking out.”

  Her lips curved slightly. “Having you here helped me, too,” she said, surprising him.

  “Why?”

  “Staying calm for your benefit kept me from freaking out myself,” she admitted.

  He stared at her in astonishment. “You were scared?”

  “Terrified,” she admitted. “But I knew I couldn’t let you see it or you’d have insisted on borrowing your father’s plane and flying us all to some critical care hospital in Dallas in the middle of the night.”

  “You’ve got that right.” He grinned. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”

  “Just typical parents, Cody.”

  The simple words were no more than the truth, yet Cody felt as if he’d just heard something terribly profound spoken for the first time. He was a parent, a certified grown-up, with responsibilities he couldn’t slough off. Responsibilities, in fact, that he actually yearned to accept.

  He wanted more Sunday mornings just like this one, waking up to the sound of his daughter making some sort of commotion to get attention, fixing breakfast for all three of them, sitting at the kitchen table across from Melissa. He renewed his vow to himself to do everything within his power to convince Melissa they ought to be a family.

  After they’d eaten and after he’d cleaned up most of the scrambled egg Sharon Lynn had managed to rub into her hair or fling halfway across the kitchen, he sat back with a sigh of pure contentment.