by Tina Leonard
Dedication
To my grandmother, Isabel Cather Sites, for suggesting I dust off my writing skills.
To my husband, Tim, for supporting my efforts.
To my six-year-old daughter, Lisa Michelle, for never passing up a wishing fountain without dropping in several pennies so the wishing star would choose her mother’s book to buy.
And my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Dean Michael, who carried a magazine to us one day, pointed proudly at Nora Robert’s picture and announced, “Look, it’s you, Mommy!”
Luckily for me, everyone in my family is a dreamer.
Chapter One
Last week Jill McCall had thought her world was in a fairly secure orbit. Today, she felt like she’d been hit by Halley’s comet.
What a shock to discover that she’d been downsized by the company that had hired her fresh out of college. Downsized, as her boss kindly explained, meant that the company was laying off workers in an attempt to become more financially stable.
Tell that to her apartment manager. Being laid off right after Thanksgiving meant it was going to be a very slim Christmas for her. So much for that bonus she’d been counting on.
To add to the feeling of being torn loose from the universe, she had broken off her engagement to her fiancé. The relationship, she’d realized, was comfortable, but missing something. It was sadly lacking in fire, and in passion, she had decided. At least it had seemed that way before a note had been dropped on her desk at work, revealing that Carl had enough passion to go around—and around and around.
He hadn’t even bothered to deny it when she’d questioned him about his apparently popular stamina and expertise. This was a side of Carl she personally had never experienced.
Well, she had plenty of excitement in her life now. No job, no boyfriend. Jill eyed the newspaper she had laid out in front of her on the kitchen table. If the cosmic forces of life were telling her anything, it was that she needed to make some changes. However, making changes could be difficult when there were no funds in one’s purse. Her gaze roved over the paper one last time, discounting the unappealing ads she’d circled.
Then, a small box caught her interest.
WANTED: HOUSEKEEPER FOR RANCH HOUSE. Cleaning and meals for a man, young boy, and an elderly woman. One hundred miles away from nearest big city; mall-dwellers need not apply. Good salary, three-thousand-dollar bonus one year from hire date. 1133 Setting Sun Road, Lassiter, Texas.
Jill quickly scanned the words again. Country life would almost certainly be a positive change from her not-so-exciting routine. The bonus was tempting, and she could be gainfully employed while sending out resumés for another corporate position. Jobs like hers as a marketing manager didn’t grow on trees. It would take time to explore the market.
Surely this rancher couldn’t be very demanding, Jill mused. He was probably out a lot, tending to cattle or whatever it was that ranchers did. Nor should an elderly woman be too great a problem. Handling a young boy might prove to be a challenge, but she’d had siblings as well as having done tons of babysitting. It couldn’t hurt to call and inquire about the position, could it?
She started to circle the phone number, then realized there was only a mailing address. Jill checked her watch, then reached for a map out of a kitchen drawer. Lassiter, Texas, was located a little over a hundred miles north from where she lived in Dallas, and her mother’s house was thirty minutes in the same direction. She could journey to Lassiter to check out the ranch and see if she could glean any information from the locals about the owner, then she could drive back to her mother’s for the night. It was a lot of travelling for one day, but it would also give her a chance to decide whether she really wanted to apply for the job.
If she didn’t like what she saw or heard about the ranch inhabitants, she could move on to searching for employment in the city. These days, a woman couldn’t be too cautious. Without further hesitation, Jill called her mother and set the plans. Throwing a few things into an overnight bag, Jill took one last look around her apartment before walking out the door.
There was an old saying that a man could not serve two masters. Wryly, Dustin Reed acknowledged that this was true. The cattle herd he had started building two years ago—replacing the dairy cows that had been on the ranch since his parents had owned it—took all of his time. Since the ranch made him a lively income however, perhaps it was only fair that it should be a demanding master.
Still, the anger Dustin kept burning inside him was a draining and unforgiving master. There was no release from the rage he felt at the speeding drunk driver that had killed his wife, Nina, leaving him to raise their son, Joey, now three and a half. Like a slow-burning torch growing steadily hotter, Dustin was angry that Nina’s parents had filed a custodial suit for Joey, and he feared they just might win. The judge who was presiding over the case was sitting squarely in David and Maxine Copeland’s silk-lined pockets. Though his lawyer had filed for a change of venue, the request had been denied.
But the greatest anger burning inside Dustin was that it was the start of the Christmas season, the first since Nina had died, a fact which time was pushing inexorably into his mind. Now it was only a matter of days until either he or the Copelands won custody of Joey, and though he was going to fight like hell, something inside him was frozen when it came to his son. Maybe it was that he didn’t have any practice with small children and had let Nina do most of the rearing.
Of course, that was when he’d been living under the assumption that he had all the time in the world to learn to be a good father.
Time had run out on him.
The frozen part of him couldn’t thaw for the wrenching fear that Joey was going to be taken from him. Dustin hadn’t expected Nina to be taken. Now he couldn’t seem to relax around his son, knowing that in a few short days, they, too, might be separated.
The anger grew, becoming Dustin’s master and selfishly, perhaps, he found he needed to ignore the marching of time, and so this year, he was having nothing to do with the spirit of the season. It seemed the only way he could take the edge off the anger was to ignore Christmas. There would be no festive lights in his home this year, no Christmas tree. To wake up on Christmas morning, with no pattering of small feet in the house, to face a tree that needed no presents because the child wasn’t there—Dustin feared the agony of it would kill him. So it would be a small spiritless gathering for holiday dinner, just him and his mother, Eunice, who lived at the Regret Ranch, too. Until the judge made his decision, Dustin was going to protect his emotions. But if the judge ruled in his favor, Dustin was going to launch a major decorating assault on his house. Until then, it simply didn’t feel safe.
He scanned the north for signs of breaking clouds, knowing that his pet name for the Regret Ranch symbolized his acceptance of that insidious master thriving inside him. This place where he was standing, this large stretch of property fit primarily for running herds of beef cattle, had been the Reed Ranch since his grandparents’ time. But since the last two letters in Reed had fallen off the metal sign at the entrance to the ranch, he’d renamed it to suit himself, and had avoided rehanging the letters.
The faster the Christmas season passed, the faster people stopped saying “Happy holidays!” to him and sending him cards he instantly tossed in the trash without opening, the faster life might return to normal. Yet he had a feeling that the well-meaning merriness in the town was only going to escalate as Christmas approached.
A blue flash at the south end of his property suddenly caught Dustin’s eye. He squinted, wondering if a blue jay was foraging red berries off the yaupon bushes.
There was the flash again, only the blue looked more like denim this time. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that flash wa
s a trespasser on his ranch.
Dustin walked to his truck, reaching inside for the shotgun off the rack and some shells out of the box. Silently, he crept down the hill, watching as the denim-wearing intruder appeared to be sneaking toward the house.
He thought of his mother, home alone with Joey, with only the aid of a cane to protect her. The arthritis in her hips and back that plagued her regularly was acting up now and he knew there was no way she could escape from an attacker. For Dustin, this was the last straw. Enough bad things had happened this year. A trespasser he knew how to deal with—swiftly.
The denim paused, and now Dustin could see the person wasn’t large, perhaps just a teenage boy out for a prank. The big-homed steers that ran on Regret Ranch were an awesome sight, and the boy likely couldn’t resist a chance to spy on them. However, he’d have had a better chance at getting a tour if he’d rung the front bell. A good scare now would keep the young prowler from trying this trick on Dustin’s property again.
He moved to the next pecan tree, just behind the trespasser. With one hand, he reached out, clamping his hand down in a viselike grip on the boy’s shoulder.
“Aiee-ee!”
Dustin grinned at the terrible shriek of fear. The boy whipped around to see what had grabbed him, and the first thing Dustin registered was what large, darkly lashed blue eyes the boy had.
The second thing Dustin saw was that he wasn’t gripping a boy at all. It was a woman, a woman so adorably cute that she took his breath away faster than the nippy air did.
“How dare you?” the woman gasped. “Take your hands off of me!”
She saw the shotgun and her eyes became huge and round. She started backing away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t even look at me. I’m going right now.”
The look on her face told Dustin that the woman thought she was in grave peril. He would have smiled, but he was still too shocked by what he’d bagged on his own land.
“Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “I didn’t mean to scare you so badly. I thought you were a trespasser.”
“I am,” she asserted. “Well, I guess I am. But I’m leaving now!”
He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a bad trespasser. He definitely wasn’t going to shoot the lady. Her voice, he’d noticed, was light and sweet, even though she was frightened out of her wits. Her full mouth trembled, and the nostrils in her dainty nose flared. The cap she’d been wearing had fallen off when she swung around, revealing shiny, chin-length blonde hair. She was definitely the prettiest thing he’d laid eyes on in a long time.
Jill had never been so petrified in her life. If this was the man who’d run the ad in the paper, then she’d been very smart to come out here and check out the situation. He was crazy. That shotgun he was holding looked like it meant business, and she wondered if the cowboy always carried that thing around like an ordinary billfold.
Just several more steps, she thought, and she’d be at her car. Jill turned, dashing that way.
“Wait!” the crazy man called.
“I can’t,” she said on a gasp, fumbling in her purse for the keys. They fell from her nervous fingers into a deep wheel rut in the dried mud. She got down, scrambling to find them, all the while glancing nervously back up at him.
He was the most handsome crazy man she’d ever seen.
“I’ve got to go,” she told him. “If you’ll give me a second, I’ll—”
He knelt down beside her, retrieving the keys which had taken an unlucky bounce toward the other side of the tire where she couldn’t see them. “Here.”
“Um…thanks.” Jill brushed hair from her eyes and tried to look like she wasn’t impressed by the man’s size. Or that he smelled wonderful, all outdoorsy and warm. Of course, this whole area had quite a different scent than what she had become accustomed to in Dallas. Lack of pollution, for one thing. Growing vegetation, for another. “I’ll be going—”
“Why are you here?”
“Ah—” Jill tried to glance away from the question in his brown eyes, and failed. Would she sound ridiculous if she admitted that she hadn’t really been trespassing, but had been coming to inquire about honest employment when those big ugly cows roaming his land had sidetracked her into wanting a closer look? That, for the sake of curiosity, she’d wanted to see what the house where she’d be working looked like? “I…”
The sound of something crying snapped both their heads around.
“Did you hear something?” he asked softly.
Oh, Lord, there was something besides herself wandering around his ranch. Jill shivered, tucking herself closer into her coat. “It was probably just a bird or something,” she said. “Nothing you can’t take care of with that.” She gestured toward the shotgun. “And since you appear well-protected, I’ll be on my way.”
The sound wafted on the air again, louder and more intent, yet still threadlike, as if the creature wasn’t very large. Jill froze where she was beside the big man.
“I can’t figure out what that is,” he muttered.
Jill was intrigued, too. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that was a baby,” she whispered.
His eyes met hers in a shared instant of co-conspiracy. “A baby!” he whispered back. “What kind of baby? Kitten? Dog?”
She shook her head, unsure. But the next time the sound came, they stepped forward together. They had gone about fifteen yards when Jill saw pink at the trunk of a barren tree.
“There,” she said, pointing down at the dull fall leaves on the ground, serving as a sort of nest for a swaddled infant.
The man beside her was suddenly very quiet. Jill walked forward to the pink bundle, squatting down beside it. A little round, pale face with roses in the cheeks from the cold, screwed itself up for another call for dinner, or perhaps a protest at being left to the elements, although its body seemed warm and well-wrapped. Gently, Jill picked the infant up, cradling it in her arms.
The man stared, his mouth open, first at the bundle, then at Jill. “I can’t believe you came to my ranch to dump your baby,” he said.
“Dump my baby!” Jill was outraged. “Dump my— Have you lost your mind? How could you think I would—no, no,” she paused, shaking her head at him. The baby let out a squall between the two combatants. “I can’t believe you’d be so careless as to leave your baby lying on the ground. Did you forget to pick her up instead of your gun? That’s a man for you, always forgetting responsibilities. Here.” She thrust the well-covered infant at him, but he stepped back cautiously.
“Uh-uh. I don’t want it. It’s angry…and it isn’t mine. You take it right back wherever you came from,” he said righteously.
Jill’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t leave with this baby just because he thought it was hers. “This is not my child,” she said stubbornly.
“Looks like you.”
“No, it doesn’t! I mean, what an idiotic statement!” Jill was getting madder by the moment. “What do you think you see that possibly resembles me in this child? The fact that it has two eyes and a mouth?”
“A loud one,” he said agreeably.
“Look,” she said, striving hard for patience, “even if this were my baby, I wouldn’t have been driving around with it in my car with no car seat. Do you understand safety precautions?”
He appeared to mull over her statement. The baby had quieted for a few minutes, but was showing signs of anxiety in Jill’s arms by thrashing in the silence. After a tense moment, the man strode down the hill. Jill followed, wondering if he intended to leave her.
Stopping in front of her tired old car, he peered inside. “No car seat.”
“I said that already,” she said through gritted teeth. It was the last of Jill’s patience. “Put that damn gun down,” she commanded. He didn’t look like he was going to, so she said, “If you don’t, I’m going to…scream.”
She wouldn’t, but she felt like it. He must not have liked the idea, worrying that she might upset the baby or bring somebody running to wi
tness their dilemma, because he leaned the gun against a tree, tossing unused shells beside it. She thrust the yelling bundle at the crazy man, which he took this time, maybe realizing she was at the end of her tether.
“I came here to inquire about the housekeeper’s position, but I can see that would be a mistake.”
She marched to her car and opened the door.
“Why didn’t you say you were here about the job?”
“You’ve given me precious little opportunity,” she ground out.
The infant appeared to be at the end of its tether, too. Jill paused. “You’d better take her up to the house and see if she’ll take some warm milk. Oh, wait a minute. Here,” she said, returning to the man’s side. “Someone thoughtfully provided you with a panic bottle.”
She withdrew a small, four-ounce bottle from inside the pink wrapping, where it had popped up due to the infant’s agitated movements. “It even has directions on it, and the brand name.” She gave the rancher a delightedly saucy grin. “You’ll probably have just enough time to feed her that and run to the store and buy some more before she demands her next meal.”
She had turned to go again when his voice stopped her.
“Hey,” he said, his voice suddenly softer and less angry than it had been in the five minutes they’d been together, “I’m sorry I’ve upset you. I’m pretty freaked out myself. Do you think I could talk you into coming up to the house with me while I feed her? Then maybe keep an eye on her while I call the police? I feel a little overwhelmed by this…early Christmas present.”
His voice had softened when he’d glanced back down at what was in his arms. It was a Christmas present of sorts, Jill thought. After all, how often was a baby delivered to your house, with blanket and bottle and instructions?
But he’d accused her of dumping the infant, charging her as the abandoner. Jill shook her head. “I don’t think I can, I—”
The unhappy baby let out a wail. Jill looked at it, forcing back latent motherly instincts she hadn’t known she possessed.
