Claim Me, Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Danielle said, sticking her hand back in, letting the horse sniff her.

  He didn’t believe that she wasn’t afraid of anything. She was definitely tough. But she was brittle. Like one of those people who might withstand a beating, but if something ever hit a fragile spot, she would shatter entirely.

  “Would you like to go riding sometime?” he asked.

  She drew her hand back again, her expression... Well, he couldn’t quite read it. There was a softness to it, but also an edge of fear and suspicion.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “You seem to like the horses.”

  “I do. But I don’t know how to ride.”

  “I can teach you.”

  “I don’t know. I have to watch Riley.” She began to withdraw, both from him and from the paddock.

  “I’m going to hire somebody to help watch Riley,” he said, making that decision right as the words exited his mouth.

  There was that look again. Suspicion. “Why?”

  “In case I need you for something that isn’t baby friendly. Which will probably happen. We have over a month ahead of us with you living with me, and one never knows what kinds of situations we might run into. I wasn’t expecting you to come with a baby, and while I agree that it will definitely help make the case that you’re not suitable for me, I also think we’ll need to be able to go out without him.”

  She looked very hesitant about that idea. And he could understand why. She clung to that baby like he was a life preserver. Like if she let go of him, she might sink and be in over her head completely.

  “And I would get to ride the horses?” she asked, her eyes narrowed, full of suspicion still.

  “I said so.”

  “Sure. But that doesn’t mean a lot to me, Mr. Grayson,” she said. “I don’t accept people at their word. I like legal documents.”

  “Well, I’m not going to draw up a legal document about giving you horse-riding lessons. So you’re going to have to trust me.”

  “You want me to trust the sketchy rich dude who put an ad in the paper looking for a fake wife?”

  “He’s the devil you made the deal with, Ms. Kelly. I would say it’s in your best interest to trust him.”

  “We shake on it at least.”

  She stuck her hand out, and he could see she was completely sincere. So he stuck his out in kind, wrapping his fingers around hers, marveling at her delicate bone structure. Feeling guilty now about getting angry over her eating his Pop-Tarts. The woman needed him to hire a gourmet chef too. Needed him to make sure she was getting three meals a day. He wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten regularly. She certainly didn’t have the look of a woman who had recently given birth. There was no extra weight on her to speak of. He wondered how she had survived something so taxing as labor and delivery. But those were questions he was not going to ask. They weren’t his business.

  And he shouldn’t even be curious about them.

  “All right,” she said. “You can hire somebody. And I’ll learn to ride horses.”

  “You’re a tough negotiator,” he said, releasing his hold on her hand.

  “Maybe I should go into business.”

  He tried to imagine this fragile, spiky creature in a boardroom, and it nearly made him laugh. “If you want to,” he said, instead of laughing. Because he had a feeling she might attack him if he made fun of her. And another feeling that if Danielle attacked, she would likely go straight for the eyes. Or the balls.

  He was attached to both of those things, and he liked them attached to him.

  “I should go back to the house. Riley might wake up soon. Plus, I’m not entirely sure if I trust the new baby monitor. I mean, it’s probably fine. But I’m going to have to get used to it before I really depend on it.”

  “I understand,” he said, even though he didn’t.

  He turned and walked with her back toward the house. He kept his eyes on her small, determined frame. On the way, she stuffed her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders forward. As though she were trying to look intimidating. Trying to keep from looking at her surroundings in case her surroundings looked back.

  And then he reminded himself that none of this mattered. She was just a means to an end, even if she was a slightly more multifaceted means than he had thought she might be.

  It didn’t matter how many facets she had. Danielle Kelly needed to fulfill only one objective. She had to be introduced to his parents and be found completely wanting.

  He looked back at her, at her determined walk and her posture that seemed to radiate with I’ll cut you.

  Yeah. He had a feeling she would fulfill that objective just fine.

  Four

  Danielle was still feeling wobbly after her interaction with Joshua down at the barn. She had touched a horse. And she had touched him. She hadn’t counted on doing either of those things today. And he had told her they were going to have dinner together tonight and he was going to give her a crash course on the Grayson family. She wasn’t entirely sure she felt ready for that either.

  She had gone through all her clothes, looking for something suitable for having dinner with a billionaire. She didn’t have anything. Obviously.

  She snorted, feeling like an idiot for thinking she could find something relatively appropriate in that bag of hers. A bag he thought had scabies.

  She turned her snort into a growl.

  Then, rebelliously, she pulled out the same pair of faded pants she had been wearing yesterday.

  He had probably never dealt with a woman who wore the same thing twice. Let alone the same thing two days in a row. Perversely, she kind of enjoyed that. Hey, she was here to be unsuitable. Might as well start now.

  She looked in the mirror, grabbed one stringy end of her hair and blew out a disgusted breath. She shouldn’t care how her hair looked.

  But he was just so good-looking. It made her feel like a small, brown mouse standing next to him. It wasn’t fair, really. That he had the resources to buy himself nice clothes and that he just naturally looked great.

  She sighed, picking Riley up from his crib and sticking him in the little carrier she would put him in for dinner. He was awake and looking around, so she wanted to be in his vicinity, rather than leaving him upstairs alone. He wasn’t a fussy baby. Really, he hardly ever cried.

  But considering how often his mother had left him alone in those early days of his life, before Danielle had realized she couldn’t count on her mother to take good care of him, she was reluctant to leave him by himself unless he was sleeping.

  Then she paused, going back over to her bag to get the little red, dog-eared dictionary inside. She bent down, still holding on to Riley, and retrieved it. Then she quickly looked up scabies.

  “I knew it,” she said derisively, throwing the dictionary back into her bag.

  She walked down the stairs and into the dining room, setting Riley in his seat on the chair next to hers. Joshua was already sitting at the table, looking as though he had been waiting for them. Which, she had a feeling, he was doing just to be annoying and superior.

  “My bag can’t have scabies,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. I looked it up. Scabies are mites that burrow into your skin. Not into a duffel bag.”

  “They have to come from somewhere.”

  “Well, they’re not coming from my bag. They’re more likely to come from your horses, or something.”

  “You like my horses,” he said, his tone dry. “Anyway, we’re about to have dinner. So maybe we shouldn’t be discussing skin mites?”

  “You’re the one who brought up scabies. The first time.”

  “I had pretty much dropped the subject.”

  “Easy enough for you to do, since it wasn�
�t your hygiene being maligned.”

  “Sure.” He stood up from his position at the table. “I’m just going to go get dinner, since you’re here. I had it warming.”

  “Did you cook?”

  He left the room without answering and returned a moment later holding two plates full of hot food. Her stomach growled intensely. She didn’t even care what was on the plates. As far as she was concerned, it was gourmet. It was warm and obviously not from a can or a frozen pizza box. Plus, she was sitting at a real dining table and not on a patio set that had been shoved into her tiny living room.

  The meal looked surprisingly healthy, considering she had discovered his affinity for Pop-Tarts earlier. And it was accompanied by a particularly nice-looking rice. “What is this?”

  “Chicken and risotto,” he said.

  “What’s risotto?”

  “Creamy rice,” he said. “At least, that’s the simple explanation.”

  Thankfully, he wasn’t looking at her like she was an alien for not knowing about risotto. But then she remembered he had spoken of having simple roots. So maybe he was used to dealing with people who didn’t have as sophisticated a palate as he had.

  She wrinkled her nose, then picked up her fork and took a tentative bite. It was good. So good. And before she knew it, she had cleared out her portion. Her cheeks heated when she realized he had barely taken two bites.

  “There’s plenty more in the kitchen,” he said. Then he took her plate from in front of her and went back into the kitchen. She was stunned, and all she could do was sit there and wait until he returned a moment later with the entire pot of risotto, another portion already on her plate.

  “Eat as much as you want,” he said, setting everything in front of her.

  Well, she wasn’t going to argue with that suggestion. She polished off the chicken, then went back for thirds of the risotto. Eventually, she got around to eating the salad.

  “I thought we were going to talk about my responsibilities for being your fiancée and stuff,” she said after she realized he had been sitting there staring at her for the past ten minutes.

  “I thought you should have a chance to eat a meal first.”

  “Well,” she said, taking another bite, “that’s unexpectedly kind of you.”

  “You seem...hungry.”

  That was the most loaded statement of the century. She was so hungry. For so many things. Food was kind of the least of it. “It’s just been a really crazy few months.”

  “How old is the baby? Riley. How old is Riley?”

  For the first time, because of that correction, she became aware of the fact that he seemed reluctant to call Riley by name. Actually, Joshua seemed pretty reluctant to deal with Riley in general.

  Riley was unperturbed. Sitting in that reclined seat, his muddy blue eyes staring up at the ceiling. He lifted his fist, putting it in his mouth and gumming it idly.

  That was one good thing she could say about their whole situation. Riley was so young that he was largely unperturbed by all of it. He had gone along more or less unaffected by their mother’s mistakes. At least, Danielle hoped so. She really did.

  “He’s almost four months old,” she said. She felt a soft smile touch her lips. Yes, taking care of her half brother was hard. None of it was easy. But he had given her a new kind of purpose. Had given her a kind of the drive she’d been missing before.

  Before Riley, she had been somewhat content to just enjoy living life on her own terms. To enjoy not cleaning up her mother’s messes. Instead, working at the grocery store, going out with friends after work for coffee or burritos at the twenty-four-hour Mexican restaurant.

  Her life had been simple, and it had been carefree. Something she hadn’t been afforded all the years she’d lived with her mother, dealing with her mother’s various heartbreaks, schemes to try to better their circumstances and intense emotional lows.

  So many years when Danielle should have been a child but instead was expected to be the parent. If her mother passed out in the bathroom after having too much to drink, it was up to Danielle to take care of her. To put a pillow underneath her mother’s head, then make herself a piece of toast for dinner and get her homework done.

  In contrast, taking care of only herself had seemed simple. And in truth, she had resented Riley at first, resented the idea that she would have to take care of another person again. But taking care of a baby was different. He wasn’t a victim of his own bad choices. No, he was a victim of circumstances. He hadn’t had a chance to make a single choice for himself yet.

  To Danielle, Riley was the child she’d once been.

  Except she hadn’t had anyone to step in and take care of her when her mother failed. But Riley did. That realization had filled Danielle with passion. Drive.

  And along with that dedication came a fierce, unexpected love like she had never felt before toward another human being. She would do anything for him. Give anything for him.

  “And you’ve been alone with him all this time?”

  She didn’t know why she was so reluctant to let Joshua know that Riley wasn’t her son. She supposed it was partly because, for all intents and purposes, he was her son. She intended to adopt him officially as soon as she had the means to do so. As soon as everything in her life was in order enough that Child Services would respond to her favorably.

  The other part was that as long as people thought Riley was hers, they would be less likely to suggest she make a different decision about his welfare. Joshua Grayson had a coldness to him. He seemed to have a family who loved and supported him, but instead of finding it endearing, he got angry about it. He was using her to get back at his dad for doing something that, in her opinion, seemed mostly innocuous. And yes, she was benefiting from his pettiness, so she couldn’t exactly judge.

  Still, she had a feeling that if he knew Riley wasn’t her son, he would suggest she do the “responsible” thing and allow him to be raised by a two-parent family, or whatever. She just didn’t even want to have that discussion with him. Or with anybody. She had too many things against her already.

  She didn’t want to fight about this too.

  “Mostly,” she said carefully, treading the line between the truth and a lie. “Since he was about three weeks old. And I thought... I thought I could do it. I’d been self-sufficient for a long time. But then I realized there are a lot of logistical problems when you can’t just leave your apartment whenever you want. It’s harder to get to work. And I couldn’t afford childcare. There wasn’t any space at the places that had subsidized rates. So I was trading childcare with a neighbor, but sometimes our schedules conflicted. Anyway, it was just difficult. You can imagine why responding to your ad seemed like the best possible solution.”

  “I already told you, I’m not judging you for taking me up on an offer I made.”

  “I guess I’m just explaining that under other circumstances I probably wouldn’t have sought you out. But things have been hard. I lost my job because I wasn’t flexible enough and I had missed too many shifts because babysitting for Riley fell through.”

  “Well,” he said, a strange expression crossing his face, “your problems should be minimized soon. You should be independently wealthy enough to at least afford childcare.”

  Not only that, she would actually be able to make decisions about her life. About what she wanted. When Joshua had asked her earlier today about whether or not she would go back to Portland, it had been the first time she had truly realized she could make decisions about where she wanted to live, rather than just parking herself somewhere because she happened to be there already.

  It would be the first time in her life she could make proactive decisions rather than just reacting to her situation.

  “Right. So I guess we should talk about your family,” she said, determined to move the conversation back in the right direction. She d
idn’t need to talk about herself. They didn’t need to get to know each other. She just needed to do this thing, to trick his family, lie...whatever he needed her to do. So she and Riley could start their new life.

  “I already told you my younger sister is an architectural genius. My older brother Isaiah is the financial brain. And I do the public relations and marketing. We have another brother named Devlin, and he runs a small ranching operation in town. He’s married, no kids. Then there are my parents.”

  “The reason we find ourselves in this situation,” she said, folding her hands and leaning forward. Then she cast a glance at the pot of risotto and decided to grab the spoon and serve herself another helping while they were talking.

  “Yes. Well, not my mother so much. Sure, she wrings her hands and looks at me sadly and says she wishes I would get married. My father is the one who...actively meddles.”

  “That surprises me. I mean, given what I know about fathers. Which is entirely based on TV. I don’t have one.”

  He lifted a brow.

  “Well,” she continued, “sure, I guess I do. But I never met him. I mean, I don’t even know his name.”

  She realized that her history was shockingly close to the story she had given about Riley. Which was a true one. It just wasn’t about Danielle. It was about her mother. And the fact that her mother repeated the same cycle over and over again. The fact that she never seemed to change. And never would.

  “That must’ve been hard,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I bet he was an ass. I mean, circumstances would lead you to believe that he must be, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s probably a pretty safe assumption.”

  “Well, anyway, this isn’t about my lack of a paternal figure. This is about the overbearing presence of yours.”

  He laughed. “My mother is old-fashioned—so is my father. My brother Devlin is a little bit too, but he’s also something of a rebel. He has tattoos and things. He’s a likely ally for you, especially since he got married a few months ago and is feeling soft about love and all of that. My brother Isaiah isn’t going to like you. My sister, Faith, will try. Basically, if you cuss, chew with your mouth open, put your elbows on the table and in general act like a feral cat, my family will likely find you unsuitable. Also, if you could maybe repeatedly bring up the fact that you’re really looking forward to spending my money, and that you had another man’s baby four months ago, that would be great.”