The Rancher and the Baby

by Marie Ferrarella

  “That’s good,” he replied, his voice mild. “Because I’m not about to tell you.”

  And that simple declaration aroused her curiosity. “Why not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be safe.”

  “For me?” she challenged. Only she was the best judge of what was—or wasn’t—safe for her to hear. He had no right to make that judgment call, and she was about to make him know it—never mind that something was warning her that she was heading into dangerous territory.

  The smile that was teasing the corners of his mouth—and consequently her—made her stomach feel as if it was filling up with wall-to-wall butterflies.

  Cassidy reminded herself that she’d been so worried about Adam and his fever that she hadn’t eaten all day. That was to blame for the tight, twisted feeling in the pit of her stomach, nothing else.

  Certainly not Will Laredo.

  “No,” Will contradicted her, “it wouldn’t be safe for me.”

  She scowled at him. “Even when you’re being supposedly ‘nice,’ you manage to make me want to strangle you,” she told him.

  The smile on Will’s face only widened. “Good to know.”

  Her eyes darkened. “That wasn’t meant to be a compliment.”

  “My mistake,” he said. His tone told her that he felt the exact opposite.

  Damn it, he wasn’t getting to her. He wasn’t, Cassidy silently insisted. It was just a matter of too little sleep and nothing to eat. And no coffee. Agitated about Adam, she hadn’t had her morning coffee. She always had her morning coffee, or nothing was in sync for her all day long.

  Tomorrow would be better, Cassidy promised herself. Tomorrow she would see this evening for what it was: a fluke, an aberration. A product of a number of minuses, nothing more.

  “Well, if you’re not going to go to sleep, then I am,” she announced.

  His smile was nothing if not encouraging. She just had to stop letting it get to her.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along,” Will said.

  “I’m not doing it because you’re telling me to,” she informed him. “I’m doing it because it’s just a huge waste for both of us to be staying awake like this.”

  Will spread his hands wide, amused. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Stop being so agreeable, Laredo,” she snapped. He was putting her on edge, behaving like this. “That’s not like you.”

  That damn sexy smile was back, undulating under her skin, causing more havoc.

  “Maybe it is.”

  She would have let out a scream if it wouldn’t have woken up the baby. As it was, it was difficult to conduct an argument in whispers, especially when one of the two people in the argument refused to argue.

  She didn’t like these new rules. “You’re just messing with my mind,” Cassidy accused.

  Will inclined his head. “If you say so.”

  She clenched her hands in her lap, curling her fingernails into her palms. She was doing what she could in order to ground herself.

  This wasn’t getting her anywhere.

  Maybe a little reverse psychology might help her out. “Anyway, thanks for trying to spell me.”

  “Operative word here being trying. Thank me once I succeed,” he told her, sounding almost annoyingly cheerful.

  It told her that he was enjoying this, enjoying getting under her skin, getting in the last word, because that was the way Laredo was built. You couldn’t change the spots on a leopard, she insisted. Even a leopard with a very sexy smile.

  Especially a leopard with a very sexy smile.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Will was gone.

  When Cassidy opened her eyes again, she looked directly across from where she was sitting to the chair on the other side of the crib and saw that it was empty.

  Her eyes swept over the small room with the same results. Will was nowhere to be found.

  Adam, mercifully, appeared to be sleeping comfortably. Had he slept quietly through the night? Or had she, for the first time in four weeks, just slept right through his cries?

  She noticed the empty formula bottle on the counter and saw that the seal on the pack of disposable diapers the doctor had left had been broken. Sometime during the night, Adam had been changed and fed—and she had slept right through it.

  “After all this time, Will Laredo, you’ve actually managed to surprise me,” she murmured, shaking her head. Who knew?

  A noise coming from the front of the clinic caught Cassidy’s attention. Thinking that Will was out there, trying to scrounge up some coffee in the minuscule break room, she went out, intending to ask him why he hadn’t woken her up to take care of the baby.

  But again, she didn’t find Will.

  Instead, she found Holly, the clinic’s other nurse, making coffee in the alcove that was right off the reception area.

  Holly swung around the second that she walked into the alcove.

  “Oh, Cassidy, you startled me,” Holly cried. “I forgot that you were staying here overnight with the baby. How’s he doing?” she asked. Putting down the coffee decanter, Holly suddenly appeared concerned. “His fever hasn’t gone up again, has it?”

  Not waiting for an answer, Holly went quickly to see for herself.

  “No, it hasn’t gone up,” Cassidy called after her. “Adam’s sleeping and his head feels cool, thank goodness.”

  Since she was already there, Holly tiptoed into the room and checked for herself, lightly brushing her fingertips across the baby’s forehead.

  Adam stirred a little but continued sleeping.

  “You’re right,” Holly whispered as she slipped out of the room. “Cool as a cucumber.” She smiled at Cassidy. “I think you’ve survived your first baby crisis.”

  Holly led the way back to the break room. “One of the doctors should be here soon. They all usually get in early,” she told Cassidy. A smile played on her lips. “You’d think we liked it here, or something.”

  Cassidy watched as the nurse went back to making coffee. “When you first came in,” she began, trying to sound as if she didn’t care what the answer was one way or another, “you didn’t happen to see anyone else here, did you?”

  “Like who?” Holly asked. “Like I said, I’d forgotten about you and Adam staying overnight. Was there supposed to be someone else here, too? Because I didn’t see anyone.”

  That was all she wanted to know. Cassidy shook her head. She definitely didn’t want to get into an explanation. “Never mind.”

  If she said anything about Will being here through the night, Holly might get the wrong idea. That was how rumors started in a town the size of a postage stamp, a town where almost nothing ever happened. The least deviation from the norm and everyone jumped on it, hoping to sink their teeth into something of substance, or at the very least, something diverting.

  She could see for herself that Will wasn’t here, and if Holly wasn’t saying anything, that meant that he had left before the nurse opened the clinic.

  Cassidy glanced at her watch. It was barely 7:00 a.m.

  How had she not heard Laredo leaving? she asked herself. Or, for that matter, how had she not heard Adam fussing? For the last month, she’d been tuned in to every sound that the baby made, so why was last night any different?

  “When did you say that one of the doctors was coming in?” Cassidy asked, then added, “I’m assuming that one of them has to sign Adam out so it’ll be okay for me to take him home.”

  Holly waved away Cassidy’s concern. “I’m sure it’s okay to take him home since his fever’s gone, but if you want to make it official, Dr. Dan or Dr. Alisha should be here anytime now.”

  The words were no sooner out of Holly’s mouth than they heard the front door being opened.

  �
��There’s one of them now,” Holly said. “Unless it’s Debi,” she amended.

  But it wasn’t Debi. It was Dan, in before eight as had become his habit ever since he’d reopened the clinic several years ago.

  “So how’s our patient doing?” he asked brightly the moment he saw Cassidy.

  “Much better,” she answered, relieved. “His fever’s gone.”

  “Told you it would be,” he reminded her. He and Alisha had taken turns checking on their littlest patient throughout the day. “Scary stuff the first time it happens, though. And the second, and the third. Gets a little better as time goes on, but never really easier. Worrying is just something you have to come to terms with and get used to.”

  Cassidy felt that the doctor was talking as if Adam was her baby instead of just a child she found temporarily in her care. She wanted to correct him and remind him that she wasn’t really connected to Adam, but decided to let it go.

  She played down the “worry” aspect by saying, “I just wanted you to look him over to make sure that I could take him home.”

  Except that it isn’t his home, it’s just his temporary shelter, Cassidy reminded herself. She was guilty of making the same mistake that the doctor had just made.

  But she had to admit that over the last month, she had come to regard Adam as her own. She knew she shouldn’t, but that didn’t change anything.

  Dan delivered the same verdict that Holly had a few minutes earlier. The baby’s fever was gone. Adam was as healthy as if yesterday had never happened.

  “Take the boy home,” Dan told her happily.

  Although she already knew that the baby was all right, Cassidy still breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you!”

  And then she put a call in to Connor.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE SURE YOU don’t mind?” she questioned her brother a little more than an hour later.

  Connor had dropped everything and come for them the moment she’d called. They were home now, and her question referred to her leaving Adam in his care while she returned to town to run an errand.

  “There’re some papers I need to pick up from the office so I can work on them here, but maybe I can do that later—”

  Connor nodded. Cassidy might very well be picking up files at the office, the way she said she needed to, but he had a hunch that those files weren’t her main focus. He had known Cassidy her entire life—long enough and well enough to see through excuses when she came up with them—like now.

  Something else was on her mind. He wasn’t about to ask her what, confident that when she wanted him to know, Cassidy would tell him.

  “I’m sure. I was planning on working on the books today, anyway, so I’ll only be a cry away if Adam wants something. Go, do whatever you have to do,” he told her, waving his sister out the front door and on her way.

  * * *

  HER BROTHER HAD worded his sentence just vaguely enough—“Go do whatever you have to do”—for her to be able to hide a multitude of deeds within it.

  Cassidy made sure she stopped at the law firm first. Something told her that if she left that errand for last, she might never make it to the office. Not that she was a slacker, or flighty, but she’d learned that things had a way of happening when she was around Laredo. Cassidy didn’t want to chance not picking up what she wanted her brother to believe was essentially her “main reason” for leaving Adam and the ranch.

  Laredo, or rather his ranch, was her next—and last—stop.

  Since he had given up his night to stay with her and watch over Adam—in essence being the only one who stayed up with Adam after a point—Cassidy felt that she owed Will an update on Adam’s condition.

  It was, she argued with herself, the decent thing to do.

  She was still telling herself that when she pulled up in front of his ranch house, parked her truck and got out. Crossing to the front door, Cassidy’s nerve failed her just about the time she raised her hand to knock.

  She stood there for a moment, her hand raised but not making contact while she carried on an internal argument with herself.

  Will could be out of the house, working on the range. He could be mending fences, training horses or any one of a dozen other things that would’ve necessitated his leaving the ranch house.

  Instead of standing here, debating, Cassidy upbraided herself, she needed to get back to Adam and her responsibilities. She could leave Laredo a message on his phone since she felt she owed him an update.

  Engrossed, she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. Not until Will was there, less than a foot away. She was just about to drop her hand to her side.

  “Posing for a statue?” Will asked.

  This time, she did shriek. Shrieked and swung around, her hand fisted and ready to make contact. Will barely jumped back in time.

  “Hey, watch that, Champ,” he chided, grabbing her wrist. “You nearly knocked me out.”

  Cassidy yanked her hand free. She wasn’t swinging that hard. “Only if I had some kind of a weapon in my hand when I made contact,” she told him sarcastically. “Or have you suddenly developed a glass jaw?”

  “Nope, my jaw is hard as ever.” His eyes swept over her. “And since you don’t have a weapon in your hand, can I assume that you came by for a friendly chat?” he asked, opening his door. “Or did you change your mind about that loan you brought over the other day?”

  “The answer’s no to both,” she informed him. “I just thought, after what you did last night, spending it watching Adam and all, I owed it to you to give you an update on his condition.”

  “Why don’t you come inside?” he urged, pushing the door open even farther when she made no effort to follow him in. “The horses like to gossip. Before you know it, they’ll be labeling us a couple, and everyone will be forced to believe it.”

  “Not if they had any sense,” she informed him crisply. But after a moment, she gave in and walked into the house.

  “Ah, well, there you have the problem in a nutshell.” When she looked at him, puzzled, he went on to explain, “Having sense doesn’t factor into it for most people.” Taking off his jacket, Will tossed it onto his sofa. Then, turning back to look at Cassidy, he became serious. “So, how is he doing?”

  He switched topics so quickly, she had to pause for a moment so her brain could catch up and make sense of his last question. She realized that the “he” Will was asking her about was Adam.

  Of course it’s Adam. Who else would it be? You just said you came here to give him an update on the boy.

  What was it about Will lately that turned her into a simpleton, unable to rub two thoughts together?

  “He’s doing great,” she told him, enthusiasm entering her voice. “His fever’s completely gone and he’s hungry.” But Will probably already knew the latter since he’d fed Adam while she’d been asleep, she reminded herself. Cassidy pushed on, determined to tell him what she’d come to tell him and then leave. Fast. “It’s like seeing a tiny miracle.”

  “That’s what he is, all right,” Will agreed, perching on the sofa’s arm, “a tiny miracle.”

  She needed to go, Cassidy told herself. She was suddenly feeling awkward and definitely out of her element. Even so, she needed to know the answer to the main question that kept cropping up in her head.

  “Why did you do it?”

  Will glared at her. “‘It’?” he repeated. “You’re going to have to get a little more specific than that.”

  “Why did you stay with me at the clinic last night? You didn’t have to. For that matter, why didn’t you wake me up when Adam needed changing and when he had to be fed?” Until last night, she would have bet any amount of money that Will would have left those things up to her, not taken them upon himself to do—and certainly not without immediately taking credit
for them.

  Will pretended to be confused by her phrasing. “So are you asking me why I did something, or why I didn’t do something?”

  “Both,” she retorted. And then she sighed, reining in her temper. She shouldn’t have snapped at him. It was just that being around him like this unsettled her. “Why does everything have to be so difficult with you?”

  Will grinned in response. “It’s more memorable that way.” He saw another hint of impatience crease her brow. It was a look he was intimately familiar with. For once, he didn’t want to bait her. In the interest of a truce, he decided he might as well answer her questions without drawing out the process.

  He did have things he needed to get to, Will reminded himself. The first of which was to put some distance between Cassidy and himself. The reason for that was a very basic one. He found himself entertaining some very strong thoughts, not to mention urges, regarding the two of them. If he didn’t get some space between them—and soon—he was going to act on those urges.

  He didn’t relish the idea of rejection.

  “But to answer your questions, I stayed with you last night because I felt you needed company. The night has a way of magnifying a person’s fears, and I didn’t want you up all night, worrying about Adam when he was going to be all right.”

  “And you knew that for a fact,” she said sarcastically. The sarcasm was a defense mechanism. She needed a barrier between them, because she was having decidedly unsettling thoughts about him and she needed something to make her stay away. Something to make him keep her away.

  Will ignored her tone. “Pretty much,” he answered. “As for why I didn’t wake you when Adam needed changing, well, that was because just before you fell asleep, you looked almost too exhausted to breathe. I thought I’d let you get some rest. Besides, I’m perfectly capable of changing a baby’s diaper.”

  “Because of all your vast experience in changing diapers,” she said, falling back on sarcasm again. If she didn’t, she was in danger of just melting right in front of him. There was this look on his face that she was having trouble resisting.

  “Not vast,” he allowed, then added, “but I’ve had some.”