The Ranch Stud

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “Patience,” Cody said, slipping an arm about her waist so she had no choice but to lean against his considerable shoulders. “I think everyone gets the gist of things here. You don’t have to say any more, “ he told her sternly.

  But she did, Patience thought furiously. She owed the faculty and friends she had invited more than this, especially since they had been sitting here for so long, gamely waiting, trying for her sake not to act as if anything were terribly wrong, when they all knew it was.

  “I’m sorry,” Patience said, meaning it from the bottom of her heart. Two hours was really way too long to wait for a wedding to occur. “Really, I am. Naturally, Alec and I—or actually, the way things are going at the moment, probably just me—will be returning all the gifts.” Keeping a stiff upper lip was getting harder. “Thank you all so very much for coming.” She forced another smile. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I think I am going to take my brothers up on their offer and let them get me out of here.” Before I make even more a fool of myself. And, tears streaming down her face, she turned and fled.

  CISCO WRAPPED a brotherly arm about her waist. “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised. “In the meantime, I’m here for you, as always.”

  “Thanks.” Patience leaned into his hug. “I knew I could count on you.”

  Patience looked up to see Josh behind her. His face was impassive, but she had the feeling he was not happy to find his bride-to-be in Cisco’s arms.

  Maybe that was just as well, she thought philosophically, choosing not to correct his unspoken misimpression. She had been getting way too close to Josh, way too fast. It had only been a little over five hours since she had met him. Already, they had talked intimately and kissed numerous times.

  Maybe the notion that she might already be emotionally involved with Cisco, on some level unbeknownst to her late Uncle Max of course, would be enough to keep Josh at arm’s length. Or at least encourage him to proceed with his romancing of her more cautiously.

  “Well, guess I better be going,” Cisco said, responding to the new tension in the air.

  Ignoring Josh’s scowl of dismay, Patience smiled at Cisco. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  She and Josh stood together while he drove off. Josh turned to Patience. Clad in a pair of jeans and a fresh blue chambray shirt, he inclined his head toward the stairs. “There’s something for you upstairs, in the back bedroom on the second floor.”

  Patience paused. She had no idea what he was talking about. “It was empty just a few hours ago, when I changed clothes before riding out with you to see the wild mustangs.” She hadn’t looked in there since.

  “Well, it’s not empty now.”

  “You going to tell me what’s up there?”

  He shook his head pragmatically. “I know it’s late, nearly ten o’clock, and you’re tired, but I still think you should see it yourself.”

  “I DON’T BELIEVE THIS,” Patience breathed, hardly able to trust her eyes.

  “Incredible, isn’t it,” Josh murmured as he lingered in the doorway beside her. “That they could do so much in so little time.”

  The once completely empty guest room had been turned into a nursery, with crib, changing table, dresser and a sturdy, burnished oak toy box that also doubled as a padded window seat. A brightly colored alphabet rug in a nubby cotton fabric covered the wood floor. A comfortable rocking chair sat in one corner. Scattered about the room were stuffed animals and toys. A note with her name on it was pinned to the pink-and-blue gingham baby quilt slung over one end of the crib.

  Patience walked over to retrieve it. She smiled as she tore open the envelope and saw Max’s familiar scrawl. Aware Josh was waiting anxiously, and that this probably concerned him as much as her, she read Max’s message to her out loud.

  “Dear Patience,

  This is my way of letting you know it is okay with me if you come back to the Silver Spur to raise your baby, married or not. I think you’re right. Any and all McKendricks should be brought up here. So do so and do it with my blessing.

  Your loving uncle,

  Max

  P.S. Should you change your mind and decide to provide said child with a daddy, Josh would make an excellent candidate.”

  Patience took another sweeping glance around the room then looked at Josh mildly. “How does he know?” she murmured, folding the note and slipping it back into the envelope with fingers that trembled only slightly.

  “What?” Josh edged nearer.

  She spread her arms dramatically wide. “That you’d make an excellent candidate for a daddy?”

  Josh shrugged, sure this was one argument he could win hands down. “Seems to me I’ve got everything I need. Strong arms to carry both a baby and the overflowing bags of paraphernalia that go everywhere babies go. A shoulder that will serve as a pillow. A lap to sit on. I can change a diaper and warm a bottle with an efficiency that’d put even a British nanny to shame. I know first aid as well as a lullaby or two.”

  “I see.” Patience nodded with mock solemnness as Josh sank into the rocking chair and tried it out. “And how are you at getting up in the middle of the night?”

  “Superb.” Josh picked up a stuffed panda and tried laying it against his shoulder as he would a baby. “I can also read stories, play games, push a swing, a stroller, assemble a number of toys and bikes.”

  “Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we, Dad?” Patience quipped dryly, plucking the stuffed panda out of his hands.

  Josh shook his head confidently as he watched her put the panda on her shoulder. He bounded out of the chair and closed the distance between them. “I don’t think so. I think when it comes to rearing kids, the wise parent can never be too prepared,” he counseled as he watched her put the panda back in the crib.

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Patience queried with grudging admiration.

  His gray eyes gentled. “I try. And so apparently did Max. I don’t think there’s anything he forgot. He’s even seen to the clothes and diapers and those tiny little undershirts—”

  “It’s called a layette.”

  “Whatever.” Josh paused, aware there was a glimmer of moisture in Patience’s eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked gently. “Don’t you like it? Was it too presumptuous of Max?”

  “No. It’s perfect,” Patience said thickly. She blinked rapidly as her voice dropped to a tremulous whisper. “And so like Uncle Max.”

  That was true, Josh thought. He had never met anyone more determined than Max to have his own way, except maybe Patience.

  “Max doesn’t pull any punches, does he?” Josh murmured thoughtfully. If all this didn’t get Patience’s baby lust going full blast, Josh didn’t know what would, ‘cause it was already doing dynamite things to his latent wish for a baby of his own.

  “Max has never been afraid to speak his mind,” Patience murmured, her lower lip trembling as she looked around her. Tears of joy filled her eyes.

  “You okay?” Josh asked.

  Patience nodded, unable to speak for a long moment. Her throat was clogged with tears. “It means a lot to me—that Max changed his mind on this and is giving me his blessing,” she said finally.

  JOSH STUDIED PATIENCE, wishing there was some way he could ease the ache in her heart. He knew that, happy as she was about Max’s approval of her plans to have a family, she still missed him desperately. “You were close to him, weren’t you?” he asked gently as he handed her a tissue, thinking maybe it would help her to talk about her relationship with Max.

  Patience nodded and wiped her eyes. She sat down on the window seat, her expression reflective as she pulled herself together. “Max was very different from our dad, who was a reserved, kind of quiet guy and not at all flamboyant or eccentric,” she confided softly. “But Max was just as loving and just as concerned about us and he tried his best to finish bringing us up the way he knew his brother would’ve wanted us brought up—with a great deal of emphasis on doing the right th
ing, and education and all that. In fact, in retrospect, I think that’s one of the reasons why Max fought so hard for so long to keep me from having a child on my own. I don’t think he felt my parents would’ve approved of that.”

  “Do you think that, too?” Josh asked, straightening the appliquéd quilt that was hanging on the side rail of the crib.

  Patience lifted her slender shoulders in an eloquent shrug. “My parents were very conservative people. They firmly believed in marriage and family above all else.”

  “So they would’ve preferred you be married, too,” Josh ascertained cautiously, wishing she didn’t look quite so vulnerable, because that in turn made him feel all the worse.

  “Yes.” Patience lifted serious blue eyes to his. “But they also would have understood my yearning to have a child. They would have accepted the fact that I’m thirty-six and my time to do this is running out.” She picked up a stuffed bunny and held it in her hands.

  “But they wouldn’t have expected you to marry someone you didn’t love, just to provide your child with a father?” Josh queried, knowing that if he was ever going to understand Patience in the in-depth way he wanted to understand her, he had to know much more about her early life.

  “No.” Patience sighed, letting him know in an instant that she had changed as much as he had in the intervening years since they had last seen each other. “They knew that building a strong marriage is hard work, and that it requires a strong love at the heart of the relationship to be successful.”

  “So Max did as they would’ve wished, after all, in trying to keep you from making a mistake at first, and then supporting you in the end.”

  Reluctantly, Patience turned and replaced the bunny on the window seat beside her. “I guess so.”

  They were quiet a moment.

  Finally, Patience looked up at Josh again. “You seem surprised.”

  Josh shrugged and figured he owed it to her to be honest about this much. He hunkered down in front of her, dropping to one knee. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if I would like Max when I first headed out to the Silver Spur to look for work. I had heard many a tall tale about him. Legend was, there wasn’t a smarter, more ambitious rancher and land baron in all of Montana.”

  “So you thought he might be a bad guy,” Patience guessed.

  “No. Bad guys are a different breed than Max,” Josh mused, getting restlessly to his feet as, unbidden, the memories came back again, hitting him even harder. He had tried to forget the night that had forever changed his life. But being here with Patience, talking about the past, made that impossible. The memories of that night were as clear in his mind as yesterday, Josh thought, remembering how it had been….

  HE LAY FACEDOWN in the back of the van, every muscle aching from the ruthless pounding his body had taken. Tears of frustration and fury streaming down his face, he strained against the ropes biting into his wrists and ankles. To no avail. His fate, and that of the unconscious victim beside him, were sealed….

  He had seen and heard too much. They both had. There was no way the thugs were going to let either of them live, Josh knew. No chance in hell either of them would make it back for the wedding, no matter what he said or did….

  “THEN WHAT DID YOU THINK Max was going to be like?” Patience asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present.

  “I thought Max might be ruthless in the extreme. But when I got here and met him, and we had a chance to talk, I realized that he and I had a lot more in common than I would ever have expected,” Josh continued.

  For once, luck had been on his side. And it still was, he thought as he and Patience linked hands and left the nursery together.

  “STILL NO SIGN OF TWEEDLES?” Josh asked Patience a few minutes later when she came in from the porch and they sat down to a late supper of cold fruit and sandwiches that he had assembled for them.

  “No.” Patience frowned as she spread spicy mustard on her roast beef. “And considering the late hour, I imagine she’s curled up somewhere, asleep for the night.”

  “Or has gone off to have her kittens in private,” Josh said matter-of-factly, pouring them both tall glasses of milk.

  Patience watched as Josh layered lettuce and tomato on his bread. “That’s a pretty common occurrence, isn’t it?”

  At least he could offer comfort about this. “Cats are solitary creatures by nature. If that is the case, I’m sure she’ll turn up soon enough,” he said. “With all the hired hands we have working this ranch, someone is sure to spot her,” he finished cheerfully.

  “You’re probably right.” Patience breathed a sigh of relief. She glanced at Goldie, who was busy dragging her dog cushion into the kitchen, and couldn’t help but smile at the antics of Josh’s pet. “Now what is Goldie doing?” she asked.

  “Looking for someplace cozy to bunk down for the night, I imagine,” Josh said, aware it was a little cornical.

  “Does she always drag her cushion around like that?” Patience asked.

  Josh nodded, feeling a flash of guilt for the way he’d moved his pet around with him, and he readily admitted, “It takes her a while to feel comfortable in any new place. When she finally decides where to keep her cushion and stops dragging it all over, I know she finally feels like she’s home. And speaking of new homes…since it is almost midnight, I think we should talk about the sleeping arrangements.” Josh leaned back in his chair. Difficult or not, this subject had to be broached. “As you may have noticed, there’s only one comfortable bed here.”

  Twin spots of color appeared in Patience’s cheeks as she lifted her eyes to his. “In the master bedroom. I know. Somehow I think Max planned it that way,” she said dryly.

  But to Josh’s pleasure, she did not look all that displeased about the situation.

  Josh shrugged and tried not to take too much for granted. Sharing the same bed was not the same as actually sleeping together and making love. “Thankfully, it’s king-size. There’s more than enough room for the both of us.”

  Patience had the feeling Josh expected her to play the part of the outraged maiden. She sat back in her chair and regarded him coolly. “You’re suggesting we share?”

  He drained his milk and decided to go for broke. “It makes more sense than one of us sleeping on the sofa,” he retorted as he leaned farther back in his chair.

  Not necessarily, Patience thought as she smiled at him. “Actually, I think you would be very comfortable there,” she pointed out.

  “Not as comfortable as in the bed. So what do you say?” Josh prodded, a challenging glint in his gray eyes. “Are you up to this or not?”

  She knew he expected her to say no. Which in turn had some little imp inside her determined to prove him wrong and yearning to say yes. She shrugged carelessly, as if it did not matter to her one way or another. “Sure, as long as you stay on your side.”

  Finished with his meal, he got up to carry his plate to the sink. His mood was extraordinarily cheerful as they both silently contemplated the evening ahead. “No problem.”

  UNFORTUNATELY for Patience, sleep proved elusive. She lay in the darkened bedroom long after lights-out, tossing and turning. Despite her fatigue and the long, emotionally grueling day, she was unable to even approach sleep. Josh was much quieter, his breathing deep and even, his eyes closed, but she had the feeling he wasn’t sleeping, either. Maybe because he hadn’t bothered to undress and lay fully clothed on top of the covers on his side of the king-size bed, while she lay, still in her green silk lounging pajamas, which were decidedly not meant for sleeping in, beneath the covers on the far opposite side.

  They could pretend this was normal, that they were sleeping in this bed as a simple matter of comfort and convenience. But they couldn’t make it seem so. Not when she was close enough to breathe in the English Leather clinging to his skin and feel the warmth of his body stretched out next to hers. Worse, she knew from the way he kept tossing and turning that he was restless and wide-awake, too.

 
Without warning, there was loud barking on the front porch, soon echoed by some plaintive canine whimpering in the kitchen below. Curious, Patience got up and went to the window. Down on the lawn below she saw a large collie, still barking furiously.

  Seconds later, Goldie appeared at the bedroom door. She came charging in, barking and pleading with Josh to go out. Josh swung himself lithely out of bed—confirming Patience’s impression that he hadn’t been asleep, either—and looked down at his dog sternly. “Quiet, Goldie.”

  Goldie ignored him and ran back out and down the stairs. There was a crash, followed by a high-pitched yelp.

  “Now what?” Josh dashed down the stairs, Patience fast on his heels.

  Patience switched on the light as they entered the kitchen. Goldie had her head and one shoulder stuck in the cat door. She was dancing around and whimpering in a lovesick way. The collie had come around and was yipping and barking excitedly on the other side.

  Josh grasped Goldie by the shoulders and dislodged her from the cat door. “Lucky for us that opening isn’t any wider or Goldie would be long gone,” Patience drawled.

  “I know,” Josh said as the loud barking continued on the other side and Goldie still struggled to get out.

  Josh peered out the back door window. “This is ridiculous. Wrangler, that’s the neighbor’s dog, I know because I gave him his rabies vaccination not too long ago—has to go back to his owner.”

  “Now?” Patience said. It was one in the morning!

  Josh grabbed Goldie by the collar and held her firmly. “You have a better idea?”