Wyoming Born & Bred

by Cathleen Galitz

  The temperature of the water may have been far from scalding, but Patricia’s thoughts were not. That image of Cameron naked was a picture that would stay with her for life. Beneath a stream of tepid water, every detail of that gorgeous, masculine body came back into stark focus. She couldn’t imagine how he had incurred such a multitude of scars. He looked rather like a beloved rag doll stitched and restitched against the wear and tear of time. The possibility such injuries might have been caused by a dangerous profession—like rodeo—hit her like a thundering herd of buffalo. Heavens to Betsy, could he possibly have been telling her the truth earlier?

  More than likely he had won those injuries in barroom brawls, she decided, remembering that gigantic chip on his shoulder the day he arrived. Evel Knievel would have had second thoughts about jumping over it. The possibility that she may have misjudged the man was too disturbing to grant permanent easement to her conscious thought. Cameron’s past would have to wait. All she needed to concern herself with right now was what was happening downstairs.

  Finishing her shower in record time, Patricia hurried to brush her teeth. She did little more than rub a towel through her hair and apply a spot of lipstick before tossing on an old pair of jeans and an oversize flannel work shirt. Sticking out her tongue at her bedraggled image as she hurried past the mirror in the hallway, she reminded herself that there was no time for primping today—not when a stranger was alone in the kitchen with her three little angels.

  The poor man!

  Cameron was aghast to discover that there was barely enough packaged cereal left for Amy Leigh alone. Talk about kids eating one out of house and home! Just a few days ago he thought he’d bought enough groceries to feed a small army. Cameron set a bowl before the toddler and directed Amy to “eat up.” She reacted with due deference by pelting him between the eyes with a handful of sticky puffed rice. Tossing a warning look over his shoulder, he abandoned her to a rainbow of colored marshmallow sprinkles.

  Cereal crunched beneath his boots as he made his way to the refrigerator. There he was greeted by a couple of gigantic green emu eggs. Quickly he shut the door on them. He found a round container of oatmeal from the pantry and proceeded to read the directions, which looked simple enough for a ten-year-old to follow. He hoped Johnny wouldn’t mind assisting him.

  “Grab a pot,” he instructed the boy, who immediately disappeared beneath the countertop.

  Amid a clatter of metal, Johnny emerged a moment later wearing one on his head. “Guess who I am,” he said, striking a pose.

  “Johnny—”

  “Appleseed,” the lad supplied with a broad grin that faded the instant he saw Cameron pouring oatmeal into a measuring cup. “Ugggh,” he offered in commentary.

  Cameron’s glare dared him to utter another desultory sound. The last thing he needed right now was a pint-size critic.

  “Shouldn’t your brother be up by now?” he asked, checking his watch.

  “It takes a team of mules to drag him out of bed in the morning. Can we have cinnamon toast with that?”

  “If you fix it yourself,” Cameron replied, assuming the child could handle that simple task. “But go and get Kirk up first. Tell him I said it’s past time for him to get up.”

  Though Johnny’s sigh indicated his displeasure at being his brother’s keeper, the dark look on Cameron’s face stopped him from registering any complaints. Moments later angry sounds erupted from upstairs.

  “Get up!”

  “Get out of my room!”

  “Get up!”

  “Get out!”

  These two lines formed alternating lyrics that persisted for at least a dozen refrains. When Cameron could not take it a second longer, he stomped over to the stairs and bellowed, “Do I need to come up there?”

  As blessed silence broke out, he returned to the stove to find a gray mass boiling over the sides of the pot. In his haste to turn the burner off, he slipped on a trail of brightly colored cold cereal littering the floor.

  Amy chortled in delight as she watched him do an interesting little step in hopes of maintaining his balance. Cameron came down on his backside hard enough to knock the open box of oatmeal to the floor.

  “Son of a—”

  Three innocent faces peered down at him.

  “—gun!” Cameron spat out with all the intended vehemence of the word he generally preferred when he went buns up.

  Somehow the boys managed to get more cinnamon and sugar on the floor than on their toast, but they dutifully took their places before two heaping bowls of oatmeal. Sticking a spoon in his, Johnny offered an opinion.

  “It looks just like the Awful Tower,” he said of the angle and position of his spoon suspended in the gluey substance.

  A smile threatened to crack the grim mask Cameron wore. Apparently the little guy had been studying “hysteric” landmarks in school.

  “Don’t you mean Eiffel?”

  “I guess. My teacher says if I don’t learn how to say the words right, I’ll end up like Rudolf the Reindeer.”

  Cameron knew better than to ask, but he couldn’t resist nevertheless. “And how’s that?”

  “I’ll go down in history.”

  The boy laughed so hard at his own joke that Cameron was unable to refrain from joining in.

  “Speaking of history, it looks to me like Sherman marched right through my kitchen.”

  Patricia stepped into the room and looked around in bewilderment. Sugar, oatmeal, cinnamon and cold cereal covered the floor in a fascinating collage of colors and textures. The smell of burned oatmeal lingered in the air, and it looked like a volcano had erupted on top of her stove.

  Cameron met her gaze sheepishly.

  She took a step toward him.

  Crunch!

  “I can not believe—”

  She took another step. Crunch!

  “—that you actually—”

  Step. Crunch!

  “—actually suffered through all this without calling for help.”

  Crunch! Crunch!

  Cameron’s mouth fell open in amazement as she stopped in front of him and produced a wobbly smile. Bonnie had been a dervish in the kitchen, always scolding him for leaving the tiniest mess behind, and he was prepared for anything. Rage, remonstrance, feminine tears... Anything but an outpouring of gratitude.

  “I’m sorry about all this, but—”

  Patricia interrupted him by placing a feather-soft kiss upon his cheek. “Don’t even think of apologizing for the sweetest gesture any man has ever done for me.”

  She had to be kidding! What kind of personal hell had this lady endured to be so touched by such a simple thing as having a little “help” in the kitchen?

  Kirk pointed at him and giggled. “You’ve got lipstick on your cheek.”

  Johnny snickered behind the safety of his napkin.

  Cameron ran his thumb over the stain of Come Hither Pink warpaint upon his face and blushed furiously. Like some stupid schoolboy, he thought to himself. Like some shy virgin, for Pete’s sake.

  The brush of Patricia’s lips upon his skin left him feeling tingly all over. Her hair glistening with water, the woman looked and smelled like a bouquet of fresh-picked flowers, and he had the wild desire to sweep her into his arms and give her a sampling of what a real kiss was all about.

  Cameron looked at her.

  Patricia looked at him.

  Seconds ticked by, and the moment slipped away as softly as a butterfly flitting through a field of blossoms. Patricia grabbed a broom and started cleaning up. She spoke to the children without looking up from her task.

  “Cameron worked real hard to fix you that breakfast. You boys go on and eat it.”

  Ignoring the looks of disgust pasted on their faces, she turned her attention to filling the sink with hot, soapy water. It was her guess that a week of soaking wouldn’t be near enough to dislodge that baked-on blackened gunk on her favorite pot. She picked it up by the handle and submerged it.

  “He
re, let me help,” Cameron offered, taking the pot from her. That familiar electrical current zinged between them again as his hand grazed hers. Sparks flew in all directions. Surely there was no more dangerous combination than electricity and water. A zillion volts rooted them both to the spot.

  “There’s no need,” Patricia assured him. “Just as soon as I get the children off to school, I’ll fix you something more—” she searched for the right word “—filling.”

  Cameron smiled at the delicious thought of skipping breakfast altogether and nibbling instead on something a little spicier in the absence of prying eyes. “Don’t you mean fix breakfast for us?” he asked, his voice soft and inviting. “I don’t believe you’ve eaten yet, either.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got to tend to the stock.”

  Stock. There was that appalling misnomer again. He gritted his teeth against it and watched his sexual fantasies disappear before the mundane obligations of the day.

  “Those idiotic birds are hardly more important than your health.”

  Patricia took Cameron’s irritability in stride. He looked more disheveled this morning than she’d ever seen him before. Taking care of a houseful of kids was far more taxing than most men realized. She’d wager even crawling back up on the roof again was preferable to being subjected to any more torment at the hands of the Hellion Three.

  “What exactly have you got against emus?” she asked, taking him to task for the affront to her birds. Quite the opposite of what he thought, they really were very intelligent creatures. She wished he would at least take the time to understand them and their habits.

  “They’re ugly, they stink, and they keep me awake all night with their strange caterwauling.”

  Patricia felt a telltale tremor in her tummy. An entirely different bird was keeping her awake at night. One with a sexy mustache and eyes as blue as a clear mountain lake. “Tell me,” she said, falling headlong into the depths of that very lake, “is there anything you like less than emus?”

  Cameron answered with a single, well-considered word.

  “Children.”

  There. He had drawn a line in the sand that he was certain Patricia would never step over.

  She met his measuring look with one of her own and tossed in a lopsided grin.

  “Just who are you trying to convince, Cameron? Me? Or yourself?”

  Chapter Eight

  For a man who claimed to dislike children, Cameron sure was good with them. Patricia had a theory about children and animals having an innate sense about who to trust, and whether her foreman wanted to admit it or not, he was a gigantic magnet for kids and critters alike.

  Seeing how Patricia’s own offspring didn’t exactly take to just anybody, that was saying a lot. Since their father’s death, the children seemed intent on scaring off any potential suitors. Not that there had been all that many. Just the veterinarian, Jim Guptill, who came out once to take a look at a sick emu, and Elliott Coleman who still lived with his own mother and blushed three shades of purple the one time he had screwed up enough courage to ask her to lunch at the local drive-in. All of her children, the baby included, reacted to anyone who showed the slightest interest in their mother, with a protective petulance that fell just short of outright rudeness. Why, the last time she’d run into Jim at the grocery store, the kids had behaved so badly, pulling on her sleeve and whining to go, all the while furtively loading all sorts of expensive contraband into her cart, that Patricia almost had a heart attack when the girl rang up her total at the checkout stand.

  She had, of course, refused Jim’s magnanimous offer to pay for her groceries but thought it extremely generous of him to even suggest it. It was at such times that Patricia couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have the support of a man with a steady, respectable job and the desire to provide for her.

  “I don’t like him,” Johnny had said in no uncertain terms. “He’s got weasel eyes.”

  Kirk slanted his own eyes at her and poured on the guilt. “I don’t think Daddy would have liked him, either.”

  It rankled Patricia that her children reacted to other men’s solicitousness with such contempt only to turn right around and embrace Cameron’s cantankerousness with open arms. Even the emus that he so openly loathed could not seem to resist the man’s dubious charm.

  Patricia found it hysterical how they took to him. Every time he walked past the corral, the birds lined up like a gaggle of teenage girls watching the local football hero go by. On those occasions when he had to actually step inside their pens, they flocked around him and regaled the heavens with the sound of their high-pitched squeals. Cameron generally reacted by kicking at them and mumbling something unintelligible under his breath.

  When Patricia ventured the opinion that they might be attracted to his particular scent, he skewered her with a look that would have put a lesser woman in the hospital.

  “Surely you aren’t suggesting it’s my cologne that’s making them attack me?” he asked in disbelief at the very thought. “They just like provoking me.”

  Rubbing her chin, Patricia feigned deep thought. “It’s just a simple matter of attraction. I wouldn’t fight it if I were you.”

  Cameron responded in a voice loaded with gravel. “I wouldn’t fight it, either—if it weren’t some torn-fool birds you were talking about but a hot little chick instead.”

  Patricia’s heart skipped a beat. Then another.

  Was he actually flirting with her?

  Just because his eyes had darkened with innuendo didn’t necessarily mean he was referring to her. It had been so long since she’d played that age-old game that she’d almost forgotten the rules. She could hardly admit that his scent drove her crazy, too. The way it lingered in her towels after his morning showers was especially nice, so much so in fact that she found herself surreptitiously stealing a secret moment to inhale deeply before depositing it onto her daily laundry pile.

  Instead she faked a nonchalance she did not feel and asked, “You really like ruffling feathers, don’t you? Be it fowl or fair...”

  Cameron blinked in disbelief.

  Had she actually winked at him?

  More than likely she was just trying to get something out of her eye. Like that unladylike gleam that sent a surge of passion raging through his body.

  Squaring off beneath the fading heat of the late-afternoon sun, they acknowledged the push-pull of their mutual attraction. And for an instant both allowed themselves to succumb to it, both imagining what it might be like to enter into a relationship unfettered by old baggage, ulterior motives, opposing personalities. And children.

  Children!

  “Oh, shoot!” Patricia said with a start. “I’ve got to pick up the kids at the bus stop.”

  Good Lord, she’d been so caught up in an inadvisable flirtation with the hired man that she’d almost forgotten her own children! What kind of a mother was she, anyway? One she’d wager Cameron would peg a complete coward by the swiftness of her departure.

  When she returned a short time later, Patricia was certain she had her hormones and her thoughts under control. Unfortunately, the instant her boys burst out of the truck and hurled themselves at Cameron like human cannonballs, her heart went all soft and mushy again.

  “Don’t bother Mr. Wade, boys,” she hollered after them.

  “He doesn’t mind,” Johnny tossed back over his shoulder. “Do you, Cameron?”

  “Not much,” he grumbled under his breath. It was awfully hard to refuse children who were so grateful for the smallest kindness shown them.

  Amy pulled away from her mother. “Me go, too,” she gurgled.

  Patricia grabbed for her, but the girl was amazingly fast for her little legs. Giggling at the game she had made, Amy dodged her mother as she chased her around the yard.

  “It’s like trying to run down a superball,” Patricia gasped.

  In light of the girl’s determination, Cameron capitulated. “That’s all right. She can come, too.” He
narrowed his eyes at the boys. “Her brothers’ll look after her.”

  They knew better than to argue. Once again Patricia was struck by the respect the boys paid this man. Had Cameron actually pandered to their obvious hero worship, they could not have been more deferential. The man had been here less than a week, and already a pattern was emerging. If they stayed out from under his feet and did as they were told, Cameron allowed them to tag along and idolize every step he took.

  It had only taken him a few days to finish the roof, and he’d already started in on a number of other odd jobs around the place without waiting for Patricia to point them out. For a woman used to doing everything on her own, she wasn’t so sure she liked him acting so completely independently of her, almost as if he owned the place. A shiver of foreboding rippled through her as she watched the painstaking measures he took to show the children the technique used to replace the broken window that Hadley had boarded over with plywood the very day he had been killed. She hoped the children didn’t somehow get the idea that their father could be replaced as easily as that pane of glass.

  That night after dinner, she was even more aware of Cameron’s masculine presence than usual. Johnny sought his advice on his math homework. As Patricia finished the dishes, she noticed her oldest voiced none of his usual objections to Cameron’s insistence that he not only show all of his work but also to do so in a legible manner. Rather than argue about how stupid the assignment was, Johnny settled right down and completed his work in record time. Afterward Kirk dragged out a well-worn Dr. Seuss book and asked Cameron to read him a bedtime story. Not two months ago, he had avowed to his mother that he was too old for such “baby stuff” and was even beginning to chafe at the thought of being tucked in at night.

  If a story was going to be read, Amy wanted to be in on it. Tucking her favorite kitty into a doll buggy, she extended Cameron her chubby little arms in hopes of being picked up herself.

  “Sorry, kid,” Cameron grumbled. “I’m not about to have ‘you know what’ running all down my shirt.”

  Amy stuck out her lower lip and regarded him with silent reproval. Meanwhile Mittens took advantage of the opportunity to make a break for freedom and scampered out of the room before the child could get her in another headlock.