by Maisey Yates
One of his siblings would have kids, and he could be the favorite uncle. That was fine with him. It was really all he could handle at this point in his life.
But there was a baby. And, genetically, it would be his baby. Which kind of took the “should he have kids” question right off the table and moved it into completely different territory.
He rummaged through the takeout bag and took out a paper carton and a plastic fork. He opened the carton and his stomach growled in appreciation. Chow mein. Good. He was starving. And since he’d had no appetite for a good portion of the day, he had catching up to do now.
He pushed the fork down into the noodles, and it snapped in half. He snorted. That explained the sink full of forks. He went to the sink and gave one of the real forks a quick rinse, then returned to his position at the kitchen table.
He had no idea what he was doing. The only thing he was sure about was that he was staying until they came to some kind of understanding.
Walking away wasn’t an option.
Chapter Three
“Oh, you’re still here,” Kelsey said. “And you’re in my kitchen.” She’d stayed an extra few minutes in the bathroom, running cold water on her wrists, hoping that her problem in cowboy boots would magically disappear by the time she came out.
No such luck.
“I am.”
“Why?”
“It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“You know what? It seems like maybe you could have gone with the ‘my host seems indisposed so perhaps I should show myself out’ right thing to do.”
“Bear with me here, Kelsey,” he said, his voice rough. “I just found out you’re carrying my baby, and you’re sick as a dog. I’m supposed to walk out the door and pretend that I didn’t see any of it? That I don’t know? I can’t do that.”
“What do you want?”
He shook his hand, hands on his lean hips. “I don’t know.”
“Then why—”
“Because. Now go sit at the table.” He was ordering her around. In her own house. Like he belonged there. The strangest thing was, it didn’t feel as bizarre as it should. He did feel like he belonged, and she couldn’t fathom how that could be.
Strangely comfortable feelings aside, she still had to deal with him. She would talk to him. They would get it straightened out. Things would go back to the wonky kind of normal she’d been living for the past couple of months.
For some reason, that thought brought her very little comfort.
She curled her lip into a sneer, made sure he saw it, and walked the rest of the way down the hall and into the kitchen. The table was set. With actual dishes. And her dinner was hot.
“Can I hire you?” she asked.
“Sorry. I have a job.”
“What do you do?” she asked, sitting in front of her previously desired Chinese food. She wasn’t sure she could muster up an appetite now, recent vomiting and unexpected cowboy considered.
“I work at a ranch. I own it. With my brother and sister. It’s one of those old family ranches. Passed down and all.”
She bit her lip, trying to keep the emotion that was rising in her chest back down where it belonged. She was pretty sure it was emotion, anyway; otherwise, she was about to be sick again.
“That’s . . . You’ll pass it down to your kids, or . . .”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. “That’s the theory.”
“Don’t you have a wife?” she asked. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
“None of the above,” he said. “You?”
“No. I’m . . . doing this alone,” she said. Then she laughed. “Not doing very well, am I? I should have . . . I haven’t told anyone yet. I kept thinking I would, and then I got the morning sickness, and I’ve just been concentrating on surviving. I’m alive, so, points for me.”
“Barely. You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping.”
“It’s hard to sleep on the couch.” His eyes widened. “Well,” she said, “it’s more trouble than it’s worth to go up and down the stairs half the time, so a lot of the day I’m in the living room.”
“That doesn’t seem . . . healthy.”
“This is stupid.” She put her face in her hands. “I don’t even know you.”
“Does anyone know you right now? You haven’t told your family you’re having a baby.”
“Fine.” She lifted her head. “I suppose, at the moment, you know me, since you know something no one, not even my best friend, knows. So, let’s pretend then. Yes, I have been sleeping on the couch.”
“Are you eating?”
She lifted up her fork and raised her eyebrows. His lip curled.
“Are you eating anything that’s staying down? You look thin.”
“I’m always thin,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you . . . not be so thin right now?”
“I’m not quite ten weeks pregnant. I’m not supposed to look different.”
“I don’t know anything about pregnant women.”
She speared a piece of chicken with her fork and put all of her energy into examining it, and not Mr. Cole Mitchell; 6’3”; Sex: Male. Per his driver’s license, but also, obviously. “In some ways I find that comforting.”
“That there aren’t a lot of women currently pregnant with my babies?”
“Yeah. So you don’t have any kids then?”
He shook his head and some of his slightly overlong hair fell into his eyes. “No. I wasn’t sure I was going to either, but this . . . changes some things.”
“Why was your sperm at the bank? I mean if you weren’t a donor, and you’re no longer sure you even want kids?”
A muscle in his jaw ticked and he averted his eyes. “It was a thing. With my ex. Something about optimum fertility. But she’s my ex so it didn’t need to be there any more, and I went to un-bank it.”
It was pretty obvious he didn’t want to give details. And she didn’t really want them. She felt weighted down, wholly and completely, by her situation. By the facts that work was piling up, that she was keeping a major secret from her family, that she couldn’t seem to keep any food in her stomach for more than a half an hour. She didn’t think she could handle the weight of Cole’s burdens too.
So she didn’t press.
“Oh.”
“So what is it you want me to do, Kelsey? Walk out of here and pretend this didn’t happen?” he asked, voice rough. He sounded just as tired as she felt.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Because it was one thing to have a baby alone, to ignore the father of her baby when he was just a nameless, faceless nobody. She didn’t feel like she was depriving her child of anything. But knowing his face . . . she wasn’t sure she could forget him. She wasn’t sure if she should.
“I don’t know you at all,” she said. “You might be a psycho stalker who saw me at Voodoo Donut a couple of weeks ago and traced me back here.”
“A possibility. But I’m not.”
“No. I know. So, why are you still here? I mean . . . what do you think we’re going to do?”
“I don’t know why I came in the first place. Not really. Because I haven’t figured out what the right thing to do is. Thing is, I’m not the kind of guy who gets a woman pregnant and walks away, and this . . . feels the same.”
“It’s not.”
“But it feels the same. And as much as I wasn’t counting on it, or asking for it, walking away still feels like the wrong thing to do.”
“And doing the right thing is important to you? Because I’m not asking for a Boy Scout to come and help me cross the street and change diapers. I can handle this on my own. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have pursued the pregnancy. You caught me at a low point, but I promise I’m not usually this pathetic.”
Cole looked down at his hands. His heart was pounding hard in his head; his entire body tense. He didn’t know which argument to take. The one for him leaving, or the one that meant staying and facing this whole
thing. This thing that he hadn’t asked for, that he hadn’t had any real involvement in, but that he felt just as connected to as if they had conceived during a one-night stand.
He swallowed. “It’s not about being a Boy Scout. It’s about . . . if I walked away, whether I would think about him. How old he was. If he looked like me. If he ever missed having a dad.”
His chest hurt just thinking about it, a kind of deep, intense emotion he wasn’t used to anymore. The kind that he’d lost along with youth and optimism a few years ago. Actually, he wasn’t sure it was like anything he’d ever felt before. It made his hands shake.
She looked at him, her eyes glistening in the dim light. “Those are pretty scary questions.”
“Scariest I’ve ever asked myself.” And that included questions about his childhood, his father, things he’d defined his whole life by. But this seemed worse somehow. This was about whether or not he could abandon a child, his child. About whether or not he could make the mistakes he’d discovered his father had made. And no, maybe this wasn’t exactly the same, but knowing it had come about differently didn’t make him feel absolved.
“I don’t . . . This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Kelsey said.
“I know.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you either, so I guess we’re even,” he said.
She put her fork down and stared at her mostly untouched dinner. He wished she would eat something. “I’m tired again.”
“Can I help you upstairs?”
“Uh . . . probably not. I know you could have . . . I mean, if you wanted to hurt me, you could have done it by now, but still, probably best not to let a strange man carry me to my bedroom.”
“For some women, that’s just Saturday night.”
“Good point. But it’s never been my Saturday night.”
He nodded and stood from the table. “Can I at least bring you something?”
“No. I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine—I’m actually deathly ill—but, you know.”
“I’m going to come over tomorrow morning.”
She nodded. “I kind of accepted that as inevitable.”
“We have a lot to talk about.”
“I know.” Her words were choked.
He’d never done well with emotions, and now was no exception. His chest felt tight and he was ready to walk out the door. Walk right out and never come back. But he also felt rooted to the spot.
“Or maybe we won’t talk that much. Maybe I’ll just bring . . . herbal tea. What can you have?”
“Usually nothing.”
“Well, I’ll figure something out.”
“I hope so,” she said.
And he knew perfectly well that she wasn’t talking about breakfast.
***
Cole didn’t know why he’d come back. He didn’t know why he hadn’t run the hell away from the whole thing. Of course, then he remembered that image, the one that had compelled him to stay at her house and make she sure she was okay in the first place.
An image of a little boy with dark hair holding a baseball. There wasn’t anyone there to throw it to him.
His own father had been tough. Limited hugs, no praise unless they’d really done something spectacular. But he’d been there. He’d supported them in his quiet, steady way, and never once had Cole doubted that he would be there for him. Always.
At least that was the treatment he and Lark and Cade had gotten. The other family, the one he’d just found out about a year ago, hadn’t been so lucky. But he didn’t have the time to think about that right now.
He knocked on Kelsey’s door as best he could with a tray of drinks in one hand and a bag of breakfast food in the other. He’d had no clue what to get her at the coffee house, so he’d gone with sweet and savory, healthy and greasy, with beverages hot, cold, caffeinated and decaf.
Just covering the bases.
He knocked again. If she didn’t answer, he was just going to walk in, because the image of her curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor made his gut tighten.
He was about to knock again when the door swung open. She was in the same clothes she’d been wearing the night before. Those stupid sweats that had writing on the butt. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a limp ponytail, and her face was pale.
“You came,” she said, not sounding particularly excited or surprised.
“Yeah. I said I would.”
She shrugged her small shoulders. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“It does when I say it. Count on it.”
“Shall I be Miss Kitty to your Stalwart Sheriff?”
“Was that a crack about the Stetson?” He walked past her into the house and set the food items, and his hat, on the counter.
“Yeah. And the belt buckle.”
“I won this,” he said, touching the intricate silver buckle.
“Doing?”
“Calf roping.”
“Cute.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called cute before, Miss Kitty. That’s a first.”
“Have mercy,” she said, rolling her eyes, her tone pitched into a breathy, Southern lilt. At least he thought that might have been what she was going for. She let out a long breath and leaned against the counter. “You’re here.”
“Yes.”
“And does that mean what I think it might mean?”
“That I think I should be involved in my child’s life? Yes. I don’t know in what capacity, but . . . now I know, Kelsey. Now I know you’re having my baby. I can’t forget that. I can’t walk away from that.”
“I should probably get a paternity test done.”
“Probably,” he said.
“I never thought I would be in the position to need one of those. Not a big Saturday-night-out girl, as I mentioned.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to be. At least not now.”
“Funny.” She opened the paper bag he’d brought and grimaced, but rummaged through the contents. “I guess I could get one at the clinic. We should sue them, by the way.”
“Probably. But that’s not really my number one priority at the moment.”
“And what is, sheriff?”
“You.”
“Me?” she arched one pale eyebrow and pulled a bran muffin from the bag.
“That’s right. You, who are too sick to get upstairs, and look like you haven’t had a decent meal in weeks. You.”
She looked away. “I’m fine.”
“You are not. You’re alone.”
“But I don’t have to be.”
“But you are.”
“I could call my parents anytime. I could call Alexa. My friend Alexa. She lives in New York, but her job is pretty flexible.”
“Then why haven’t you called them?”
She picked at a raisin that was half exposed in the top of the muffin. “Because. Because they would say I was crazy. And if not crazy, then maybe just irresponsible, or plain wrong, to have a baby when I’m not married.”
“And why are you having a baby by yourself? Are you a . . . Do you not like men?”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no. I like men. JTT posters all over my room in junior high. Definitely a man-liker.”
“Then why?”
“Because there’s not a particular man I like right now. And I don’t see there being one in the near future. And I’m independent. Apart from this whole sickness fiasco, which, have I mentioned, is not just inconvenient, but pretty freaking humiliating? I’m a very well-respected columnist. I write about health and wellness, ironically, and I’ve been on GMA. And I have this house, and I have the finances. I wanted kids. I want kids.”
“You were just done waiting.”
“Everything I’ve ever wanted I’ve gone out and gotten for myself. My sisters all got married right out of high school, and it’s what they wanted, so that’s fine. But I wanted more. And I moved away, and I got more. But I’m ready
for the next phase now, and . . . the rest of it hadn’t fallen into place yet. I was at my sister’s wedding and I was watching my other sisters with their kids and I thought . . . ‘That part of life is passing me by.’ I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want to wake up one morning and realize I’d left it too late.”
“Better than jumping the gun.” And he was speaking from experience.
“True. I had a near brush with gun-jumping. But this is different. This is . . . You have goals, don’t you, sheriff?”
He thought of Elk Haven Stables. Of the way things were really getting up and running there. How they were taking a business that had been failing and turning it into something successful. Unless his father’s newly discovered debts screwed things up. “Yeah, I have a few.”
“So you have to understand then. The importance of meeting goals.”
“I get it.”
“And I doubt anyone I’m related to would. They’re so traditional, and I’m already the wild one because I moved to the big city and went to college.”
“Clearly a fallen woman of Babylonian proportions.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“And you think they won’t notice when you have a baby?”
“No, I’m going to tell them. But I don’t think I could stomach my mom putting a cold cloth on my forehead while she was shaking her head asking me what on earth I was thinking. And Alexa would just cuss me out. And then she’d put chick flicks on and ignore me until I needed something. Maybe I should call Alexa.”
“Sounds like a peach.”
“She is, actually.”
“I meant it.”
“So what do you propose we do, Cole?”
She turned her blue eyes on him, sharp now, not glassy. And he saw the businesswoman she was. The keen mind. The woman who had been determined enough to go after what she wanted whether she had the support of everyone or no one.
And he had no clue what to tell her.
“Come to my ranch.”
Apparently his mouth had more of a clue than his brain.
“Your ranch?”
“It’s a guest ranch. Well, not entirely; we have horses. But the majority of our income is in the guest cabins. It would be private, but we have a chef there who could cook for you. We also have maid service.”
