Claiming the Rancher's Heir

by Maisey Yates

  He grimaced. “All right.”

  “Sorry. Get used to cozying up with your right hand.”

  He snorted. “In more ways than one, it’s like being sixteen again.”

  “The fact of the matter is, we have got to find a better way to deal with each other than we have been. And I mean, we really do. So, we certainly don’t have room for anyone else in this whole... situation.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “All right,” she said. She extended her hand.

  He looked at it. “I’m not shaking your hand.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not business, Wren. And it isn’t going to be. You and me can’t ever be business, sweetheart.”

  She lowered her hand, her heart fluttering. “I approach everything that way. Because of my dad.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We just... We are who we are. Can’t do much about it.”

  “I want to do something about it, I guess. This whole figuring-myself-out thing is going to weave together with figuring out how we can be a family.”

  She would never have thought she would become family with Creed Cooper. But here she was.

  “I guess so.”

  “Well.” She looked down at her cleared plate. “I guess that’s it. For now.”

  “For now. The wedding will be in three days.”

  “Are you going to invite your family?”

  “Hell no,” he said. “Just you and me.”

  “Don’t we have to have a witness?”

  “Bring your sister.”

  “Okay.”

  Then she stood up, and the two of them walked to the counter. Creed paid the bill.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  “You’re feeding my baby.”

  She looked around, feeling a little embarrassed. It wasn’t like they would be able to hide it in the upcoming months. “I guess it can’t really be a secret, can it?”

  “Why does it have to be?”

  “It doesn’t,” she said.

  He had been treated like a secret before. And Wren wasn’t about to do to him what Louisa had done.

  Wren couldn’t hate Louisa for it, though. She’d been sixteen. Who hadn’t done a host of stupid things when they were sixteen? It was just that when Wren had done stupid things, they hadn’t affected someone else for the rest of their life.

  “It really doesn’t,” she affirmed.

  Then the two of them walked out of the restaurant together, engaged.

  It was so strange, because just a few weeks ago Wren had the sense of being on a different path from the one she had been on before. But she hadn’t imagined that the path would lead here.

  But this was one of those moments where she had to change.

  It was actually a good thing. Because she needed a change anyway.

  The only way to handle all of this change was to keep on going.

  So that was what she would do.

  The fact that she had to keep going with Creed... Well, they would figure it out.

  They had no other choice.

  Eight

  It was his wedding day.

  He hadn’t ever imagined a wedding day. Hadn’t figured he would ever get hitched. But then, what he’d said to Wren at the diner had been true. He had never planned to be in a situation where he got a do-over on the biggest regret of his life.

  A slug of something hard hit him in the gut. It wasn’t really a do-over. Because it wouldn’t give him time back with his son. His son whose name he couldn’t even think.

  Because it wasn’t a name he would’ve given to his kid. And it served as a reminder of the ways in which Creed wasn’t part of his son’s life.

  But that didn’t matter.

  Today Creed was going to make sure he never missed out again. And the more he’d thought about it over the last few days, the firmer a conclusion he’d come to.

  Sure. He could understand where Wren was coming from—she had the idea that they might be able to exist in a middle ground. And that the middle ground would be better than trying and failing at having a marriage.

  But what she didn’t understand about him was that he didn’t do middle ground. He was all in. Or not in at all.

  If he decided to make a marriage, then he was going to make it. And there would be no living separately. No other relationships.

  No amicable divorce when the year was up.

  He wanted to be in his child’s life. He didn’t want to have regrets. A real marriage was the simplest way to that path he could think of.

  He would talk to her later.

  After their wedding night.

  As it was, he’d gone and dressed up for the occasion. Because she had liked it so much when he had dressed up for their winery event, so he was sure she would like it for this.

  She’d said she would meet him at the courthouse. He assumed she was driving there with her sister.

  And when he arrived, Wren was standing in front of the red brick building, wearing a simple white dress that fell just past her knees. On either side of her were her sisters. And her mother was there too, looking pale and drawn.

  “Well, I didn’t realize the whole family would be joining us,” he said.

  Wren grinned at him, then took hold of his arm, leading them ahead of her sisters and mother. “I had to bring them all,” she said. “And they don’t know the whole situation.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They don’t know that it’s temporary.”

  He nearly said right then that she didn’t seem to realize that temporary was off the table. But he decided to save that for after the vows. Instead, he bent down and brushed a kiss across her cheek. The action sent a slug of lust straight down to his gut.

  She turned to face him, her eyes wide.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  He heard a rustle of whispers behind him. And he gave her a knowing look.

  “Thank you. So do you.”

  He knew she wasn’t lying. She did think he looked good.

  The heat between them was real.

  It was all way too real.

  Her mother looked between them. “I do wish we could’ve had a real wedding.”

  “You know why we have to do it quickly,” Wren said.

  “Nobody cares anymore if a woman is pregnant at her wedding, or if they have a baby in attendance,” her mother replied.

  “I care,” Wren said.

  “I was impatient,” he said. “I just couldn’t wait.”

  “Indeed,” her older sister, Emerson, said, looking him in the eye with coolness.

  “You don’t approve of me?” he asked.

  “I’m deeply suspicious of you. But then, I would be deeply suspicious of anyone marrying my sister.”

  “I hear tell that your husband is a pretty suspicious character, too.”

  “And Wren did her sworn sisterly duty by being skeptical of him.”

  Well, that was fair enough.

  It was the youngest sister, Cricket, who gave him the kind of open, assessing look that made him feel actual guilt.

  “You had better be good to her. Our father was terrible, and Wren deserves to be happy.”

  “I’ll be good to her,” he said.

  He would be. Her happiness mattered. He told himself it mattered only because of their baby.

  But somehow, he suspected it was more.

  “Good,” Cricket said. “Because if you aren’t, I’ll hunt you down and I’ll kill you.”

  She said it cheerfully enough that he suspected she wasn’t being hyperbolic.

  They all filed into the courtroom, and he and Wren took their position up near the judge’s bench. They exchanged brief pleasantries with the woman before getting down
to business.

  It was surprisingly quick. Pledging his life to another person. When the ceremony was stripped away, a wedding was just a business deal where you held hands.

  Wren’s voice trembled on the part about staying together until death separated them.

  His own didn’t. But maybe that was because he didn’t feel like he was lying. He felt as committed as he could be to this. To her.

  Maybe it was that simple for him because he didn’t have other dreams of love, marriage or anything of the kind. He imagined that Wren, on some level, dreamed of romance. Most women did, he assumed.

  He wondered what his sister would say if he leveled this theory at her. She would probably bite him. Honey didn’t like to be what anyone expected.

  And she would also be annoyed at him for having a wedding and not inviting her. Probably, she would be irritated at him for not telling her that he was going to be a father.

  But Honey was a problem that would have to wait.

  “You may kiss the bride,” the judge said.

  And this... Well, this was the part Creed had been waiting for.

  He wrapped his arms around Wren and pulled her against him. The look in her eyes was one of shock, as if she hadn’t realized they would be expected to do this. As if she hadn’t realized that whether a wedding was permanent or not, in a courthouse or not, if you were trying to pass it off as something real to your family, you were going to have to kiss.

  And so they did.

  It was everything he remembered. Her mouth so soft and sweet. She was a revelation, Wren Maxfield.

  And he tried to remember what it had been like when he wanted to punish her with his passion.

  That wasn’t what he wanted now. No.

  Now what he wanted was something else altogether.

  A strange need had twisted and turned inside him, upside down and inside out, until he couldn’t recognize it or himself. He might not know exactly what was happening in him, but he knew desire. And desire flared between them whenever they touched. No question about it.

  When they parted, her family was staring at them, openmouthed.

  He shrugged. “There’s a reason we had to get married so quickly.”

  That earned him a slug on the shoulder. Wren looked disheveled, and furious. And he wondered if he had set a record for husband who got punched soonest after the vows were spoken.

  When it was over, they went to his truck, and sat there. Silence ballooned between them.

  “I thought you weren’t going to involve your family?” he asked.

  “I... I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t want to tell them I was getting married to you just because of a legal thing. It felt stupid. And then it snowballed.”

  “Wren...”

  “So, can I come to your house? Just for a while?”

  She was making his whole seduction plan a hell of a lot easier than he had expected it to be. He had thought he would have to contrive a way to get her to spend their wedding night together, but it turned out she had walked herself into a situation where she was going to have to do it anyway.

  “Gee, I think I can think of something for us to do.”

  “Creed...”

  “You can’t deny that it’s real between us, Wren. Whatever else—the desire between us is real.”

  * * *

  Wren stared at her new husband.

  She had to wonder if all this time she had simply been lying to herself. By increments, stages and degrees. Lying to herself that they could be together and not be together, that they could somehow have a platonic relationship that wouldn’t be affected if the other one ended up with a different partner. That they could be friends, and keep everything easy for their child.

  But she realized now that perhaps the real issue in her parents’ marriage had been honesty. And maybe it wasn’t even honesty with each other, but honesty with themselves.

  Wren didn’t really know how to be honest with herself, that was the thing.

  The realization shocked her about as much as anything else had since she’d started this thing with Creed. About as much as their kiss at the altar, and as much as how real the vows had felt.

  It was just so different from how she had imagined. He was different from how she had imagined.

  They were different together.

  “Take me home,” she said softly.

  And he did.

  The truck moved quickly around the curves as he maneuvered it expertly along the rural road.

  “Did you ever want to do anything but work at the family winery?” she asked.

  His eyes were glued to the road as he drove. “I have my ranch. Not a huge operation, because, of course, I’m tied up a lot of the time with Cowboy Wines. But I’ve found a way to do what I want, and what I feel like my responsibility is.”

  “So it feels like a responsibility to you?”

  “Yes. It does. And more so in the years since my mother died.”

  Her heart went tight. “I’m so sorry. About your mother.”

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said. “I know I wasn’t very nice about it before. I’m not proud of what I said, Wren. But sometimes I get my head buried in the sand. I turned your family into an enemy, because you were competition, and because I was pouring myself into making our winery better. Since my mother died, I felt like I was on some crusade to make my dad interested in life. I lost sight of some things. But I’m good at that. I’m good at losing sight of things. Sometimes intentionally.”

  “Does that have to do with...”

  “My son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trying to ignore that pain certainly didn’t improve my disposition, let’s put it that way. And it’s a wound that hurts worse the older I get. The more I realize what I missed. What I can’t get back. Kids always make you aware of how time passes, as I understand it. Mine comes with accompanying grief and regret.”

  She could see that. How that would work. At sixteen, everyone was short on perspective and long on time. But at their age... That’s when a person realized how precious it all was, and that feeling only increased with the years. The desire to hang on to what was important.

  Of course, she wasn’t sure it was age that had given her that perspective.

  “You know, losing my relationship with my father the way I did is what forced me to look at my life more critically,” Wren said. “It’s what forced me to ask myself why I was doing anything. And I think it’s what made me feel ready for the baby. But even with those changes, there are so many things I still don’t know how to navigate. So many things I’m not sure about. Because all these revelations are so very new and I...” She looked at him. “People like to be comfortable, don’t we? We don’t want to change. And usually, life doesn’t ask us if we want to go through the things that most define us. We just have to go through them.”

  “I’m sure losing your dad the way you did is a lot like losing my mom.”

  She shook her head. “No. You can’t see your mom anymore. I don’t want to see my dad. It’s a loss, Creed, but I wouldn’t compare the two. My dad was never who I thought he was.”

  His truck pulled up to the long gravel driveway that led to the ranch. His house was so different from any she would have imagined herself living in before. Her place at Maxfield Vineyards was styled after the vineyard house itself, which was her parents’ taste. Or maybe just her father’s taste. Maybe what her mother wanted didn’t come into it at all. Wren didn’t know.

  It bothered her, going from a house that had been decided on by her parents, straight to a man’s house.

  He stopped the car and looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve never had my own place. Not really. I don’t know what I like. I don’t know...who I am. I try to think of what kind of house I would choose and it’s just a
blank in my head.”

  “What do you know, Wren?” he asked.

  “I know that I want you,” she said, meeting his gaze.

  Because that was one choice she had made in the middle of all of this, the one choice that had been down to her—kissing Creed Cooper in the first place.

  They’d made a deal. A deal to not do this. But she didn’t think she could stick to the deal. Didn’t think she could be near him, with him like this, and not have him.

  So maybe just once?

  Maybe just for their wedding night.

  Whether it made sense or not, it was what she’d chosen.

  That desire for him hadn’t come from anywhere but inside herself. And there was something empowering about that.

  Maybe the wedding had been his idea, but wanting him... She knew that was all her. Nothing anyone would have asked her to do. Nothing her family was even all that supportive of. Some might have argued it was a bad thing to have given in to, on some level, but it had been her own choice. And right now, sitting in a truck that wasn’t hers, in front of the house that wasn’t hers, having taken vows that weren’t her idea, the desire between them at least seemed honest.

  And wasn’t honest what she really needed?

  Yes, she was trying to be smart, whatever that meant in this situation. Yes, she was trying to do the right thing for her child, but if she didn’t know what the right thing was for herself... How could she be a good mother?

  She thought about her own mother. Soft but distant, somebody Wren had never connected with.

  Because she didn’t know her. She didn’t know her mother, and Wren had to wonder if the other woman knew herself.

  “Yes,” she repeated now. “I want you. I want you, because I know that’s real.”

  He threw the truck into Park and shut off the engine. Then he got out, rounded to her side and opened the door. He pulled her out and into his arms, carrying her up the front steps and through the door. Then he carried her up the stairs, set her down in his bed.

  And when they kissed, she felt like she might know something.

  Something deep and real inside herself.

  She didn’t have a name for it. But it didn’t matter.

  Because all she wanted to do was feel.