by Dana Nussio
“Yum!” the adults both said together and laughed.
“And I won’t have time to stop anywhere else before I do my other errand tonight,” he added.
“Here. Give me a minute.” Willow left the three of them in the kitchen and descended the staircase to the center below. She returned minutes later, carrying a second high chair for Harper.
“Great idea.”
Asher lowered the infant into it and handed her a teething toy. When Willow passed him a box of cereal, he dropped a handful of pieces on the tray.
She opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a bag of mixed greens and a large tomato. “Here, let me throw together a salad. Meanwhile, you can tell me what made you miss what was probably a fine dinner on the Triple R and show up late here after you promised you’d be on time.”
“It was kind of an emergency.”
She paused from slicing the tomato to repeat his joke from the other day. “A cow had a difficult delivery?”
“No, someone cut down the fence, and we had about two hundred head of cattle running all over southeastern Arizona.”
“Deliberately cut?”
“Sliced out like a new gate.”
She couldn’t help shivering as he filled her in about their discovery that afternoon. The situation had nothing to do with her or Luna, and yet the attack felt personal to her.
“Were you able to get all the cattle back inside their pens?”
After handing Asher plates and cutlery to set the table, which he did well for someone probably performing the task for the first time, she carried the salad bowl to the table. Then she pulled the small pan of lasagna from the oven and set it on a hot pad at the center.
“If you mean pasture, then yes. We think we have them all. But it took us hours.”
“Which is why you’re late and why you’re starving now.”
“Yeah, you’ll have to forgive me if I make a pig of myself with your lasagna.”
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“I might.”
She grinned as she slid into the seat next to his, and then she blinked as the truth fell into place. “Wait. You didn’t bring Harper here because you had to or even as a cute shield for being late. After the damage you found in the field, you just wanted her with you.”
He’d started to lift the first slice from the pan, but at her words, his hand stilled.
“Can you blame me? Too many things have happened to my family lately. They must be connected somehow.”
Finally, he lowered the spatula without dishing out the lasagna to either of them.
“What do you mean?” she prodded when he didn’t start again.
“The email to the board saying that Ace wasn’t a real Colton. Someone shooting my dad. The bomb threat. All three things were awful, and they all jeopardized my family members, but tonight? This one was different. It happened on the ranch. We live there. My baby lives there.”
His voice broke on his last comment, and her heart squeezed on his behalf. Asher was watching his daughter instead of her, his shoulders drooping as if the weight of his family’s problems all rested squarely on his back.
“I forgive you for being late to sign the forms tonight. You can still register Harper at Tender Years.”
When Asher turned back to her, he was almost smiling.
“If my excuse worked, then it was all worth it, right?”
“Some people will do anything to make sure they’re not stuck on a waiting list.”
His lips spread wide, and it was there again, that spark that flashed inside her whenever he was around. Dangerous, yet utterly appealing, two traits she’d learned to avoid in her well-ordered life. Sparks from flint and steel produced fire, which could consume everything in its path. She couldn’t afford to take a risk like that again, not when she had a child to protect.
Her thoughts pushing her up from her chair, Willow reached for the dish Asher still hadn’t served. She scooped portions out for each of them. With the drumbeat of two six-month-olds’ fists on high chair trays as background noise, she used tongs to place salad onto her plate and passed him the bowl. He went through the motions of giving himself some and even ate a little, but he seemed miles away from her kitchen table.
“Guess I should have told you it was store-bought if it’s that bad,” she said after several minutes.
Asher’s head jerked, his eyes widening. “What? Oh, I’m sorry. It’s delicious.”
He took another bite, pausing to savor it with closed eyes, before setting his fork aside.
“Well, good. I was worried I should give up cooking.”
He shook his head. “No, don’t do that. It’s just that I’m—I don’t know...”
“Furious? Worried? Scared?”
“D. All of the above. You don’t ever want to know what it’s like to want to protect your child from danger and have no idea where the danger is coming from.”
She understood that better than he thought, but then didn’t seem to be the time to remind him about the threats she’d faced. They seemed trivial when compared with the bogeyman coming after his family.
“Do you really think all those things are connected?” She twirled her fork in the remaining sauce on her plate as she considered it. “Because if they are, could the incidents happening here be somehow connected, as well? Maybe the same person?”
He didn’t answer, so she continued.
“No. That didn’t make any sense. We hadn’t even met when I received that letter. And the complaint had to have been filed before—”
Her breath caught, and her jaw went slack as another thought appeared like a too-close lightning flash. Slowly, she shifted to face Asher, whose eyes were as wide as hers had to be.
“The switch,” they announced together.
At the sharp sound of their parents’ voices, both infants stopped pounding long enough to look at them with wide eyes. Willow held her breath, waiting for the chorus of tears to begin, but Luna returned to her banging, and Harper played along.
In a lower voice, Willow spoke aloud the question that Asher had to be thinking, as well. “Is it possible that whoever is trying to hurt your family gave the phone tip about the switch? That maybe the girls weren’t switched at all? Like the bomb threat, maybe it’s just another hoax.”
Her words kept coming faster and at a higher pitch until her voice cracked over the last part.
Asher held out his hands above the table in front of him, fingers splayed, and bounced them, his hands never quite contacting the table in a signal for her to calm herself.
“No, I will not calm down.” She settled back in the chair, crossing her arms, her palms clammy against her biceps.
“Just wait,” he said. “Let’s think about this a minute. If someone called the hospital with a claim of a switch, why would they be so willing to believe them?”
He held up his hand. “Wait. Don’t answer that. Obviously, because the other allegation they’d received was later confirmed.”
Willow loosened her arms and rested her hands on the edge of the table. “Anne Sewall had no choice but to take the claim seriously until it could be disproven. Guilty until proven innocent.”
Asher pushed his nearly empty plate away and planted his elbows on the table, gripping his hands together and resting his chin on top of them. He rolled his lips, as if considering what she’d said.
“How would some outsider know that our daughters were born that day?”
“Ever heard of social media?”
“I’m not on it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Can you say that no one in your family posted anything the day that Harper was born? Selina Barnes Colton, public relations guru, didn’t blast a ‘welcome to the newest Colton’ on Colton Oil’s social media accounts?”
“She did,” he said with
a frown.
She studied him for several seconds. “Don’t you want the switch to be a lie? Or at least a mistake?”
“Yes, I want them to be wrong. I want the babies we brought home from the hospital to be the ones who should have been in our homes all along. I just don’t want you to be caught up in any of this. I mean you and Luna.”
“Thanks.” She cleared her throat, not sure what to say.
“With everything else going on, I haven’t even told Mom or any of my brothers and sisters about the potential switch. I figured all the other incidents had involved Colton businesses. Even the cut fence. But this one, it’s personal.”
“I doubt your dad would say that the shooting wasn’t personal. I mean, if he could.” She winced. “Sorry.”
Willow took a few more bites of her dinner, though she was no longer hungry. Why hadn’t she thought it through before making a joke like that? It wasn’t as if his dad was at the ranch convalescing from a golf injury. Though the family wasn’t talking about it, no one knew if Payne Colton would ever come home from the hospital.
Asher reached for his plate again and finished off the last of his lasagna.
“Yes, he would say it was personal,” he said after a few minutes. “He’d also be furious about it, if he’d only wake up.”
“He will,” she found herself promising. Strange for her to say those words about a man she’d spent so many years and so much energy hating.
Asher’s smile was a sad one.
“Thanks. I am sorry, you know.”
“For what?”
“That you might be caught up in all of this because of my family.”
“We still don’t know that. And we won’t until the DNA results come in. We have no proof there’s a connection between the circumstances with your family and the threats here.”
“That’s why I’m going to hire a couple of guards to watch your place during the daytime. Just for extra peace of mind. Then for nighttime, the two of you should move into our place—”
“I can’t accept help from you, and we’re definitely not going to stay at the Triple R.” She’d already said hogs would have to take flight before she would even visit the ranch.
“You wouldn’t be with Harper and me, specifically. There’s plenty of space.”
She was already shaking her head. “Not going to happen.”
He settled back in the chair and crossed his arms. “Hear me out. I just need to know that you and Luna are safe.”
Something warmed inside her at his words, but she pushed thoughts that he cared about their well-being to the back of her mind. “And I can’t move into the same house where my mother was thrown out like garbage.”
“This isn’t only about you.”
They shot glances at the occupants of the two high chairs. Both infants had stopped pounding on their trays and were dozing off, their shoulders swaying and heads nodding.
“Guess our conversation isn’t all that riveting,” she said.
For several seconds, neither spoke as they watched their sweet, drowsy children.
“We have to figure out something,” Asher whispered. “For them.”
This time Willow nodded. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. No matter how they’d ended up where they were that night, this involved the girls and their safety.
She pulled the tray back and unbuckled her child, who immediately whined.
“It’s okay, sweetie.” She lifted Luna into her arms, rested the infant’s filthy face against her and spoke over her shoulder. “Let’s clean them up, change them and put them down. I’ll grab a portable crib from downstairs.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt for a while.” He bent to unstrap Harper.
“We’ll do the paperwork for Harper—” she paused, shrugging “—and then we’ll figure out the other thing.”
She might have been reluctant to accept assistance for herself, but for the child she loved, she would do almost anything, even take help from a Colton.
Chapter 12
Asher peeked at his watch just as he completed the final form. The chore had taken far longer than he’d planned, but then he hadn’t expected Willow to invite him to dinner or that he would be reckless enough to accept.
“Have somewhere to be?”
“What?”
“That’s the third time you’ve looked at your watch in the past fifteen minutes.”
“It’s just that I expected this to go faster.”
“I told you there were a lot of forms to fill out.”
She’d also shown him around the center, which had taken some valuable time. Every bit of it appeared to have been well-thought-out, from the infant room where Harper would nap and the playroom with tons of developmental toys and games to the craft room and the large activity space for when it was too warm or cold to play outside. After spending all day in a fun place like that, Harper probably wouldn’t want to come home at night.
Willow wasn’t paying attention as he scanned the facilities again. She flicked through all the forms he’d completed, arranging them in some specific order and then slipping a paper clip over them.
When she caught him watching her, she gestured toward the stack.
“All the paperwork has to be perfect according to state requirements. I know it’s a lot, but it’s important for me to have all this information in case something happens with one of my charges and I am unable to reach the parents. I usually have clients print out the forms from my website and fill them out before they come in.”
“You mean you gave me a special privilege? A Colton, no less.”
That she shifted under his stare made him grin. It also proved he should get on the road. Soon.
“It was special circumstances.”
He would give her that. Nothing about the way he’d ended up at Tender Years could be described as ordinary.
With another glance at his watch, he pushed back from the tiny kidney-shaped table and unfolded his cramped legs from the even smaller kid’s chair.
“I do have to get going.”
“Okay.”
She followed him as he climbed the interior stairs to her apartment and was only a few steps behind when he reached the closed door to the tiny nursery.
“But I thought we were going to talk about, well, you know, safety,” she whispered.
“I know, but I have to get to the hospital before visiting hours are over. I’m trying to take my turn visiting Dad more often.” He blew out a breath.
“I’d planned to go over last night, but then ten more cows delivered. Then it was supposed to be this afternoon after I finished checking the fencerow. You know how that turned out.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll wait to talk about it Monday. When you drop off Harper. Or when you pick her up.”
His fingers closing around the doorknob, he looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t think we should wait. We need to handle this now.”
He couldn’t blame her for the confusion in her eyes. Yes, he was overwhelmed. What was she supposed to do about it? She probably would ask him why he hadn’t dropped by his father’s room either time they’d been together at the hospital that week. How could he tell her he’d been too caught up in his personal drama to face the guilt that came with each visit to his dad’s bedside?
“But you have a lot of other obligations, too.”
“My first commitment is to my child.” He whirled to face her but indicated the room behind him with his thumb. “Until we know for sure that Luna definitely isn’t mine, then I need to protect her and you, too.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but he lifted his hand in a request for her to pause.
“I know. You two are just fine. You don’t need anyone.”
Willow nodded. “At least you remember.”
“But your personal
safety is only part of it. The business you’ve worked so hard to build could be jeopardized, as well. Don’t you want to protect that?”
When she didn’t respond immediately, he suspected he’d gotten through to her.
He opened the nursery door, flipped on the light and stepped inside. The two infants lay sleeping peacefully in side-by-side cribs, one high off the floor, the portable squeezed in next to it. He couldn’t help pausing to watch them, these sweet, innocent babies who knew nothing of how they’d either had their lives dramatically changed by someone’s mistake or they’d been used as pawns in a cruel game.
“It’s a shame to wake her,” Willow said from behind him.
“I can’t just leave her here.”
“Have you thought this through? Were you planning to take her to the hospital? Have you brought her there before?”
“Yes, I’ve thought about it.” Well, not technically. “And, no, I haven’t brought her before. I haven’t had to.”
All the other times he’d visited his dad in the past four months, there’d been someone at the house who could watch Harper. This time was different, since he’d been too worried to leave her on the ranch when he’d left.
“It should be fine, anyway. Kids are allowed to visit direct relatives.”
Willow shot a look his way, reminding him that they still weren’t sure whether Harper was related to any of the Coltons, but at least she didn’t say it out loud.
“You’re right about that, but Harper’s under a year old,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“A baby under twelve months old doesn’t have a fully developed immune system. Some patients there are very sick. Harper could pick up an infection from one of them, or, if she’s coming down with a cold, she could infect one of them.”
“Why do you have to know so much about babies?”
Willow leaned over the end of Luna’s crib since the room was too packed for her to slip in beside it and brushed back her daughter’s sweaty hair.
“Same reason you know about livestock and farm machinery. It’s my job. My degree is in early childhood development, too.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? I can’t take advantage of you by asking you to stay here with my daughter this late at night. I haven’t even brought her to the center one time, and I’m already breaking the rules.”
