Bethany heard a whimper coming from inside the wicker basket.

To her utter amazement, a small pink fist flailed in the air. The whimper swelled to a cry, and when Bethany bent over to look, she saw a tiny baby wrapped in a print blanket.

It was crying, its face screwed up and its legs kicking emphatically under the blanket. Bethany dissolved into total bewilderment, half thinking this must be some practical joke, yet knowing in her heart that it couldn’t be.

Bethany reached down and unpinned an envelope from the baby’s blanket. The outside of the envelope was blank, so she opened it and unfolded the note inside.

COLT, it said in printed block letters. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF ALYSSA FOR ME. I’LL BE BACK.

It seemed that her new ranch hand, Colt McClure, had some explaining to do.

Cowboy with a Secret
Pamela Browning

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pamela Browning spent a lot of years living and rearing a family in a charming South Carolina town that was nothing like Yewville. No one in this book bears any resemblance whatever to persons living, dead or comatose, except for Muffin the cat, who will never reveal her real name. Never. If she wants her catnip mouse refilled on a regular basis.

Pamela enjoys hearing from her readers and invites you to visit her website at www.pamelabrowning.com.

This book is dedicated to the memory

of my brother-in-law, Bob Grier,

who loved to demonstrate in rip-roaring fashion

the wonders of the Grier Ranch.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

COLT MCCLURE PEGGED THE gal at the Banner-B Ranch for a babe as soon as he spotted her. But it was the promise of the ice-cold beer he’d insulated and stowed in his saddlebag that made him urge his horse into a hellzapoppin’ gallop down the long curving driveway.

The hot Texas wind flung a handful of grit into the five days’ growth of beard bristling from his face, but Colt didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything now except finding a place to work and a place to live. Oh, yeah—and that beer.

Instantly alert at the hammer of hoofbeats on parched earth, the gal lifted one hand to shade narrowed eyes against the orange sun sinking its way toward the horizon. The other hand rested on a neatly rounded hipbone.

He reined his horse to a stop at the edge of a patch of dry dusty grass in front of the two-story house. As he swung down from his mount, he realized that the woman’s eyes were a cool aquamarine, the shade of the sea where there was no bottom. Or at least what he thought the sea would look like—he’d never seen the ocean. And he never wanted to after having a gander at those eyes. He could drown in them if he’d let himself.

The air shimmered with heat in the space between them. “Bethany Burke?” he said.

Long golden hair fell in loose curls around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. The way she nodded her head in confirmation and the resulting ripple of that incredible hair jolted Colt with the kind of emotion he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Or maybe it wasn’t emotion. Maybe he’d been too long away from women. Well, he planned to work on that, and from the look of things, Gompers, Texas, could be the place to do it.

“I’m the mail-order cowboy,” he said into the silence.

Her skin was nut-brown from spending long hours in the sun. Her eyes startled him again with their beauty. She had a soft-looking mouth, the lips full and berry-red without the aid of makeup. It formed itself into a perfect O.

“You wrote. You said you needed a ranch hand.” His voice was gruff and rusty with disuse. He hadn’t done much talking in prison.

“I did. I do. I didn’t expect you to just—arrive,” she said.

“I rode over from town. Managed to cadge a ride down from Oklahoma for both me and Buckaroo with some folks who had extra room in their horse trailer.”

She was a little thing, although well-worn boots added a couple more inches to her five-two or so, and she was clearly all woman under that plaid shirt. A man’s shirt, too big for her, but it had been washed so many times that the well-worn cotton clung tightly to her fully rounded breasts.

No bra. He reckoned he knew such things. She’d left the top buttons unfastened to reveal a deep cleavage, shadowy and pretty near fascinating.

She toyed nervously with the front of her shirt, then realized he was watching. Her hand fell away. A roughly callused hand, but daintily made.

“Where do I bunk?” he said. He saw no point in wasting words. The ranch was a shambles; fences sagging, bunkhouse falling apart, who knew what else. There was work for him here.

She gestured with a thumb. “You’ll—you’ll find an apartment over the barn. I would have cleaned it out if I’d known you were coming.” She didn’t have the local accent, which had a tendency to twang like out-of-tune banjo strings.

“No matter if it’s clean or not. It’ll do. I’ll start in the morning.” He nodded his head curtly and began to lead his horse away.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

He stopped and turned slowly. His shadow fell across her face. “McClure,” he said. “Clayton McClure. They call me Colt.”

“Well, Mr. McClure, we’ll meet in my kitchen tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp. Breakfast. We’ll talk about your duties then.”

“You got it,” he said.

He knew she watched him all the way to the barn, but he didn’t care. As soon as he popped the top off the beer, he took the stairs two at a time and poked around the tiny apartment. If you could put that name to a room-and-a-half with a tiny bath attached. Everything was furred with a thick layer of dust, but that was Texas. Basic furniture, nothing fancy. It would do.

Colt wasn’t daunted by the lack of suds the soap coaxed out of the trickle of alkaline water that passed for a shower in his quarters. Afterward he unfurled an old musty blanket from his bedroll and spread out naked on the bare mattress provided. The air was stuffy; not much of a window. His skin was slicked with sweat before he was half asleep.

He didn’t dream. He’d trained himself not to. It was better that way, especially when your dreams had a way of slipping out from under you and catapulting you into a shaky shadowy world where nightmares woke you screaming.

BETHANY BURKE STARED wide-eyed as Colt disappeared into the barn. When she’d first seen him trying to outrun the cloud of dust he’d stirred up as he galloped toward her, she’d thought he was one of those mirages conjured up out of the heat on a hot summer’s day. She’d almost forgotten about replying to that peculiar ad.

But, she admitted to herself, if she’d ordered a cowboy to her own specifications, he couldn’t have been better. He was lean and lithe, without an extra ounce of fat. His narrow hips sat a horse like he was born to it. Those wide shoulders meant muscular upper arms, good for roping and branding. And he had hungry eyes.

That last thought took her by surprise. Hungry for what? Or was the expression under those drooping eyelids a raw insolence unconcealed by his thin veneer of politeness? Those eyes weren’t only hungry, they were hard as flint. A shiver ran down her spine in spite of the fact that it was ninety-five degrees in the shade.

“Who was that I saw go into the barn?”

Bethany whirled to see Frisco, her bandy-legged foreman, stumping toward her from the equipment shed. Jesse James, the border-collie mix, bounded along beside him.

“A guy I just hired to work on the ranch,” Bethany said offhandedly.

“What guy?”

“His name’s Colt McClure. I answered an ad.”

“What ad?”

Bethany scuffed the ground with the toe of one boot. “It was a kind of mail-order thing.”

“What,” Frisco said suspiciously, “are you talking about?”

“I ordered him. Through an advertisement. He showed up. That’s about all there is to tell.” She turned toward the house, but Frisco caught her arm.

His expression was incredulous. “You ordered this honcho through one of them catalogs you’re always getting in the mail?” Frisco always teased her about her penchant for mail-order catalogs. Seed catalogs, clothing catalogs, knickknacks, lingerie, and health-care catalogs—all found their way into the big Banner-B Ranch mailbox.

Bethany bit her bottom lip. “The ad was in the Cattle Rancher’s Journal. It was a quarter page, with a wide border. I couldn’t help seeing it.”

Frisco released her arm and shot her a baleful glance out of his one eye. “Looking for trouble if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you, Frisco. We need someone around here, and we need him desperately.” This ongoing conversation between them reminded her of a snake eating its tail, circling ’round and ’round.

“I try my best,” Frisco said, lapsing into his defensive mode. “I know I’m getting a little worn, but I ain’t about to assume room temperature yet.”

Bethany slid an arm around his stooped shoulders, wishing that every successive episode of this debate didn’t have to scrape away at Frisco’s self-esteem, although she knew that’s exactly the way it was. “I want you to take it easy because Doc Hogan said you should. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

Frisco jutted his jaw out. “So you invite a perfect stranger to live in the barn. A stranger who needs a shave real bad. Hair’s overlong, too. He looks no ’count.”

“We’ve had hands who weren’t razor-friendly before, Frisco.” She tried not to think about Colt McClure’s eyes and how they’d sliced right through her like a well-aimed bullet.

“One of them hands you’re talking about took a hankering after somebody else’s horse, another ran up an overlarge tab at Pug’s Tavern before he lit off for parts unknown, and the last one wrecked the pickup. That’s what happens when you hire people you don’t know.”

“No need to have a conniption fit over this, Frisco. Besides, no one we know wants to work here. Mott Findley has seen to that.” Mott was her late husband’s cousin, and he wanted nothing more than to see the Banner-B go belly-up.

Frisco worked his forehead into a knot, a sure sign that he was engaged in deep thought, and rammed his hands down in his pockets. “We’ll see how this guy works out,” he said grudgingly.

Bethany bent and scratched Jesse behind one ear. The dog immediately stopped thumping his tail in the dust and relieved himself on the sunflower seedlings she’d recently set out on the side of the house. He always did this when he was happy, according to Frisco.

It was exasperating, this habit of Jesse’s. “You know, Jesse,” she said, “you’re a mighty expensive flea motel. For two cents I’d trade you in on a good mouser.”

“Jesse eats cats for fun,” Frisco warned. “He ran off all them barn cats we used to have.”

“Maybe I’ll get me a nice inside cat, one of those flat-faced white Persians to sit on the windowsill and lord it over all of us. Including that ungrateful mutt.”

Frisco looked pained. “You really want to tick Jesse off, you go right ahead and do that. No telling what Jesse might do, you tick him off.”

Bethany sighed. They’d acquired the dog to help with cutting cattle, but from the beginning he’d refused to have anything to do with such foolishness. The fact was, Jesse was untrainable. Unfortunately he and Frisco had bonded.

“I’d better go find that posthole digger. I plan to let our new hand build fence tomorrow,” she said.

Frisco’s one good eye regarded her with deep affection. “Don’t get to counting on this mail-order guy,” he said.

Bethany remained unruffled as she headed toward the shed. It had taken Frisco a few years to learn to take orders from a woman. And besides, she was the one who had promised Justin that she’d make the Banner-B a success.

She’d do it. No matter what.

THE NEXT MORNING BETHANY hurried downstairs in her bathrobe to plug in the coffeemaker at precisely six-fifteen. She never set her alarm clock because this was the time she always woke up, rain or shine, weekday or weekend. But today was different. Today she would interview Colt McClure.

She sneaked an early cupful from the coffeepot and nursed the fragrant steaming mug in her two hands as she paused to fill her ears with the first warbles and trills of birdsong outside her window. Morning bathed the home place in delicate silver-gray light, unfurling a misty curtain to blur the relentless brown everything.

As usual, she turned on the radio for the early farm-and-ranch report, “brought to you by Rubye’s Beauty Box, we curl up and dye for you.” Down by the chicken coop, a raucous rooster greeted the slow-rising rim of the sun with a jubilant fanfare. Later the heat would be blistering, sucking precious moisture from the grass, the trees, the vegetables in the garden.

When Bethany had first arrived on the Banner-B, she’d hated west Texas with its endless wind and dust and heat and glare, not to mention its indigestible food. Later, after a rough period of adjustment and more Texas Pete hot sauce than she cared to think about, Bethany had come to appreciate the wide-open spaces and the friendly people.

Anyway, she thought with a sigh, she was here to stay. At least she’d learned to tolerate the food well enough. Some people bragged about abs of steel. Bethany was proud of her stomach of iron, forged by repeated blasting in hot-pepper sauce.

Listening to the ranch report with one ear, she mentally began to arrange the day’s schedule around breaking in a new hand. First she’d make sure this McClure guy knew how to dig those postholes, and while he was working at it, she’d drive into town and sweet-talk old Fred Kraegel into letting her charge more barbed wire to her account. Later she’d tackle Sidewinder, the most ornery horse in the world.

But before she got started on any of this, she’d best get decent, which meant throwing on a pair of jeans and one of Justin’s old shirts, same as she did every day. There was no need to put on airs while she interviewed a new employee. By her best recollection, the last time she’d worn a dress was to her husband’s funeral five years before.

Once upon a time before she married, before she moved from Wichita to Gompers, Texas, to start a new life as Justin Burke’s wife and helpmate, Bethany had worked in an office. In a tall building. With air-conditioning. And she’d dressed stylishly in suits complete with pantyhose and heels for her nine-to-five job in an insurance office. She’d been Bethany Carroll then, had belonged to a young singles’ club, jaunted around town in a red convertible and had never owned a jar of moisturizer in her life.

Now she rode a horse and worked cattle, gunned a dented pickup truck through the dry arroyos and gullies of the Banner-B, and her only concession to skin care was giant jars of moisturizer that she ordered periodically from one of those catalogs Frisco was always grousing about. Her main hobby consisted of daydreaming about growing the hardscrabble ranch left to Justin by his daddy into a spread whose name could actually be uttered in the same breath with the word prosperous.

That time, however, still seemed mighty far in the future. So far, in fact, that maybe by the time she could afford decent clothes and makeup again, she wouldn’t have the face or the figure to show off anymore.

But I’m only thirty years old! Out of sheer desperation, she reminded herself of this often. Most of the time she felt much older; the responsibility of the ranch weighed heavily on her shoulders. With no family of her own, distanced from her friends in Wichita by a life that they couldn’t begin to understand, she often felt so alone.

These thoughts were abruptly ended by the unmistakable clomp of cowboy boots on the wide wooden boards of the back porch. A wild glance at the clock confirmed that it was only six-thirty, too early for Frisco and certainly too early for Colt McClure. And Mott Findley usually didn’t swagger onto her porch at this ungodly hour.

She edged a cautious eye around the bravely starched curtain hanging at the window. It wasn’t even properly light outside.

“Ma’am?” Colt McClure peered back at her, and her coffee sloshed over the rim of her mug before she dumped it in the sink with a clatter. She was suddenly mindful that she wore nothing under her old chenille bathrobe but bare skin. Backing away from the window, she clutched the two sides of fabric together. “I told you seven o’clock,” she said sharply.

He cleared his throat. “No offense, ma’am, but I’m here to work. I don’t mind gettin’ an early start.”

“Well,” she said. Her robe had never seemed so skimpy, and she wondered if it revealed anything she didn’t want him to see. A sneaky peek at her reflection in the black plastic door of the microwave oven reassured her. Faded yellow chenille was not exactly titillating stuff.

She flicked off the radio. “Come in,” she said. She kept her back to the door, hitched the belt of her robe even tighter and busied herself pouring him a mug of coffee until he was inside. Well, actually it oozed more than poured—she brewed her coffee strong.

When she turned around, Colt McClure, all six feet and more of him, stood to one side of the kitchen table crushing the brim of his worn black Stetson brushpopper in his enormous hands. He smelled of soap and leather and clean blue denim, and he’d slicked his dark hair back behind his ears. Today he looked much less fierce; he’d shaved the beard stubble to reveal a square, lean jaw. His eyes gleamed above the planes and hollows of his face, and she searched them for a hint of the insolence she’d noticed yesterday. If it was there, he’d concealed it.

He wasn’t drop-dead handsome; far from it. The scar bisecting one cheek took care of that. But he gave off a rugged strength, and he was certainly an imposing figure, with shoulders way out to El Paso, stomach flat as the west Texas plains, and long, long legs. His jeans were well-worn and so soft that they clung all the way down. His thighs—but she had no business thinking about his thighs. Or any of the rest of him.

“Sit down, please,” she said briskly, attempting a brief and impersonal smile. “Sugar? Cream?”

“Black,” he said. He lowered himself onto one of the kitchen chairs, the woven cane seat creaking under his weight. Even sitting, he blocked a good deal of light from the door.

She slid the coffee in front of him and clapped a spoon down on the table beside it. He kept his eyelids lowered, which she found respectful until she realized that he was staring at her bare feet. Her toes curled unwittingly, and she felt a slow heat work its way up from her chest to her neck to her cheeks.

She turned away in embarrassment, so fast that the bottom part of her robe flipped open. In exasperation, she yanked it closed. She’d give anything to be able to stuff the fabric between her knees and clamp it in place with her kneecaps, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to appear undignified.

She’d intended for the new hand to take her seriously, which was perhaps a futile hope at this point. Nevertheless, she tried.

“I believe your ad said that you’ve worked on a ranch before,” she ventured primly as she assembled eggs, flour, milk and bacon on the counter beside the stove.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in that grating voice of his, rusty as an old door hinge.

If she wanted more information, obviously she’d have to dig.

“What kind of work?”

“Everything.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Ropin’, brandin’, workin’ cattle. Fences, barn repair, cleanin’ out ditches. Balin’ hay, trainin’ horses—”

“Are you good at it?” She slapped cold bacon into the warming skillet.

“At which, ma’am?”

“Breaking horses.”

“I think so.”

“What’s your philosophy about it?” she shot back. She began to cut out biscuits with the top of a jelly glass the way Dita, Frisco’s wife, had showed her years ago when Bethany had arrived at the ranch with no more idea of how to bake biscuits than how to rope or brand or ride fences.

He watched her punching out floury circles of dough, narrowing his eyes as if he suspected a trick question. Which it wasn’t. “Philosophy, ma’am?”

“Please don’t call me ma’am. You can call me Mrs. Burke. Or Bethany, if you prefer.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I asked your philosophy about breaking horses,” she reminded him.

He paused before answering. “I don’t like to think of it as breakin’. I like to think of it as buildin’. I think if you’ve got a horse to train, it’s like bringin’ up a kid. Your future relationship with the horse depends on how well you do it.”

She was surprised at this easy, unexpected flow of words and risked a quick look at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You’ve trained a lot of horses?”

“A fair number. Even some tough ones.”

She turned around and studied him. His deep-set gray eyes were thoughtful and clear, with silvery motes swimming in their depths.

“And how do you go about training a horse that doesn’t cooperate?” She was thinking of Sidewinder, the two-year-old quarter horse who had, of late, appointed himself the bane of her existence. Or so it seemed.

Colt’s eyes, those marvelous eyes, met hers with a crinkle of amusement. There was nothing hard about them now. “You have to train an uncooperative horse like porcupines make love. Very gently, ma’am—Mrs. Burke.”

She whipped back around, not wanting him to see that she was charmed as well as embarrassed. She shoved the biscuits into the oven and slammed the oven door. The noise it made reverberated into an awkward silence. Well, perhaps it was only awkward for her. She didn’t dare look at him.

“Mr. McClure, how many eggs can you eat, and how do you like them cooked?” she blurted.

“You better call me Colt. And I can eat five eggs. Or six. Sunny-side up.”

“I don’t usually cook for the help. From now on, you’ll eat with the ranch foreman at his house.” She was setting boundaries now; she discouraged familiarity with the hands.

“That’s fine.”

She drew a deep stabilizing breath. “Maybe I’d better explain things. Frisco’s my foreman, and he’s been here since my late husband was a boy. Dita’s his wife, a hard worker. She does the work of a man around here. Eddie’s their nineteen-year-old son, and he cooks, handles odd jobs and works in the garden.” She didn’t tell him the rest about Eddie; Colt would figure that out for himself.

“This Dita—you mean to say she’s a regular hand?”

“That’s what I mean to say, all right. She’s in her forties and as strong as an ox. She’s also solid and dependable, which is more than you can say for some.”

“I see,” Colt said, although she knew he was puzzling over a forty-something-year-old woman being employed as a hand. Well, Dita was a blessing, and you had to take help wherever you could get it. Also, Dita and Frisco and Eddie were her family. They weren’t related by blood, but they were all she had now that Justin was gone; her own parents had died when she was a teenager.

“You have any objection to hard work, cowboy?” she asked Colt.

“That’s what I’m looking for,” he said evenly.

“I’d say you’ve found it at the Banner-B.”

“Looks like it, all right. Speakin’ of which, what do you want me to do today?”

“Dig postholes,” she said. “You’ll find the posthole digger in an empty stall in the barn, and my foreman will show you where to start.”

She caught him eyeballing her breasts, but he quickly glanced away when he saw that she noticed. Still, she felt her nipples pucker under the soft robe. And in response to what? A cocky attitude, a penetrating gaze?

Colt McClure wasn’t her type; he was a drifter, no doubt, and there was something hard about him. Something tough. And something dangerous enough to set off wild alarms inside her head.

She’d meant to ask Colt where he’d worked last, and she wanted him to supply references, but her physical response to him was getting way out of line. It embarrassed her and made her feel guilty—she hadn’t even looked at another man since Justin. She’d figured that sex was something she’d never experience again, like wearing suits to work and drawing a regular paycheck.

Fine, but then why was she feeling something breathtakingly akin to lust simmering just below the surface of her skin? Why had her heartbeat gone all aflutter under the chaste folds of her robe?

And the man who was responsible for her turmoil was totally unaware. Colt McClure wolfed down eggs and biscuits as if there were no tomorrow. He had a sensual mouth and big hands, and for an instant she imagined that mouth exploring hers and those hands caressing her breasts.

No!

The man was an unknown quantity with nothing to commend him but the right physique for the job and a willingness to work at the Banner-B. Bethany probably shouldn’t have hired him, but what else was she to do? She’d promised Justin to make the ranch a success, and she couldn’t do it all alone even with Frisco and his family’s help. And maybe she wouldn’t be able to do it at all if cousin Mott succeeded in snatching the place out from under her.

Oh, why had she thought of that? Sudden tears welled in her eyes, and she blinked them away. If Mott succeeded—but she’d already made up her mind that she wouldn’t allow it, no matter how powerful he was, no matter what his political connections.

“Anything wrong, Mrs. Burke?”

Bethany couldn’t let herself seem vulnerable to this man. Or to anyone else for that matter. Vulnerability was too often seen as weakness. But oh, sometimes she felt her loneliness like a vise around her heart, and sometimes she thought she couldn’t stand the pain of it.

She tossed a spatula into the sink with a distracting clatter and made a blind beeline for the hall stairs. She called out over her shoulder, “Any questions about the job, ask Frisco.”

“I thank you kindly for breakfast,” he called after her. “And do you have any sheets for my bed?”

She pretended that she hadn’t heard, but she wished she’d thought of that. Of course he’d need sheets. And maybe some other things, too.

It was the other things that she didn’t dare to contemplate. Felt guilty for even thinking about. But she was sure that they also had something to do with bed.

CHAPTER TWO

BY ONE O’CLOCK IN THE afternoon, the day was rolling along full blaze ahead. Colt swiped at his forehead with one sleeve of the shirt he’d tied around his waist in an attempt to tan away some of the prison pallor. He hadn’t been out in the sun much for the past three years—inmates were allowed only one hour a day exercise in the pen.

He squinted for a moment at the line of dust rolling toward him from the horizon, then threw himself into the task at hand—digging holes. It wasn’t an interesting job, but it gave him time to think.

Thinking was a pastime he’d cultivated in prison because there hadn’t been a whole lot else to do except explore the prison law library for information that would win him a new trial. New information had surfaced, finally. And he’d been sprung, thank God. The trouble was, he hadn’t thought out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. When you didn’t think you were going to be able to have a real life, you didn’t plan for it. At least, he hadn’t. All his plans went down the drain when the judge handed down that prison sentence.

He moved on to the next spot. Now he could see the dilapidated ranch pickup at the head of all that dust, and he figured it was probably Frisco checking to see if he was working. The old guy didn’t think much of him. Colt had figured that out the first time they set eyes on each other. Or eye, in the case of Frisco, who wore a black patch over his left one.

The pickup jolted over a rise and pulled to a stop just short of where he stood. Colt worked stolidly, knowing he had to prove himself. To his surprise, the person who slid out of the truck wasn’t Frisco but Bethany Burke.

“Greetings, cowboy,” she said. “How’s it going?” She seemed cautious and so solemn. He wondered what it would take to make her bust loose and let go of that cool reserve.

He straightened and leaned on the posthole digger. A runnel of sweat trickled down his back. “It’s going okay,” he said.

“I brought you something to drink.” She looked deceptively delicate as she hauled a large thermos and a mason jar out of the pickup and poured him some iced tea. It was sweetened already, the way he liked it. He thanked her and gulped it down before holding out the jar for more.

Even in this miserable heat, Bethany looked so cool that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth or on any other place, either. She stood close enough for him to inhale the warm sweet fragrance of her skin, and it reminded him of the scent of wildflowers borne on a prairie breeze. Colt’s eyes were inadvertently drawn to her cleavage, or rather to where her cleavage had formerly shown. Today her shirt—big and blousy like yesterday’s—was buttoned higher.

His eyes roamed elsewhere, taking in the paler skin of her inner arm, the glint of sunlight on blond curls, the way she stood with one hip canted to counter the weight of the big thermos. He felt a rush and a stirring somewhere south of his belt and bolted down the second jar of cold tea in an attempt to quench the fire.

He made himself look somewhere, anywhere, which was why he happened to notice that over on the highway, a small light-colored sedan had slowed to armadillo speed. That in itself seemed unusual, since when people hit a lonely stretch of road in isolated parts like these, they tended to floor the accelerator. The car stopped briefly, then sped up. Bethany kept her eye on it the same way he did before turning back to him.

“Did you talk to Frisco about supper?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Colt said. Then he remembered. She didn’t like to be called ma’am. And somehow Mrs. Burke didn’t fit her. He’d call her Bethany, but it seemed overly familiar to call her by her first name. Okay, so from now on he’d call her nothing. Though he did think Bethany was a good name for her—soft and feminine, just like her.

“And did he tell you what time to show up?”

“Six o’clock,” Colt said. Because he didn’t include the ma’am, he thought he sounded too abrupt. “Dinner today was delicious,” he added.

“Eddie cooks at noon. He’s good at it.” She watched him carefully for his reaction, but he wasn’t going to give her one. Sure, he knew about the kid. The signs were unmistakable. Eddie had Down’s syndrome, born with an extra chromosome. Mentally challenged, as some put it. That didn’t bother him. Eddie had been polite, friendly and interested.

“Can’t say I’ve ever had a better meat loaf,” Colt said.

Bethany’s face lit up with a smile. Clearly the kid meant a lot to her. “You’ll eat well at the Neilsons’,” she said.

He nodded, bedazzled by the shimmer of her when she smiled like that.

“I’m going to leave this thermos of tea with you,” she said, setting it on the ground. “There’s salt tablets in the barn, and you’d better take them in this weather. You can keep the thermos. You’ll need something to drink when you’re working far away from the home place in such heat.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” he said.

Without saying anything else, she marched back to the pickup and got in. When the engine turned over, she backed and wheeled around, leaving him standing at the edge of a spurt of dust.

Colt watched her go, thinking that a high-class babe like her was wasted ’way out here in no man’s land. Bethany Burke should be someplace where there were palm trees waving in the breeze, balmy nights and a passel of admiring men flitting around her in appreciation of her spectacular beauty.

Come to think of it, he could appreciate it well enough, but he didn’t think she’d like it. She’d made it clear that her relationship with him was to be businesslike.

He wondered about her, wondered how long she’d been struggling to make a go of this place. There was something valiant about Bethany Burke’s refusal to do the obvious with the Banner-B. Many an experienced rancher would have packed it in by this time. But she didn’t seem of much of a mind to give up. She wasn’t a quitter. That was one thing the two of them had in common.

The pickup merged with the horizon where it flattened under the weight of the sky, and Colt put his back into his work and dug another posthole. He thought about his new employer, pictured her reclining under a palm tree in one of those tiny string bikinis, a demure come-hither glint in those remarkable blue eyes.

He might have sworn off nighttime dreaming, but there was no reason why he couldn’t indulge in a few daydreams now and then.

COLT HEARD THE RUCKUS as he was storing the posthole digger in the corrugated equipment shed where he thought it belonged, not in the barn where he’d found it. A horse squealed in panic, the heart-wrenching sound echoing back and forth between the barn and the shed. A horse’s terror was one thing Colt couldn’t stand to think about. He knew what it was like to feel that way—no damn good.

He ran out of the shed and around it. A red roan galloped around the perimeter of the corral behind the barn, bucking every once in a while for good measure. Whatever else was going on wasn’t any clearer than his vision, which was normally 20/20 but presently obscured by the ominous cloud of dust billowing in the air.

Then he saw Bethany Burke clambering up on the fence, displaying the pert curve of her backside in the process. She dragged a leather halter behind her.

“What the—?” he hollered.

“This horse is meaner than cuss,” she hollered over her shoulder. The halter caught on the fence post, and then her foot slipped and she fell back into the corral.

Colt was over the fence in an instant. The roan, a thousand pounds or so of muscle and sinew, was wild-eyed and galloping straight toward Bethany. She realized the danger and rolled over twice to fling herself away from the onslaught of thundering hooves. Colt planted his two feet firmly in the dust between Bethany and the horse and fixed his gaze on the horse’s eyes. Not surprisingly, the horse fled to the other side of the corral and stood panting, sides quivering.

“Get up,” Colt said tersely into the sudden quiet. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the horse.

Behind him, he heard Bethany climb on the fence, up and over. Colt backed away, still holding the horse with his gaze. Then he vaulted over the fence and jumped down, landing lightly beside her.

Bethany’s face was ashen. She was scared. He couldn’t blame her; she could have been trampled.

“You all right?” he asked sharply.

She nodded and closed her eyes for a long moment. “I’m okay. Thanks.”

“What were you doing?”

“Trying to put a halter on him.”

“Who spooked this horse? Not you, I take it?”

She lifted a shoulder and let it fall, but she wasn’t as nonchalant as she seemed. A slick of perspiration beaded her forehead, and he thought he detected a slight trembling of her upper lip—a very sensual upper lip, it seemed to him.

“You’d have to ask Mott Findley.”

“Who’s he?”

“My neighbor. I took Sidewinder from Mott in trade believing I could help him, but I’m thinking he’s hopeless. Sometimes I’ll be making progress, then something sets him off. If he can’t catch on to what a good horse is supposed to do on a ranch, I’ll have to get rid of him.”

Colt knew what that meant. The roan was well on his way to becoming poodle food. With a marginal operation like the Banner-B, a horse wasn’t worth the feed and vet care it took to maintain him if he couldn’t pull his weight.

He moved closer to the fence, leaned on it. The sinking sun felt good spread across his shoulders. The roan, a gelding about fourteen and a half hands high, had the powerful hind-quarters and deep chest of a good quarter horse, a breed developed for cutting cattle and roping steers. To say this horse was skittish was an understatement—he was downright dangerous. Colt hadn’t seen a horse in such bad shape in years, not since Ryzinski’s. He didn’t have to think about it for more than a moment.

“You mind if I have a try at him?”

Bethany chuckled mirthlessly. “Not if he’s going to kill a perfectly good ranch hand.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Colt turned around and looked at her. She was covered with dust, but she didn’t seem to mind. She’d bundled her hair into a barrette at her nape and tucked her thumbs inside the waistband of her jeans. It drew them tight around her belly. Nice.

“You think you can calm him down, go ahead. Just don’t take any chances.”

“I figure I can help him some,” he told her. She didn’t say anything, so he climbed up on the fence and studied the roan. The horse was blowing air in long huffs and eyeing Colt with trepidation, his ears laid back along his neck. His sleek coat gleamed in the sun.

“What’s his name?”

“Sidewinder. Like the rattlesnake.”

Colt wasn’t sentimental about animals. He wasn’t sentimental about anything anymore. But Sidewinder was an animal caught in a prison, and Colt identified with that. Worse, the animal had no one to help him get out. And a horse only knew to run when threatened. A horse didn’t fight. Block his flight, and you terrified the animal. The horse was beside himself with wanting to be free.

Trouble was, this horse would never be free. He was expected to work. If someone didn’t show him how to work, he’d soon be a dead horse. Nothing free in being dead.

Colt’s shirt was sweaty and stuck to his skin; he stripped it off in one swift motion and flung it over the fence. He alit from the fence, dropping into the corral. Bethany moved closer, but he didn’t look at her. The only power that would hold Sidewinder was the strength of his gaze, and this wasn’t the time to waste it.

The horse rolled his eyes, shook his proud head and took off at a trot, but that was what Colt expected. He strode to the center of the enclosure and kept his body turned fully toward Sidewinder, maintaining eye contact. What has someone done to you? he said silently. He’d never known if horses knew what people were thinking, and he wasn’t sure it mattered if they did. He didn’t need any special ESP with Sidewinder because his body language would do the job. It had never failed yet.

Sidewinder took off at a gallop, and Colt let him run off some steam, facing him all the while, finally allowing himself to break eye contact. Soon he noticed that Sidewinder kept the ear on Colt’s side still, and Colt knew that the horse was trying to understand the situation. In Sidewinder’s world, Colt was a new person presenting a new scent and a new attitude; Sidewinder was intelligent and wanted to know what was going on.

The horse made several more revolutions of the corral. He was amazingly beautiful as he ran, a magnificent horse. Bethany looked on doubtfully from the other side of the fence. Colt couldn’t blame her for being skeptical.

It took a while, but Colt finally recognized the signs. Sidewinder licked his lips and pretended to chew. The horse was ready to calm down.

“Maybe you’d better come out of there,” Bethany said behind him. “He’s looking agitated.”

She’d misread the signs. Lots of people did. Bethany clearly thought that Sidewinder was gathering himself for an attack. Well, her thinking was not unusual.

“He’s fine, just fine,” he said. To his satisfaction, Sidewinder dropped his head and kept trotting. This was a signal.

Colt now broke eye contact and changed his body position. Sidewinder stopped running. The roan stood, his flanks heaving, watching. Colt didn’t move.

“Colt—” Bethany said urgently.

Colt shook his head slightly and she knew enough to keep quiet. The horse took a tentative step forward, then another. He stopped again. Colt waited.

Then Sidewinder, the horse that had almost trampled Bethany Burke less than a half hour ago, walked slowly to him and stood submissively at his side.

Colt spoke to him then. “Good boy,” he said as he reached out and stroked Sidewinder’s nose. The horse remained alert, but allowing himself to be stroked was an admission of trust. Colt kept stroking, moving his hand downward to rub the horse’s neck. This horse was no problem horse. He just hadn’t been handled right.

“Never have I seen anything like that. It’s incredible,” Bethany said from her perch on the fence. She sounded awestruck.

“Tomorrow we’ll try a saddle,” Colt said. He patted Sidewinder’s neck and made a slow turn. The horse followed him when he headed for the gate.

Bethany met him on the other side and waited while he closed and latched it. “Lordy, Colt, what is it you do?” she said.

Colt was feeling pretty good about what he’d accomplished. “Secret,” he said. He didn’t let on how psyched he was.

“Will you really try a saddle tomorrow?”

He peeled his shirt off the top rail of the fence. It had dried stiff, and he didn’t want to put it on so he crumpled it into a ball.

“And maybe more.” Until those final moments, he hadn’t realized how exhilarating it was to be doing what he did best. He’d been aware of Bethany Burke. He’d wanted to impress her. But that wasn’t the main thing.

Bethany studied him, and he wondered if she was assessing more than his resolve. Her gaze dropped to his bare chest, a movement that looked involuntary. Or was he reading too much into this? Maybe he’d better stick to reading horses.

“Well, cowboy, that was some show. I’d like you to tell me how you do it. I mean it.”

“I can show you much better than I can tell you,” he said. “Meet me here tomorrow afternoon at the same time.”

“Is it okay if Frisco watches?”

“How about just you?” So far Frisco had been all hiss and vinegar, and the idea of the old guy’s spectating held no appeal. Colt was determined to cement his place here before setting himself up for criticism. A job was a job, and he intended to keep this one. It was far enough away from Oklahoma, for one thing, and there was plenty to do and no competition. The Banner-B suited him.

“All right, then, just me.” Bethany smiled at him.

Smiles from beautiful women had been few and far between in the last few years, and it was all Colt could do not to turn his considerable charm on her.

Bad idea. He’d save it for the horse.

“I’ll be out planting posts tomorrow early,” he said. He deliberately tacked a gruff edge to his words.

“Fine.”

With a curt nod, he left her. Next, supper with the Neilsons. Maybe he could soften up the old coot by being friendly with the kid. Eddie liked him, he could tell.

COUNTRY MUSIC WAS PLAYING on the radio, something whiny and sad that made Bethany feel mopey just listening to it. She rattled around in the kitchen, cobbling a meal together from leftovers because she didn’t feel like cooking. To make things even worse, she was nursing a bruised shoulder, an unpleasant souvenir of her dust-up with Sidewinder.

While her food warmed in the microwave, she wondered what was going on around the Neilsons’ supper table. Frisco was probably whittling invisible notches in that chip on his shoulder, and Dita would be making cheerful table conversation. Eddie—well, Eddie was Eddie.

What would Colt McClure add to the mix? He wasn’t exactly Mr. Personality. And anyway, why did she care?

Well, she did care. She desperately wanted the new hand to work out. Not to prove Frisco wrong, but to make life easier at the Banner-B for all of them. After she’d left the corral that afternoon, she’d ridden out to the new fence line and checked on the work Colt had done. He’d dug more fencepost holes than she’d imagined one man could do in a single day. And what he’d accomplished with Sidewinder was nothing less than phenomenal.

Bethany was glad that the old system of breaking a horse’s willpower and creating subservience through fear had fallen into disrepute. She hated pain and cruelty of any kind. These days, the trend in horse training was to use more humane methods than trainers had employed in the past.

She and her own horse, Dancer, worked as a team, and next to Frisco, Bethany considered Dancer her best friend on the ranch. Consequently when Sidewinder first arrived in trade from Mott Findley for some extra bales of hay that she’d grown last year, when the horse had turned out for some reason to be skittish and afraid, she’d thought that teaching him was a mere matter of showing him love and thereby developing trust. So far, all her high-minded theory had achieved for her was a near-death experience courtesy of a terrified horse that was worth less than spit.

But Colt McClure knew something she didn’t, something that would save Sidewinder. He had a rare gift. And Bethany was eager to learn his secret.

She’d been so preoccupied with all she’d had to do today that she’d clean forgotten that Colt needed sheets for his bed. After supper, she loaded the dishwasher and then rummaged in the linen closet until she found what she was looking for. Colt would probably still be eating with Frisco and his family, so she’d drop the sheets off and afterward take a long walk the way she often did late in the evening.

That rascal Jesse roused himself from his spot alongside her old slat-bottomed porch rocker and followed her as she headed toward the barn, her arms full of neatly folded sheets and an extra pillow.

“Dumb dog,” she said to him, nice as pie even though she didn’t feel it. “Trying to ruin my sunflowers. Seems like after all I’ve done for you, you could show respect for the things I love. How am I ever going to get flowers started around the house? What am I going to do with you, Jesse James?”

Jesse, outlaw that he was, wagged his tail enthusiastically and lifted his leg on the truck tire.

Bethany, thoroughly put out, kept walking. “Like I said, Jesse, you’re a dumb dog. But maybe not so dumb. You’ve got Frisco on your side at least.” When he saw that Bethany was going nowhere more interesting than the barn, Jesse wandered away toward the bunkhouse, which was so decrepit and rundown that it wasn’t in use anymore.

The barn was big and more ramshackle than Bethany would have liked, but repairing either it or the bunkhouse was out of the question as long as she continued to have serious cash flow problems. Still, the barn was comforting in its familiarity. As she wrinkled her nose against the dust motes swimming in the last rays of the dying sun, Colt’s horse stuck his head over the door to his stall and pricked his ears. He was a beautiful black quarter horse, sleek and well-kept.

Her own horse, Dancer, nickered and blew in recognition at the sight of her, but her arms were full and Bethany couldn’t get to the carrot she’d stashed in her back pocket. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. Dancer snorted and bumped her nose against the gate to her stall.

All was quiet overhead in Colt’s apartment. Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the wooden steps as she made her way upstairs. The door hung wide-open, which didn’t surprise her much. Anybody would want to get a cross-draft going in such airless quarters.

“Colt?” she called.

No answer. Inside the tiny room, an oscillating fan positioned on a table blew air across the top of a chipped enamel pan heaped with ice cubes. A primitive air conditioner? It made sense, but not when Colt wasn’t there. And where’d he get that much ice? The apartment refrigerator was the small square kind college kids used in their dorms, and it made minuscule ice cubes.

She stepped into the room, thinking to leave the sheets on the bed. But before she could set them down, she saw a photograph resting on the mattress. It was tattered around the edges, as if someone had repeatedly taken it out of a wallet for a closer look.

The picture was one of those glamour photos. It was of a young woman with dark hair teased into what Bethany thought of as Mall Bangs and deep soulful eyes made comical by too much eye makeup. Despite the hair, eyes and the studded leather jacket with the collar turned up, there was something arresting about the girl’s expression. She looked as if under all that bravado she was hiding an underlying sorrow. Then again, it might be the photographer’s lighting. Whatever it was, she was very pretty.

Bethany was so absorbed in the photograph that she didn’t hear Colt until he entered the room. She wheeled around, startled. And then she saw him.

Her new ranch hand was buck naked and dripping from the shower. His hair was slicked back, darker wet than it was dry, and the water had curled the hair on his chest into tight little burrs. He looked as startled as she felt—thank goodness, certain strategic body parts were modestly hidden by the towel he held in front of him.

She dropped the sheets. Also the pillow. She was totally unprepared for the wave of lust and helplessness that washed over her at the sight of him. Colt McClure was magnificently built, from the solid muscles of his arms and chest to the hard rippling ridges of his abdomen. And below that—she looked away, refusing to speculate on what was behind the towel.

Their gazes caught and held. Bethany could not pull her eyes away. Colt, completely unabashed, merely quirked his eyebrows and said, “Hand me the jeans on that hook behind the door, would you?”

The spell broken, Bethany groped behind her, felt cloth and yanked blue denim. She tossed the jeans to him and bent over to gather up the sheets. When she straightened, he’d wrapped the towel around his waist.

“I—um—well, I brought the sheets,” she said, swallowing hard.

Colt cleared his throat. “I think you better excuse me for a few seconds,” he said, and he disappeared into the bathroom.

She wanted to run, but that would betray her embarrassment. She told herself that the thing to do was act as if nothing unusual had happened. This was a ranch. She was accustomed to stallions mounting mares, to bulls servicing cows, to misguided but amorous female dogs seeking out Jesse James.

But she wasn’t used to naked men.

When Colt emerged from the bathroom, she was nonchalantly shaking dust off the previously clean sheets and pillow.

“These got a little messed up,” she said, wondering if her cheeks were flushed. They certainly felt that way, and the air blowing across the ice cubes in the pan didn’t help much.

Colt wore only jeans, and his hair was still wet. It was wavy, something she hadn’t noticed when it was dry.

He reached for the sheet she was folding, and the fragrance of fabric softener and dried lavender wafted up from the soft percale. The scent brought back memories so sweet that they pierced her to the heart and left her aching inside. Justin had always liked the way she folded dried lavender sprigs from her little garden into the sheets, and they had spent many, many nights making love on those sheets in their double bed beneath the eaves of the bedroom they’d shared in the ranch house, the same room where his father had been born.

She surrendered the sheet. “I’d better be going,” she said as she watched Colt’s big hands smooth wrinkles out of the fabric. Thankfully she heard footsteps on the stairs and backed toward the door. She knew it wasn’t Frisco because the tread was too even to fit his unsteady gait, and for a moment, Bethany thought it might be Dita. But it was only Eddie, toting a bucketful of ice cubes.

“Mom sent these,” he said, holding out the bucket.

Colt grinned at him, man-to-man friendly. “Much obliged, Eddie. Set the bucket by the table.”

“Anytime you want ice or company, Mom says hang your red bandanna out the window.” Eddie brushed fine pale hair out of his eyes and turned to Bethany. “Hi, Bethany. Dancer wants a carrot and I don’t have one.”

Bethany was flooded with relief. Eddie had provided a rescue of sorts. She pulled the carrot out of her back pocket. “You’re in luck,” she said, dangling it in front of him.

Eddie grabbed at it, eyes asparkle. “Can I give it to her?” He was like a child, all enthusiasm. It was one of the things Bethany loved about him.

“Of course you can.”

She turned to say goodbye to Colt, but he had scooped the photograph up from the bed and was sliding it into his wallet. He looked preoccupied, thoughtful.

Bethany didn’t speak after all, just high-footed it out of there. Colt called out a goodbye, but not until she and Eddie were most of the way down the stairs.

AFTER THEY’D FED DANCER half of the carrot and given the other half to Colt’s horse as a kind of welcoming present, Eddie started back toward the Neilsons’ and Bethany headed for the stand of tall cottonwoods beside the creek. There she sank down on the mossy bench Justin had built for her during her first year at the Banner-B.

Sometimes she’d had to get away from the heat and dust and cattle and the rowdy hands they’d employed in those days, and this was where she’d sought refuge. Here, where the Little Moony Creek meandered slowly around slippery boulders and purled over shiny rocks; here where she could pull off her boots, spraddle her legs in unladylike fashion and dabble bare feet in the cool, refreshing water. In the spring, cottony seeds drifted down from the trees and caught in her hair, and in the summer, shiny triangular leaves cast welcome shadows across her upturned face. At night, myriad stars peeped through the lattice of foliage above, and now they were winking at her against the backdrop of a velvety blue sky. Winking seductively, it seemed to her tonight.

“Well, now what?” she said out loud. Frisco would have called it dingbat behavior, but sometimes Bethany talked to Justin in this special place. It kept her from getting too broody, too introspective. And it was a way to think over the pros and cons of a thing, like the time early on when she’d gotten it into her head to sell the ranch to Mott. She’d been disabused of that notion when Mott came to call and suggested that he could warm her on cold nights, which was when she had worked herself into such a hot temper that she’d thrown him out.

She was much too young for all the responsibility the inheritance of this ranch had placed on her, and she was the first one to admit it, though she excelled at putting up a brave front. After Justin died, she hadn’t thought she could go on without him. She’d had to grow tough and hard in order to cope. Sometimes she got tired of being tough and hard, she longed to be soft and sweet the way she used to be. That sweetness was what Justin had loved about her, and she wondered if he’d still love her now that she was a different person. But then, love didn’t die, Justin had always said. He had been positive of that, and because Bethany was the one he’d loved, she’d been sure of it, too. That undying love was why she liked to think that maybe Justin heard her out when she had a problem.

The problem was Colt McClure. Maybe she should have known better than to resort to the mail-order method of hiring, but what was she to do? Mott Findley was telling everyone that she couldn’t pay her bills. No hand worth his salt dared to take the chance of not being paid for services rendered at the Banner-B when there was plenty of work available on nearby ranches. It further complicated matters that she was a woman and Frisco was a grouch.

Whatever, she’d be better off not thinking about it, not talking out loud when no one else was present, and not allowing herself to be fascinated by Colt McClure. She’d be better off watching TV, which functioned as her mind-numbing drug of choice on nights when the stars seemed too near and her body seemed too deprived. This was definitely one of those nights.

Steady, said the voice in her head that she sometimes heard when she sat here. Steady.

That was all it said. She didn’t know for sure if the voice came from Justin or not. Maybe it was merely her own thoughts rattling around inside her brain. Whatever it was, it gave her heart. It gave her the will to go on.

After a while she stood and followed the path along the creek until it bisected the driveway about a half mile from the house. She was walking along, hands in pockets, mulling, when she saw a small car cut out of the driveway onto the blacktop highway. They’d had a visitor, then. She didn’t recognize the car at first, but as she watched it she thought it resembled the light-colored sedan that she’d seen moseying past when she was talking to Colt that afternoon out in the far pasture.

The car’s presence made the pit of her stomach feel hollow, which was ridiculous. It was just a car, perhaps someone visiting the Neilsons or lost on this remote stretch of highway after taking a wrong turn from town. She squared her shoulders and ignored the feeling that something was wrong.

Chances were that the car was driven by one of Mott’s minions, who might be checking out anything from the new hand to the line of fence posts going up along her property line. Well, let Mott look. She wasn’t ready to declare bankruptcy yet. Or to sell. He and his vultures would have a long wait.

She strode forward, head down, preoccupied with calculations. She’d ship cattle to the feed lots later in the month, and she’d be able to pay her bill at Kraegel’s after they were sold at auction. Fred Kraegel had thrown in an extra bag of feed today, she thought because he liked her and wanted her to succeed. Or maybe he just didn’t like Mott, which was not all that unusual in these parts.

She’d left the house before dark, so the porch light wasn’t on. When she started up the porch steps, lost in her musings, she almost tripped over the wicker basket.

Bethany’s first thought was that Dita had left her laundry on the front porch, which was a natural assumption because Bethany and the Neilsons shared one washer and dryer located in the utility room off the kitchen. But the kitchen was in the back of the house and had its own porch, so it was highly unlikely that Dita had left her basket in the front of the house.

And then she heard the whimper. Something inside the basket moved.

To her utter amazement, a small pink fist flailed the air. The whimper swelled to a cry, and when Bethany bent over to look, she saw a tiny baby wrapped in a print blanket. No, it must be a doll. It couldn’t be a baby. People didn’t really leave babies on peoples’ doorsteps. Certainly they didn’t leave them on her doorstep.

But it wasn’t a doll. It moved. It was crying, its face screwed up and its legs kicking emphatically under the blanket. Bethany dissolved into total bewilderment, half thinking this must be some trick of Mott Findley’s, yet knowing in her heart that it couldn’t be.

Jesse, who among his many failings never bothered to bark at strangers, loped over from the barn, tail wagging, tongue lolling, and looking doggily curious. And, ominously, much too happy.

Before the dog could proceed with his self-appointed mission to water the world, Bethany yanked the basket out of harm’s way. She nudged the front door open with the toe of her boot and carried the baby inside, letting the door slam in the perplexed Jesse’s face.

“Mercy me, what on earth!” she said to the baby, which only wailed more loudly.

Bethany pushed aside a stack of catalogs to set the basket on the narrow hall table and unpinned an envelope from the baby’s blanket. The outside of the envelope was blank, so she opened it and unfolded the note inside.

COLT, it said in printed block letters. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF ALYSSA FOR ME. I’LL BE BACK WHEN I GET SOME MONEY. I LOVE YOU, MARCY.

CHAPTER THREE

“WELL, I’LL BE,” SAID Frisco.

“Is the baby going to live with us?” Eddie asked. “Like a sister?”

“I don’t know, son,” Dita said as she slid an arm around his shoulders. Though she was a native of Mexico, her voice bore little trace of an accent; she’d lived in the States for more than twenty years.

“Colt?” Bethany stood with her arms folded across her chest, reminding herself to be tough. As soon as she’d realized that this baby wasn’t about to be leaving the premises right away, she had summoned Frisco and Dita and Eddie with a quick phone call. Eddie, goggle-eyed, had hurried to get Colt, who ran all the way from the barn. Now the five of them hovered over the wicker basket, and the baby was cooing and laughing up at them, putting on a show.

“I—well, I sure didn’t expect this,” Colt said. His voice rumbled deep in his throat, prickly as a cocklebur.

“The note was addressed to you.” In Bethany’s mind, Colt had some explaining to do.

Colt frowned at the bit of paper, then folded it and stuffed it down into his jeans pocket. He wore only jeans, a T-shirt and boots, and the T-shirt was wrinkled as if he’d just pulled it out of his bedroll. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.

“It’s a very nice baby,” Eddie said.

“Yes, it is. But it’s not our baby,” Bethany replied firmly, her irritation building.

Colt cleared his throat and looked from one of them to the other, his gaze stopping when it reached Bethany. The pause lengthened, stretched, hung there. “I know whose baby it is,” he said finally.

“Would you mind telling us?” Frisco growled.

Colt seemed to stew over this before shaking his head. “I can’t,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Bethany asked, sharp as all get-out. She recalled the well-worn photo on Colt’s bed and figured that the girl in the picture was Marcy.

“I just can’t say right now, ma’am. Mrs. Burke.” Colt had the good grace to look embarrassed, but he met her gaze squarely.

“Call me Bethany,” she said.

“Bethany,” Colt repeated. He drew a deep breath. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask your patience. And your understandin’. I’ll look after the baby.” He looked away for a moment as if considering. “The baby can stay in my apartment for tonight,” he added.

“There’s barely room in your apartment for one, much less a baby, and there’s no air,” Dita said. She tended to have a blunt manner, which people sometimes misunderstood.

“She could stay with us,” Eddie suggested, looking hopeful.

“Absolutely not,” Frisco huffed. “We ain’t set up for a baby.”

At that the baby puckered up her face and began to wail.

Frisco pounced on this development. “You see? Babies cry, and they make messes. Babies are a lot of work. We can’t have the baby at our house, and that’s that.” He stumped over to the door and stood looking out toward the barn.

The baby’s squalling roused a maternal instinct in Bethany. She found herself absolutely incapable of listening to the baby’s screams. Before she’d even thought about it, she had slid her hands beneath the tiny body and lifted Alyssa out of the basket. She halfway expected the child to fill her arms like a minisack of feed grain, but she wasn’t at all like that. Alyssa had less heft to her, and bones. Not only that, but the baby stiffened every time she screamed, clutching her little fingers into wildly brandishing fists and contorting her face into a tight red knot of anger. Instinctively and with only a slight hesitation at first, Bethany rocked the baby back and forth.

“Shh,” she crooned softly. “It’s all right. We won’t hurt you.” Her motherly instinct, or whatever it was, billowed full-blown. It took only a moment to decide what she had to do. She looked around at the others and spoke over the baby’s cries. “Alyssa can stay with me tonight. In the extra bedroom.”

“Great,” said Frisco. “Peachy. I’m going home to watch TV. Too much noise around here.” He slammed outside and down the stairs.

The noise of the door’s banging distracted Alyssa so that she suddenly stopped screaming. Dita touched the baby’s cheek. “So soft,” she said. “So sweet. Look, Eddie, at her little fingers. Have you ever seen anything so perfect?”

“Never,” Eddie breathed in awe.

“Dita, how old do you think she is?”

“A month or two, I’d guess.”

Colt rummaged under the blankets in the basket. “There’s canned formula and a bottle here,” he said, setting them on the table. “And enough disposable diapers until I can get more. And a pacifier.”

“Eddie and I can bring the old family cradle over,” Dita said. “It’s stored in the attic. Oh, and you’ll want cornstarch. I have that, too.”

“Cornstarch?” Bethany said blankly.

“It prevents diaper rash,” Dita told her.

“Goodness gracious,” she said, embarrassed. “I guess I don’t know much about babies.”

“No reason you should,” Dita said. She chuckled and patted Bethany on the shoulder. “I’ll dig out that cradle right now,” she said, and then she and Eddie left, Eddie chattering excitedly all the way out the door.

When it was quiet, Bethany stopped rocking the baby, who in turn regarded her solemnly. The baby’s hair looked like downy dark chick fluff, and her breath smelled milky. Bethany thought about how it might have been to hold her own baby like this, to have someone to care about more than anything in the world. More than the ranch, even.

“All this time I’ve been learning how to run the Banner-B while other women my age are having children,” she said, half to herself.

“Sounds like that bothers you.”

Colt’s words startled her. She had momentarily forgotten that he was there.

“My husband and I always wanted kids,” she said. The baby was staring intently up at her, searching her face for—what? Its mother? What kind of mother would leave a baby on someone’s doorstep?

Bethany found herself growing angry on the baby’s behalf. A baby deserved parents who cared enough about it to keep it safe. A baby deserved better than being dropped on someone’s doorstep, prey to anything that came along, like abusive kids or coyotes or—well, peeing dogs.

“Here, why don’t you let me take her,” Colt said. Wordlessly she let him lift the baby from her arms. Although his hands were big and rough, he was surprisingly gentle. Bethany thought, maybe Colt McClure has the same feeling for babies that he has for horses.

For some reason, this was a disturbing thought. Or was it the way Colt’s hands adjusted the baby’s blanket, or maybe the unaccustomed softness of expression that flickered brief as heat lightning across his rough-hewn face? Or the way he offered the pacifier and his look of relief when the baby accepted it?

Maybe none of this was so surprising. The baby was his. Had to be. Why else would this Marcy, whoever she was, be leaving a baby here?

Her anger burgeoned to include Colt. And yet there wasn’t much she could do if he’d earlier abandoned this Marcy and their baby to come to the Banner-B. It wasn’t her fault. She reminded herself that Colt was the one who’d advertised for work. She’d only answered the ad. It wasn’t as if she was the one responsible for his irresponsibility.

She thought if she didn’t get away from him she might say something she’d regret. “The baby’s probably hungry. I’ll go pour this formula into the bottle,” she said through clenched teeth. She pivoted abruptly to go into the kitchen, the air in her wake sending a picture of Justin clattering to the floor. Quickly she bent and picked it up, carefully examining the frame to see if it was broken. The picture had been taken during the first year of their marriage, and Justin was smiling into the camera lens. Smiling at her. Bethany had taken the picture.

She carefully returned the picture to its hallowed place on the hall table. “Your husband?” Colt said.

“Yes.” She didn’t want to talk about Justin with this man, but when she went into the kitchen, Colt followed.

“I reckon it’s none of my business, but how long have you been a widow?” he asked in a conversational tone.

“You’re right. It’s not your business.” Any more than it’s my business how a baby came to be left on my doorstep for you. Or who Marcy is, she almost added.

“Sorry,” Colt said.

Suddenly it seemed important to her to let this drifter, this man who’d abandoned his own child, know exactly what responsibility was. “Justin died five years ago after a tractor accident, and I’ve been running the ranch ever since.”

“That’s no easy job.”

“Right,” she snapped. “The most important things in life aren’t.” She could have told him plenty about how hard it was, how she’d had to learn computer management programs and read up on cattle breeding and deal with creditors and, of course, fend off Mott—but she wouldn’t.

If he felt the sting of her words, Colt gave no sign. He didn’t reply, but sat down on a kitchen chair and hoisted Alyssa so that her face rested against his shoulder. The baby was alert, sucking vigorously on the pacifier. Colt looked pensive for a moment and drew a deep breath before he spoke.

“I want you to know that I’ll do my best to find Alyssa’s mother, and as soon as possible.”

“And if she can’t take the baby back?”

“I don’t rightly know whether she can or not.”

“There’s always foster care,” Bethany said.

“No!” Colt said forcefully.

Bethany hadn’t expected her casual and matter-of-fact suggestion to provoke such an outburst. She swiveled and looked at Colt in ill-concealed surprise. His expression had gone all dark and forbidding.

“Never. No matter what. I’d leave and take her with me before I’d let her go to a foster home,” Colt said fiercely. His arms tightened protectively around the baby.

Bethany hid her dismay. He could have talked from hell to breakfast and not said that part about leaving when the last thing she needed was to lose a ranch hand.

It took a moment for her to recover. “All right, then. We’ll manage for now,” she replied in a level tone, not wanting him to know he’d rattled her. She ran hot water into a pan and set the bottle in it to warm.

When she heard Dita and Eddie outside, she opened the back door and they came in. They presented the cradle for inspection by depositing it in the middle of the kitchen floor and setting it to rocking. “It’s a family heirloom Frisco and I brought from Mexico,” Dita said. She grinned at Bethany. “Frisco’s not half as hard-hearted as he seems, you know. He already had the cradle out and was cleaning it when Eddie and I walked in the house.”

“I’ll take it upstairs,” said Eddie. He was strong and proud of it.

“Put the cradle in the blue bedroom, Eddie,” Bethany told him.

“Blue bedroom. Okay.” He lifted the cradle and departed.

“Here’s the cornstarch,” Dita said as she set the small yellow box on the kitchen table. “Anything else you need?”

“No, Dita, I think we’re all set.”

They heard Eddie clattering down the stairs. “I put the cradle by the window,” he said.

“Thanks, Eddie,” Bethany told him.

“Well, Bethany, I’ll see you in the morning. Eddie, let’s go. Your dad’s about to pop a movie into the VCR.” Dita kissed Bethany briefly on the cheek and left, Eddie following close behind.

When they had gone, Bethany turned her attention back to Colt. Cowboy and baby made an incongruous sight; Colt was concentrating on his task, his brow furrowed slightly, and Alyssa slurped hungrily at the bottle, her tiny fists curved like pink seashells against Colt’s broad chest.

Bethany thought how pretty the baby was, and how helpless. And she still couldn’t understand how anyone could have left such a beautiful child on a strange doorstep. Or how the father of such a lovely child could leave her behind somewhere to take a job on a ranch like this one.

“She’s stopped drinking,” Colt announced, interrupting Bethany’s thoughts.

“I think that means she’s had enough.”

He looked up at Bethany, his eyes troubled. “I won’t let the baby be a problem. I’ll look after her tonight. She’ll have to be fed and diapered, and I can get up with her and do it. You need your sleep.”

He was right about that, because suddenly she felt very tired indeed. It had been a long day. Her bruised shoulder ached. But he had worked hard, too.

She must have looked hesitant because he said, “I mean it. I’ll be the one to get up with Alyssa.”

Reluctantly she decided that it was only fitting for Colt to do the honors. Plus, she didn’t want to get overly attached to the baby. She was already feeling little tugs of her heartstrings over the way Alyssa looked and felt and smelled.

“Bethany?”

At least he hadn’t called her ma’am again. Colt was looking at her inquiringly, and she knew he wanted her to show him where the baby would sleep. And where he would sleep, too, in order to be near. Well, she had wanted him to accept responsibility, and now he was doing it. Still, she hardly knew him. Did she really want him in her house all night long?

Bethany had sensed something dangerous about Colt McClure from the beginning, and certainly something about him didn’t quite add up. She was well aware that this man could have found work on any of a couple dozen ranches, and she didn’t know why he had chosen to work for her. And, adding even more uncertainty, she knew Frisco didn’t like him.

He waited for her answer, and she detected a challenge in him—or maybe it was a dare. It was almost as if he knew what she was thinking. His eyes filled with concern as he looked from the baby to her and back to the baby again. No—what she saw in Colt McClure was more than mere concern. It was that hunger again, that longing that she had interpreted as insolence when he rode up to the house yesterday.

She briefly considered sending Colt and the baby back to the barn, but she thought again how bare Colt’s rooms were, and how stifling hot. The smells of the animals in the barn below penetrated the thin boards of the apartment’s floor.

Now, as he stood before her holding the baby in his arms, he didn’t seem at all threatening, only worried. She reminded herself that she was doing this for the baby’s sake. The kid already had a couple of strikes against her, and Bethany didn’t want to make things even worse. Being responsible, she told herself, meant doing things you didn’t want to do sometimes. That was what finally made up her mind.

“Okay, come with me,” she said into the loaded silence. She heard Colt let out his breath as if in relief. It surprised her, that release of tension, but then he’d been full of surprises ever since he appeared, galloping his horse up the driveway.

She led Colt, who was still carrying the baby, through the quiet and dark house, into the hall with its picture of Justin staring at her reproachfully from its embossed silver frame, past the seldom-used living room full of well-worn but cherished furniture, up the stairs and past the door of her own bedroom.

Across the hall from hers, the guest room was occupied by a four-poster double bed, which was covered with the quilt that had been given to Justin’s mother by her best friend on her wedding day. An antique washstand held a matching china pitcher and wash basin, and rag rugs hooked by Justin’s grandmother adorned the hardwood floor.

Bethany turned on the small candlestick lamp on the bow-front dresser. It bathed the room in dim golden light. “Here’s where you both can stay. The bathroom’s near and you’ll be comfortable enough. In fact, you can put Alyssa in the cradle now. Wait—we’d better check to see if her diaper is wet. I’ll get a towel.”

Bethany hurried into the bathroom next door. When she returned with the towel and spread it over the quilt, Colt laid the baby on the bed, opened the blanket and felt the diaper.

“Soaked,” he said. “Looks like I’d better be fixin’ to change her.”

“Do you know how?”

“I’ve never changed a diaper before,” he conceded. “Have you?”

“No, never. It can’t be too hard,” she said. Reluctantly, because she didn’t want to have anything more to do with this situation than absolutely necessary, she picked up one of the clean disposables and unfolded it. Colt had already removed Alyssa’s wet diaper.

“Hand it over.”

She gave him the diaper and Colt slid it under Alyssa’s plump bottom. He fumbled with the adhesive tabs. “Waste-basket?” he said.

Bethany nudged it closer to him with her foot. “Here.”

Colt tossed the pull-off strips into the basket and tentatively sprinkled on a smattering of cornstarch. Alyssa bicycled energetically, her plump little legs pumping the air. Colt’s enormous hands fit the fresh diaper around her hips, and even though he stuck it together lopsided, Alyssa didn’t seem to mind. If she hadn’t been so tired and so angry with Colt, Bethany would have smiled at the sight of the big rawboned ranch hand turned nanny.

Those same hands lifted Alyssa tenderly, readjusted the sacque she wore, and laid her carefully in the cradle. For a moment the baby stared curiously up at them, two large strangers looming over her with concern. Then she uttered a soft little sigh, and slowly her eyelids became heavier and heavier until they closed.

“You can sleep on the bed,” she said to Colt. She leaned over him and pulled the quilt down to expose the clean sheets underneath.

He stopped her with a hand on her arm. His touch was so unexpected that a warm tremor swept through her, and she stepped away from him as far as the narrow space between bed and wall would allow. “I’ll do that. You’ve done enough. Thanks, Bethany. Thanks for not flyin’ all to pieces over this.”

His appreciation sounded heartfelt, and she was bewildered at the confusion she felt. She was still angry with him, but she was beginning to respect the way he was rising to the challenge of this baby.

In that moment it struck her that he was standing so near and the setting was so intimate she could have reached over, twined her fingers together behind his neck and pulled his head down to hers. And kissed him.

Heavens! She would never.

“Good night,” she said, pushing past him so that her thigh brushed his, so close that she could smell the clean male scent of him, so close that the hollows under his cheekbones lost their shadow. All grace had left her, had drained clean away, and she felt awkward and ungainly. She stumbled over the toe of his boot, and his arm whipped out to steady her.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m okay. I’ll see you in the morning.” She made herself walk past the cradle and out the door.

In her own room, she closed the door with a firm click and locked it for the first time ever. Then she leaned against it, wearily circling a hand under the damp collar of her shirt and thinking that Texas summers had surely grown hotter than they used to be. After a minute or so, she removed her clothes and pulled on a nightgown, any gown, from her dresser drawer. The gown smelled of old cherry wood and fabric softener and, faintly, of lavender. Its soft familiarity soothed her.

She lay awake for a long time that night, listening to cicadas chirring in the shrubbery and to Jesse James yodeling at the moon. She never heard the baby cry, not even once. But she did hear Colt’s footsteps pacing back and forth, back and forth on the creaky oak floor. If he slept at all, she couldn’t tell it, and she didn’t fall asleep herself until past midnight.

MORNING. PALE LIGHT. A baby fussing. The scent of coffee.

Colt struggled out of a deep sleep. For a moment he was confused. Where was he?

Then he remembered. Marcy’s baby was waking up. He’d fed her and diapered her during the night, and now she was probably hungry again.

He forced himself to slide out from beneath the smooth sheets, marveling at the fact that he no longer slept in a prison bunk. As he pulled on his jeans and shirt, he thought that never again would he take a real bed with a comfortable mattress for granted.

He bent over the cradle. Alyssa was squirming, screwing her face into an expression that he’d learned meant she was about to let loose with big-time bawling. He poked around under the blanket and found the pacifier.

“Here’s your stopper,” he said. Alyssa opened her mouth and accepted it, her eyes wide as she took in the looks of him.

“I know I’m not much to look at with this scar and all,” he whispered as he gathered her up from the cradle, a family heirloom carved with initials and angels and roses. Eddie had probably slept in this cradle, and maybe Frisco, too. Colt smiled to think of the crusty Banner-B foreman as a baby.

He changed Alyssa’s diaper, getting the hang of it now. It wasn’t an unpleasant job, exactly. Cleaning up after horses was much worse, though he’d heard tell of horses that wore diapers, carriage horses in touristy towns, and he thought it was a travesty. Babies, now, that was a different thing altogether. Trouble is, the person who should be dealing with this baby’s diapers was Marcy.

“Well, now, I am goin’ to find your mommy,” he told the baby. “Goin’ to bring her back.”

Not that it was so hard to understand the desperation that had brought Marcy to the point where she’d left her baby with him, but he couldn’t imagine what she’d thought he would do with a baby. Just out of prison, trying to make a life for himself—well, he could think of better things than dealing with somebody else’s problems. But then he’d always been a sucker for Marcy no matter how sorely she tried his patience, mostly because he knew how unhappy she was. Poor kid, she’d never had a chance with Ryzinski for a father.

“We’d better get you something to eat,” he said to the baby. He lifted her in his arms and studied her features for a moment. She had Marcy’s dark hair and eyes, and the set of her chin was pure Marcy.

A voice materialized outside the door. “Colt?”

Colt caught a glimpse of himself as he passed the mirror over the dresser. He looked rumpled and unshaven with one lock of hair falling over his forehead and his eyes rimmed by dark circles. He’d hardly slept at all.

He swung the door open with his free hand. Bethany stood there smelling of soap and shampoo, and he felt a little current of pleasure quiver through him just to see her. She’d showered and washed her hair, he could tell from the fresh clean scent of her. And she was wearing a T-shirt today. It was big, though, and left plenty to the imagination. He had no trouble imagining, none at all.

“How is the baby? I didn’t hear her cry during the night.”

“I didn’t let her cry. Didn’t want her to wake you.” He’d jumped up out of that comfortable bed at the slightest whimper from the cradle, and he’d rocked and fed and changed diapers like he knew what he was about.

Bethany sallied forth into the room. There was a sashay to her walk, but he’d bet she was completely unaware of it. “I’ll fill her bottle with more formula.” She looked at the baby, and the focus of her eyes softened. “Here,” she said, “let me take her.” She held out her arms and he sort of dumped Alyssa into them. He was wary of touching Bethany’s breasts by mistake. Wary and aware. Today she wore a bra, but instead of enhancing her figure, to his way of thinking it minimized it. Maybe that was what she wanted.

As Alyssa began to whimper, Bethany hesitated, then, as if she couldn’t help herself, dropped a kiss on the fuzzy little head. “Hush,” she said, a gentle command. The baby hushed.

“You can wash up in the bathroom if you like,” she said. “Meet me in the kitchen afterward.” It was as if she hardly saw him. She only had eyes for the baby. Which was a good thing. At least she hadn’t demanded that he leave. In fact, she’d looked right put out last night when he’d said that bit about not letting the baby be sent to a foster home. Well, he’d meant it.

Colt went into the bathroom. It was all white tile and white fixtures with a fluffy blue rug on the floor. It was clean, real clean. To him, it seemed the ultimate in comfort and convenience. He would have liked to take a shower from a spigot with a decent flow of water, but Bethany hadn’t said anything about that so he didn’t. He did open the corroding mirrored door of the medicine cabinet, hoping to find a razor. There wasn’t one, only a bottle of aspirin and one of mouthwash. He gargled with the mouthwash and studied his face in the mirror. No wonder Bethany wasn’t more friendly.

Well, hell, why would she be? He’d arrived unannounced, taken up residence, and saddled them with a baby, all in a short period of time. Boy, would he give Marcy a real talking-to when he finally caught up with her.

And how would he do that? He had no idea. The last time she’d visited Colt in jail, Marcy had informed him that she had a boyfriend, and she’d made it clear that she’d moved in with the guy because there was nowhere else to go. The man had probably walked out on her, left her pregnant and she couldn’t support the kid. End of story. Beginning of a major problem—for Colt, anyway.

He’d have to find Marcy. And he would, as soon as possible.

When he walked in the kitchen, Bethany was sitting in a rocking chair that hadn’t been there before. She had the baby spread out on her lap and was crooning to her, punctuating each word with a gentle pat-a-cake of the baby’s tiny feet. Alyssa seemed to like it, gazing at Bethany in rapt attention.

“You’re safe with us, Alyssa, safe with us. Yes, you are, you are,” Bethany said. She glanced up at the sound of Colt’s footsteps and suddenly became all business.

“Give me her bottle, will you, Colt? And help yourself to the coffee.” She gathered the baby in her arms, the game, whatever it was, over.

Colt handed Bethany the warm bottle, which she tested on the inside of her arm before sliding the nipple into Alyssa’s eager mouth. The baby began to suck and commenced looking blissful, making little dovelike noises deep in her throat.

Colt circled around and poured himself a big mug of coffee. Then he leaned against the counter and said, “I know it’s a burden on everyone, havin’ a baby here. This morning I thought I’d make a few phone calls, see if I can find out where her mother is.”

“Good. I’m supposed to work cattle with Dita today, and you can pick up digging postholes whenever you’re through making calls. But—” her face fell in dismay “—someone has to watch the baby. We can’t leave her alone here.”

He raked a hand through his hair. There were so many things to think about when a baby was involved. “She can stay with me while I’m on the phone,” he said. “Isn’t there someone around here who can babysit?”

Bethany shook her head, and despite everything else that he was thinking about this morning, he couldn’t help reflecting that she was one beautiful woman. She was talking, and he made himself concentrate on her answer to his question.

“We’ll have to manage ourselves, I’m afraid. The closest people are Milt and Betty Harbison, who live on the next ranch. They’re elderly and don’t get around too well, and I can’t imagine that they could look after a baby.” Colt got the idea that Bethany Burke prided herself on her self-reliance and wouldn’t ask for help with much of anything.

That decided him. “How about if I make a quick trip into town? I’ll get more diapers and more formula. While I’m there I’ll ask around, see if there’s anyone who could help out.”

Bethany tossed off a resigned look that seemed to say, Well, okay, if that’s what you want to do. “Fix yourself some breakfast first. There’s eggs and bacon, and I’ve set the skillet out. Bread’s in the freezer, make yourself some toast. After you eat, you can use the pickup and take Alyssa with you. I don’t think you’ll find a babysitter easily, unless you make it worthwhile money-wise.”

“I’ll pay whatever I have to.” This delivered with grim determination.

Another look, highly skeptical. “I expect you remember that I won’t be handing you your first paycheck for another two weeks,” she reminded him.

“That’s okay. I have money.”

He didn’t think she believed him, but it was true. His life savings were parked in interest-bearing accounts here and there. Before he went to prison, he’d been planning to start a business.

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