Real Love Is Worth The Wait

When Kasey Stonestreet’s husband walked out on her and their newborn son, her best friend, Eli Rodriguez, was her rock. Eli took them in at his Forever, Texas, ranch without hesitation. As a suddenly single mom with nowhere else to go, Kasey expected to feel out of place. Instead, for the first time in her life, she felt as though she was home.

Eli has secretly loved Kasey since they were kids; he was devastated when she married another man. Now, he’s got a second chance at happiness. The woman of his dreams, and the family he always wanted, are in his reach. But if he reveals his true feelings, it could ruin their friendship, and he’d lose Kasey forever.

How long can Eli and Kasey go on pretending to each other—and to themselves—that they’re still just friends? And what will happen when Kasey’s husband returns? A Baby on the Ranch

“Don’t you want to kiss me, Eli?”

Kasey whispered the words to Eli’s back, knowing that if he faced her, she wouldn’t have the nerve to say them.

Eli stopped, half convinced that he’d imagined her saying words that he would have sold his soul to hear. Releasing the breath that had gotten caught in his throat, he slowly turned around.

“More than anything in the world.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

He could have said that he couldn’t kiss her because, technically, she was still Hollis’s wife. Or that he couldn’t because he didn’t want to take advantage of her, or the situation. There were as many reasons to deny himself as there were leaves on the tree by his window. And only one reason to do it.

Because he ached for her.

Dear Reader,

I have this thing about families. When I was little, I wanted three older brothers. Unfortunately, since I was the first born, no amount of my pleading seemed to rectify that. All my parents could give me were two younger ones. Now, because of our ages, I tell people they’re my older brothers, so in essence, it all worked out. Once I began writing, I created those brothers (and sisters) that nature (and my parents) failed to give me. I became caught up in the worlds I was creating and just kept going. What began as a small family—and small town—kept on growing. Which is why Alma, who first appeared in the sheriff’s story, suddenly was given siblings en masse by the time she got her own story (Lassoing the Deputy). I like large families and I like returning to them. So this is Eli’s story, which shows how selfless love is ultimately rewarded. It’s also a story about never giving up hope because if something is meant to be, it will happen.

I hope you enjoy this latest addition to the Forever, Texas saga. As always, I thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

All the best,

Marie Ferrarella

A Baby on the Ranch

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author has written over two hundred books for Harlequin Books, some under the name of Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

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Baby on the Ranch

To Kathleen Scheibling,

for wanting to see more.

Thank you.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Prologue

“Eli!”

The loud, insistent pounding worked its way into his brain and rudely yanked Eli Rodriguez out of a deep, sound sleep. Eyes still shut, he sat up in bed, utterly disoriented, listening without knowing what he was listening for, or even why.

He’d fallen into bed, exhausted, at eleven, too tired even to undress.

Was he dreaming?

“Eli, open up! Open the damn door, will you?”

No, he wasn’t dreaming. This was real. Someone was yelling out his name. Who the hell was pounding on his door at this hour?

The question snaked its way through his fuzzy brain as Eli groped his way into the hallway and then made his way down the stairs, clutching on to the banister. His equilibrium still felt off.

Belatedly, he realized that it was still the middle of the night. Either that, or the sun had just dropped out of the sky, leaving his part of the world in complete darkness.

His mind turned toward his family. Had something happened to one of them? They were all well as of the last time they’d been together, but nothing was stationary.

Nothing was forever.

“Eli! C’mon, dammit, you can’t be that asleep! Wake up!”

The voice started to sound familiar, although it was still hard to make it out clearly above the pounding.

Awake now, Eli paused for a second to pull himself together before opening the front door.

And to pick up a firearm—just in case.

The people who lived in Forever and the surrounding area were good people, but that didn’t mean that unsavory types couldn’t pass through. There’d been an incident or two in the past five years, enough to make a man act cautiously.

“Dammit all to hell, Eli!”

That wasn’t an unsavory type—at least, not according to the general definition. That was his friend, Hollis Stonestreet. Except right now, he wasn’t feeling very friendly.

With an annoyed sigh, Eli unlocked his front door and found himself face-to-face with Hollis.

A one-time revered high school quarterback, the blond-haired, blue-eyed former Adonis had become a little worn around the edges. Though he was still considered handsome, the past eight years hadn’t been all that good to Hollis.

Eli rested the firearm he no longer needed against the wall. “You trying to wake the dead, Hollis?” he asked wearily.

“No, just you,” Hollis retorted, walking into the front room, “which I was starting to think was the same thing.”

“This couldn’t wait until morning?” Eli asked, curbing his impatience.

Hollis was wearing his fancy boots, the ones with the spurs. They jingled as he walked.

Looking at the boots, Eli started getting a very bad feeling about this. What was Hollis doing here at this hour?

Last he’d heard, Hollis had been missing for almost a week now. At least according to his wife, Kasey. She’d said as much when she’d called him two days ago, apologizing for bothering him even though they’d been friends forever. Apologizing, and at the same time asking that if he wasn’t too busy, would he mind driving her to the hospital in Pine Ridge because her water had just broken.

“The baby’ll be coming and I don’t think I can drive the fifty miles to the hospital by myself,” she’d said.

He’d known by the tone in her voice that she was afraid, and doing her best not to sound like it.

His pulse had begun to race immediately as he’d told her to hang in there. Five seconds later, he’d torn out of his ranch house, dashing toward his Jeep.

That was the first—and the last—time he’d let the speedometer climb to ninety-five.

The following day, when he’d visited Kasey and her baby—a beautiful, healthy baby boy—he knew boys weren’t supposed to be beautiful, but in his opinion, this one was—Hollis still hadn’t shown up.

Nor had he come the next morning when Eli had gone back to visit her again.

And now, here he was, pacing around in his living room at 2:00 a.m.

What was going on? Why wasn’t he with Kasey, where he belonged? He knew that he would be if Kasey was his wife.

But she wasn’t and there was no point in letting his thoughts go in that direction.

“No, it can’t wait,” Hollis snapped, then immediately tempered his mood. He flashed a wide, insincere grin at him. “I came by to ask you for a favor.”

This had to be one hell of a favor, given the hour. “I’m listening.”

“I want you to look after Kasey for me.”

Eli stared at the other man. If he wasn’t awake before, he was now. “Why, where are you going to be?” Eli asked. When Hollis didn’t answer him, for the first time in their long relationship, Eli became visibly angry. “Did you even bother to go see Kasey in the hospital?”

Pacing, Hollis dragged a hand through his unruly blond hair. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. I saw her, I saw the kid.” Swinging back around, Hollis watched him, suddenly appearing stricken. “I thought I could do it, Eli, but I can’t. I can’t do it,” he insisted. “I can’t be a father. My throat starts to close up when I even think about being a father.”

Eli dug deep for patience. Hollis had never thought about anyone but himself. Because of his looks, everything had always been handed to him. Well, it was time to man up. He had a wife and a baby who were counting on him.

“Look, that’s normal,” Eli said soothingly. “You’re just having a normal reaction. This is all new to you. Once you get the hang of it—”

He got no further.

“Don’t you get it?” Hollis demanded. “I don’t want to get the hang of it. Hell, I didn’t even want to get married.”

No one had held a gun to his head, Eli thought resentfully. If he’d backed off—if Hollis had left town five years ago—then maybe he would have had a chance with Kasey. And that baby she’d just had could’ve been his.

“Then why did you?” he asked, his voice low, barely contained.

Hollis threw up his hands. “I was drunk, okay? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Look, I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving and nothing you say is going to stop me.” He started to edge his way back to the front door. “I’d just feel better if I knew you were going to look after her. She’s going to need somebody.”

“Yeah, her husband,” Eli insisted.

Hollis didn’t even seem to hear as he pulled open the front door. “Oh, by the way, I think you should know that I lost the ranch earlier today.”

Eli could only stare at him in disbelief. “You did what?”

Hollis shrugged, as if refusing to accept any guilt. “I had a straight—a straight, dammit—what’re the odds that the other guy would have a straight flush?”

Furious now, Eli fisted his hands at his sides, doing his best to keep from hitting the other man. “Are you out of your mind?” Eli demanded. “Where is she supposed to live?”

The question—and Eli’s anger—seemed to annoy Hollis. “I don’t know. But I can’t face her. You tell her for me. You’re good like that. You always know what to say.”

And then he was gone. Gone just as abruptly as he’d burst in less than ten minutes ago.

Eli ran his hand along the back of his neck, staring at the closed door.

“No,” he said wearily to the darkness. “Not always.”

Chapter One

When she turned her head toward the doorway, the expression on Kasey Stonestreet’s face faded from a hopeful smile to a look of barely suppressed disappointment and confusion.

Eli saw the instant change as he walked into her hospital room. Kasey hadn’t been expecting him, she’d expected Hollis. Hollis was the one who was supposed to come and pick her and their brand-new son up and take them home, not him.

“Hi, Kasey, how are you?” Doing his best to pretend that everything was all right, Eli flashed her an easy smile.

He had a feeling that for once, she wasn’t buying it or about to go along with any pretense for the sake of her pride.

Kasey pressed her lips together as a bitter disappointment rooted in the pit of her stomach and spread out. When he left her yesterday, Hollis had told her that he’d be here at the hospital long before noon. According to the hospital rules, she was supposed to check out at noon.

It was past noon now. Almost by a whole hour. When the nurse on duty had passed by to inform her—again—that checkout was at noon, she’d had no choice but to ask for a little more time. She hated the touch of pity in the woman’s eyes as she agreed to allow her a few more minutes.

Excuses came automatically to her lips. Life with Hollis had taught her that. “He’s stuck in traffic,” she’d told the other woman. “But I know he’ll be here any minute now.”

That had been more than half an hour ago.

So when the door to her room finally opened, Kasey had looked toward it with no small amount of relief. Until she saw that the person walking in wasn’t Hollis. It was Eli, her childhood friend. Eli, who always came when she needed him.

Wonderfully dependable Eli.

More than once she’d wondered why Hollis couldn’t be more like the man he claimed was his best friend. It went without saying that if she had asked Eli to come pick her up before noon, he would have been there two hours early, looking to help her pack her suitcase.

Unlike Hollis.

Where was he?

The disappointment evolved into a feeling of complete dread, which in turn spilled out all over her as she looked up at the tall, muscular man she’d come, at times, to think of as her guardian angel.

When her eyes met his, the fear she harbored in her heart was confirmed.

“He’s not coming, is he?” she asked, attempting to suppress a sigh.

Last night or, more correctly, Eli amended, this morning, when Hollis had left after delivering that bombshell, he’d suddenly snapped out of his fog and run after Hollis barefoot. He’d intended to either talk Hollis out of leaving or, that failing, hog-tie the fool until he came to his senses and realized that Kasey was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

But it was too late. Hollis was already in his car and if the heartless bastard saw him chasing after the vehicle in his rearview mirror, Hollis gave no indication. He certainly hadn’t slowed down or attempted to stop. If anything, he’d sped up.

His actions just reinforced what Eli already knew. That there was no talking Hollis into acting like an adult instead of some errant, spoiled brat who did whatever he wanted to and didn’t stick around to face any consequences.

Eli looked at the young woman he’d brought to the hospital a short three days ago. She’d been on the very brink of delivering her son and they had just made it to the hospital in time. Had she waited even five minutes before calling him, Wayne Eli Stonestreet would have been born in the backseat of his Jeep, with him acting as an impromptu midwife.

Not exactly a notion he would have relished. He had a hunch that Kasey wouldn’t have been crazy about it, either.

The doctor who’d been on duty that night had mistaken him for the baby’s father and started to pull him into the delivery room. He’d been very quick to demur, telling the doctor that he was just a friend who’d volunteered to drive Kasey here.

He’d almost made it to the waiting area, but then Kasey had grabbed his hand, bringing his escape to a grinding haul.

On the gurney, about to be wheeled into the delivery room, Kasey had looked at him with panic in her eyes. “Eli, please. I’ll feel better if you’re there. I need a friend,” she’d pleaded. Her own doctor was out of town. With Hollis not there, she felt totally alone. “Please,” she repeated, her fingers tightening around his hand.

The next moment he’d felt as if his hand had gotten caught in a vise. Kasey was squeezing it so hard, she’d practically caused tears to spring up in his eyes. Tears of pain.

Kasey might have appeared a fragile little thing, despite her pregnant stomach, but she had a grip like a man who wrestled steers for a living.

Despite that, it wasn’t her grip that had kept him there. It was the look of fear he’d seen in her eyes.

And just like that, Eli had found himself recruited, a reluctant spectator at the greatest show in town: the miracle of birth.

He’d taken a position behind Kasey, gently propping her up by her shoulders and holding her steady each time she bore down and pushed.

The guttural screams that emerged from her sounded as if they were coming from the bottom of her toes and he freely admitted, if only to himself, that they were fraying his nerves.

And then, just as he was about to ask the doctor if there wasn’t something that could be done for Kasey to separate her from all this pain, there he was. The miracle. Forever’s newest little citizen. Born with a wide-eyed look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe where he had wound up once he left his nice, safe, warm little haven.

Right now, the three-day-old infant lay all bundled up in a hospital bassinet on the other side of Kasey’s bed. He was sound asleep, his small, pink little lips rooting. Which meant he’d be waking up soon. And hungry.

Eli took all this in as he cast around for the right way to tell Kasey what he had to say. But he hadn’t been able to come up with anything during the entire fifty-mile trip here, despite all his best efforts. Consequently there was no reason to believe that something magical would pop up into his brain now as he stood in Kasey’s presence.

Especially when she usually had such a numbing effect on him, causing all thought to float out of his head, unfettered. It had been like that since kindergarten.

So, with no fancily wrapped version of a lie, no plausible story or excuse to offer her, Eli had nothing to fall back on except for the truth.

And the truth was what he offered her, hating that it was going to hurt.

“No, he’s not coming,” he confirmed quietly. “Hollis asked me to pick you up because he said that the hospital was discharging you today.” He offered her a smile. “Guess that means that you and the little guy passed the hospital’s inspection.”

His attempt at humor fell flat, as he knew it would. He hated that she had to go through this, that Hollis had never proven worthy of the love she bore him.

His attention was drawn to the sleeping infant in the bassinet. He lowered his voice so as not to wake Wayne. “Hey, is it my imagination, or did he grow a little since I last saw him?”

“Maybe.” Kasey struggled not to give in to despair, or bitterness. She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

It was clear that she was upset and struggling not to let her imagination take off.

But it did anyway.

Still, Kasey tried to beat it back, to deny what she felt in her soul was the truth. Her last sliver of optimism had her asking Eli, “Is he going to be waiting for us at the ranch?”

Dammit, Hollis, I should have taken a horsewhip to you instead of just let you walk out like that. You’re hurting her. Hurting the only decent thing in your life. She deserves better than this. Better than you, he thought angrily.

It hurt him almost as much to say it as he knew it hurt her to hear it. “No, Hollis isn’t going to be there.”

Suspicion entered eyes as blue as the sky on a summer’s day, momentarily blocking out her fear. “Why? Why are you so sure?” she asked, struggling to keep angry tears from falling.

When Hollis had come to see her, not on the first day, but on the second, he’d been full of apologies and even more full of promises about changing, about finally growing up and taking responsibility for his growing family. All right, he hadn’t held Wayne, hadn’t even picked him up when she’d tried to put the baby into his arms, but she told herself that was just because he was afraid he’d drop the baby. That was a normal reaction, she’d silently argued. First-time fathers had visions of their babies slipping right out of their arms and onto their heads.

But he’d come around, she’d promised herself. Hollis would come around. It would just take a little time, that was all.

Except now it seemed as if he wasn’t going to come around. Ever.

She felt sick.

“Why?” she repeated more sharply. “Why are you so sure?”

He didn’t want to say this, but she gave him no choice. He wasn’t good at coming up with excuses—with lies—on the spur of the moment. Not like Hollis.

“Because he came by at two this morning and asked me to look after you and the baby.”

“All right,” she said slowly, picking her way through the words as if she were navigating a potential minefield that could blow her apart at any second. “Nothing he hasn’t said before, right?” Her voice sped up with every word. “He’s just probably got a job waiting for him in another town. But once that’s over, he’ll be back.” A touch of desperation entered her voice. “He’s got a son now, Eli. He can’t walk out on both of us, right?” Her eyes searched his face for a confirmation. A confirmation she was silently begging for.

More than anything in the world, Eli wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear. That she was right. That Hollis had just gone away temporarily.

But he couldn’t lie, not to her. Not anymore.

And he was tired of covering for Hollis. Tired of trying to protect Kasey from Hollis’s lies and his infidelities. Tired most of all because he knew that he would be lumped in with Hollis when her anger finally unleashed.

He looked at her for a long moment, hoped that she would find it in her heart to someday forgive him, and said, “I don’t think that he’s coming back this time, Kasey.”

She didn’t want to cry, she didn’t. But she could feel the moisture building in her eyes. “Not even for the baby?”

The baby’s the reason he finally took off, Eli told her silently.

Rather than say that out loud and wound her even more deeply, Eli placed his hands very lightly on her slender shoulders, as if that would somehow help soften the blow, and said, “He said he was taking off. That he wasn’t any good for you. That he didn’t deserve to have someone like you and Wayne in his life.”

Yes, those were lies, too. He knew that. But these were lies meant to comfort her, to give her a little solace and help her preserve the memory of the man Kasey thought she’d married instead of the man she actually had married.

“‘Taking off,’” she repeated. Because of her resistance, it took a moment for the words to sink in. “Where’s he going?”

Eli shook his head. Here, at least, he didn’t have to get creative. He told her the truth. “He didn’t tell me.”

She didn’t understand. It didn’t make any sense to her. “But the ranch—with Hollis gone, who’s going to run the ranch?” She was still trying to recover from the delivery. “I’m not sure if I can manage that yet.” She looked back at the bassinet. “Not if I have to take care of—”

This felt like cruelty above and beyond the norm, Eli couldn’t help thinking, damning Hollis to hell again. “You’re not going to have to run the ranch,” he told her quietly.

Because this was Eli, she misunderstood what he was saying and jumped to the wrong conclusion. “Eli, I can’t ask you to run the ranch for me. You’ve got your own spread to run. And when you’re not there, I know that you and your brothers and Alma help your dad to run his. Taking on mine, as well, until I get stronger, would be too much for you.”

He stopped her before this got out of hand. “You’re not asking,” he pointed out. “And I’d do it in a heartbeat—if there was a ranch to run.”

“If there was…” Her voice trailed off, quaking, as she stared up at him. “I don’t understand.”

He might as well tell her all of it, this way he would pull the Band-Aid off all at once, hopefully minimizing the overall pain involved. As it was, he had a feeling that this would hurt like hell.

Eli measured out the words slowly. “Hollis lost the ranch in a card game.”

“He…lost the ranch?” she repeated in absolute disbelief.

Eli nodded. “In a card game.”

It wasn’t a joke. She could see it in Eli’s face. He was telling her the truth. She was stunned.

“But that was our home,” she protested, looking at Eli with utter confusion in her eyes. “How could he? How could he?” she repeated, a note of mounting anger in her voice.

Good, she was angry, he thought. Anger would keep her from slipping into a depression.

“Gambling is an addiction,” Eli told her gently. “Hollis can’t help himself. If he could, he would have never put the ranch up as collateral.” Hollis had had a problem with all forms of gambling ever since he’d placed his first bet when he was seventeen and lied about his age.

Stricken, her knees unsteady, Kasey sank back down on the bed again.

“Where am I going to go?” she asked, her voice small and hollow.

The baby made a noise, as if he was about to wake up. Her head turned sharply in his direction. For a moment, embalmed in grief, she’d forgotten about him. Now, having aged a great deal in the past ten minutes, she struggled to pull herself together.

“Where are we going to go?” she amended.

It wasn’t just her anymore. She was now part of a duo. Everything that came her way, she had to consider in the light that she was now a mother. Things didn’t just affect her anymore, they affected Wayne as well. Taking care of her son was now the most important thing in her life.

And she couldn’t do it.

She had a little bit put aside, but it wasn’t much. She had next to no money, no job and nowhere to live.

Her very heart hurt.

How could you, Hollis? How could you just walk out on us like this? The question echoed over and over in her head. There was no answer.

She wanted to scream it out loud, scream it so loud that wherever Hollis was, he’d hear her. And tell her what she was supposed to do.

Taking a shaky breath, Kasey tried to center herself so that she could think.

Her efforts all but blocked everything else out. So much so that she didn’t hear Eli the first time he said something to her. The sound of his voice registered, but not his words.

She looked at him quizzically, confusion and despair playing tug-of-war for her soul. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

He had a feeling she hadn’t heard when she didn’t answer or comment on what he’d just said.

This time, he repeated it more slowly. “I said, you and the baby can stay with me until we figure things out.”

Eli wasn’t making an offer or a generous gesture. He said it like it was a given. Already decided, Kasey thought. But despite his very generous soul, she wasn’t his problem. She would have to figure this out and deal with it on her own.

As if reading her mind, Eli said, “Right now, you’re still a little weak from giving birth,” he reminded her. “Give yourself a few days to recover, to rest. You don’t have to make any decisions right away if you don’t want to. And I meant what I said. You’re coming home with me. You and Wayne are going to have a roof over your heads for as long as you need. For as long as this takes for you to come to terms with—and that’s the end of it,” he concluded.

Or thought he did.

“We can’t stay with you indefinitely, Eli,” Kasey argued.

“We’re not talking about indefinitely,” he pointed out. “We’re talking about one day at a time. I’m just asking you to give yourself a little time to think things through,” he stressed. “So you don’t make decisions you’d rather not because the wolf’s at the door.”

“But he is,” she said quietly. That was the state of affairs she faced.

“No, he’s not. I shot the wolf,” he told her whimsically. “Now, are you all packed?” It was a needless question, he knew she was. He’d found her sitting on her bed, the closed suitcase resting on the floor beside her foot. Rather than answer, she nodded. “Good. I’ll go find the nurse. They said hospital policy is to escort you out in a wheelchair.”

“I don’t need a wheelchair,” she protested. “I can walk.”

“Make them happy, Kasey. Let them push the wheelchair to the front entrance,” he coaxed.

Giving in, she beckoned him over to her before he went off in search of the nurse. When he leaned in to her, she lightly caressed his cheek. “You’re a good man, Eli. What would I do without you?”

He, for one, was glad that she didn’t have to find out. And that he didn’t have to find out, either, for that matter.

“You’d manage, Kasey. You’d manage.” She was resilient and she’d find a way to forge on. He had no doubts about that.

He might not have any doubts, but she did.

“Not very well,” she said in a whisper meant more for her than for him. Eli had already gone out to notify a nurse that she was ready.

Even though she really wasn’t ready, Kasey thought, fighting a wave of panic. She did what she could to tamp it down. She wasn’t ready to face being a mother all by herself. This wasn’t how she’d pictured her life at this very crucial point.

A tear slid down her cheek.

Frustrated, Kasey brushed it aside. But another one only came to take its place, silently bearing testimony to the sadness within her.

The sadness that threatened to swallow her up whole, without leaving a trace.

Chapter Two

Kasey thought she was seeing things when Eli brought his vehicle to the front of the hospital and she caught a glimpse of what was in the backseat. She could feel the corners of her eyes stinging.

Leave it to Eli.

“You bought him an infant seat.” Her voice hitched and she pressed her lips together, afraid that a sob might suddenly break free and betray just how fragile her emotions were right now.

Eli nodded as he got out of the Jeep and hurried around the hood of his vehicle to her side. The nurse who had brought the wheelchair had pushed Kasey and the baby right up to the curb and stood behind them, waiting for Kasey and her son to get into the vehicle.

Was Kasey upset, or were those happy tears shimmering in her eyes? Eli couldn’t tell. Even though he’d grown up with Alma, he’d come to the conclusion that all women should come with some kind of a manual or at least a road map to give a guy a clue so he could properly navigate a course.

“I got the last one at the Emporium,” he told her. “I know that Rick would cut me some slack if I took the baby home without a car seat, given the circumstances,” he said, referring to the sheriff. “It’s not like there’s a whole lot of traffic around here. But I thought you’d feel safer if Wayne was strapped into his own infant seat when he’s traveling.”

“I do,” she said with feeling, her voice just barely above a whisper as she struggled to keep the tears back. What might have seemed like a small act of kindness to a casual observer threatened to completely undo her. “Thank you.”

Never comfortable with being on the receiving end of gratitude, Eli merely shrugged away her thanks.

He looked down at the sleeping infant in her arms. It almost seemed a shame to disturb him, he seemed so peaceful. But they did have to get going.

While he was fairly adept at holding an infant, strapping one into an infant seat was something else. Eli looked from Wayne to the infant seat in the rear of the Jeep and then slanted a glance toward the nurse. He didn’t like admitting to being helpless, but there was a time to put pride aside and own up to a situation.

“Um…” Eli dragged the single sound out, as if, if he continued debating long enough, a solution would occur to him.

The nurse, however, was in a hurry.

“If you open the door—” the young woman pointed to the side closest to the infant seat “—I’ll strap your little guy into his seat for you,” she offered.

Relieved, Eli immediately swung the rear door open for the nurse. “I’d really appreciate that. Thanks,” he told her heartily.

“Nothing to it.” With a nod in his direction, the nurse turned her attention to the baby in her patient’s arms. “If you’re lucky,” she said to Kasey as she eased the infant from her arms, “he’ll just sleep right through this.”

Cooing softly to the baby that Kasey had just released, the nurse leaned into the Jeep’s backseat and very deftly strapped Wayne Eli Stonestreet in for his very first car ride. Eli moved closer, watching her every move intently and memorizing them.

“You’re all set,” the young woman announced, stepping back onto the curb and behind the wheelchair. She took hold of the two handlebars in the back. “Time to get you into your seat, too,” she told Kasey.

Eli offered Kasey his hand as she began to stand. Feeling slightly wobbly on her feet, Kasey flushed. “I didn’t think I was going to feel this weak,” she protested, annoyed. “After all, it’s been three days. I should be stronger by now.”

“You will be,” Eli assured her. Getting her into the front passenger seat, he paused to thank the nurse again. The latter, holding on to the back of the wheelchair, was all set to leave. Eli flashed her a grateful smile. “Thanks for your help with the baby. I figure it’s going to take me a while before I get good at all this.”

The nurse released the brakes on either side of the wheelchair. “It won’t take as long as you might think,” she told him. “It’ll all become second nature to you in a blink of an eye. Before you know it, you’ll be doing all that and more in your sleep.” She smiled as she nodded toward the back of the Jeep. “These little guys have a habit of bringing out the very best in their parents.”

He was about to correct the woman, telling her that he wasn’t Wayne’s father, but the nurse had already turned on her heel and was quickly propelling the wheelchair in front of her, intent on going back and returning the wheelchair to its proper place. Calling after her wasn’t worth the effort.

And besides, he had to admit that, deep down, he really liked the idea of being mistaken for Wayne’s father, liked the way someone thinking that he and Kasey were actually a family made him feel.

You’re too old to be playing make-believe like this, he upbraided himself. Still, the thought of their being an actual family lingered a while longer.

As did his smile.

With his passengers both in the Jeep and safely secured, Eli hurried around the front of his vehicle and slid in behind the steering wheel. A minute later the engine revved and he was pulling away from the curb, beginning the fifty-mile trip to Forever. More specifically, to the small ranch that was just on the outskirts of that town.

His ranch, he thought, savoring the burst of pride he felt each time he thought of the place. He was full of all sorts of big plans for it. Plans that were within his control to implement.

Unlike other things.

Because he didn’t want to disturb the baby, Eli had left the radio off. Consequently, they drove in silence for a while. There was a time that Kasey had been exceedingly talkative and exuberant, but right now she was quiet. Almost eerily so. He wondered if it was best just to leave her to her thoughts, or should he get her talking, just in case the thoughts she was having centered around Hollis and her present chaotic state of affairs.

If it was the latter, he decided that he needed to raise up her spirits a little, although what method to use eluded him at the moment.

It hadn’t always been this way. There was a time when he’d known just what to do, what to say to make her laugh and forget about whatever it was that was bothering her. Back then, it usually had something to do with her verbally abusive father, who only grew more so when he drank.

Eli was about to say something about the baby—he figured that it was best to break the ice with a nice, safe topic—when Kasey suddenly spoke up.

It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear.

“I can’t let you do this,” she told him abruptly, feeling woven about each word.

“Do what?” he asked. The blanket statement was rather vague, although, in his gut, he had a feeling he knew what she was referring to. Still, he decided to play dumb as he stalled. “Drive you?” he guessed.

“No, have me stay at your ranch with the baby.” She turned in her seat to face him. “I can’t put you out like that.”

“Put me out?” he repeated with a dismissive laugh. “You’re not putting me out, Kasey, you’re doing me a favor.”

She looked at him, unconvinced and just a little confused. “How is my staying at your place with a crying newborn doing you a favor?”

“Well, you might remember that I grew up with four brothers and a sister,” he began, stating a fact tongue-in-cheek since he knew damn well that she knew. Growing up, she’d all but adopted his family, preferring them to her own. “That made for pretty much a full house, and there was always noise. An awful lot of noise,” he emphasized. “When I got a chance to get my own place, I figured that all that peace and quiet would be like finally reaching heaven.”

He paused for a second, looking for the right words, then decided just to trust his instincts. Kasey would understand. “Well, it wasn’t. After living with all that noise going on all the time, the quiet got on my nerves. I found that I kind of missed all that noise. Missed the sound of someone else living in the place besides me,” he emphasized. “Having you and Wayne staying with me will help fill up the quiet. So you see,” he concluded, “you’re really doing me a favor.

“Besides,” he continued. “What kind of a friend would I be, turning my back on you at a time like this when you really need someone?”

“A friend with a life of his own,” she answered matter-of-factly.

“You’re right,” he replied with a nod of his head. “It is my life. And that means I get to choose who I want to have in it.” He looked into his rearview mirror, angling it so that he could catch a glimpse of the sleeping infant in the backseat. “And I choose Wayne. Since he’s too little to come to stay with me by himself, I guess that means that I have to choose you, too, to carry him around until he can walk on his own power,” he concluded with a straight face.

Repositioning the mirror back to its original position, he glanced toward Kasey. She hadn’t said anything in response. And then he saw why. Was he to blame for that? “Hey, are you crying?”

Caught, she had no choice but to nod. Avoiding his eyes, she said evasively, “My hormones are all over the map right now. The doctor who delivered Wayne said it’s because I gave birth, but it’s supposed to pass eventually.”

She was lying about the cause behind the tears and he knew it. He could always tell when she was evading the truth. But for the time being, he said nothing, allowing her to have her excuse so that she could have something to hide behind. It was enough that he knew the tears she was crying were tears of relief.

Shifting and taking one hand off the steering wheel, he reached into his side pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. Switching hands on the steering wheel, he silently held out the handkerchief to Kasey.

Sniffing, she took it and wiped away the telltale damp streaks from her cheeks. Eli’s offer of a place to stay had touched her. It meant a great deal. Especially in light of the fact that the man she’d loved, the man she’d placed all her faith and trust in, not to mention given access to the meager collection of jewelry her late mother had left her, had thought nothing of just taking off. Abandoning her at a point in time when she very possibly needed him the most.

And, on top of that, he’d left her and their newborn son virtually homeless.

If Eli wasn’t here…

But he was. And she knew he was someone she could always count on.

“I’ll pay you back for this,” she vowed to Eli. “I’m not sure just how right now, but once I’m a little stronger and back on my feet, I’ll get a job and—”

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said, cutting her off. “And if you want to pay me back, you can do it by getting healthy and taking care of that boy of yours. Besides,” he pointed out, “I’m not doing anything that extraordinary. If the tables were turned and I had no home to go to, you’d help me.” It wasn’t a question.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” he continued, “that’s what friends are for. To be there for each other, not just when the going is good, but when it’s bad. Especially when it’s bad,” he emphasized. “I’ll always be here for you, Kasey.” It was a promise he meant from the bottom of his heart. “So do us both a favor and save your breath. You’re staying at my place for as long as you want to. End of discussion,” he informed her with finality.

She smiled then, focusing on his friendship rather than on Hollis’s betrayal.

“I had no idea you could be this stubborn,” she told him with a glimmer of an amused smile. “Learn something every day, I guess.”

He caught the glimmer of humor. She was coming around, Eli thought, more than a little pleased. With any luck, Hollis taking off like some selfish bat out of hell wouldn’t scar her. But then, above all else, he’d always figured that, first and foremost, Kasey was a survivor.

“There’s probably a lot about me that you don’t know,” he told her as he continued to drive along the open, desolate road that was between Pine Ridge and Forever.

“A lot?” Kasey repeated, then laughed softly as she turned the notion over in her mind. After all, they’d known each other in what felt like close to forever. “I really doubt that.”

He loved the sound of her laughter. Loved, he freely admitted, if only to himself, everything about Kasey—except for her husband. But then, he didn’t have to love Hollis. Only she did.

It was because he’d accidentally found out that she loved Hollis that he’d kept his feelings for her to himself even though he’d finally worked up the nerve to tell her exactly how he felt about her.

But that was back in high school. Back when Hollis, the school’s football hero, had attracted a ring of girls around him, all completely enamored with his charm, each and every one of them ready to do whatever it took to have him notice them.

Hollis, being Hollis, took all the adulation in stride as being his due. He took his share of worshipful girls to bed, too.

Even so, he always had his eye on Kasey because, unlike the others, while very friendly, she didn’t fawn all over him. So, naturally, she was the one he’d had to have. The one he’d wanted to conquer. She’d surprised him by holding out for commitment and a ring. And he’d surprised himself by letting her.

One night, not long after graduation, drunk on far more than just her proximity, Hollis had given her both a commitment and a ring, as well as a whirlwind wedding ceremony in a run-down, out-of-the-way chapel that specialized in them, with no questions asked other than if the hundred-dollar bill—paid up-front—was real.

And just like that, Eli recalled, the bottom had dropped out of his world. Not that he felt he had a prayer of winning her heart while Hollis was busy sniffing around her. But Eli had honestly thought that if he bided his time and waited Hollis out, he’d be there when Kasey needed someone.

And he was.

It had taken eight years, far longer than he’d thought Hollis would actually last in the role of husband. More than anything, Eli wanted to be there for her. He’d take her gratitude—if that was all she had to offer—in place of her love.

At least it was something, and besides, he knew that unless he was dead, there was no way he wouldn’t be there for Kasey.

He heard her sigh. This was all weighing heavily on her, not that he could blame her. In her place, he’d feel the same way.

“I want you to know that I really appreciate this and that I promise Wayne and I won’t put you out for long.”

“Oh, good,” he quipped drily, “because I’ll need the room back by the end of the week.”

His words stopped her dead. Eli spared her a look, one that was a little long in length since he was fairly confident that there was nothing to accidentally hit on this stretch of lonely highway.

“I’m only going to say this one more time, Kasey. You’re not putting me out. I want to do this. I’m your friend and I always have been and this is what friends do, they have each other’s backs. Now, unless you really want to make me strangle you, please stop apologizing, please stop telling me that you’re going to leave as soon as possible. And please stop telling me that you feel you’re putting me out. Because you’re not. It makes me feel good to help you.

“Now, I don’t want to hear anything more about this. My home is your home for as long as you need a place to stay—and maybe for a little bit longer than that.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Understood?”

“Understood,” she murmured. Then, a bit more loudly and with feeling, she promised, “But I will make it up to you.”

“Good, I’m looking forward to it,” he told her crisply. “Now, moving on,” he said deliberately. “You have a choice of bedrooms. There are two to choose from, pretty much the same size,” he told her, then stopped when a thought occurred to him. “Maybe I should let you have the master bedroom. We can put the crib in that room, so you can have Wayne right there—unless you’d rather have him stay in his own room, at which point you can take one of the bedrooms and place him in the other.”

Kasey felt as if she was still stuck in first gear, her brain fixated on something he’d said to start with. “The crib?”

Why did she look so surprised? he wondered. “Well, Wayne’s got to sleep in something, and I thought a crib was better than that portable whatchamacallit that you had at your place. Or a dresser drawer,” he added, recalling stories his father told him about his being so small to begin with, they had tucked him into the bottom drawer of a dresser, lined with blankets and converted into a minicrib. He’d slept there for a month.

Kasey pounced on something he’d only mentioned in passing. “You were there?” she asked eagerly. “At our ranch?” The our in this case referred to her and Hollis. When he nodded, her mind took off, fully armed to the teeth. “So that means that I can still go over there and get—”

He shook his head. The man who had won the ranch from Hollis had made it very clear that he considered everything on the premises his. Still, if she had something of sentimental value that she wanted retrieved, he would be there in less than a heartbeat to get it for her. The new owner would just have to understand—or be made to understand.

“The guy who won the ranch from Hollis is living there,” he told her. “I had to talk him into letting me come in and get some of your things. Actually—” never one to take any undue credit, he felt he needed to tell her “—having Rick and Alma with me kind of gave me the leverage I needed to convince the guy to release your things so I could bring them to you.”

“Rick and Alma,” she repeated as that piece of information sank in with less than stellar results. “So they know? About Hollis leaving me?” she asked in a small, troubled voice.

He knew that she would have rather kept the fact that Hollis had walked out on her a secret, but secrets had a way of spreading in a small town the size of Forever. And besides, the sympathy would all be on her side for reasons beyond the fact that she was a new mother with an infant to care for. Everyone in and around the town liked her.

That couldn’t be said of Hollis.

“They know,” Eli told her quietly. “I figured they—especially Rick, since he’s the sheriff—should hear it from me so that they’d know fact from fiction, rumors being what they are in this town,” he added.

Kasey felt as if there was a lead weight lying across her chest. There was a very private, shy woman beneath the bravado. A woman who wanted her secrets to remain secrets.

“How many other people know?” she asked him.

“For now, just Rick and the deputies.”

For now.

“Now,” she knew, had an exceptionally short life expectancy. As Eli had said, rumors being what they were, she had a feeling that everyone in town would know that Hollis had taken off before the week was out—if not sooner.

It was a very bitter pill for her to swallow.

But she had no other choice.

Chapter Three

“I guess you’re right. No point in pretending I can hide this,” Kasey finally said with a sigh. “People’ll talk.”

“They always do,” he agreed. “It’s just a fact of life.”

Fact of life or not, the idea just didn’t sit well with her. She wasn’t a person who craved attention or wanted her fifteen minutes of fame in the spotlight. She was perfectly content just to quietly go about the business of living.

“I don’t want to be the newest topic people talk about over breakfast,” she said, upset.

“If they do talk about you, it’ll be because they’re on your side. Fact of the matter is, Hollis more or less wore out that crown of his. People don’t think of him as that golden boy he once was,” Eli assured her. Over the years, he’d become acutely aware of Hollis’s flaws, flaws that the man seemed to cultivate rather than try to conquer. “Not to mention that he owes more than one person around here money.”

Kasey looked at him, startled. Her mouth dropped open.

Maybe he’d said too much, Eli thought. “You didn’t know that,” he guessed.

Kasey’s throat felt horribly dry, as if she’d been eating sand for the past half hour.

“No,” she answered, her voice barely above a shaken whisper. “I didn’t know that.”

If she didn’t know about that, it was a pretty safe bet that she certainly didn’t know about her husband’s dalliances with other women during the years that they were married, Eli thought.

Hollis, you were and are a damn fool. A damn, stupid, self-centered fool.

He could feel his anger growing, but there was no point in letting it fester like this. It wasn’t going to help Kasey and her baby, and they were the only two who really mattered in this sordid mess.

“Are you sure?” Kasey asked. She’d turned her face toward him and placed a supplicating hand on his upper arm, silently begging him to say he was mistaken.

It was as if someone had jabbed his heart with a hot poker. He hated that this was happening to her. She didn’t deserve this on top of what she’d already gone through. All of his life, he’d wanted nothing more than to make life better for her, to protect her. But right now, he was doing everything he could. Like taking her to his ranch.

Dammit, Hollis, how could you do this to her? She thought you were going to be her savior, her hero.

The house that Kasey had grown up in had been completely devoid of love. Her father worked hard, but never got anywhere and it made him bitter. Especially when he drank to ease the pain of what he viewed as his dead-end life. Carter Hale had been an abusive drunk not the least bit shy about lashing out with his tongue or the back of his hand.

He’d seen the marks left on Kasey’s mother and had worried that Kasey might get in the way of her father’s wrath next. But Kasey had strong survival instincts and had known enough to keep well out of her father’s way when he went on one of his benders, which was often.

Looking back, Eli realized that was the reason why she’d run off with Hollis right after high school graduation. Hollis was exciting, charming, and fairly reeked of sensuality. More than that, he had a feeling that to Kasey, Hollis represented, in an odd twist, freedom and at the same time, security. Marrying Hollis meant that she never had to go home again. Never had to worry about staying out of her father’s long reach again.

But in Hollis’s case, “freedom” was just another way of saying no plans for the future. And if “security” meant the security of not having to worry about money, then Hollis failed to deliver on that promise, as well.

Eli had strong suspicions that Kasey was beginning to admit to herself that marrying Hollis had been a huge mistake. That he wasn’t going to save her but take her to hell via another route.

Most likely, knowing Kasey, when she’d discovered that she was pregnant, she had clung to the hope that this would finally make Hollis buckle down, work hard and grow up.

Eli blew out a short breath. He could have told her that Hollis wasn’t about to change his way of thinking, and saved her a great deal of grief. But lessons, he supposed, couldn’t be spoon-fed. The student could only learn if he or she wanted to, and he had a feeling that Kasey would have resisted any attempts to show her that Hollis wasn’t what she so desperately wanted him to be.

Eli tried to appear as sympathetic as possible. As sympathetic as he felt toward her. This couldn’t be easy for her. None of it.

“I’m sure,” he finally told her, taking no joy in the fact that he was cutting Hollis down.

Kasey shook her head. She felt stricken. “I didn’t have a clue,” she finally admitted, wondering how she could have been so blind. Wondering how Hollis could have duped her like this. “What’s wrong with me, Eli? Am I that stupid?”

“No, you’re not stupid at all,” he said with feeling. “What you are is loyal, and there’s nothing wrong with you.” To him, she’d always been perfect. Even when she’d fallen in love with Hollis, he hadn’t been able to find it in his heart to take her to task for loving, in his opinion, the wrong man. He’d just accepted it. “Hollis is the one who’s got something wrong with him. You’ve got to believe that,” he told her firmly.

Kasey lifted her slender shoulders in a helpless shrug and then sighed again. It was obvious that she really didn’t want to find fault with the man who’d fathered her child. The man whom she’d loved for almost a decade. “He was just trying to get some money together to make a better life for us,” she said defensively.

The only one whose lot Hollis had ever wanted to improve was his own, Eli thought grudgingly, but he knew that to say so out loud would only hurt Kasey, so he kept the words to himself.

After pulling up in front of his ranch house, he turned off the engine and looked at her. “Until you’re ready, until you have a place to go to and want to go there,” he added, “this is your home, Kasey. Yours and Wayne’s. What’s mine is yours,” he told her. “You know that.”

He saw her biting her lower lip and knew she was waging an internal war with herself. Kasey hated the idea of being in anyone’s debt, but he wasn’t just anyone, he silently argued. They were friends. Best friends. And he had been part of her life almost from the time they began forming memories. There was no way he was about to abandon her now. And no way was he going to place her in a position where she felt she “owed” him anything other than seeing her smile again.

“Don’t make me have to hog-tie you to make you stay put,” he warned.

The so-called threat finally brought a smile to her lips. “All right, I won’t.”

Feeling rather pleased with himself, at least for the moment, Eli unfolded his lanky frame out of the Jeep and then hurried over to Kasey’s side of the vehicle to help her out. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have even thought of it. She’d always been exceedingly independent around him, which made her being with Hollis doubly difficult for him to take. Kasey couldn’t be independent around Hollis.

Hollis enjoyed being in control and letting Kasey know that he was in control. That in turn meant that he expected her submission. Because she loved him, she’d lived down to his expectations.

Unlike Hollis, he was proud of the fact that Kasey could take care of herself. And also unlike Hollis, he liked her independent streak. But at the moment, that had to take a backseat to reality. It was obvious that her body was having a bit of difficulty getting back in sync after giving birth only a few days ago. Eli just wanted to let her know that he was there for her. Whether it meant giving her a hand up or a shoulder to cry on, she could always rely on him.

She knew he meant well, but it didn’t help her frame of mind. “I don’t like feeling like this,” she murmured, tamping down her frustration.

Eli took her hand and eased her to her feet. “It’ll pass soon and you can go back to being Super Kasey,” he quipped affectionately.

Just as she emerged from the passenger side, the tiny passenger in the backseat began to cry.

“Sounds like someone’s warming up to start wailing,” Eli commented, opening the rear door. “You okay?” he asked Kasey before he started freeing Wayne from all his tethers.

She nodded. “I’m fine.” A sliver of guilt shot through her as she watched Eli at work. “I should be doing that,” she said, clearly annoyed with herself. “He’s my responsibility.”

“Hey, you can’t have all the fun,” he told her good-naturedly, noting that she sounded almost testy. He took no offense, sensing that she was frustrated with herself—and Hollis—not him.

The baby was looking at him, wide-eyed, and for a moment he had stopped crying. Eli took that to be a good sign.

“Hi, fella. Let’s get you out of all those belts and buckles and into the daylight,” he said in a low, gentle voice meant to further soothe the little passenger.

In response, the baby just stared at him as if he was completely fascinated by the sound of his voice. Eli smiled to himself, undoing one belt after another as quickly as possible.

Behind him, he heard Kasey say, “I’m sorry, Eli.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, puzzled. “About what?”

“About being so short with you.” He was being nothing but good to her. He didn’t deserve to have her snapping at him.

“Can’t help being the height you are,” he answered wryly.

“I meant—”

He didn’t want her beating herself up about this. God knew she had reason to be upset and short-tempered.

“I know what you meant,” he told her, stepping back from the Jeep and then straightening. Holding Wayne securely in his arms, he changed the subject. “I can’t get over how little he is. It’s like holding a box of sugar. A wiggling box of sugar,” he amended as the baby twisted slightly.

He saw that the infant’s lips were moving. “Rooting,” he thought the nurse had called it on one of his visits to hospital. It was what babies did when they were hungry and searching for their mother’s breast.

“I think your son is trying to order an early dinner,” he told her. Wayne had latched on to his shirt and was sucking on it. Very gently, he extracted the material from the infant’s mouth.

Wayne whimpered.

Eli was right, Kasey realized. The nurse had brought her son to her for a feeding approximately four hours ago. She needed to feed him.

Kasey took the baby from Eli and Wayne turned his little head so that his face was now against her breast. As before, he began questing and a frustrated little noise emerged from his small, rosebud mouth.

“I think you’re right,” she said to Eli, never taking her eyes off her son.

She still wasn’t used to Wayne or the concept that she was actually a mother. Right now, she was in awe of this small, perfect little human being who had come into her life. Holding him was like holding a small piece of heaven, she thought.

That her best friend seemed so attuned to her son made her feel both happy and sad. Happy because she had someone to share this wondrous experience with and sad because as good and kind as Eli was, she was supposed to be sharing this with Hollis. Her husband was supposed to be standing beside her. He should be the one holding their son and marveling about how perfect he was.

Instead, Eli was saying all those things while Hollis was out there somewhere, heading for the hills. Or possibly for a good time. And it was Hollis who had gambled their home right out from under them and then hadn’t been man enough to face her with the news. He’d sent in Eli to take his place.

What kind of man did that to the woman he loved—unless he didn’t love her anymore, she suddenly thought. Was that it? Had he just woken up one morning to find that he’d fallen out of love with her? The thought stung her heart, but she had a feeling that she was right.

Meanwhile, Wayne was growing progressively insistent and more frustrated that there was nothing to be suckled from his mother’s blouse. All that was happening was that he was leaving a circular wet spot.

Glancing toward the protesting infant, Eli abandoned the suitcase he was about to take out.

“I’d better get you inside and settled in before Wayne decides to make a meal out of your blouse,” he said. Nodding at the suitcase, he told her, “This other stuff can wait.”

With that, he hurried over to the front door and unlocked it. Like most of the people in and around Forever, he usually left the front door unlocked during the daytime. But knowing he was going to be gone for a while, he’d thought it was more prudent to lock up before he’d left this morning.

Not that he actually had anything worth stealing, but he figured that coming into a house that had just been ransacked would have been an unsettling experience for Kasey, and he’d wanted everything to be as perfect as possible for her.

Despite their friendship, coming here wasn’t going to be easy for her. Kasey had her pride—at times, that was all she had and she’d clung to it—and her pride would have been compromised twice over if she’d had to stay in a recently robbed house. If nothing else, it would have made her exceedingly uneasy about the baby’s safety, not to mention her own.

She had more than enough to worry about as it was. He wanted to make this transition to his house as painless, hell, as easy as possible for her. That meant no surprises when he opened the front door to his house.

“Don’t expect much,” he told her as he pushed the front door open. “I’m still just settling in and getting the hang of this place. It’ll look a lot better once I get a chance to get some new things in here and spruce the place up a bit.”

Walking in ahead of him, Kasey looked around slowly, taking everything in. She knew that Eli had bought the ranch in the past couple of months. Though she’d wanted to, she hadn’t had the opportunity to come by to visit. It wasn’t so much that she’d been too busy to spare the time, but that she’d had a feeling, deep down, Hollis hadn’t wanted her to come over. That was why, she surmised, he’d kept coming up with excuses about why he wasn’t able to bring her over and he’d been completely adamant about her not going anywhere alone in “her condition,” as if her pregnancy had drained all of her intelligence from her, rendering her incapacitated.

Not wanting to be drawn into yet another futile, pointless argument, she’d figured it was easier just to go along with what Hollis was saying. In her heart, she knew that Eli would understand.

Eli always understood, she thought now, wondering why she’d been such a blind fool when it came to Hollis. There were times, she had to reluctantly admit, when Hollis could be as shallow as a wading pool.

At other times…

There were no other times. If he’d had a moment of kindness, of understanding, those points were all wiped out by what he’d done now. A man who’d walked out on his family had no redeeming qualities.

She forced herself to push all thoughts of Hollis from her mind. She couldn’t deal with that right now. Instead she focused on Eli’s house.

“It’s cozy,” she finally commented with a nod, and hoped that she sounded convincing.

He went around, turning on lights even though it was still afternoon. The sun, he’d noticed shortly after buying the ranch, danced through the house early in the morning. By the time midafternoon came, the tour was finished and the sun had moved on to another part of the ranch, leaving the house bathed in shadows. It didn’t bother him, but he didn’t want to take the chance that it might add to Kasey’s justifiably dark mood.

“By ‘cozy’ you mean ‘little,’” he corrected with a laugh. He took no offense. By local standards, his ranch was considered small. But everything had to start somewhere. “I figure I can always build on to it once I get a little bit of time set aside,” he told her.

She nodded. “I’m sure your brothers would be willing to help you build.”

“And Alma,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget about Alma.”

His sister, the youngest in their family and currently one of the sheriff’s three deputies, was always the first to have her hand up, the first to volunteer for anything. She was, and always had been, highly competitive. At times he had the feeling that the very act of breathing was some sort of a competition for Alma, if it meant that she could do it faster than the rest of them.

His sister had slowed down some, he thought—and they were all grateful for that—now that Cash was in the picture. The one-time resident of Forever had gone on to become a highly sought-after criminal lawyer, but he was giving it all up to marry Alma and settle down in Forever again. He knew they all had Cash to thank for this calmer, gentler version of Alma. Eli could only hope that Alma was going to continue on this less frantic route indefinitely.

“Nobody ever forgets Alma,” Kasey said fondly. Wayne, his cries getting louder, was now mewling like a neglected, hungry kitten. She began to rock him against her chest, trying to soothe him for a minute longer. “Um, could you show me where we’ll be staying?”

Because Hollis had caught him by surprise, he hadn’t had time to do much of anything by way of getting her room ready for her—or, for that matter, make up his mind about which room might be better suited to her and the baby. He was pretty much winging it. Stopping to buy the infant seat, as well as bringing over the baby’s crib, was just about all he’d had time for before driving to the hospital.

“For now, why don’t you just go into the back bedroom and use that?” he suggested. When she continued looking at him quizzically, he realized that she didn’t know what room he was talking about. “C’mon—” he beckoned “—I’ll show you.”

Turning, Eli led the way to the only bedroom located on the first floor. Luckily for him—and Kasey—the room did have a bed in it. It, along with the rest of the furnishings, had come with the house. The previous owner had sold him the house on the one condition that he wasn’t going to have to move out his furniture. That, the old widower had told him, would be one big hassle for him, especially since he was flying to Los Angeles to live with his daughter and her family.

Eli, who hadn’t had a stick of furniture to his name, had readily agreed. For both it had been a win-win situation.

Opening the bedroom door, he turned on the overhead light and then gestured toward the full-size bed against the wall. It faced a bureau made of dark wood. The pieces matched and both were oppressively massive-looking.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Eli urged. Stepping to the side, he added, “I’m going to go out and get your suitcase. Holler if you need anything.”

And with that, he turned and left the room.

Kasey watched him walk away. With each step that took him farther away from her, she could feel her uneasiness growing.

I’m hollering, Eli. I’m hollering, she silently told him.

You’re not the only one in the room, she reminded herself.

Smiling down at Wayne, she turned her attention toward quelling her son’s mounting, ever-louder cries of distress.

Chapter Four

Eli kept looking at the door to the downstairs bedroom, waiting for it to open. It seemed to him as if Kasey had been in there with the baby for a long time.

Was that normal?

He debated knocking on the door to ask if everything was all right. But on the other hand, he didn’t want Kasey to feel as if he was crowding her, either.

He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he just kept watching the door for movement. He had no idea how long it took to actually feed an infant. Alma was the last one born in their family and since he was only eleven months older, he never had the opportunity to be around an infant.

Dragging a hand through his unruly, thick black hair, he blew out an impatient breath. No doubt about it, he’d never felt so out of his depth before.

When he glanced down at his watch, he noted that twenty minutes had passed. Again he wondered if he should be worried that something was wrong. Though she’d tried to hide it, Kasey had been pretty upset when she’d gone into the bedroom with the infant. Not that he could blame her. The man she’d wanted to count on had abandoned her without so much as a shred of consideration for how she would feel about the situation. Hollis certainly hadn’t had the courage to face her before he’d pulled his disappearing act.

She really was better off without him, but, if he said anything like that now, it might strike her as cold.

Frustrated, concerned, Eli ran his hand through his hair again, trying to think of a possible way to make things better for Kasey.

Maybe Hollis should have at least left her a letter or some sort of a note, apologizing for his actions and telling her that he just needed to get his head straight. That once that happened, maybe he could come back and do right by her. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that Kasey would have taken comfort in that.

But there was no point in reflecting on that, since Hollis hadn’t even been thoughtful enough of her feelings to do something as simple as that—

Eli stopped thinking of what was and began thinking of what should have been.

If it helped, why not?

He looked at the door again, and then at the old-fashioned writing desk butted up against the far wall in the living room. Weighing the pros and cons, he wavered for less than a moment, then quickly crossed over to the desk, took out a piece of paper, a pen and an envelope.

With one eye on the entrance to the living room, watching for Kasey, he quickly dashed off a note of apology to her, doing his best to approximate Hollis’s handwriting, then signed it Hollis.

He’d just finished sealing the envelope when he heard the bedroom door opening. The very next moment, he heard Kasey calling to him.

“Eli? Eli, are you down here?” Her voice sounded as if she was coming closer.

Stuffing the envelope into his back pocket, Eli raised his own voice slightly. “Out here. I’m in the living room.”

The next moment Kasey walked into the room. Both she and the baby looked somewhat calmer.

“Well, he’s all fed and changed, thanks to the disposable diapers in that little care packet the hospital gave me.” Even as she said it, Kasey caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He was so tuned in to her, he could almost read her mind. She was already thinking ahead to all the things she was going to need, including a veritable mountain of disposable diapers.

“Well, unless we can get Wayne potty-trained by tonight, you’re going to need more of those,” he commented, taking the burden of having to mention it from her. “Tell you what, why don’t you make up a list of what you’ll need and I’ll take a quick trip into town?” Eli suggested.

Kasey smiled, grateful for his thoughtfulness. How did one man turn out like this while another—

Don’t go there, she warned herself. There weren’t any answers for her there and she would drive herself crazy with the questions.

“Sounds like a good idea,” she agreed. Then her eyes narrowed as she saw the long envelope sticking out of his back pocket. “What’s that?” she asked.

Appearing properly confused, Eli reached behind himself. He pulled out the envelope, looked at it and slowly allowed recognition to enter his expression.

“Oh, in all the excitement of bringing you and Wayne home, I totally forgot about this.”

Kasey cocked her head, curious as she studied him. “Forgot about what?”

“When Hollis came over in the middle of the night to ask me to look after you, he wanted me to give this to you.” And with that, he handed her the envelope.

She stared at it, then looked up at Eli. “Hollis left me a letter?” That really didn’t sound like the Hollis she knew. He would have made fun of anyone who actually put anything in writing.

“I don’t know if it’s a letter or not, but he left something,” Eli told her vaguely. “Here, why don’t you let me hold on to the little guy so you can open the envelope and see what’s inside.” Even as he made the offer, Eli was already taking Wayne away from her and into his arms.

Really puzzled now, Kasey nodded absently in Eli’s direction and opened the envelope. The letter inside was short and to the point. It was also thoughtfully worded. She read it twice, and then one last time, before raising her eyes to Eli’s face. She looked at him for a long moment.

Swaying slightly to lull the baby in his arms, he looked at her innocently. “So? What did Hollis have to say?”

She glanced down at the single sheet before answering. “That he was sorry. That it’s not me, it’s him. He doesn’t want to hurt me, but he just needs some time away to get his head together. Until he does, he can’t be the husband and father that we deserve. In the meantime, he’ll send money for the baby and me when he can,” she concluded. Very deliberately, she folded the letter and placed it back in its envelope.

Eli nodded. “That sounds about right. That’s more or less what he said to me before he left,” he explained when she looked at him quizzically. “At least he apologized to you.”

“Yes, at least he apologized,” she echoed quietly, raising her eyes to his. Still looking at him, she tucked the letter into her own pocket. There was an odd expression on her face.

Did she suspect? He couldn’t tell. There were times, such as now, when her expression was completely unreadable.

The next moment Kasey took her son back from Eli and sat with the infant on the sofa. A very loud sigh escaped her lips.

Eli perched on the arm of the sofa and looked into her face. Hollis was clearly out of his mind, walking away from this.

“Are you all right, Kasey?” he asked solicitously.

She nodded her head slowly in response. When she spoke, her voice seemed as if it was coming from a very far distance. And, in a way, she supposed it was. With each word he uttered, she closed the door a little further to her past.

He was about to ask her again when Kasey abruptly began to talk.

“I guess, deep down, I knew that Hollis wasn’t the father type. As long as it was just him and me, he could put up with some domesticity, provided it didn’t smother him.”

Her eyes stung and she paused for a moment before continuing. She didn’t tell Eli about the times she suspected that Hollis was stepping out on her, that he was seeing other women. There was no point in talking about that now.

“But then I got pregnant, and once the baby was here, it really hit Hollis that he might have to…” Her voice trailed off for a moment as she struggled with herself, vacillating between being angry at Hollis and feeling disloyal to him for talking about him this way. For once, anger won out. “That he might have to grow up,” she finally said.

“First of all, you didn’t just ‘get pregnant,’” Eli corrected. “Last time I checked, it took two to make that happen. Hollis was just as responsible for this as you were,” he pointed out.

Kasey smiled affectionately at him then. Smiled as she leaned forward and lightly touched his face. Both the look and the touch spoke volumes. But Eli had no interpreter and he wasn’t sure just what was hidden behind her smile or even if there was something hidden behind her smile.

All he knew was that, as usual, her smile drew him in. There were times, when he allowed his guard to slip, that he loved her so much that it hurt.

It would be hard having her here under his roof, sleeping here under his roof, and keeping a respectful distance from her at all times.

Not that he would ever disrespect her, he vowed, but God, he wanted to hold her in his arms right now. And more than anything in the world, he wanted to lean over and kiss her. Kiss her just once like a lover and not like a friend.

But that was impossible, and it would ruin everything between them.

So he rose off the arm of the sofa and got down to the business of making this arrangement work. “If you could just give me that list of things—”

“Sure. I’m going to need a pen and some paper,” Kasey prompted when he just remained standing there.

“Right.”

Coming to life, Eli was about to fetch both items from the same desk he had just used to write that “note from Hollis” to her when there was a knock on the front door.

The first thing Eli thought of was that Hollis had had a change of heart and, making an assumption that Kasey would be here, had returned for his wife and son.

A glance at Kasey’s face told him she was thinking the same thing.

As he strode toward the door, Eli struggled to ignore the deep-seated feeling of disappointment flooding him.

Kasey followed in his wake.

But when he threw open his door, it wasn’t Hollis that either one of them saw standing there. It was Miss Joan and one of her waitresses from the diner, a tall, big-boned young woman named Carla. Miss Joan was holding a single bag in her exceptionally slender arms. Carla was holding several more with incredible ease, as if all combined they weighed next to nothing.

“Figured you two had probably gotten back from the hospital by now,” Miss Joan declared. Her eyes were naturally drawn to the baby and she all but cooed at him. “My, but he’s a cutie, he is.”

And then she looked up from the baby and directly at Eli. “Well, aren’t you going to invite us in, or are you looking to keep Kasey and her son all to yourself?”

Eli snapped to attention. “Sorry, you just surprised me, that’s all, Miss Joan,” he confessed. “C’mon in,” he invited, stepping back so that she and the waitress had room to walk in.

He watched the older woman with some amusement as she looked slowly around. Miss Joan made no secret that she was scrutinizing everything in the house.

As was her custom, Miss Joan took possession of all she surveyed.

“I don’t recall hearing about a tornado passing through Forever lately.” She raised an eyebrow as she glanced in his direction.

Eli knew she was referring to the fact that as far as housekeeping went, he got a failing grade. With a shrug, he told her, “Makes it easier to find things if they’re all out in the open.”

Miss Joan shook her head. “If you say so.” She snorted. “Looks like this could be a nice little place you’ve got here, Eli.” Her eyes swept over the general chaos. “Once you get around to digging yourself out of this mess, of course.” She waved her hand around the room, dismissing the subject now that she’d touched on it.

“Anyway, I got tired of waiting for an invite, so I just decided to invite myself over.” Pausing, the older woman looked at Eli meaningfully. “Thought you might need a few things for the new guy,” she told him, nodding at the baby in Kasey’s arms.

“Oh, I can’t—” Kasey began to protest. The last thing she wanted was for people to think of her as a charity case.

“Sure you can,” Miss Joan said, cutting Kasey off with a wave of her hand. Then she directed her attention to the young woman who had come with her. “Just set everything down on the coffee table, Carla,” she instructed. She shifted her eyes toward Kasey. “I’ll let you sort things out when you get a chance,” she told her. “Brought you some diapers and a bunch of other items. These new little guys need a lot to get them spruced up and shining.” She said it as if it was a prophesy.

Miss Joan was right. She couldn’t afford to let her pride get in the way, or, more accurately, Wayne couldn’t afford to have her pride get in his way.

“I don’t know what to say,” Kasey said to Miss Joan, emotion welling up in her throat and threatening to choke off her words.

“Didn’t ask you to say anything, now, did I?” Miss Joan pointed out. And then the woman smiled. “It’s what we do around here, remember? We look out for each other.” She nodded at the largest paper bag that Carla set down. Because she had run out of room on the coffee table, Carla had deposited the bag on the floor beside one of the table legs. “Thought the baby might not be the only one who was hungry, so I brought you two some dinner. My advice is to wait until you put him down before you start eating.”

“What do I owe you?” Eli asked, taking his wallet out.

Miss Joan put her hand over his before he could take any bills out. “We’ll settle up some other time,” she informed him.

Kasey wasn’t about to bother asking Miss Joan how the woman knew that she was here, at Eli’s ranch, rather than at her own ranch. Even when things were actually kept a secret, Miss Joan had a way of knowing about them. Miss Joan always knew. She ran the town’s only diner and dispensed advice and much-needed understanding along with the best coffee in Texas.

Joan Randall had been a fixture in Forever for as long as anyone could remember and had just recently given in to the entreaties of her very persistent suitor. She and Harry Monroe had gotten married recently in an outdoor wedding with the whole town in attendance. Even so, everyone still continued to refer to her as Miss Joan. Calling her anything else just didn’t feel right.

Having done everything she’d set out to do, Miss Joan indicated that it was time to leave.

“Okay, Carla and I’ll be heading out now,” she announced, then paused a moment longer to look at Kasey. “You need anything, you just give me a call, understand, baby girl?” And then she lowered her voice only slightly as she walked by Eli. “You take care of her, hear?”

He didn’t need any prompting to do that. He’d been watching over Kasey for as long as he could remember.

“I fully intend to, Miss Joan,” he told her with feeling.

Miss Joan nodded as she crossed the threshold. She knew he meant it. Knew what was in his heart better than he did.

“Good. Because she’s been through enough.” Then, lowering her voice even further so that only Eli could hear her, she told him, “I ever see that Hollis again, I’m going to take a lot of pleasure in turning that rooster into a hen.”

Eli had absolutely no doubts that the older woman was very capable of doing just that. He grinned. “Better not let the sheriff hear you say that.”

Miss Joan smiled serenely at him. “Rick won’t say anything. Not with Alma helping me and being his deputy and all. Your sister doesn’t like that bastard any better than any of us do,” she confided. Then, raising her voice so that Kasey could hear her, she urged, “Don’t wait too long to have your dinner.” With a nod of her head, she informed them that “It tastes better warm.”

One final glance at Kasey and the baby, and the woman was gone. Carla was right behind her, moving with surprising speed given her rather large size.

“I didn’t tell her about Hollis” was the first thing Eli said as he closed the door again and turned around to face Kasey. He didn’t want her thinking that he had been spreading her story around.

Kasey knew he hadn’t. This was Miss Joan they were talking about. Everyone was aware of her ability to ferret out information.

“Nobody ever has to tell that woman anything. She just knows. It’s almost spooky,” Kasey confessed. “When I was a little girl, I used to think she was a witch—a good witch,” she was quick to add with a smile. “Like in The Wizard of Oz, but still a witch.” At times, she wasn’t completely convinced that the woman wasn’t at least part witch.

He grinned. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he quipped. “Speaking of babes, I think your little guy just fell asleep again. Probably in self-defense so that he didn’t have to put up with being handled.” He grinned. “Carla looked like she was dying to get her hands on him.” He had noticed that the waitress had struggled to hold herself in check. “But then, I guess that everyone loves a new baby.”

The second the words were out, he realized what he’d said and he could have bitten off his tongue.

Especially when Kasey answered quietly, “No, not everyone.”

He could almost see the wound in her heart opening up again.

Dammit, he would have to be more careful about what he said around Kasey. At least for a while. “Let me rephrase that. Any normal person loves a new baby.”

Kasey knew he meant well. She offered Eli a weak smile in response, then looked down at her son.

“I’ll try putting him to bed so that we can have our dinner. But I can’t make any promises. He’s liable to wake up just as I start tiptoeing out. Feel perfectly free to start without me,” she urged as she walked back to the rear bedroom with Wayne.

As if he could, Eli thought, watching her as she left the room.

The truth of it was, he couldn’t start anything anywhere, not as long as she continued to hold his heart hostage the way she did.

Shaking free of his thoughts, Eli went to set the table in the kitchen. With any luck, he mused, he’d find two clean dishes still in the cupboard. Otherwise, he would actually have to wash a couple stacked in the sink.

It wasn’t a prospect he looked forward to.

Chapter Five

Eli wasn’t sure just when he finally fell asleep. The fact that he actually did fall asleep surprised him. Mentally, he’d just assumed that he would be up all night. After all, this was Kasey’s first night in his house, not to mention her first night with the baby without the safety net of having a nurse close by to take Wayne back to the nursery if he started crying.

Granted, he wasn’t a nurse, but at least he could be supportive and make sure that she didn’t feel as if she was in this alone. He could certainly relieve her when she got tired.

Last night, when it was time to turn in, Kasey had thanked him for his hospitality and assured him that she had everything under control. She’d slipped into the same bedroom she’d used earlier. The crib he’d retrieved from her former home was set up there.

Her last words to him were to tell him that he should get some sleep.

Well that was easier said than done, he’d thought at the time, staring off into the starless darkness outside his window. He’d felt much too wired. Besides, he was listening for any sound that struck him as being out of the ordinary. A sound that would tell him that Kasey needed help. Which in turn would mean that she needed him, at least for this.

He almost strained himself, trying to hear if the baby was crying.

It was probably around that time that, exhausted, he’d fallen asleep.

When he opened his eyes again, he was positive that only a few minutes had gone by. Until he realized that daylight, not moonlight, was streaming into his room. Startled, he bolted upright. Around the same moment of rude awakening, the aroma of tantalizingly strong coffee wound its intoxicating way up to his room and into his senses.

Kicking off a tangled sheet, Eli hit the ground running, stumbling over his discarded boots on his way to his door. It hurt more because he was barefoot.

Even so, he didn’t bother putting anything on his feet as he followed the aroma to its point of origin, making his way down the stairs.

Ultimately, the scent brought him to the kitchen.

Kasey was there, with her back toward him. Wayne wasn’t too far away—and was strapped into his infant seat. Sometime between last night and this morning, she’d gotten the baby’s infant seat out of the car and converted it so that it could hold him securely in place while she had him on the kitchen table.

Turning from the stove, Kasey almost jumped a foot off the ground. Her hand immediately went to her chest, as if she was trying to keep her heart from physically leaping out.

“Oh, Eli, you scared me,” she said, struggling to regain her composure.

“Sorry,” he apologized when he saw that he’d really startled her. “I don’t exactly look my best first thing in the morning.” He ran his hand through his hair, remembering that it hadn’t seen a hint of a comb since yesterday.

“You look fine,” she stressed. No matter what, Eli always looked fine, she thought fondly. She could count on the fact that nothing changed about him, especially not his temperament. He was her rock and she thanked God for him. “I just wasn’t expecting anyone to come up behind me, that’s all.” She took in a deep breath in an attempt to regulate her erratic pulse.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

“Well, I never got into the habit of cooking while I was lying in bed,” she stated, deadpan. “So I had to come over to where the appliances were hiding,” she told him, tongue-in-cheek.

But Eli shook his head, dismissing the literal answer to his question. “No, I mean why are you up, cooking? You’re supposed to be taking it easy, remember?” he reminded her.

She acted mystified. “I guess I missed that memo. Besides, this is how I take it easy,” she informed him. “Cooking relaxes me. It makes me feel like I’m in control,” she stressed. Her eyes held his. “And right now, I need that.”

He knew how overwhelming a need that could be. Eli raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, cook your heart out. I won’t stand in your way,” he promised, then confessed, “And that does smell pretty amazing.” He looked from her to the pan and then back again. He didn’t remember buying bacon. Maybe Alma had dropped it off the last time she’d been by. She had a tendency to mother him. “And that was all stuff you found in my pantry?”

“And your refrigerator,” Kasey added, amused that the contents of his kitchen seemed to be a mystery to him. “By the way, if you’re interested, I made coffee.”

“Interested?” he repeated. “I’m downright mesmerized. That’s what brought me down in the first place,” he told her as he made a beeline for the battered coffeepot that stood on the back burner. Not standing on ceremony, he poured himself a cup, then paused to deeply inhale the aroma before sampling it. Perfect, he thought. It was a word he used a lot in reference to Kasey.

He looked at her now in unabashed surprise. “And you did this with my coffee?”

She merely smiled at him, as if he were a slightly thought-challenged second cousin she had grown very fond of. “Yours was the only coffee I had to work with,” she pointed out. “Why? You don’t like it?”

He took another extralong sip of the black liquid, waiting as it all but burned a path for itself into his belly.

“Like it?” He laughed incredulously at her question. “I’m thinking of marrying it.”

Outwardly he seemed to be teasing her, but it was his way of defusing some of the tension ricocheting through him. He was using humor as a defense mechanism so that she didn’t focus on the fact that he struggled not to melt whenever he was within several feet of her. Though he had brought her here with the very best of intentions, he had to admit that just having her here was all but undoing him.

“Really, though,” he forced himself to say, putting his hand over hers to stop her movements for a second, “you shouldn’t be doing all this. I didn’t bring you here to be my cook—good as you are at it.”

She smiled up at him, a thousand childhood memories crowding her head. Memories in which Eli was prominently featured. He was the one she had turned to when her father had been particularly nasty the night before. Eli always knew how to make her feel better.

“I know that,” she told him. “You brought me here because you’re good and kind and because Wayne and I didn’t have a place to stay. This is just my small way of paying you back a little.”

He shook his head. “This isn’t a system of checks and balances, Kasey. You don’t have to ‘pay me back,’” he insisted. “You don’t owe me anything.”

Oh, yes, I do. More than you can ever guess. You kept me sane, Eli. I hate to think where I’d be right now without you.

Her eyes met his, then she looked down at his hand, which was still over hers. Belatedly, he removed it. She felt a small pang and told herself she was just being silly.

“I know,” she told him. And that was because Eli always put others, in this case her, first. “But I want to.” Taking a plate—one of two she’d just washed so that she could press them into service—she slid two eggs and half the bacon onto it. “Overeasy, right?” she asked, nodding at the plate she put down on the table.

They’d had breakfast together just once—at Miss Joan’s diner years ago, before she’d ever run off with Hollis. At the time, he envisioned a lifetime of breakfasts to be shared between them.

But that was aeons ago.

Stunned, he asked, “How did you remember?” as he took his seat at the table.

She lifted her slender shoulders in a quick, dismissive shrug. “Some things just stay with me, I guess.” She took her own portion and sat across from him at the small table. “Is it all right?” she asked. For the most part, it was a rhetorical question, since he appeared to be eating with enthusiasm.

Had she served him burned tire treads, he would have said the same thing—because she’d gone out of her way for him and the very act meant a great deal to him. More than he could possibly ever tell her, because he didn’t want to risk scaring her off.

“It’s fantastic,” he assured her.

The baby picked that moment to begin fussing. Within a few moments, fussing turned to crying. Kasey looked toward the noise coming from the converted infant seat. “I just fed him half an hour ago,” she said wearily.

“Then he’s not hungry,” Eli concluded.

He remembered overhearing the sheriff’s sister-in-law, Tina, saying that infants cried for three reasons: if they were hungry, if they needed to be changed and if they were hurting. Wayne had been fed and he didn’t look as if he was in pain. That left only one last reason.

“He’s probably finished processing his meal,” he guessed. “Like puppies, there’s a really short distance between taking food in and eliminating what isn’t being used for nutrition,” he told her.

With a small, almost suppressed sigh, Kasey nodded. She started to get up but he put his hand on her arm, stopping her. She looked at him quizzically.

“Stay put, I’ll handle this.” Eli nodded at his empty plate. “I’m finished eating, anyway.” He picked Wayne up and took him into the next room.

She watched him a little uncertainly. This was really going above and beyond the call of duty, she couldn’t help thinking.

“Have you ever changed a diaper before?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer her directly, because the answer to her question was no. So he said evasively, “It’s not exactly up there with the mysteries of life.”

Changing a diaper might not be up there with the mysteries of life, but in his opinion, how something so cute and tiny could produce so much waste was one of the mysteries of life.

“This has got to weigh at least as much as you do,” he stated, marveling as he stripped the diaper away from the baby and saw what was inside.

Making the best of it, Eli went through several damp washcloths, trying to clean Wayne’s tiny bottom. It took a bit of work.

Eli began to doubt the wisdom of his volunteering for this form of latrine duty, but he’d done it with the best of intentions. He wanted Kasey to be able to at least finish her meal in peace. She didn’t exactly seem worn-out, but she certainly did look tired. He wondered just how much sleep she’d gotten last night.

After throwing the disposable diaper into the wastebasket, he deposited the dirty washcloths on top of it. The latter would need to be put into the washing machine—as soon as he fixed it.

Dammit, anyway, he thought in frustration, recalling that the last load of wash had flooded the utility room.

Served him right for not getting to something the second it needed doing. But then, life on a ranch—especially since he was the only one working it—left very little spare time to do anything else, whether it was a chore or just kicking back for pleasure.

And now that Kasey and her son were here—

And now that they were here, Eli amended, determined to throw this into a positive experience, there was an abundance of sunshine in his life, not to mention a damn good reason to get up in the morning.

There! he thought with a triumphant smile as he concluded the Great Diaper Change. He felt particularly pleased with himself.

The next moment he told himself not to get used to this feeling or the situation that created it. After all, it could, and most likely would, change in a heartbeat.

Hadn’t his life come to a skidding halt and changed just with Hollis banging on his door, abandoning his responsibilities on the doorstep? Well, just like that, Kasey could go off and find her own place.

Or Hollis might come back and want to pick up where he’d left off. And Kasey, being the softhearted woman she was, would wind up forgiving him and take Hollis back. After all, the man was her husband.

But that was later, Eli silently insisted. For now, Kasey was here, in his house with her baby, and he would enjoy every second of it.

Every second that he wasn’t working, he amended.

Picking Wayne up, he surveyed his handiwork. “Not a bad job, even if I do say so myself,” he pronounced.

Ready to go back out, he turned around toward the door with the baby in his arms. He was surprised to find that Kasey was standing in the doorway, an amused expression on her face.

What was she thinking? he couldn’t help wondering. “Have you been standing there long?” he asked.

She smiled broadly at him. “Just long enough to hear you evaluating your job,” she said. Kasey crossed to him and her son. “And you’re wrong, you know,” she told him as she took Wayne into her arms with an unconscious, growing confidence. “You’re being way too modest. You did an absolutely great job.” There was admiration in her voice. “The nurse had to walk me through the diapering process three times before I got the hang of it,” she told him with a wide smile. “You never told me you had hidden talents.”

“Didn’t know, myself,” he freely confessed. “I guess that some people just rise to the occasion more than others.”

She thought about him opening his home to her. They were friends, good friends, but that didn’t automatically mean she could just move in with him. He had been under no obligation to take her in. She certainly hadn’t expected him to do that.

Looking at him pointedly, she nodded. “Yes, they do,” she agreed softly.

For one shimmering second, as he stood there, gazing into her eyes, he felt an incredibly overwhelming desire to kiss her. Kiss her and make a full confession about all the years he’d loved her in silence.

But he sensed he might scare her off. That was the last thing that either one of them wanted, especially him. He needed to put some space between them. He thought about his ever-growing list of things that needed his attention. Just thinking about them was daunting, but he needed to get started.

Eli abruptly turned toward the door.

“Well, I’d better get to work,” he told Kasey. “Or the horses will think I ran off and left them.” But instead of heading outside, the smell of a diaper that was past its expiration date caught his attention. “But the horses are just going to have to wait until I take care of this,” he told Kasey, nodding at the wastebasket and its less-than-precious pungent cargo.

“Don’t bother,” Kasey said. “I’ll take care of that.” To make her point, she placed herself between Eli and the wastebasket. “Go, tend to your horses before they stampede off in protest.”

Instead of getting out of his way, she leaned forward and impulsively kissed his cheek. “Thank you for everything,” she whispered just before her lips touched his cheek. “Now go,” she repeated with feeling.

His cheek pulsated where her lips had met his skin.

Eli didn’t quite remember going upstairs to put on his boots or walking out of the house and across the front yard, but he figured he must have because when he finally took stock of his surroundings, he was on his way to the stable.

It wasn’t as if she’d never kissed him before. She had. She’d kissed him exactly like that a long time ago, before she’d become Hollis’s wife and broken his heart into a million pieces. But back then, she’d brushed her lips against his cheek, leaving her mark by way of a friendly demonstration of affection.

And the results were always the same. His body temperature would rise right along with his jumping pulse rate.

Just being around her could set him off, but that went doubly so whenever she brushed by him, whether it was her hand, her lips or the accidental contact of different body parts.

It made him feel alive.

It also reminded him that he loved her. Loved her and knew that he couldn’t have her because it was all one-sided.

His side.

But he’d made his peace with that a long time ago, Eli reminded himself as he continued walking. It was enough for him to know that he was looking out for her, that he was ready to defend her at a moment’s notice, Hollis or no Hollis. And because of that, she would be all right. If on occasion he yearned for something more, well, that was his problem, not hers.

During the day, he could keep it all under control, enjoying just the little moments, the tiny interactions between them as well as the longer conversations that were exchanged on occasion.

It was only in his sleep that all these emotions became a good deal more. In his dreams he experienced what he couldn’t allow himself to feel—or want—during his waking hours.

But that was something he could never let her even remotely suspect, because in disclosing that, he’d risk losing everything, especially her precious friendship.

He wanted, above all else, to have her feel at ease with him. He wanted to protect her and to do what he could to make her happy. That couldn’t happen if she thought he might be trying to compromise not just her but her honor, as well.

His own happiness, he reasoned, would come from her feeling secure. That he could do for her. For them, he amended, thinking of the baby.

Reaching the stable, he pulled open the doors. The smell from the stalls assaulted him the moment he walked in. Babies weren’t all that different from horses in some ways. They ate, digested and then eliminated.

Mucking out the stalls would allow him to put changing a small diaper into perspective.

“Hi, guys,” he said, addressing the horses that, for now, made up his entire herd. “Miss me?” One of the horses whinnied, as if in response. Shaking his head, Eli laughed.

Approaching the stallion closest to him, he slipped a bridle over the horse’s head, then led Golden Boy out of his stall. He hitched the horse to a side railing so that the animal would be out of the way and he could clean the stall without interference.

“Well, I’ve got a good excuse for being late,” he told the horses as he got to work. “Wait till I tell you what’s been going on….”

Chapter Six

Eli worked as quickly as he could, but even so, it took him a great deal of time to clean out the stalls, groom the horses, exercise and train them, then finally feed them.

There were five horses in all.

Five horses might not seem like a lot to the average outsider who was uninformed about raising and training quarter horses, but it was a lengthy procedure, especially when multiplied by five and no one else was around to help with the work.

The latter, he had to admit, was partially his own fault. He didn’t have the money to take on hired help, but that still didn’t mean that he had to go it alone if he didn’t want to.

It was understood that if he needed them, he could easily put out a call to one or more of his brothers and they’d be there to help him for the day or the week. He had four older brothers, ranchers all, and they could readily rotate the work between them until Eli was finally on his feet and on his way to making a profit.

But for Eli it boiled down to a matter of pride—stubborn pride—and this kept him from calling any of his brothers and asking for help. He was determined that, as the youngest male in the Rodriguez family, he would turn the ranch into a success without having to depend on any help from his relatives.

Ordinarily he found a certain satisfaction in working with the horses and doing all the chores that were involved in caring for the animals. But today was a different story. Impatience fairly hummed through his veins.

He wanted to be done with the chores, done with the training, so that he could go back to the house and be with Kasey. He really didn’t like leaving her alone like this for the better part of the day.

He sought to ease his conscience by telling himself that she could do with a little time to herself. What woman couldn’t? His being out here gave her the opportunity to get herself together after this enormous emotional roller-coaster ride she’d just been on—gaining a child and losing a husband.

Not that losing Hollis was really much of a loss.

In addition Eli was fairly certain that Kasey wouldn’t want him around to witness any first-time mistakes that she was bound to make with the baby. In her place, he certainly wouldn’t want someone looking over his shoulder, noting the mistakes he was making.

Even if he wanted to chuck everything and go back up to the house to be with her, he couldn’t just up and leave the horses. Not again. Not twice in two days. He’d already neglected their training segment yesterday when he’d gone to bring Kasey and the baby home from the hospital in Pine Ridge.

Not that he actually neglected the horses themselves. He’d made sure that he’d left food for the stallions and God knew they had no trouble finding the feed, or the water, for that matter. But the stalls, well, they were decidedly more ripe-smelling than they should have been. Breathing had been a real problem for him this morning as he mucked out the stalls.

Raising horses was a tricky business. He knew that if they were left on their own for too long, the horses could revert back to their original behavior and then all the hours that he’d put into training them would be lost.

Now they wouldn’t be lost, he thought with a wisp of satisfaction. But he was really, really beginning to feel beat.

He was also aware of the fact that his stomach had been growling off and on now for the past couple of hours. Maybe even longer. The growling served to remind him that he hadn’t brought any lunch with him.

Usually, when that happened, he’d think nothing of just taking a break and going back to the house to get something to eat. But he really didn’t want to risk just walking in on Kasey. What if she was in the middle of breast-feeding Wayne?

The thought generated an image in his head that had him pausing practically in midstep as his usually tame imagination took flight.

He had no business thinking of her that way and he knew it, but that still didn’t help him erase the scene from his brain.

Taking a deep breath, Eli forced himself to shake free of the vivid daydream. He had work to do and standing there like some oversexed adolescent, allowing his mind to wander like that, wouldn’t accomplish anything—except possibly to frustrate him even further.

Silver Streak, the horse he was currently grooming, suddenly began nudging him, as if clearly making a bid for his attention. The horse didn’t stop until he slowly ran his hand over the silken muzzle.

“Sorry, Silver,” Eli said, stroking the animal affectionately. “I was daydreaming. I won’t let it happen again.”

As if in response, the stallion whinnied. Eli grinned. “Always said you were smarter than the average rancher, which in this case would be me,” he added with a self-deprecating laugh.

Since it was summer, the sun was still up when Eli fed the last horse and officially called it a day. He had returned all five of the quarter horses to their stalls and then locked the stable doors before finally returning to his house.

Reaching the ranch house, Eli made as much noise as he could on the front porch so that Kasey was alerted to his arrival and would know that he was coming in. He didn’t want to catch her off guard.

Satisfied that he’d made enough of a racket to raise the dead, Eli finally opened the front door and called out a hearty greeting. “Hi, Kasey, I’m coming in.”

“Of course you’re coming in,” Kasey said, meeting him at the door as he walked in. “You live here.”

Eli cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable with the topic he was about to broach. “I thought that maybe you were, you know, busy,” he emphasized, settling for a euphemism.

“Well, I guess I have been that,” she admitted, shifting her newly awakened son to her other hip. “But that still doesn’t explain why you feel you have to shout a warning before walking into your own home.”

He didn’t hear the last part of her sentence. By then he was too completely stunned to absorb any words at all. Momentarily speechless, Eli retraced his steps and ducked outside to double check that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the wrong house—not that there were any others on the property.

The outside of the house looked like his, he ascertained. The inside, however, definitely did not. It bore no resemblance to the house he had left just this morning.

What was going on here?

“What did you do?” he finally asked.

“You don’t like it,” Kasey guessed, doing her best to hide her disappointment. She’d really wanted to surprise him—but in a good way. Belatedly she recalled that some men didn’t like having their things touched and rearranged.

“I don’t recognize it,” Eli corrected, looking around again in sheer amazement. This was his place? Really?

The house he had left this morning had looked, according to Miss Joan’s gentle description of it, as if it had gone dancing with a tornado. There were no rotting carcasses of stray creatures who had accidentally wandered into the house in search of shelter, but that was the most positive thing that could have been said about the disorder thriving within his four walls.

He’d lived in this house for the past five months and in that amount of time, he’d managed to distribute a great deal of useless material throughout the place. Each room had its own share of acquired clutter, whether it was dirty clothing, used dishes, scattered reading material or some other, less identifiable thing. The upshot was that, in general, the sum total of the various rooms made for a really chaotic-looking home.

Or at least it had when he’d left for the stables that morning. This evening, he felt as though someone had transported him to a different universe. Everything appeared to be in its place. The whole area looked so neat it almost hurt his eyes to look around.

This would take some getting used to, he couldn’t help thinking.

The hopeful expression had returned to Kasey’s face. She’d just wanted to surprise and please him. She knew she’d succeeded with the former, but she was hoping to score the latter.

“I just thought that I should clean up a little,” she told him, watching his face for some sign that he actually liked what she had done.

“A little?” he repeated, half stunned, half amused. “There was probably less effort involved in building this house in the first place.” This cleanup, he knew, had to have been a major undertaking. Barring magical help from singing mice and enchanted elves, she’d accomplished this all herself.

He regarded her with new admiration.

She in turn looked at him, trying to understand why he didn’t seem to have wanted her to do this. Had she trespassed on some basic male ritual? Was he saving this mess, not to mention the rumpled clothes and dirty dishes, for some reason?

“You want me to mess things up again?” she offered uncertainly.

“No.” He took hold of her by her shoulders, enunciating each word slowly so that they would sink in. “I don’t want you to do anything. I just wanted you to relax in between feedings. To maybe try to rest up a little, saving your strength. Taking care of a newborn is damn hard enough to get used to without single-handedly trying to restore order to a place that could easily have been mistaken for the town dump—”

She smiled and he could feel her smile going straight to his gut, stirring things up that had no business being stirred up—not without an outlet.

Eli struggled to keep a tight rein on his feelings and on his reaction to her. He succeeded only moderately.

“It wasn’t that bad,” she stressed.

She was being deliberately kind. “But close,” he pointed out.

Her mouth curved as she inclined her head. “Close,” Kasey allowed. “I like restoring order, making things neat,” she explained. “And when he wasn’t fussing because he was hungry or needed changing, Wayne cooperated by sleeping. So far, he’s pretty low maintenance,” she said, glancing at her sleeping son. “I had to do something with myself.”

“Well, in case you didn’t make the connection, that’s the time that you’re supposed to be sleeping, too,” Eli pointed out. “I think that’s a law or something. It’s written down somewhere in the New Mother’s Basic Manual.”

“I guess I must have skipped that part,” Kasey said, her eyes smiling at him. His stomach picked that moment to rumble rather loudly. Kasey eyed him knowingly. “Are you all finished working for the day?” Eli nodded, trying to silence the noises his stomach was producing by holding his breath. It didn’t work. “Good,” she pronounced, “because I have dinner waiting.”

“Of course you do,” he murmured, following her.

He stopped at the bedroom threshold and waited as Kasey gently put her sleeping son down. Wayne continued breathing evenly, indicating a successful transfer. She was taking to this mothering thing like a duck to water, Eli couldn’t help thinking. He realized that he was proud of her—and more than a little awed, as well.

He looked around as he walked with her to the kitchen. Everything there was spotless, as well. All in all, Kasey was rather incredible.

“You know, if word of this gets out,” he said, gesturing around the general area, “there’re going to be a whole bunch of new mothers standing on our porch with pitchforks and torches, looking to string you up.”

She gazed at him for a long moment and at first he thought it was because of his vivid description of frontier justice—but then it hit him. She’d picked up on his terminology. He’d said our instead of my. Without stopping to think, he’d turned his home into their home and just like that, he’d officially included her in the scheme of things.

In his life.

Was she angry? Or maybe even upset that he’d just sounded as if he was taking her being here for granted? He really couldn’t tell and he didn’t want to come right out and ask her on the outside chance that he’d guessed wrong.

His back against the wall, Eli guided the conversation in a slightly different direction. “I just don’t want you to think that I invited you to stay here because I really wanted to get a free housekeeper.”

Kasey did her best to tamp down her amusement. “So, what you’re actually saying is that I could be as sloppy as you if I wanted to?”

He sincerely doubted if the woman had ever experienced a sloppy day in her life, but that was the general gist of what he was trying to get across to her. She could leave things messy. He had no expectations of her, nor did he want her to feel obligated to do anything except just be.

“Yes,” he answered.

Kasey shook her head. The grin she’d been attempting to subdue for at least five seconds refused to be kept under wraps.

“That’s not possible,” she told him. “I think you have achieved a level of chaos that few could do justice to.”

Somewhere into the second hour of her cleaning, she’d begun to despair that she was never going to dig herself out of the hole she’d gotten herself into. But she’d refused to be defeated and had just kept on going. In her opinion, the expression on Eli’s face when he’d first walked in just now made it all worth it.

“How long did you say you’ve lived here?” she asked innocently.

He didn’t even have to pause to think about it. “Five months.”

Kasey closed her eyes for a moment, as if absorbing the information required complete concentration on her part. And then she grinned. “Think what you could have done to the house in a year’s time.”

He’d rather not. Even so, Eli felt obligated to defend himself at least a little. “I would have cleaned up eventually,” he protested.

The look on her face told him that she really doubted that, even though, out loud, she humored him. “I’m sure you would have. If only because you ran out of dishes and clothes.” Now that she thought of it, she had a feeling that he’d already hit that wall several times over without making any lifestyle changes.

At the mention of the word clothes, Eli looked at her sharply, then looked around the room, hoping he was wrong. But he had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t.

“Where did you put the clothes?” he asked her, holding his breath, hoping she’d just found something to use as a laundry hamper.

“Right now, they’re in the washing machine.” Where else would dirty clothes be? Kasey glanced at her watch. “I set the timer for forty-five minutes. The wash should be finished any minute now.”

She’d wound up saying the last sentence to Eli’s back. He hurried passed her, making a beeline for the utility room.

“What’s wrong?” she called after him, doubling her speed to keep up with Eli’s long legs.

Eli mentally crossed his fingers before he opened the door leading into the utility room.

He could have spared himself the effort.

Even though he opened the door slowly, a little water still managed to seep out of the other room. Built lower than the rest of the house, the utility room still had its own very minor flood going on.

Right behind him, Kasey looked down at the accumulated water in dismay. Guilt instantly sprang up. She’d repaid his kindness to her by flooding his utility room.

Way to go, Kase.

Thoroughly upset, she asked, “Did I do that?”

“No, the washing machine did that,” Eli assured her, his words accompanied by a deep-seated sigh. “I should have told you the washing machine wasn’t working right—but in my defense,” he felt bound to tell her, “I wasn’t anticipating that you’d be such a whirlwind of energy and cleanliness. Noah could have really used someone like you.”

“It wouldn’t have worked out,” she said with a shake of her head. “I have no idea what a cubit is,” she told him, referring to the form of measurement that had been popular around Noah’s time.

Although she was trying very hard to focus on only the upbeat, there was no denying that she felt awful for compounding his work. She’d only wanted to do something nice for Eli and this definitely didn’t qualify.

“I’m really very sorry about the flooding. I’ll pay for the washing machine repairs,” she offered.

Kasey wasn’t sure just how she would pay for it because she had a rather sick feeling that Hollis had helped himself to their joint account before leaving town. But even if everything was gone and she had no money, she was determined to find a way to make proper restitution. Eli deserved nothing less.

Eli shook his head. “The washing machine was broken before you ever got here,” he told her. “There’s absolutely no reason for you to pay for anything. Don’t give it another thought.”

There had to be at least two inches of standing water in the utility room, Kasey judged. The only reason it hadn’t all come pouring into the house when he’d opened that door was because the utility room had been deliberately built to be just a little lower than the rest of the house—more likely in anticipation of just these kinds of scenarios.

“But I caused this.” She gestured toward the water. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t filled up the washing machine, poured in the laundry detergent and hit Start.

“I want to make it up to you,” Kasey told him earnestly.

He had a feeling that he just wasn’t destined to win this argument with her. Besides, she probably needed to make some sort of amends to assuage her conscience.

Who was he to stand in the way of that?

But right now, he really had a more pressing subject to pursue.

“You said something about having to make dinner?” he asked on behalf of his exceptionally animated stomach, which currently felt as if it was playing the final death scene from Hamlet.

“It’s right back here,” she prompted, indicating the plates presently warming on the stove. “And I don’t have to make it, it’s already made,” she told him.

“That’s perfect, because the washing machine was already broken. Looks like one thing cancels out the other.” Satisfied that he’d temporarily put the subject to bed, he said, “Let’s go eat,” with the kind of urgency that only a starving man could manage. “And then I’ll fix the washing machine,” he concluded. “That way you get to keep Wayne in clean clothes,” he added.

And you, too, she thought as she nodded and led the way back to the kitchen. I get to keep you in clean clothes, too.

She had no idea why that thought seemed to hearten her the way it did, but there was no denying the fact that it did.

A lot.

She smiled to herself as she placed his plate in front of him. If the smile was a little brighter, a little wider than normal, she really wasn’t aware of it.

But Eli was.

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