Sandra Steffen - Wes Stryker's Wrangled Wife

He hung his hat and coat on a hook by the door, ran a hand through his hair and wandered to the bedroom where he’d spent most of his youth planning his escape from Jasper Gulch. His leaving hadn’t bothered his father. By that time, Sam Stryker’s only love was for the bottle he curled up with every night, and maybe the fleeting memory of the woman he’d buried when Wes had been five.

Wes barely remembered his mother, but he’d always thought she would have liked Dusty Malone. He and Dusty had started on the rodeo circuit the same year. Dusty had ridden bulls, while bucking broncos had been Wes’s specialty. Nothing had come between them, not winning, or losing, not barroom brawls, not even falling for the same girl. When that girl had married Dusty, Wes had been the best man. Although Dusty had insisted that he would always be the best man, Wes had always known that Dusty would have done the same for him if the tables had been turned and Kate had married him, instead. Friends like that didn’t come along every day. Kate used to say that all the time. She also used to say she’d married one of the only two men on the planet who put the toilet seat down. Obviously, putting the toilet seat down was a big deal with women. It had certainly been an issue with Jayne Kincaid.

Wes’s right boot hit the floor about the same time thoughts of Jayne Kincaid jump-started his heart. He took the letter out of his pocket and placed it on the stand next to his bed. He knew he had a decision to make regarding Dusty’s two kids, but it wasn’t the kids he was thinking about as he turned back the covers. He was thinking about Jayne, and he wished to high heaven he wasn’t crawling into bed alone.

Wes opened his eyes slowly. He wasn’t sure what had awakened him. It wasn’t quite daybreak, but it was close, the color of the sky on the other side of his wavy windowpanes somewhere between black and gray. He felt a smile pulling at his face, not because it was Christmas—he didn’t have a tree or even a stocking, after all—but because he had a woman on his mind. That’s what had awakened him. He’d been dreaming, and while the remnants of the dream weren’t clear in his mind, they were evident on his body.

He wondered if Jayne was awake yet. And he wondered what she would say if he called on her so early in the day. While he was at it, he wondered how she would react if he told her he was going to petition for guardianship of Kate and Dusty’s two kids and raise them the best way he knew how. Would she say he was nuts? Maybe he was. But other than their father’s eighty-two-year-old great aunt, Annabell, who lived in a two-bedroom house southeast of Sioux Falls, two hundred and twenty miles away, and Kate’s long-lost sister who could be dead for all anybody knew, Wes was all those two kids had.

He made quick use of the facilities, layered on his clothes and hiked out to the kitchen. Shivering, he made a mental note of all the things he had to do to get the place ready for Logan and Olivia’s arrival. He could have lived in the barn, but a five-year-old girl and her ten-year-old brother needed heat and windows with glass instead of plywood. They needed good food in their stomachs. Most of all they needed to know he wanted them.

Picking up the old black telephone from the place it had sat for as long as he could remember, he dialed the number Annabell had listed in her letter. Her answering machine clicked on after the fourth ring. Wes smiled, remembering some of the messages she’d left on that thing. Most folks her age didn’t even bother with the contraptions, but Annabell Malone wasn’t like most folks her age. She welcomed challenges, and wasn’t afraid to try new things. For an eighty-two-year-old woman she was very young at heart.

Figuring they were all probably in church, Wes followed the instructions Annabell recited in her feeble-sounding voice and left a message. He took a minute to start the coffee, then donned his sheepskin jacket and his favorite cowboy hat. At the last minute, he went in search of the cellular phone. Tucking it into his pocket just in case Annabell returned his call any time soon, he headed outside to feed and water the horses.

Maybe he’d hook the trailer up to his truck and haul Stomper and the sleigh into-town in a little while. He was in the process of imagining Jayne’s reaction to such an old-fashioned activity when he lowered his right foot to the first step.

Whoosh.

He was airborne. His arms flailed, his feet flew out from under him. He landed on the icy ground five steps below, in less time than it had taken High Kicker to buck him off that time down in Santa Fe. He was gasping for breath and in too much pain to be dead, so the fall couldn’t have killed him. He couldn’t tell if he’d damaged the ribs that had started to heal, and his knee was aching pretty badly again, but it was the searing pain in his left shoulder that kept him very still. Damn. He’d dislocated it again.

Clutching his shoulder with both hands, he picked up one boot, gritted his teeth and tried to roll onto his side. His foot slid on the ice, his bad knee crashing onto the hard surface so fast he saw stars. He tried rolling the other way, but he almost passed out from the pain slicing through his shoulder. He tried several other maneuvers. The results were the same.

He should have known his father wouldn’t have had the downspout fixed, thereby routing the rainwater to a less hazardous spot. From the look of the place and the back taxes that had to be paid, it was obvious that his father hadn’t taken care of much of anything these past several years. It looked as if it was up to him to make the place operational again. First, he had to figure out a way to get up.

Think, Stryker, think.

He considered whistling for Stomper, but Wes had closed the stall door himself yesterday, and although Stomper could finagle an apple or a carrot out of anybody’s pocket, he wouldn’t be able to unlatch the stall. It was fifteen miles to town, two miles to his nearest neighbor. It was also Christmas morning, and not too many people would be out and about, and if they were, they wouldn’t be driving past this old place on Old Stump Road.

Wes was breathing easier and thinking clearly. A lot of good it did him. Between the ice and the pain, he was stuck on his back, staring at a sky as dull as the old steel sink in his kitchen, cold seeping into his coat and jeans as he tried to decide how to keep from freezing to death. His fingers were already starting to tingle. He slid them into his pockets, paused. What the—

He took a careful breath and he almost smiled.

Lo and behold, the cellular phone.

Chapter Two

“Look, Alex! A huck! And a doctor’s kit. Can you tell Aunt Jayne thank you?”

“Tanks, Aun‘ie Jayne. Aun’ie Jayne!”

“Jayne?”

“Sis, are you all right?”

“What?” Jayne came out of her musings with a start, only to find Louetta, Burke and Alex staring at her from the living room floor where wrapping paper and ribbons were strewn everywhere.

“Alex said thanks,” Burke said, watching her closely.

“Oh, you’re very welcome, Alex.”

Alex went back to his new truck, but Burke and Louetta continued looking at her strangely. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered Jayne. People looked at her strangely all the time, but Burke and Louetta looked concerned, and that made Jayne uneasy.

“You were a thousand miles away,” Burke said, handing Alex another package.

Jayne pulled a face.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, obviously reluctant to let the subject drop.

“My mind wandered, that’s all.”

“Were you daydreaming or reminiscing?” Louetta asked in that quiet, knowing way she had.

Unwilling to admit just how close Louetta had come to the truth, Jayne stifled a yawn and gestured to the two-year-old, who was tearing into another package with obvious glee. The ploy worked: Burke’s and Louetta’s attention strayed to Alex and then met over the top of his dark, little head. Louetta was wearing a pale pink robe she’d bought especially for her new husband, and although Burke had pulled on a cable-knit sweater and a pair of navy chinos, they were obviously having a difficult time keeping their hands off each other. They’d been married less than a day, which made the open longing in their expressions perfectly understandable.