Sherri Shackelford - Mail-Order Christmas Baby

He hoisted her worn trunk onto his shoulder and climbed the stairs. He discovered Heather perched on the tall tester bed unlacing her boots. She startled upright, her boot dangling from her toe, her feet not quite reaching the floor. She was tiny and alone and achingly vulnerable.

Warmth flooded through his chest. Her fiery hair hung in loose waves around her shoulders, and his fingers itched to know if the strands were as soft as they looked. But he held himself in check. If he’d experienced a twinge of fright at thoughts of the future, she must have experienced moments of doubt and panic. She was in a far more helpless position. To put her at ease, he’d assigned her and Gracie rooms on the other side of the house from his. They needed time to settle in and acquaint themselves with their new surroundings.

Heather’s eyelids drooped and she muttered a soft thank-you.

Sterling paused in the doorway. Something was bothering him, and the sooner he brought it out into the open, the better. There was no use avoiding the obvious.

“Gracie’s family may still come for her. You know that, right?”

“No.” She stifled another yawn. “No one will come for her.”

Her complete refusal to even contemplate the idea worried him more than anything else that had happened in the past week. “Listen, Heather. You and I got picked up by a tornado and put down in this place. And that’s the thing about tornadoes—they’re unpredictable. You have to accept that another storm might be on the way, and neither of us can predict what will happen then.”

“No,” she stubbornly insisted. “If they haven’t come for her yet, they aren’t going to.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

Losing Gracie, even after such a short time, would break her heart. The child was the only thing tying the three of them together.

He hadn’t immediately understood what Heather had meant in church—about how moments in life changed a person. The past few hours had given him perspective, though. His ma’s death had been one of those moments. Encouraging Dillon to enter the cavalry had been one. Setting out on his own two years ago had been yet another.

More than all of those things combined, his decision to say “I do” had changed the course of his life, and if Gracie was gone, Heather was sure to follow.

“Get some rest,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

There was always the chance Heather and Gracie were exactly what the ranch needed. He only had to persuade her in that direction.

If she regretted her choice when Dillon returned, he’d cross that bridge when the time came. Being her second choice was a lot easier to ignore with his brother gone.

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