Marie Ferrarella - The Rancher And The Baby

“I would,” Ron told her dryly, “if you’d let me lead for a change.”

Cassidy could have sworn she heard Will laughing in the background.

She wasn’t going to cause a scene, she promised herself. Not here. This was the first wedding in the family, and it was Cody’s day. But the moment it was over, she was going to find out which of her three brothers had put Will Laredo up to this, and they were going to pay dearly for it. They knew how she felt about him.

She’d been incensed when she found out that Cody had gotten in contact with Will and asked if he would come and be in his wedding party. When he’d told her about it, she’d almost withdrawn herself, but Connor had talked her out of it, appealing to her sense of family.

“Cassidy,” Ron said, raising his voice.

She realized by the look on the man’s face that this was not the first time that Ron had tried to get her attention.

“What?” she snapped, then cleared her throat and repeated the word in a more subdued tone—silently damning Laredo. The man had the ability of messing with her mind and ruining any moment just by his being there. “What? Am I leading again?”

“I don’t care about that,” Ron said, which told her that she was guilty of doing just that. Again.

“Then what?” she asked.

“You’re crushing my hand.” He looked positively pained.

Embarrassed, as well as annoyed, Cassidy released Jenkins’s hand. A more accurate description would have been that she threw it aside and out of her grasp.

To the casual observer from across the floor, had Ron’s hand been detached, it would have most likely bounced on the floor and gotten wedged somewhere.

“Man up,” she ordered Ron through gritted teeth and then walked away from him just as the band began to play another song.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Laredo shaking his head. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was observing her. She felt herself growing angry. Had they not been at her brother’s wedding, she would have marched right up to him and demanded to know just what he thought he was shaking his head at.

But they were at Cody’s wedding, so she couldn’t cause a scene, couldn’t hold Will accountable or wipe that smug look off his pretty-boy face. It wouldn’t look right for the maid of honor to deck one of the groomsmen at her own brother’s wedding.

That didn’t change the fact that she really wanted to.

Cassidy squared her shoulders and went to get a glass of punch.

Hang in there, she told herself. Come tomorrow, Will Laredo was leaving Forever, going back to wherever it was that he disappeared to when he’d initially left. And then life would go back to being bearable again.

Twelve more hours, she thought. Just twelve more hours.

It felt like an eternity.

Chapter One

Noise had never been a distraction for Olivia Blayne Santiago. She had learned how to effectively tune it out long before her law school days.

Rain, however, was another matter.

While noise, from whatever source, had always been an ongoing part of her day-to-day life and as such could be filed away in the recesses of her mind and matched later to an entire catalog of different sounds, rain demanded immediate attention.

Because rain in this part of Texas could sometimes come under the heading of being a life-or-death matter.

As the first lawyer to open a practice in Forever, Texas—a practice she now ran jointly with Cash Taylor with an eye out for further expansion—Olivia put in rather long hours. This despite the fact that she was married to the town sheriff and had a young, growing family. Between them, she and Cash handled all the legal concerns for the residents of Forever, be those concerns large or small. For the most part, Olivia could do that in her sleep.

But rain was something that always made Olivia pause, especially when it seemed to give no indication of stopping. What that meant was that a downpour could turn into a flash flood—often without any warning.

Olivia had learned to be leery of the sound of rain on her roof. It had been raining since early morning and gave no sign of stopping.

“This storm looks like it’s going to be a bad one,” she commented, looking at Cassidy.

Cassidy McCullough had been interning at the law firm for close to four months now, and she saw a great deal of herself in the young woman. Granted she was the firstborn in her family while Cassidy was the last, but Cassidy possessed a spark, a drive to become someone. She wasn’t one to just allow herself to float along through life, enjoying each day but never having any sort of an ultimate game plan other than making it through to the end of another week. A go-getter, Cassidy was working for her as an intern even as she was taking online courses at night to complete her postgraduate degree.

They had instantly hit it off, and Olivia had taken an interest in Cassidy from the first day she had walked into the law office.

Since Cassidy hadn’t said anything in response to her comment, Olivia raised her voice to get the young woman’s attention. “Why don’t you call it a day and go home?” she suggested.

Stationed at a small desk in the corner of Olivia’s office—a desk that was piled high with stacks of paper—Cassidy glanced up from the report she’d been compiling since she’d come in that morning.

Her brow furrowed slightly as she replayed Olivia’s words in her head.

“I can’t leave now. I’m not anywhere near finished with this.” It wasn’t something she would have normally advertised since she took pride in being fast as well as thorough, but if Olivia was considering sending her home, it was something the lawyer needed to know.

Olivia listened again to the rain as it hit the windows. Was it her imagination, or had the rain gotten even more pronounced in the last five minutes? If it got any worse, she wondered if the windows could withstand it.

“If you don’t leave now,” Olivia warned her, “you may have to sleep on that desk, and I promise that you won’t find it very comfortable.”

“Why?” Cassidy asked, puzzled. “I mean, I can see why the desk wouldn’t be comfortable, but why would I have to sleep on it if I went on working?” She glanced at her watch. “It’s not late.”

“It’s later than you think,” Olivia responded, then looked at the younger woman seriously. “Don’t you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Cassidy asked uncertainly, scanning the room.

“That.” Olivia pointed toward the window when she saw she wasn’t getting through to her intern. “The rain,” she added for good measure just in case she wasn’t making herself clear.

Enlightened, Cassidy nodded. “Oh, that. Of course I hear the rain,” she acknowledged. As far as she was concerned, a storm was no big deal. There was always going to be another one. “It was raining when I came in this morning.”

“Not like this,” Olivia insisted. “This sounds like it’s only going to get worse, and you know what that could mean.”

Cassidy nodded. “Yeah. Connor’s going to be stomping around the ranch house, muttering that he can’t do any of his work because it’s raining too hard.”

Olivia shook her head. Her intern was misreading the situation. “I think you should go home,” she said.

Cassidy still saw no need for her evacuation. “To watch Connor stomping around?”

“No, to keep from being washed away,” Olivia insisted. “You should know better than I do just how quick these flash floods can hit.”

“I know,” Cassidy agreed, “but there hasn’t been one in a couple of years and even that one was over before it practically started.” She waved away what she felt was Olivia’s needless concern. “Besides, I can take care of myself.”