Cara Colter - The Cowboy, The Baby And The Bride-To-Be

And there was Nick, in a park uniform, talking about grizzly bears and living alone on some godforsaken mountain, studying them.

The reporter, a pert little blond in a miniskirt, asked the typical question of a hermit. “Don’t you crave human company?”

If Turner wasn’t mistaken, there might have been just a hint of invitation in the question to his handsome brother.

“Only one,” Nick had said slowly, missing the invitation. “And I lost her a long time ago. I’ve learned something on this mountain. If you want something with your whole heart and soul, don’t listen when other people try to tell you it doesn’t make sense, don’t listen when they tell you no.”

Of course, he’d been the SOB who told his little brother no to Maria Gerrardi.

Though, from the look of this young pup in front of him, he hadn’t said no quite soon enough.

The interview had opened old wounds. Made him wish he’d done some things differently, made him wish you could go back and try it again. Only with more patience and wisdom—the patience and wisdom that the painful estrangement from his brother had given him.

Turner had been seventeen years old when he was thrust into a man’s world, had had to shoulder a man’s responsibilities. His parents had been killed when their private plane crashed, leaving him to cope with a huge ranch and two younger siblings.

It had been scary and hard. The scary part he never showed, and the hard part he got too good at. He’d been so busy trying to keep everything together, trying to keep Nick and Abby out of trouble, that he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t exactly communicating with them.

And if he had noticed, he probably wouldn’t have known how to change it, anyway. Seventeen. What do seventeen-year-olds know about communicating?

Taking charge. Taking control. Snapping orders. That’s what he’d gotten good at. Too good.

When Nick left he’d shouted angrily at Turner, “No one’s even allowed to breathe around here without your say-so.”

The words still stung.

But now this. His brother’s son here. Did that mean he was going to get a second chance? Was he so much better at communicating now, that he could say, “Nick, it was always for love.” He’d wanted the best for them. For his brother and sister.

Abby knew. But Nick had decided grizzly bears were better than an overbearing brother. Who had meant well. Why hadn’t that part come through?

He sighed. Probably because of Maria. Nick had just finished college. He’d been way too young. He had his whole life ahead of him.

But Turner hadn’t said it like that at all. And when Nick had shown every sign of not listening, Turner had taken it upon himself to go talk to Maria. She’d listened. She’d been gone the next day. And a look as black as the devil’s heart had come into Nick’s eyes and never gone away. After a month of treating Turner to looks snapping with ill-concealed anger, he’d accepted a job at a remote mountain wilderness park.

Turner had thought he would last a month. He’d been wrong. He didn’t like it one bit that his brother matched him for stiff-necked stubbornness.

Why had Maria sent the boy here?

He felt sick when he thought of her crying that night, four years ago. Saying she understood. She wasn’t good enough for his brother...she’d always known that. At the time, Turner had been sure he was doing the right thing, arranging everybody’s lives to his own satisfaction.

Four years without so much as a Christmas card from his brother. A hell of a price to pay for being right. And now, finding out a child had lived without his daddy because he’d been so sure he was right.

Things were about to happen big-time. He could practically sniff it in the air, the same way he could smell a big storm rolling in.

The wee Nicky, built like a sturdy little dump truck, stopped howling. That must have convinced her it was safe, or that she needed to attempt a rescue, but either way the door squeaked open and she came in.

She stood hesitantly inside the door, the light framing her. She was slender and willowy, and despite the jeans and T-shirt, she reminded him of a ballerina he’d seen at the ballet Celia had dragged him to. He’d slept through most of the damned thing, but he remembered that ballerina, looking so fragile and dainty, hiding incredible strength.

“Aspirin’s over the stove,” he told her. “Grab it, would you?”

“I read somewhere you shouldn’t give aspirin to babies because—”

“Look, lady, the nearest drugstore is a pretty long haul, okay? Nearly as far as the hospital. We make do out here.”

He reached into the fridge. A carton of apple juice happened to be among the isolated inhabitants. He grabbed it and slammed the door quick before she caught sight of that plate of blue-green something that he had at one time planned to reheat.

He wondered, briefly, why he cared if she caught sight of the molding contents of his fridge.

“Oh,” she said, from across the room, “this isn’t aspirin. It’s acetaminophen. That’s okay then.”

“Could you crush whatever it is and bring it here?”

Acetaminophen. It was all aspirin to him. He slid her a look.

There was certainly nothing glamorous about his unexpected visitor. She had no high-gloss hairdo, the kind that stayed perfectly in place even when the wind picked up, which it did plenty around here. The sun was shining through her hair right now. Outside, it had looked plain, old light brown. In here it looked like liquid honey, curling around her neck and ending just before her shoulders.

But anybody who called aspirin acetaminophen with such ease probably had taken in a ballet or two herself. And not slept through it, either.

If he was shopping for a woman, which of course he wasn’t, he needed one who wore cowboy boots, not one with painted toenails and flimsy shoes.

He did a quick check. Sandals. Little pink dots on each toe. Cute toes, now that he looked. But no doubt she would be all lace and silk under the plain old T-shirt and jeans she was wearing.

Now what had made him think of that? And why did that quick mental flash make his mouth go dry as if he was stuck in a sandstorm?

Maybe it was the way those jeans had clung in all the right places when she had bent into the car to release the catch on the car seat, and then again when she had stretched up to that cabinet above the fridge.

“What’s the holdup?” Turner growled.

“It’s harder than you think!”

He moved across the kitchen to her, painfully aware suddenly of what a plain room it was. The linoleum was old and worn. The table was a relic from an old bunkhouse. There were only two chairs, one with a plastic seat that had been patched with hockey tape and another with three different colors of paint showing through the worn spots. Well, he hadn’t been expecting highfalutin’ company. At least the place was clean. He’d learned to keep up with housework long ago the hard way. Rinsing a dish right after he ate was a lot easier than trying to blowtorch month-old remains off of them.

He looked over her shoulder. He couldn’t help but notice the top of her head came up to about the bottom of his chin. And that she smelled good. Of soap and shampoo and something sweet and tantalizing that was pure woman.

She was trying to beat the aspirin to death with a soup ladle.

He took two spoons out of his kitchen drawer, placed a tablet between them and squeezed. Instant powder.

“This is how you squish acetaminophen.” He mixed the powder in a teaspoon of apple juice, went back across his kitchen and spooned it into the kid.

The kid spit it out on him.

“Little man, you sure do know how to make a first impression. Squish me another one of those, would you?”