She wanted to be with him. Letter to Reader Title Page Dedication About the Author Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Copyright

She wanted to be with him.

“I kind of thought—” Shayla was suddenly shy. “You and I could go horseback riding. I packed a lunch.”

Turner stared at her. “Well,” he said, his heart hammering at a ridiculous rate, “I guess if you went to all the trouble of packing a lunch.”

She burst out laughing.

And he realized it was funny. A grown man acting as though he found lunch irresistible, when it really was her.

He went to her in one long stride. He lifted her chin. Her eyes were huge, and her lips soft and moist. Calling his name, begging, though she spoke not a word.

“Maybe we’re going too fast,” he said softly.

“Too fast?” she whispered. “I thought there were no speed limits in Montana.”

He kissed her then. Surrendering his hard-held control.

Completely.

Dear Reader,

In 20 months Silhouette Romance will celebrate its 20th anniversary! To commemorate that momentous occasion, we’d like to ask you to share with us why you’ve chosen to read the Romance series, and which authors you particularly enjoy. We hope to publish some of your thoughtful comments during our anniversary year—2000! And this month’s selections will give you food for thought....

In The Guardian’s Bride by Laurie Paige, our VIRGIN BRIDES title, a 20-year-old heiress sets out to marry her older, wealthy—gorgeous—guardian. Problem is, he thinks she’s too young.... The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-to-Be is Cara Colter’s newest book, where a shy beauty reunites a lonely cowboy with his baby nephew...and lassoes love in the process! Karen Rose Smith’s new miniseries, DO YOU TAKE THIS STRANGER?, premieres with Wealth, Power and a Proper Wife. An all-work-and-no-play millionaire learns the value of his marriage vows when the wife he’d suspected of betraying him suffers a bout of amnesia.

Rounding out the month, we have Her Best Man by Christine Scott, part of the MEN! promotion, featuring a powerful tycoon who heroically offers protection to a struggling single mom. In Honey of a Husband by Laura Anthony, an ex-bull rider returns home to discover his childhood sweetheart is raising his child—by another woman. Finally, rising star Elizabeth Harbison returns to the lineup with True Love Ranch, where a city gal and a single-dad rancher lock horns—and live up to the Colorado spread’s name.

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor Silhouette Romance

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Lynne Cormack,

my best friend

right through it all

CARA COLTER

shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.

She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”

Dear Nick,

I’m not a man too good with words. Or with babies, either. I can turn an honest day’s work, though, and I’m a fair hand with a horse.

I guess I’m trying to tell you I’m a cowboy, plain and simple. I can face down a ton or so of raging, red-eyed Brahma bull without turning a hair. But babies—and women—scare the heck out of me.

The first time I saw you, I knew you belonged out on the ranch. You may be only three, but it was still there. In your eyes, in the way you stand, in the way you hold yourself.

Being a cowboy is more than puttin’ on a hat and riding a bull. It’s more than rodeos and wranglers. It’s something in the soul.

Nicky, I don’t want you growing up in the middle of a city, living in some cramped apartment, playing on concrete playgrounds. You’re a boy who needs to run where there are no fences. You’re a boy who needs to lasso sawhorse steers. You’re a boy who needs to get bucked off old barrels rigged up with ropes.

How do I know? I look at you and see your daddy. And myself.

So I will teach you about this thing deep inside cowboys that needs blue skies and wide open spaces, that needs a good horse, and a herd of cattle, that needs to be strong.

And you will teach me about the most important thing of all.

Love. You will teach me about love.

Your uncle,

Turner

Chapter One

It was love at first sight.

Shayla had never used that expression before in her entire twenty-four years.

But then she had never seen anything like this before.

Montana.

The land was huge and breathtaking. Some people might have found the mile upon mile of treeless rolling plain desolate, but Shayla felt something in her opening up, soaring like that red-tailed hawk above her.

The prairie was in constant motion: the wind playing in tall golden grass, creating slow and sensuous waves; herds of pronghorns appearing in the distance, suddenly disappearing again; funny black-tipped spikes poking above the grass, turning out to be the ear tips of deer.

She unrolled the window on her ancient Volkswagen and took a deep breath of air that smelled of earth and sunshine, and something she couldn’t quite define.

“Love at first sight,” she repeated, out loud this time, letting it roll off her tongue.

“Bluv burst bite,” her passenger echoed.

Shayla started. “Nicky! You’re awake.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder at her little charge, strapped securely in the brand-new car seat in the back of her car.

“Did you see them? The deer and antelope? It’s just like the song,” she realized with delight. “You know the one. ‘Home, home on the range...”’

Nicky nodded solemnly, his eyes huge and black behind a sooty fringe of lashes. Dark loops of hair curled around his fat cheeks. He was a truly beautiful child, save for a tendency to beetle his brows and frown ferociously when he wanted his own way. Which was often.

“Me free,” he said, holding up a fistful of fingers.

Free, she thought. That’s what it was. The landscape spoke to something in her about wildness and freedom.

“That’s right,” she said, glancing at him in her rearview mirror. “Three.” She noticed bright dots of color on each of his cheeks. “We’re going to be at your uncle’s soon. What do you think about that?”

“Me free.”

She laughed. “Me, too. Having my first adventure at the ripe old age of twenty-four. Me, Shayla Morrison having an adventure!”

It wasn’t really an adventure. She was doing a friend a favor. That was all. But this landscape called out to a part of her that she hadn’t known existed.

A part of her that longed for an adventure.

Tentatively she pushed her foot down a little harder. No speed limit in Montana. She had never gone fast in her whole life. The road was good, straight, paved and empty. Why not fly?

“Me six,” Nicky announced.

“No, three.”

In her rearview mirror, she watched black eyebrows drop down, and a pug nose scrunch up.

“Six!”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re three, when you’re a tree,” Shayla sang lightly, “and it doesn’t matter if you are six if you are in a fix.”

“Ohhh,” Nicky breathed with delight. “Poppy Pepperseed.”

Shayla laughed again. Her laughter felt rich within her, as glorious as this sun-filled day. For the past two years she had worked out of her home, writing the music and lyrics for the “Poppy Pepperseed Show,” a locally-produced children’s TV program in Portland, Oregon. Though she didn’t do the voice or the singing for the program, Nicky invariably recognized when she became “Poppy.”

“Sing,” he commanded.

And so she sang. Nonsense lyrics that celebrated the huge sky and the circling hawks and the bouncing pronghorns. The next time she looked in the mirror her number-one fan was sound asleep.

She frowned. Again? How often did kids sleep? The red in his cheeks seemed to be deepening. He wasn’t sick, was he?

She gave herself a little shake. She worried too much. Worrying was her specialty.

It was probably just boredom. They had been traveling now for two days.

A week ago, her neighbor Maria, a young single mom she had met about a year ago at the apartment’s pool, had dropped Nicholas—Nicky—off for an afternoon as she occasionally did.

But by late that evening, the shy, beautiful Maria hadn’t come back. Nicky had fallen asleep on the couch, his thumb in his mouth, cuddling his hand-knit purple-and-turquoise dinosaur, Ralph. It wasn’t at all like Maria, who was soft-spoken and conscientious always, and Shayla began to wonder if she should start calling the hospitals.

When the phone rang, Shayla listened to the coins falling into place before Maria had come on the line.

“Shayla, I hate to ask, but could you keep Nicky for a day or two? Something has come up.”

“Are you all right?” Shayla asked. Maria’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away.

Maria laughed, and Shayla realized she had never heard her neighbor laugh before.

Of course she couldn’t keep Nicky. He was not exactly the kind of child content to play on the floor with his Tonka toys while she plunked away at her old piano. Her next deadline was looming large.

“Please?”

A note in Maria’s voice made her say yes. Her neighbor’s voice held the smallest thread of happiness.

Maria always seemed to Shayla to be too young to look so tired and overburdened.

What was a day or two? She would have to figure out a way to work with Nicky around. Maybe even test the songs on him. A novel concept, testing a children’s song on a real child.

What was a few days if it did something to take the sad and defeated slump out of Maria’s thin shoulders?

Two days had come and gone, and then Maria had phoned again. She couldn’t come back right away. Something had come up. An emergency. She wasn’t sure when she would be back, actually, maybe weeks. Could Shayla take Nicky to his uncle in Montana?

That thread of happiness ran even stronger in Maria’s voice.

“I can’t go to Montana, Maria. When are you going to be back? What do you mean weeks?”

She knew she could not keep Nicky for weeks. He was a small tyrant, ordering her around like some tiny generalissimo dictator. No wonder Maria always looked so tired!

“Nicky eat. Now.”

“Nicky go to pool. Now.”

“Nicky not sleep. Nicky swim. Now.”

“Nicky not eat green. Nicky eat red. Lick-rish. Now.”

“Nicky playground. Now.”

Shayla was beginning to hear the word now in her sleep.

If her choice was to either keep him for weeks or take him to his uncle in Montana, she was going to Montana.

She had written down Maria’s directions carefully and phoned in to work to tell them the music would be a little late. It was the first time in two years she had missed a deadline, but she was writing the Halloween episode, so she was nearly a month in advance of production, anyway.

As soon as she had started packing, she’d realized she felt happy.

“I think I wanted to get away,” she murmured to herself, pressing down the accelerator just a little bit more. Seventy-two miles an hour. It was absolutely heady stuff.

Away from what?

Her job? It was true that after two years of writing the music for Poppy, her career was something less than challenging now. There were mornings she woke up and absolutely dreaded trying to think of a weather song, or a feelings song or any other kind of song that was going to be sung by adult actors dressed as puppets and furry animals...and clowns.

Which brought her to Barry Baxter. Bo-Bo the Clown on the show. Her beau-beau for the past year.

“You’re going where?” he’d yelped when she’d called him. “Montana? With that kid?”

She’d resented the way he’d said that, as if Nicky was a two-headed monster instead of a child. A bossy child, yes, but still barely a baby nonetheless.

“You don’t like kids, do you?” she’d asked with slow comprehension.

“It’s not that I don’t like them. I’m just surrounded by kid stuff all the time. The show, the kids who come on the show. I’m a man who wears a clown suit for a living. For Pete’s sake when I take it off, I want to be a grown-up. No kids. And especially not that one.”

“It’s going to be that one for weeks, unless I go to Montana.”

“Look, isn’t there a law or something? She can’t just dump her kid off there and expect you to deal with it.”

“Are you suggesting I call the police? On sweet little Maria?”

“She’s abandoned the kid.”

“She has not.”

Shayla sighed as she drove along. That was the real reason it felt so good to get away, she admitted to herself. She had a lot of thinking to do about herself and Barry.

Her mother thought she should marry him. So did Barry.

He was what her mother called a catch. Even though he was an actor, he had a steady job, and he was stable. He was also very good-looking, if just a trifle on the chubby side.

“You’re never going to meet anyone else,” her mother lamented. “You’re a recluse, sitting at home plunking away on that piano. He’s a nice boy. What’s wrong with him?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Shayla said desperately. “Is that a good reason to get married? Because there’s nothing wrong with the person?”

“Shayla, this is your mother speaking. You marry a man with a good heart. A provider. Forget all these schoolgirl romantic notions. Forget your heart beating faster and skyrockets. There’s nothing but pain in those things. I should know.”

Shayla’s mother and father had divorced years ago, a passion burned out quickly.

She had phoned to tell her mother she was going to Montana. How had the whole marriage issue come up?

“He doesn’t like kids, Mom.”

“There are worse things.”

“I like kids.”

“He loves you, Shayla. What more do you want?”

To love him back. She liked Barry. Her mother was right. She’d lived like a recluse until he’d come along. Now she had a charming companion to go to the movies with, to eat dinner with sometimes. They shared a certain creative bent that made them very compatible.

But marry him?

She didn’t even really like kissing him. Why couldn’t things just stay the same? Why did it have to move on? Why couldn’t they just enjoy going to movies and out for dinner together?

But if she truly wanted things to stay the same how could she explain the creeping discontent she felt in a lot of areas of her life? She should like writing Poppy. She should feel lucky to have a job doing something in her field. With the exception of Lillian Morehouse, who was playing with the Philharmonic, ninety percent of her graduating class had not gained employment in the music field. Mike Webster’s job in a record store didn’t count.

It was Montana that was doing this to her—awakening some restless spirit within her, calling to some part of her that was just a touch wild and reckless.

Her mother and Barry had mournfully watched her pack the car to go.

“I can’t believe you’re doing something so harebrained,” Barry had said.

Her mother had nodded vigorous agreement.

Well, she’d hardly been able to believe it herself, but now that she was doing it, it felt great! Perhaps there had been a harebrained side of her, hidden for many years, just dying to get out.

She slowed, approaching an intersection, and glanced at the mileage covered, according to her trip meter. She had passed the small community of Winnet and the even smaller one of Sand Springs. This was it.

The signs were right beside the road, just as Maria had told her they would be.

Provided by the 4-H Club, neat placards said who lived down the road—the family name followed by the number of miles down that road.

Shayla scanned the placards quickly. There it was. MacLeod. Thirty-seven miles down that road. It looked like his closest neighbor was seven miles from him.

The immenseness of the country struck her anew. She got out, looked around, stretched and felt it again. Free.

Nicky slept on. She quietly opened the back door and loosened his little plaid shirt, so painstakingly stitched by his mother. The heat coming off him startled her.

It was a warm day, though, one of those September days that still held the full heat of summer.

When she got back in the car she unrolled the passenger-side window, too, so that the breeze could blow on Nicky.

She reset her trip meter and turned down the gravel road, somehow feeling her whole life was ahead of her.

At mile thirty-seven there was a big-timbered gatepost that spanned a drive on the west side of the road. Hanging from the weathered center beam was a piece of driftwood with the name MacLeod burned deep into it. In this barren country, where only a few spindly deciduous trees grew in the draws, it must have taken quite a bit of effort to get those timbers.

She drove under the sign. She had expected to see a house, but instead it was another road, more narrow now, twisting and dipping over little rolls of land and through small coulees.

She had gone another five miles before she topped a rise in the undulating landscape and saw the buildings sprawled out in the draw below her.

She stopped the car and checked Nicky. He was still sleeping soundly, his cheeks, thankfully, felt cooler to her now.

She looked down at the buildings below her. It wasn’t much, really. A small square of a house, a barn that looked newer and more distinguished than the house, and a few scattered outbuildings.

A cloud of dust drew her eyes beyond the outbuildings to a corral. She shielded her eyes against the sun.

“Oh, my,” she whispered.

A man stood dead center in that corral, while a beautiful black horse galloped around him, kicking and bucking.

Even from a distance she could see he was the quintessential cowboy. Whipcord lean in his dust-covered jeans, denim shirt, a big-brimmed white cowboy hat shading him from the sun. She liked the way he was standing, loose-limbed and calm in the middle of all that ruckus, radiating an easy strength.

And then he took off the hat and wiped a careless sleeve over a sweating brow.

Even from a distance his features seemed even and clean, pleasing to the eye.

Her heart somersaulted, and again she used an expression she had never used until today.

“Love at first sight.”

She blushed at her own silliness.

The man was a stranger, glimpsed from a distance. He did make a decidedly romantic figure, but obviously Montana had had a strange effect on her senses—heightened and honed them to a dangerous sharpness.

If she had an ounce of sense, she would get back in her car and go down the road the way she’d come.

But then if she had an ounce of sense, as Barry and her mother had already told her, she wouldn’t be here in the first place.

She’d made a commitment to deliver Nicky to his uncle, and she would carry it through until the end.

She got back in her car and pointed it right toward those buildings.

The dust behind the car must have told him she was coming. As she pulled up to the house, he was in the yard, if not waiting for her, at least done working the horse for a moment.

He was sitting on the edge of a water barrel in front of his house, one foot anchoring him on the ground, a dipper in his hand. His hat was on the stoop beside him. His hair was thick, the rich color of melted chocolate. He took a slow swallow of water, watching her over the edge of the dipper.

When she drew to a halt, he saluted her mildly, hung the dipper from a nail on the wall, retrieved his hat and, tugging it down over his brow, stood and came toward the car.

For a minute she was absolutely frozen where she was.

He had the lean grace of a cowboy as he moved toward her, one-hundred-percent man.

Not that Barry wasn’t one-hundred-percent man, but it was a different kind of percentage.

He was smiling, a warm smile that showed beautiful teeth and crinkles around his eyes.

Eyes a color she had seen only once before. Last night Just before the sun had gone down, the sky had turned the most incredible shade of blue. Indigo, really.

And he was smiling at her, hypnotizing her with incredible indigo eyes.

She stumbled out of the car.

“Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.

She commanded herself to look way up at him, break the spell of those eyes, but she absolutely couldn’t. He was stunning.

She was suddenly aware how rumpled she must look after two days on the road. She wished she’d thought to comb her hair when she’d paused up there on the knoll—applied a little lipstick. And mascara. Eye shadow. Hair dye.

Anything so that it wasn’t plain-Jane Shayla Morrison standing there with the most spectacular man she had ever seen.

“Are you lost?” he asked, his eyes flicking from her to the car, resting for a moment, warmly, on the little bundle snoozing in the back seat.

She was lost all right, and she’d better pull out before she went any farther into the depths of those astounding eyes.

“I’ve brought you your nephew,” she blurted out.

Even before she registered the surprise in his features it occurred to her something was wrong. He should have been expecting her.

“His mother said you would be expecting me.” Her voice trembled. She’d come so far. How on earth could this be happening? She suddenly felt exhausted and confused.

Her mother and Barry had been right. What a harebrained thing to do. Now what was she going to do?

“You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, ma’am. It’s easy enough to do in this country. I don’t have a nephew. One niece.”

His voice was slow and easy, deep and wonderful. How could he say a word as proper as ma‘am and make her feel as if he’d said something deliciously indecent? How could he say something that made her feel deliciously indecent and reassured at the same time?

He didn’t have a nephew, but it was just a wrong turn.

“Wrong turn,” she stammered. “Of course, you must be right. I must have—” she thought of the big sign over the front gate “—I must have found the wrong MacLeod. Is there another one?” She felt flustered as the amusement leaped in his eyes.

“Lots of MacLeods in this country. Which one are you looking for?”

Nicky suddenly let loose a holler from the backseat, like a cat with its toenail caught in the screen door.

“Turner,” she said, pivoting from him, bending into the car to release the belt on the car seat. “I’m looking for Turner MacLeod.”

She looked back. His jaw had dropped. It was a strong jaw, deeply shadowed.

“Well, that would be me, ma‘am, but I don’t—”

Nicky exploded from his seat and pushed by her. He ran straight for the big lean man who was eyeing them now with horrified fascination.

Nicky grabbed Turner MacLeod’s blue jeans in a tight chubby fist. His head dropped. He threw up on the man’s boots.

Shayla closed her eyes in mortification. Thousands of miles of open prairie, and Nicky had chosen the man’s boot? Barry would have been furious.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

Nicky was shrieking, still holding that leg.

The man squatted down, ignoring the substance on his boot. He took Nicky’s tiny shoulders in both strong hands and scanned his face, and then touched his forehead quickly with the back of his hand.

Turner scooped up the boy with easy strength, tucked him into his shoulder. “Better come in. He’s got a bit of a fever.”

The calm in his voice quelled the panic in the pit of her stomach.

She froze, looking at them together. Nicholas’s coloring was different from Turner’s, darker and more exotic, but the bone structure was identical.

She had the sudden sinking sensation that Maria had not sent her to the boy’s uncle after all.

Turner MacLeod was Nicholas’s father.

And he didn’t know it.

Love at first sight and he was an utter cad.

She could almost see her mother sniffing triumphantly. Hear her voice in her mind saying, “Don’t you trust hormones or hearts to make those really important decisions, Shayla. This is your mother talking. Use your head. That’s what the good Lord gave it to you for.”

Well, her head was saying run, and run fast. But her feet were following his long stride toward his porch. She couldn’t very well leave Nicky here with a perfect stranger. Even if it was his father.

“I better get him to a hospital,” she said frantically.

He shot her a quick look over his shoulder. “Ma’am, the nearest hospital is a long, long way from here.”

He said it quietly, patiently, even, but she could sense a judgment, and a harsh one. Outsider. City slicker. Not aware of the realities of life in these big empty spaces.

He slipped off his boots at a jack on the porch outside his screen door. Then he opened the door and held it with a foot, indicating for her to follow him.

“I don’t even know you,” she said, hesitating.

He shot her an incredulous look. “You might have thought of that a couple of hundred miles ago.” The door squeaked and closed behind him.

“How do you know how far I’ve come?” She suddenly felt even more suspicious. Oh great, she had driven hundreds of miles to walk straight into the clutches of the only ax murderer in Montana.

“The license plates say Oregon, ma’am. That’s one hell of a pile of time to give some thought to what you’re doing.”

“Back then I thought you knew Nicky!”

“Nicky,” he repeated it slowly. He held the caterwauling boy back, and studied his face.

Nicky was making a lot of noise but not crying. Shayla had noticed the little boy had a particularly tough streak in him. He never cried.

A light came on in Turner MacLeod’s face as he studied the boy. A light, followed by a look of bewildered tenderness that completely erased her worries about the position of the nearest ax.

“Geez,” he breathed under his breath. He looked up at her, his eyes pinning her with intense blue light. “Who’s his mama?”

Just how many beds had his boots been under? she wondered, borrowing a phrase from a song she wished she had written.

“Maria Gerrardi,” she said tightly. She added silently—a good Catholic girl, whose life lies in ruins because of you, you handsome devil you.

Something tightened in his features.

With another look at Nicky’s face, he sighed and disappeared into the darkness of his house.

Chapter Two

She was standing out on his porch deciding whether or not it was safe to come in, he thought wryly.

She was probably from a big city—an alarm on her key chain, a half dozen dead bolts on her doors, a penchant for watching evening news that scared her silly.

She probably thought he had an ax in here.

He set the boy down on a chair. “Stay,” he said sternly.

The little boy continued caterwauling, but looked at him with huge startled eyes. Turner noticed, for all the noise, the kid was dry-eyed.

He had eyes, huge and coal dark, just like Turner’s brother, Nicholas. Even the same name. Nick. A strange coincidence that the boy was here now. He hadn’t seen Nick for nearly four years. And then a couple of days ago the satellite dish had decided to work, and he’d caught the tail end of the news when they did the human interest stuff.

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?”

He got up and found some tea towels, ran them under lukewarm water in the sink. “Running water,” he said. “Had it for near six months now.” He drawled it out nice and slow like a real hick. He kept his face completely deadpan.

She cast him a sideways look from under lashes that he noticed were as thick and tangled as a sooty chimney brush. It didn’t look like she had mascara on though, or any other war paint, either. No bright red lips or stripes of green over her eyes. No little pencil-thin eyebrows or slashes of fake pink on her cheeks.

He didn’t revise his first opinion. She was no beauty. But there was something just plain natural about her that was easy on a man’s eyes. He decided he’d had nothing to look at but horses for a sight too long.

She was grunting trying to squish the tablets. Not enough muscle in those arms to wring out a dishrag. If he was shopping for a woman, which of course he wasn’t, he needed one who could heft a bale or two.

She wasn’t Celia, he realized suddenly, and it wasn’t fair to her to treat her like she was, or to assume that all women from the cities would be the same. Maybe she wasn’t even from a city.

“Which part of Oregon are you from?” he asked.

“Portland.”

Best to keep his guard up. Celia, a born-and-bred Baltimore girl, had thought the country would be romantic as all get-out, and she’d had a notion or two about cowboys, too. All of them wrong.

She had thought Turner was rugged and real because she’d seen him ride to glory for eight seconds on the back of a raging bull.

As long as he was handing his Stetson to maître d’s or the hatcheck girl at the ballet her illusions were pretty safe.

Then he’d made the mistake of asking her out here.

Her disappointment and disillusionment had set almost at once. Her first impression of this very room had put a look on her face that would have soured milk.

Then his best reining horse had foaled badly, and the foal had ended up behind the heater in the house, with him trying to coax an eyedropper of milk into it about every ten seconds or so.

It had pretty much sealed his fate when he didn’t even have a candle to light for the special dinner she’d made him. He’d offered to drive over to his sister’s—an hour-and-five-minute round trip—but the moment was definitely lost. She’d said it didn’t matter. When he’d seen those escargot things in full light he’d wished he’d insisted on making the trip.

Turner knew it was for the best, her leaving. They’d been living in some sort of fantasy world, and the reality check had been inevitable. The truth was out. Rugged and real meant he was hardworking, stubborn, a loner, and about as romantic as a skunk in a trap.

He’d wondered so much about whether or not those candles really had mattered that on his next grocery run to town he’d picked up a pair of nice red ones, and bought three videos. For next time.

So far there hadn’t been a next time. The candles were still wrapped and so were the videos.

Maybe his unexpected guest would be impressed. Since the videos were now three years old he doubted it.

He hadn’t been to a rodeo in nearly that long, either. He was getting old, he supposed. At thirty, a ton of Brahma bull, tap dancing on his chest, was not as appealing as it had been a decade ago.

He liked working with horses. He’d finalized an arrangement with his sister and his brother-in-law just last year where they would run the cattle part of the ranch that had been in his family since shortly after Noah, and he could devote himself to doing what he did best. He’d bought this little parcel over here because he liked the barn.

He was a good trainer and he knew it. He had more business than he could handle. Between his training fees, selling colts he’d finished, and his share of the profits from the ranch, he made a pretty fine living. He would actually have lots of money, if he could ever learn to curb his impulse to buy just one more horse.

Turner had paid seven thousand dollars for the lunatic Appaloosa out there. His sister had sighed, looked at his house and had the good sense to say nothing.

Horses made him happy. Show him a house that could do that.

Life was good. Settled. All right, he missed his brother. And from time to time he yearned for the soft company of a pretty woman.

A man got lonely. There was nothing that brought out his vulnerability like this time of year, the promise of winter already in the air at night, the thought of short days and long cold nights filling him with an ache he didn’t want to feel.

He’d wanted very badly for it to work with Celia. But it hadn’t, and it had killed something in him trying to make it. Having a woman digging her spikes into the region near your heart was no less painful than the bull tap dancing. He was too old for them both.

There wasn’t an available woman within a thousand square miles. He knew all the girls, long since turned into women, who had grown up around here, and they were either long gone or long taken. And he was too proud and stubborn and busy to go searching worlds unfamiliar to him like some lonely-hearts-club reject.

But this one had come to him.

Turner slid a glance to her ring finger. Blank. He was aware, suddenly, of a sense of something missing from his life since he’d given up rodeo.

Adventure. Spontaneity. Not knowing precisely what was going to happen next.

Geez, MacLeod, he told himself. Don’t go bein’ no fool. He noticed a little scattering of light freckles over her nose.

She finally managed to break up the acetaminophen.

“You try and give it to him this time,” he said gruffly. “Then we’ll get his clothes off and sponge him down real good.”

She took the juice from him and sat down across from the little boy who looked at her with mulish stubbornness that reminded him of his own brother.

“Oh, little love, open wide,” she sang in such a clear true voice it made Turner start, “let this magic come inside, chase away all the germs that hide—”

The little scoundrel opened his mouth like a baby bird, and swallowed the medicine with a satisfied slurp.

“Did you just make that up, just now?” Turner asked incredulously.

“Oh,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. “It’s silly, but it works.”

Her eyes crinkled up at the edges when she laughed, and they were a nice color. Hazel, he supposed it was called, when they were kind of gold and green and brown all mixed together like that.

“Sing again, Poppy. Now.”

“No,” she said uncomfortably, a sudden blush painting her high cheekbones a becoming shade of scarlet.

Poppy. Despite the color in her cheeks at the moment, it didn’t suit her. Poppies, in his mind, were flamboyant flowers, in too-brilliant shades of red or orange.

She was more like a little brown-eyed Susan.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I liked it.” More than liked it. It was like listening to an angel sing.

But she wouldn’t sing again. Instead she took off the little boy’s shirt and sponged him off with those tea towels he’d prepared.

“Let’s lay him down,” he suggested. “The back room stays cool.”

When she moved to lift the boy, he took him from her.

“He’s not heavy,” she protested.

He shrugged. Oh, right. It was this brand-new world where women did all the same things as men. Never mind that he had just been evaluating her bale-throwing ability. He suspected it was this kind of thing that had driven Nick away—he demanded the best from everyone and then never gave them a chance to show it to him. But other than toss the kid back at her, he didn’t know what to do about it.

They went down the narrow hall. He managed to snag his bedroom door with his toe on the way by and pull it shut before she got a glimpse of three or four days’ worth of dirty shirts and socks on the floor.

His spare bedroom was as plain as the rest of his tiny house. It didn’t even have a curtain. Not many Peeping Toms could be bothered coming out this far.

Especially to only get a peep at him.

“Poppy, sing,” the wee tyrant demanded again as she tucked relatively clean sheets around the tyke.

She glanced self-consciously in Turner’s direction, and he took the hint and left. He had a pair of boots that needed cleaning before they were ruined, anyway.

But as he bent over the boots with the garden hose, he could hear her voice drifting out the window.

“Oh, little love, close your eyes,

Think of sun and wide blue skies,

Deer playing and grass swaying,

Coyotes at the moon baying...”

After a few minutes the singing stopped. He realized he had stood there, frozen, not paying the least bit of attention to his boots.

She came out the back door a moment later. “He went right to sleep.”

“How do you do that? Just make up rhymes to music like that?”

“I don’t know. It just comes to me. I’m sorry about your boots.”

“They’ve seen worse.”

“What could be worse?” she asked, crinkling up her nose.

He decided to be a gentleman and not describe to her in generous detail the afterbirth of a cow.

“Should we call a doctor?” she asked. “Maybe just run Nicky’s symptoms by him?”

“We’ll wait and see. I don’t think it’s much. Could be too much heat. Maybe he’s carsick. I think the temperature will come right down now.”

“You handle a crisis very well.”

He snorted. “This is a long way from a crisis. But when you do have a crisis, you don’t have any choice when you’re this far from anything.”

She hugged herself and looked out over the land. “I think this is right in the middle of everything.”

Sure you do, honey. “Until the first time you crave pizza at two in the morning.”

“Pizza is easy to make.”

“It is?” he said with reluctant respect.

“Oh, sure. A little bread dough and tomato sauce, pepperoni, and fresh green peppers.”

“Fresh. There you have it. What we don’t have.”

“I can eat it without,” she said absently. “You could grow a garden, couldn’t you?”

He shot a guilty look at the dead flowers in the box under the bedroom window.

She followed his gaze. “Oh. Did you plant those?”

“Not hardly,” he said a trifle defensively. Did he look like the kind of man who planted pansies?

Something tightened in her face, and he could read the whole story of what she thought had happened there. He’d had a brief fling with a woman who thought she was staying and had planted flowers. He’d gotten rid of her and not even bothered to water the plants.

Actually, his sister had planted the flowers in one of those periodic attempts she made to spiff his place up. He’d watered them meticulously for a week or so. And then he’d gotten contracts to put thirty days’ training on six horses, plus he’d acquired that renegade, leopard-spotted Appy mare who only had murder—his—on her mind.

He decided, stubbornly, not to tell his uninvited guest those few facts, even if they might have redeemed his hardened soul somewhat in her eyes.

If she was silly enough to think he was some kind of playboy, let her think it. It might keep her from getting any damn fool notions.

That kid was going to be here for a day or two, and she wasn’t leaving without him tucked in his little seat in the back of her little car.

“Poppy, is it?” Perhaps that would explain a sensitivity to perished flowers.

She looked baffled.

“Your name?”

“Good grief, no. Shayla. Shayla Morrison.”

He thought Poppy was a somewhat more sensible name, even if it didn’t suit her. Shayla was an exotic name, which for some ridiculous reason made him wonder about her underwear again. Frills. He’d bet his last buck on that one. Come to that, he’d probably bet his soul for one little peek, so he’d better get himself out of harm’s way and quick.

“Miss Morrison—”

“Shayla, please.”

“Shayla, I’ve got some chores to do, so you’ve got the place to yourself if you want to have a bath or shower. I’ll pull out the sofa bed for the night.”

“I can’t stay here!”

“Well, you sure as hell can’t leave. That kid isn’t going anywhere, and you’re not going anywhere without him.”

She mulled that over. “And the nearest motel?”

“Care to guess?”

“Close to the pharmacy and hospital?”

“Right around the comer.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“An irritating habit I have.”

She smiled, and it was a nice smile that showed small white teeth and lit up a light inside her eyes, making him realize he’d been wrong about one thing. Because she was downright beautiful when she did that.

The smile disappeared, and she gnawed on her bottom lip thoughtfully. “I don’t know what I’m going to do—”

“I think you’re going to have to stick around. For a day or two. I’ll see if I can track down Maria and find out what’s going on.”

“Track her down? But—”

“She used to have some family in these parts.” Family, he remembered, who lived in a frightful little shack with a car corpse or two in the yard. Part of the reason he’d decided she was completely unsuitable for his brother.

MacLeod, he told himself, you’re a real SOB.

“I’m sure she’s planning to call you,” Shayla said. “I can stay the night, but—”

“You can’t leave him here. You either have to stay or take him with you when you go. He strikes me as a tough little tyke, but his Mom’s gone, and I think he’d be scared to death if you dropped him here with a complete stranger.”

The depth of his caring for the little boy took him slightly aback.

“I think you’re right,” she said, apparently as surprised by his sensitivity as he himself was.

“Are you rushing back to a job or a boyfriend or something?”

“Not really. I can do my job anywhere.”

“What job is that?” No mention of a boyfriend? Why did that make his stupid heart skip a beat?

“I write songs for a children’s show.”

“That explains it. The songs you pull out of the air.” For some reason her offbeat job made her seem appealing.

Then again after three years without so much as a kiss, he’d probably see appeal in just about anyone, up to and including Ma Baker who ran a pretty good café in Jordan—and was two hundred and thirteen pounds, and damn proud of every one of them.

And now he’d gone and encouraged her to stay. Sleep in his bed. Take a shower. She’d get out all rosy and smelling of sweetness and soap—

And he’d work himself into the ground until well after dark, come in, hit the sack and fall into a deep, dreamless and exhausted sleep. He could manage that for a day or two. Actually it wouldn’t be that different from his regular routine.

He watched her go into the house, and he pulled on his newly cleaned boots.

He noticed the door to her car was still open and went to give it a shove before her battery died.

Her suitcase was still in the back seat.

He hesitated. He’d told her she’d have the place to herself, but all her clean clothes were out here. It wouldn’t hurt him to do the gentlemanly thing before he vamoosed down to the corral for a session with that hell-horse.

The one he wasn’t getting paid to work with, he reminded himself with a wry shake of his head.

He picked her suitcase out of the back seat.

It was old and battered, not like those Gucci bags of Celia’s.

He took the steps two at a time and went into the house. He was crossing the living room, when without warning the top flap flew open and her possessions scattered across his living room floor.

He said a word he generally didn’t say within hearing distance of women and children.

Who generally weren’t within hearing distance of him.

He bent and began to cram things back into the suitcase. He was trying hard not to look, but there wasn’t a scrap of lace or silk in the whole works.

Plain old white cotton.

What he felt for her at this moment was the oddest thing. A pretty little woman like that without one pretty little thing. He felt strangely sad for her.

Right from the start he’d known she was the kind of woman who should have silk and lace. He was pretty sure there was passion there, right below that calm surface—

“Oh!”

She had come down the hallway, and was standing there looking at him shoving her personal stuff back into her bag.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “The catch—”

“I know,” she said. “Broken.”

He glanced up at her. She was blushing. Well, unless he was mistaken, so was he.

She came quickly toward him. “Here. That’s all right. Let me.”

She squatted beside him. Her hand touched his in a frantic effort to get to a white unmentionable before he did.

Her skin was as soft as that silk he’d just been thinking of, and a jolt went through him like he’d been hit full-strength with a cattle prod.

He scrambled to his feet. “I’ve got horses to see to.”

“Would you like me to make dinner?”

Dinner. Dinner. “Sure. When you’re hungry. Help yourself.”

“I meant for you.”

“Dinner for me?” He gawked at her.

“I don’t mind. I certainly don’t expect you to cook for Nicky and me.”

“You won’t find anything much to make it with. I think I’ve got some tins of stew and wieners and beans. Frozen dinners in the freezer.”

She smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Now he wasn’t going to be able to hide in the barn until all the lights went off in the house. He was going to have to sit across from her and have dinner and think of things to say.

It had been a long time.

And suddenly he was looking forward to it.

In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. “You’ll find some red candles over there in that drawer.”

He turned abruptly on his heel and left her there neatly folding things back into her suitcase.

Lordy, he was in big trouble. Thank God he had horses waiting—one waiting to kill him.

And with any luck it would do precisely that before he ever found out how big the trouble really was that he was in.

Chapter Three

She was staying. In the home of a complete stranger. A dangerously attractive complete stranger. For one night and maybe two.

It was absurd. Crazy.

Why was she so happy about it?

Because her heart liked him. Her head didn’t. Her head was full of her mother’s voice telling her to beware. Reminding her Turner might be Nicky’s father, not his uncle.

But her heart held tight to the warmth she had seen in his gaze when he first looked at Nicky, to his lack of concern over the condition of his boots after Nicky’s unfortunate accident on them, and to his very real concern for a sick child.

That alone, she told herself, had earned him the pizza she was making him for supper.

His cupboards were quite well supplied with dry goods, though most of the good stuff was way at the back, behind the rows of canned stew, spaghetti and ravioli. She found tomato sauce and tiny tinned sausages and biscuit mix.

His fridge contained a six-pack of soda pop, a twenty-pound bag of apples, a ten-pound bag of carrots, some strange blue-green substance busily growing fur and two small blocks of cheese.

Not an onion or green pepper to be seen.

When everything was ready she set it on top of the oven. She’d wait until he came in.

She checked on Nicky, relieved that he was now cool and breathing easily.

She smiled at the spartan, tidy little room.

His world, Turner’s world, was obviously not within the confines of these four walls. His world was out there—the rough and rugged world she had first seem him in, standing in the center of a dusty corral as some half-wild horse lunged around him.

She lugged her traitorous suitcase down the hall and took a shower, berating herself for not having had the latch fixed and wishing she owned some frothy underwear.

It had been awful seeing his big tanned hands cramming her most personal things back into that suitcase.

Especially since her most personal things were so ordinary.

Everything she owned was ordinary, she thought, getting out of the shower and fishing through each item in her suitcase with a critical eye.

She finally settled for mossy green jeans and a matching cream-coloured flannel shirt with a faint green stripe. She tied her damp hair back with an elastic and made a face at herself in the smoky mirror. She wasn’t trying to make herself attractive for him, was she? She decided, perhaps a little more emphatically than necessary, that she was not. She was a guest in his home, and it was only decent that she make herself neat and presentable.

She had long ago accepted she was not one of those women who was ever going to turn a head as she walked down the street. Construction workers did not whistle at her. Teenage boys did not crane their necks or drive their bicycles into the backs of cars to get a better look.

She had neat and tidy features, ordinary really.

Her university days had been largely without the rush of romance. She’d been dedicated to her studies, and quite shy. She chose the study carrels at the library rather than the open tables. She had developed some very solid friendships with both sexes, but an actual relationship evaded her.

Her mother, who seemed to consider university a happy hunting ground for the unwed, found her lack of romantic involvement with some budding doctor or lawyer very discouraging.

Her mother’s distress had increased when Shayla found a job where she would be working mostly out of her own apartment rather than where she would be meeting people—make that “men”—of interest.

Did part of her actually delight in thwarting her mother’s plans for her?

Is that why her wardrobe was minus form-hugging shirts in siren red, or lace-trimmed blouses that would make her look wonderfully feminine and alluring?

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