Widowed Jessie was about to give birth, and she needed help fast. Unfortunately, the closest ranch in town belonged to her brother-in-law. Though this charismatic rancher was her only hope, he was the last person Jessie wanted to be with.

Previously published.

A Christmas Blessing

Sherryl Woods

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-03378-7

A CHRISTMAS BLESSING

© 1995 Sherryl Woods

Published in Great Britain 2015

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited

Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Version: 2018-04-18

Table of Contents

Cover

Back Cover Copy

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Copyright

Chapter One

Getting Consuela Martinez out of his kitchen was proving to be a much more difficult task than Luke Adams had ever envisioned. His housekeeper had found at least a dozen excuses for lingering, despite the fact that her brother was leaning on his car’s horn and causing enough ruckus to deafen them all.

“Go, amiga,” Luke pleaded. “Enjoy your holidays with your family. Feliz Navidad!”

Consuela ignored the instructions and the good wishes. “The freezer is filled with food,” she reminded him, opening the door to show him for the fourth time. Though there were literally dozens of precooked, neatly labeled packages, a worried frown puckered her brow. “It will be enough?”

“More than enough,” he assured her.

“But not if you have guests,” she concluded, removing her coat. “I should stay. The holidays are no time for a good housekeeper to be away.”

“I won’t be having any guests,” Luke said tightly, picking the coat right back up and practically forcing her into it. “And if I do, I am perfectly capable of whipping up a batch of chips and dip.”

“Chips and dip,” she muttered derisively.

She added a string of Spanish Luke felt disinclined to translate. He caught the general drift; it wasn’t complimentary. After all this time, though, Consuela should know that he wasn’t the type to host a lot of extravagant, foolish parties. Leave that sort of thing to his brother Jordan or his parents. His brother thrived on kissing up to his business associates and his parents seemed to think that filling the house with strangers meant they were well loved and well respected.

“Consuela, go!” he ordered, barely curbing his impatience. “Vaya con Dios. I’ll be fine. I am thirty-two years old. I’ve been out of my playpen for a long time.”

One of the dangers of hiring an ex-nanny as a housekeeper, he’d discovered, was the tendency she had to forget that her prior charge had grown up. Yet he could no more have fired Consuela than he could have his own mother. In truth, for all of her hovering and bossiness, she was the single most important constant in his life. Which was a pretty pitiful comment on the state of his family, he decided ruefully.

Consuela’s unflinching, brown-eyed gaze pinned him. Hands on ample hips, she squared off against him. “You will go to your parents’ on Christmas, sí? The holidays are a time for families to be together. You have stayed away too long.”

“Yes,” he lied. He had no intention of going anywhere, especially not to his parents’ house where everyone would be mourning, not celebrating, thanks to him.

“They will have enough help for all of the parties that are planned?”

Luke bit back a groan. “Consuela, you know perfectly well they will,” he said patiently. “The place is crawling with your very own nieces and nephews. My parents haven’t had to cook, clean or sneeze without assistance since you took over the running of that household forty years ago before they’d even met. When you came over here to work for me, you handpicked your cousin to replace you. Maritza is very good, yes?”

“Sí,” she conceded.

“This trip to see your family in Mexico is my present to you. It’s long overdue. You said yourself not sixty seconds ago that the holidays are meant for families. You have not seen your own for several years. Your mother is almost ninety. You cry every time a letter comes from her.”

“After all these years, I get homesick, that’s true. I am a very emotional person, not like some people,” she said pointedly.

Luke ignored the jibe. “Well, this is your chance to see for yourself how your mother is doing. Now stop dawdling and go before you miss your plane and before your brother busts our eardrums with that horn of his.”

Consuela still appeared torn between duty to him and a longing to see her mother. Finally she heaved a sigh of resignation and buttoned her coat. “I will go,” she said grudgingly. “But I will worry the whole time. You are alone too much, niño.”

It had been a long time since anyone had thought of Luke Adams as a little boy. Unfortunately, Consuela would probably never get the image out of her head, despite the fact that he was over six feet tall, operated a thriving ranch and had built himself a house twice the size of the very lavish one he’d grown up in.

“Ever since—“ she began.

“Enough,” Luke said in a low, warning tone that silenced her more quickly than any shout would have.

Tears of sympathy sprang to her eyes, and she wrapped her plump arms around him in a fierce hug that had Luke wincing. For a sixty-year-old woman she was astonishingly strong. He didn’t want her weeping for him, though. He didn’t want her pity. And he most definitely didn’t want her dredging up memories of Erik, the brother who’d died barely seven months ago, the brother whose death he’d caused.

“Go,” he said more gently. “I will see you in the new year.”

She reached up and patted his cheek, a gesture she dared only rarely. “Te amo, niño.”

Luke’s harsh demeanor softened at once. “I love you, too, Consuela.”

The truth of it was that she was about the only human being on the face of the earth to whom he could say that without reservation. Even before Erik’s death had split the family apart, Luke had had his share of difficulties with his father’s attempted ironclad grip on his sons. His mother had always been too much in love with her husband to bother much with the four boys she had borne him. And Luke had battled regularly with his younger brothers, each of them more rebellious than the other. Erik had been a year younger, only thirty-one when he’d died. Jordan was thirty, Cody twenty-seven. Consuela had been the steadying influence on all of them, adults and children.

“Te amo, mi amiga,” Luke said, returning her fierce hug.

Consuela was still calling instructions as she crossed the porch and climbed into her brother’s car. For all he knew she was still shouting them as the car sped off down the lane to the highway, kicking up a trail of dust in its wake.

Alone at last, he thought with relief when Consuela was finally gone from view. Blessed silence for two whole weeks. His cattle were pastured on land far from the main house and were being tended by his foreman and a crew of volunteers from among the hands. The ranch’s business affairs were tied up through the beginning of the new year. He had no obligations at all.

He opened a cupboard, withdrew an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey from the supply he’d ordered, ostensibly to take along as gifts to all the holiday parties to which he’d been invited. He pulled down a nice, tall glass, filled it with ice and headed for his den and the big leather chair behind his desk.

Uncapping the bottle, he poured a shot, doubled it, then shrugged and filled the glass to the rim. No point in pretending he didn’t intend to get blind, stinking drunk. No point in pretending he didn’t intend to stay that way until the whole damned holiday season had passed by in a blur.

Just as he lifted the glass to his lips, he caught sight of the wedding photo on the corner of his desk, the one he’d turned away so that he wouldn’t have to see Erik’s smile or the radiance on Erik’s wife’s face. He’d destroyed two lives that day, three if he counted his own worthless existence. Erik was dead and buried, but Jessie’s life had been devastated as surely as if she had been in that accident with him.

A familiar knot formed in his stomach, a familiar pain encircled his heart. He lifted his glass in a mockery of a toast. “To you, little brother.”

The unaccustomed liquor burned going down, but in the space of a heartbeat it sent a warm glow shimmering through him. If one sip was good, two were better, and the whole damned bottle promised oblivion.

He drank greedily, waiting to forget, waiting for relief from the unceasing anguish, from the unending guilt.

The phone rang, stopped, then rang again. The old grandfather clock in the hall chimed out each passing hour as dusk fell, then darkness.

But even sitting there all alone in the dark with a belly full of the best whiskey money could buy, Luke couldn’t shut off the memories. With a curse, he threw the bottle across the room, listened with satisfaction as it shattered against the cold, stone fireplace.

Finally, worn out, he fell into a troubled sleep. It wasn’t his brother’s face he saw as he passed out, though. It was Jessie’s—the woman who should have been his.

* * *

The sky was dark as pitch and the roads were icing over. Jessie Adams squinted through the car’s foggy windshield and wondered why she’d ever had the bright idea of driving clear across Texas for the holidays, instead of letting her father-in-law send his pilot for her. She wasn’t even sure how Harlan and Mary Adams had persuaded her that she still belonged with them now that Erik was gone.

She’d always felt like an outsider in that big white Colonial house that looked totally incongruous sitting in the middle of a sprawling West Texas ranch. Someone in the family, long before Harlan’s time, had fled the South during the Civil War. According to the oft-told legend, the minute they’d accumulated enough cash, they’d built an exact replica of the mansion they’d left behind in ashes. And like the old home, they’d called it White Pines, though she couldn’t recall ever seeing a single pine within a thirty-mile radius.

The bottom line was the Adamses were rich as could be and had ancestry they could trace back to the Mayflower, while Jessie didn’t even know who her real parents had been. Her adoptive parents had sworn they didn’t know and had seemed so hurt by her wanting to find out that she’d reluctantly dropped any notion of searching for answers.

By the time they’d died, she’d pushed her need to know aside. She had met Erik, by then. Marrying him and adjusting to his large, boisterous family had been more than enough to handle. Mary Adams was sweet as could be, if a little superior at times, but Erik’s father and his three brothers were overwhelming. Harlan Adams was a stern and domineering parent, sure of himself about everything. He was very much aware of himself as head of what he considered to be a powerful dynasty. As for Erik’s brothers, she’d never met a friendlier, more flirtatious crew, and she had worked in her share of bars to make ends meet while she’d been in college.

Except for Luke. The oldest, he was a brooder. Dark and silent, Luke had been capable of tremendous kindness, but rarely did he laugh and tease as his brothers did. The expression in the depths of his eyes was bleak, as if he was bearing in silence some terrible hurt deep in his soul. There had been odd moments when she’d felt drawn to him, when she’d felt she understood better than anyone his seeming loneliness in the midst of a family gathering, when she had longed to put a smile on his rugged, handsome face.

That compelling sense of an unspoken connection had been ripped to shreds on the day Luke had come to tell her that her husband was in the hospital and unlikely to make it. In a short burst riddled with agonized guilt, he’d added that he was responsible for the overturning of the tractor that had injured Erik. He’d made no apologies, offered no excuses. He’d simply stated the facts, seen to it that she got to the hospital, made sure the rest of the family was there to support her, then walked away. He’d avoided her from that moment on. Avoided everyone in the family ever since, from what Harlan and Mary had told her. He seemed to be intent on punishing himself, they complained sadly.

If Luke hadn’t been steering clear of White Pines, Jessie wasn’t at all sure she would have been able to accept the invitation to come for the holidays. Seeing Luke’s torment, knowing it mirrored her own terrible mix of grief and guilt was simply too painful. She hated him for costing her the one person to whom she’d really mattered.

Searching for serenity, she had fled the ranch a month after Erik’s death, settled in a new place on the opposite side of the state, gotten a boring job that paid the bills and prepared to await the birth of her child. Erik’s baby. Her only link to the husband she had adored, but hadn’t always understood.

She stopped the dark thoughts before they could spoil her festive holiday mood. There was no point at all in looking back. She had her future—she rested a hand on her stomach—and she had her baby, though goodness knows she hadn’t planned on being a single parent. Sometimes the prospect terrified her.

She found a station playing Christmas carols, turned up the volume and sang along, as she began the last hundred and fifty miles or so of the once familiar journey back to White Pines. Her back was aching like the dickens and she’d forgotten how difficult driving could be when her protruding belly forced her to put the seat back just far enough to make reaching the gas and brake pedals a strain.

“No problem,” she told herself sternly. A hundred miles or more in this part of the world was nothing. She had snow tires on, a terrific heater, blankets in the trunk for an emergency and a batch of homemade fruitcakes in the back that would keep her from starving if she happened to get stranded.

The persistent ache in her back turned into a more emphatic pain that had her gasping.

“What the dickens?” she muttered as she hit the brake, slowed and paused to take a few deep breaths. Fortunately there was little traffic to worry about on the unexpectedly bitter cold night. She stayed on the side of the road for a full five minutes to make sure there wouldn’t be another spasm on the heels of the first.

Satisfied that it had been nothing more than a pinched nerve or a strained muscle, she put the car back in gear and drove on.

It was fifteen minutes before the next pain hit, but it was a doozy. It brought tears to her eyes. Again, pulling to the side of the road, she scowled down at her belly.

“This is not the time,” she informed the impertinent baby. “You will not be born in a car in the middle of nowhere with no doctor in sight, do you understand me? That’s the deal, so get used to it and settle down. You’re not due for weeks yet. Four weeks to be exact, so let’s have no more of these pains, okay?”

Apparently the lecture worked. Jessie didn’t feel so much as a twinge for another twenty miles. She was about to congratulate herself on skirting disaster, when a contraction gripped her so fiercely she thought she’d lose control of the car.

“Oh, sweet heaven,” she muttered in a tone that was part prayer, part curse. There was little doubt in her mind now that she was going into labor. Denying it seemed pointless, to say nothing of dangerous. She had to take a minute here and think of a plan.

On the side of the road again, she turned on the car’s overhead light, took out her map and searched for some sign of a hospital. If there was one within fifty miles, she couldn’t spot it. She hadn’t passed a house for miles, either, and she was still far from Harlan and Mary’s, probably a hundred miles at least. She could make that in a couple of hours or less, if the roads were clear, but they weren’t. She was driving at a safe crawl. It could take her hours to get to White Pines at that pace.

There was someplace she could go that would be closer, someplace only five miles or so ahead, unless she’d lost her bearings. It was the last place on earth she’d ever intended to wind up, the very last place she would want her baby to be born: Luke’s ranch.

Consuela would be there, she consoled herself as she resigned herself to dropping by unannounced to deliver a baby. Luke probably didn’t want to see her any more than she wanted to see him. And what man wanted any part of a woman’s labor, unless she happened to be his wife? Luke probably wouldn’t be able to turn her over to Consuela fast enough. With all those vacant rooms, they probably wouldn’t even bump into each other in the halls.

Jessie couldn’t see that she had any choice. The snow had turned to blizzard conditions. The world around her was turning into a snow-covered wonderland, as dangerous as it was beautiful. The tires were beginning to skid and spin on the road. The contractions were maybe ten minutes apart. She’d be lucky to make it these few miles to Luke’s. Forget going any farther.

The decision made with gut-deep reluctance, she accomplished the drive by sheer force of will. When she finally spotted the carved gate announcing the ranch, she skidded to a halt and wept with relief. She still had a mile of frozen, rutted lane to the house, but that would be a breeze compared to the five she’d just traveled.

A hard contraction, the worst yet, gripped her and had her screaming out loud. She clung to the steering wheel, panting as she’d seen on TV, until it passed. Sweat streamed down her face.

“Come on, sweet thing,” she pleaded with the baby. “Only a few more minutes. Don’t you dare show up until I get to the house.”

She couldn’t help wondering when that would be. There was no beckoning light in the distance, no looming shape of the house. Surely, though, it couldn’t be much farther.

She drove on, making progress by inches, it seemed. At last she spotted the house, dark as coal against the blinding whiteness around it. Not a light on anywhere. No bright holiday decorations blinking tiny splashes of color onto the snow.

“Luke Adams, you had better be home,” she muttered as she hauled herself out from behind the wheel at last.

Standing on shaky legs, she began the endless trek through the deepening snow, cursing and clutching her stomach as she bent over with yet another ragged pain. The wind-whipped snow stung her cheeks and mingled with tears. The already deepening drifts made walking treacherous and slow.

“A little farther,” she encouraged herself. Three steps. Four. One foot onto the wide sweep of a porch. Then the other. She had made it! She paused and sucked in a deep breath, then looked around her.

The desolate air about the place had only intensified as she’d drawn closer. There was no wreath of evergreens on the front door, no welcoming light shining on the porch or from any of the rooms that she could detect. For the first time, she allowed a panicky thought. What if she had made it this far, only to find herself still alone? What if Luke had packed his bags and flown away for the holidays?

“Please, God, let someone be here,” she prayed as she hit the doorbell again and again, listening to the chime echo through the house. She pounded on the glass, shouted, then punched the doorbell again.

She heard a distant crash, a loud oath, then another crash. Apparently Luke was home, she thought dryly, as she began another insistent round of doorbell ringing.

“For cripe’s sakes, hold your horses, dammit!”

A light switch was thrown and the porch was illuminated in a warm yellow glow. Finally, just as another contraction ripped through Jessie, the door was flung open.

She was briefly aware of the thunderstruck expression on Luke’s face and his disheveled state, only marginally aware of the overpowering scent of alcohol.

And then, after a murmured greeting she doubted made a lick of sense, she collapsed into the arms of the man who’d killed her husband.

Chapter Two

“What in blazes…?”

Luke folded his arms around the bundled-up form who’d just pitched forward. Blinking hard in an attempt to get his eyes to focus, he zeroed in on a face that had once been burned into his brain, a face he’d cursed himself for cherishing when he had no right at all. He’d seen that precious face only minutes ago in the sweetest dream he’d ever had. For an instant he wondered if he was still dreaming.

No, he could feel her shape, crushed against his chest. He drank in the sight of her. Her long, black hair was tucked up in a stocking cap. Her cheeks, normally pale as cream, had been tinted a too-bright pink by the cold. Her blue eyes were shadowed with what might have been pain, but there was no mistaking his sister-in-law.

“Jessie,” he whispered, worriedly taking in the lines of strain on her forehead, the trickle of sweat that was likely to turn to ice if he didn’t get her out of the freezing night in a hurry.

When in hell had it turned so bitter? he wondered, shivering himself. There hadn’t been a snowflake in sight when he’d sent Consuela off. Now he couldn’t see a patch of uncovered ground anywhere. Couldn’t see much of anything beyond the porch, for that matter.

More important than any of that, what was his sister-in-law doing here of all places? Was she ill? Feverish? She would have had to be practically delusional or desperate to turn up on his doorstep.

He scooped her up, rocking back on his heels with the unexpected weight of her, startled that the little slip of a thing he’d remembered was bulging out of her coat. She moaned and clutched at her belly, shuddering against him.

She’s going to have a baby, he realized at last, finally catching on to what would have been obvious to anyone who was not in an alcohol-altered state of mind. No one in the family had told him that. Not that he’d done more than exchange pleasantries with any of them in months. And Jessie would have been the last person they would have mentioned. Everyone walked on eggshells around him when it came to anything having to do with his late brother. If only they had known, if only they had realized that his guilt was compounded because he’d fallen for Erik’s wife, they would never have spoken to him at all.

“You’re going to have a baby,” he announced in an awestruck tone.

Bright blue eyes, dulled by pain, snapped open. “You always were quick, Lucas,” Jessie said tartly. “Do you suppose you could get me to a bed and find Consuela before I deliver right here in the foyer?”

“You’re going to have a baby now?” he demanded incredulously, as the immediacy of the problem sank in. He would have dropped her if she hadn’t been clinging to his neck with the grip of a championship arm wrestler.

“That would be my best guess,” she agreed.

Luke was so stunned—so damned drunk—he couldn’t seem to come to any rational decision. If Jessie had realized his condition, she would have headed for the barn and relied on one of the horses for help. He had a mare who was probably more adept at deliveries than he was at this precise moment. His old goat, Chester, was pretty savvy, too. Jessie would have been in better hands with them, than she likely was with him.

“Lucas?” Her voice was low and sweet as honey. “Could you please…”

He sighed just listening to her. The sweetest little voice in all of Texas.

“Get me into a bed!”

The shout accomplished what nothing else had. He began to move. He staggered ever so slightly, but he got her into the closest bedroom, his, and settled her in the middle of sheets still rumpled from the previous night. And several nights before that, as near as he could recall. He’d ordered Consuela to stay the hell out of his bedroom after he’d found little packets of some sweet-smelling stuff in his sock drawer.

He stood gazing down at Jessie, rhapsodizing to himself about her presence in his bed, marveling at the size of that belly, awestruck by the fact that she was going to have a baby here and now.

“Luke,” she said in a raspy voice that was edged with tension. “I’m going to need a little help here.”

“Help?” he repeated blankly.

“My clothes.”

“Oh.” He blinked rapidly as he watched her trying to struggle out of her coat. Awkwardly, she shrugged it off one shoulder, then the other. When she started to fumble with the buttons on her blouse, his throat worked and his pulse zoomed into the stratosphere.

“Lucas!”

The shout got his attention. “Oh, yeah. Right,” he said and tried to help with the buttons.

For a man who’d undressed any number of women in his time, he was suddenly all thumbs. In fact, getting Jessie out of her clothes—the simple cotton blouse, the oddly made jeans, the lacy bra and panties—was an act of torture no man should have to endure. Trying to be helpful, she wriggled and squirmed in a way that brought his fingers into contact with warm, smooth skin far too frequently. Trying to look everywhere except at her wasn’t helping him with the task either. Every glimpse of bare flesh made his knees go weak.

The second she was stripped bare, he muffled a groan, averted his gaze and hunted down one of his shirts. He did it for his own salvation, not because she seemed aware of anything except the demands her baby was making on her body. Surely there was a special place in hell for a man whose thoughts were on sex when a woman was about to have a baby right before his eyes.

She looked tiny—except for that impressively swollen belly—and frightened as a doe caught in a hunter’s sights. He felt a powerful need to comfort her, if only he could string an entire sentence together without giving away his inebriated state. If she knew precisely how drunk he was, she wouldn’t be scared. She’d be flat-out terrified, and rightfully so. He wasn’t so serene himself.

“Where’s Consuela?” she asked, then let out a scream that shook the rafters. She latched on to his hand so hard he was sure that at least three bones cracked. That grip did serve a purpose, though. It snapped him back to reality. Pain had a way of making a man focus on the essentials.

The baby clearly wasn’t going to wait for him to sober up. It wasn’t going to wait for a doctor, even if one could make it to the ranch on the icy roads, which Luke doubted.

“Consuela’s in Mexico by now,” he confessed without thinking. “She left earlier today.” When panic immediately darkened her eyes, he instinctively patted her hand. “It’s going to be okay, darlin’. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“I’m…not…worried,” she said between gasps. “Shouldn’t you boil water or something?”

Water? Water was good, he decided. He had no idea what he’d do with it, but if it got him out of this bedroom for five seconds so he could try to gather his scattered thoughts, it had to be good. Coffee would be even better. Gallons of it.

“You’ll be okay for a minute?” He grabbed a key chain made of braided leather off his dresser and gave it to her. “Hang on to this if another pain hits while I’m gone, okay? Bite into it or something.” It had worked for cowboys being operated on under primitive conditions, or so he’d read. Of course, they’d also been liberally dosed with alcohol at the time.

Jessie’s blue eyes regarded the leather doubtfully, but she nodded gamely. “Hurry, Luke. I don’t know much about labor, but I don’t think there’s a lot of time left.”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he promised. Stone-cold sober, if he could manage it.

He fumbled the first pot he grabbed, spilled water everywhere, then finally got it onto the stove with the gas flame turned to high. With a couple of false starts, he got the coffee going as well, strong enough to wake the dead, which was pretty much how he felt.

For a moment he clung to the counter and tried to steady himself. It was going to be okay, he vowed. He’d delivered foals and calves. How much different could delivering a baby be? Of course, mares and cows had a pretty good notion of what they were doing. They didn’t need a lot of assistance from him unless they got into trouble.

Jessie, on the other hand, seemed even more bemused by this state of affairs than he was. She’d obviously been counting on a doctor, a team of comforting nurses, a nice, sterile delivery room and plenty of high-tech equipment. A shot of some kind of painkiller, too, more than likely. What she was getting was a drunken amateur in an isolated ranch house. It hardly seemed fair after all she’d already been through. After all he’d put her through, he amended.

An agonized scream cut through the air and sent panic slicing through him. He tore down the hall to the bedroom. He found her panting, her face scrunched up with pain, sweat beading up on her brow and pouring down her cheeks. Damned if he didn’t think she looked beautiful, anyway. The door to that place in hell gaped wider.

“You okay?” he asked, then shook himself. “Sorry. Dumb question. Of course, you’re not okay.”

He grabbed a clean washcloth from the linen closet, dashed into the bathroom to soak it with cool water, then wiped her brow. He might not be exactly sober yet, but his brain was beginning to function and his limbs were following orders. For the first time, he honestly believed they could get through this without calamity striking.

“You’re doing fine,” he soothed. “This is one hell of a pickle, but nothing we can’t manage.”

“Did…you…call…a doctor?” she asked.

A doctor? Why hadn’t he acted on that thought back when he’d had it himself? Maybe because he’d figured it would be futile. More likely, because his brain cells had shut down hours ago just the way he’d wanted them to.

“Next thing on my list,” he assured her.

She eyed him doubtfully. “You…have…a list?”

“Of course I have a list,” he said, injecting a confident note into his voice. “The water’s boiling. The coffee’s on.”

“Coffee?”

“For me. You don’t want me falling asleep in the middle of all the fun, do you?”

“I doubt there’s much chance of that,” she said, sighing as the pain visibly eased.

Her gaze traveled over him from head to toe, examining him so intently that it was all Luke could do not to squirm. Under other circumstances, that examination would have made his pulse buck so hard he wouldn’t have recovered for days. As it was, he looked away as fast as he could. Obviously, this was some sort of penance dreamed up for his sins. He was going to be stranded with Jessie, forced to deliver his brother’s baby, and then he was going to have to watch the two of them walk out of his life. Unless, of course…

“Luke, can I ask you a question?”

He was relieved by the interruption. There was only heartache in the direction his thoughts were taking. “Seeing how we’re going to be getting pretty intimate here in a bit, I suppose you can ask me anything you like.”

“Are you drunk?”

He had hoped she hadn’t noticed. “Darlin’, I don’t think you want to know the answer to that.”

This time he doubted Jessie’s groan of anguish had anything to do with her labor pains.

“Luke?”

“Yes, Jessie.”

“Maybe you’d better bring me a very big glass of whatever it was you were drinking.”

He grinned at the wistful note in her voice. “Darlin’, when this baby turns up, you and I are going to drink one hell of a toast. Until then, I think maybe we’d both better stay as far away from that bottle as we can. Besides, as best I can recall, I smashed it against the fireplace.”

She regarded him with pleading blue eyes. “Luke, please? I’m not sure I can do this without help. There’s bound to be another bottle of something around here.”

He thought of the cabinet filled with whiskey, considered getting a couple of shots to help both of them, then dismissed the temptation as a very bad idea. “You’ve got all the help you could possibly need. I’m right here with you. Besides, alcohol’s not good for the baby. Haven’t you read all those headlines warning about that very thing?”

“I don’t think the baby’s going to be inside me long enough to get so much as a sip,” she said.

As if to prove her point, her body was seized with another contraction. Going with sheer instinct, Luke reached out and placed his hand over her taut belly. The skin was smooth and tight as a drum as he massaged it gently until the muscles relaxed.

He checked his watch, talked to her, and waited for the next contraction. It came three minutes later.

He wiped her brow. “Hang in there, darlin’. I’ll be right back.”

She leveled a blue-eyed glare on him. “Don’t you dare leave me,” she commanded in a tone that could have stopped the D-Day invasion.

“I’m not going far. I just want some nice, sterile water in here when the baby makes its appearance. And we could use a blanket.” And something to cut the umbilical cord, he thought as his brain finally began to kick in without prodding.

He’d never moved with more speed in his life. He tested the phone and discovered the lines were down. No surprise in this weather. He sterilized a basin, filled it with water, then cleaned the sharpest knife he could find with alcohol. He deliberately gave a wide berth to the cabinet with the whiskey. He was back in the bedroom before the next pain hit.

“See there. I didn’t abandon you. Did you take natural childbirth classes?”

Jessie nodded. “Started two weeks ago. We’d barely gotten to the breathing part.”

“Then we’re in great shape,” he said with confidence. “You’re going to come through this like a champ.” The truth was he was filled with admiration for her. He’d always known she had more strength and courage than most women he’d known, but tonight she was proving it in spades.

“Did you call a doctor?” she asked again.

“I tried. I couldn’t get through. Don’t let it worry you, though. You’re doing just fine. Nature’s doing all the work. The doctor would just be window dressing.”

Jessie shot him a baleful look.

“Okay,” he admitted. “It would be nice to have an expert on hand, but this baby’s coming no matter who’s coaching it into the world, so we might just as well count our blessings that you got to my house. What were you doing out all alone on a night like this anyway?”

“Going to your parents’ house,” she said. “They invited me for the holidays.”

Luke couldn’t believe that they’d allowed her to drive this close to the delivery of their first grandchild. “Why the hell didn’t Daddy fly you over?”

“He offered. I’m not crazy about flying in such a little plane, though. I told him the doctor had forbidden it.”

Luke suspected that was only half the story. He grinned at her. “You sure that was it? Or did that streak of independence in you get you to say no, before you’d even given the matter serious thought?”

A tired smile came and went in a heartbeat. “Maybe.”

He hitched a chair up beside the bed and tucked her hand in his. He would not, would not allow himself to think about how sweet it was to be sitting here with her like this, despite the fact that only circumstance had forced them together.

“Can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “If you don’t kick up a fuss with Daddy every now and then, next thing you know he’s running your life.”

“Harlan just wants what’s best for his family,” she said.

Luke smiled at her prompt defense of her father-in-law. One thing about Jessie, she’d always been fair to a fault. She’d even told anyone who’d listen that she didn’t blame him for Erik’s death, even with the facts staring her straight in the face. It didn’t matter. He’d blamed himself enough for both of them.

“Dad’s also dead certain that he’s the only one who knows what’s best,” he added. “Sometimes, though, he misses the mark by a mile.”

Her gaze honed in on him. “You’re talking about Erik, aren’t you? You’re thinking about how your father talked him into staying in ranching. If Harlan had let him go, maybe he’d still be alive.”

And if Luke had been on that tractor, instead of his brother, Erik would be here right now, he thought. He’d known Erik couldn’t manage the thing on the rough terrain, but he’d sent him out there, anyway. He’d told him to grow up and do the job or get out of ranching if he couldn’t hack it. Guilt cut through him at the memory of that last bitter dispute.

He glanced at Jessie. The mention of Erik threw a barrier up between them as impenetrable as a brick wall. For once, Luke was glad when the next contraction came. And the next. And the one after that. So fast now, that there was no time to think, no time to do anything except help Jessie’s baby into the world.

“Push, darlin’,” Luke coaxed.

Jessie screamed. Luke cursed.

“Push, dammit!”

“You don’t like how I’m doing it, you take over,” she snapped right back at him.

Luke laughed. “That’s my Jessie. Sass me all you like, if it helps, but push! Come on, darlin’. I’m afraid this part here is entirely up to you. If I could do it for you, I would.”

“Luke?”

There was a plaintive, fearful note in her voice that brought his gaze up to meet hers. “What?”

“What if something goes wrong?”

“Nothing is going to go wrong,” he promised. “Everything’s moved along right on schedule so far, hasn’t it?”

“Luke, I’m having this baby in a ranch house. Doesn’t that suggest that the schedule has been busted to hell?”

“Your schedule maybe. Obviously the baby has a mind of its own. No wonder, given the way you take charge of your life. You’re strong and brave and your baby’s going to be just exactly like you,” he said reassuringly.

“I think I’ve changed my mind,” she said with a note of determination in her voice. “I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready to be a mother. I can’t cope with a baby on my own.”

Luke laughed. “Too late now. Looks to me like that horse is out of the barn.”

Moments later, a sense of awe spread through him at the first glimpse of the baby’s head, covered with dark, wet hair.

“My God, Jessie, I can see the baby. Just a little more work, darlin’, and you’ll have a fine, healthy baby in your arms. That’s it. Harder. Push harder.”

“I can’t,” she wailed.

“You can,” Luke insisted. “Here we go, darlin’.” He slid his hands under the baby’s tiny shoulders. “One more.” Jessie bore down like a trooper and the baby slipped into his hands.

“Luke,” Jessie whispered at once. “Is the baby okay? I don’t hear anything.”

The baby let out a healthy yowl. Luke beamed at both of them. “I think that’s your answer,” he said.

He surveyed the squalling baby he was holding. “Let’s see now. Ten tiny fingers. Ten itsy-bitsy toes. And the prettiest, sassiest blue eyes you ever did see. Just like her mama’s.”

“Her?” Jessie repeated. She struggled to prop herself up to get a look. “It’s a girl?”

“A beautiful little angel,” he affirmed as he cleaned the baby up, wrapped her in a huge blanket and laid her in Jessie’s arms.

Even though her eyes were shadowed by exhaustion, even though her voice was raspy from screaming, the sight of her daughter brought the kind of smile to Jessie’s face that Luke had doubted he would ever see again.

She looked up at him, her eyes filled with gratitude and warmth, and his heart flipped over. A world of forbidden possibilities taunted him.

“She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Jessie said, her gaze locked on the tiny bundle in her arms.

“Just about the most gorgeous baby I’ve ever seen,” he agreed, thinking how desperately he wished he could claim her as his own. His and Jessie’s. He forced the thought aside. “Do you have a name picked out?”

“I thought I did,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Because she rushed things and decided to come at Christmas,” she explained. “I’m going to call her Angela. That way I’ll always remember that she was my Christmas miracle.” She turned a misty-eyed gaze on Luke. “Thank you, Lucas.”

If he lived a hundred years, Luke knew he would trade everything for this one moment out of time.

Later the guilt and recriminations would come back with a vengeance. Jessie would remember who he was and what he had done to ruin her life. The blame, no matter how hard she denied it, would be there between them.

But right now, for this one brief, shining moment, they were united, a part of something incredibly special that he could hold in his heart all the rest of his lonely days. They had shared a miracle.

Chapter Three

Jessie felt as if she’d run a couple of marathons back-to-back, but not even that bone-weary exhaustion could take away the incredible sense of joy that spread through her at the sight of her daughter sleeping so peacefully in her arms. Her seemingly healthy baby girl. Her little angel with the lousy sense of timing.

For perhaps the dozenth time since dawn had stolen into the room, bathing it in a soft light, she examined fingers and toes with a sense of amazement that anyone so small could be so perfect. Her gaze honed in on that tiny bow of a mouth, already forming the instinctive, faint smacking sounds of hunger even as she slept. Any minute now she would wake up and demand to be fed.

“Luke, she’s hungry,” Jessie announced with a mixture of awe and pride that quickly turned to worry. Not once during all the hours of labor or since had she given a single thought to what happened next. “What’ll we do?”

Given their past history, it was amazing how quickly she’d come to rely on Luke, how easily she’d pushed aside all of her anger and grief just to make it through this crisis. And, despite his less than alert state on her arrival, despite all the reasons he had for never wanting to see her again, he hadn’t let her down yet.

Of course, judging from the way he was sprawled in the easy chair in a corner of the bedroom with his eyes closed, the last bit of adrenaline that had gotten him through the delivery had finally worn off.

Faint, gray light filtered through the frosted window and cast him in shadows. She studied him surreptitiously and saw the toll the past months—or some mighty hard drinking—had taken on him.

The lines that time and weather had carved in his tanned, rugged face seemed deeper than ever. His jaw was shadowed by a day or more’s growth of beard. His dark brown hair, which he’d always worn defiantly long, swept the edge of his collar. He looked far more like a dangerous rebel than the successful Texas rancher he was.

If he looked physically unkempt, his clothes were worse. His plaid flannel shirt was clean but rumpled, as if he’d grabbed it from a basket on his way to the door. It was unevenly buttoned and untucked, leaving a mat of dark chest hair intriguingly visible. The jeans he’d hauled on were dusty and snug and unbuttoned at the waist.

Jessie grinned as her gaze dropped to his feet. He had on one blue sock. The other foot was bare. She found the sight oddly touching. Clearly he’d never given a thought to himself all during the night. He’d concentrated on her and seeing to it that Angela made it safely into the world. She would never forget what he’d done for her.

“Luke?” she repeated softly.

The whisper accomplished what her intense scrutiny had not. His dark brown eyes snapped open. “Hmm?” He blinked. “Everything okay?”

“The baby’s hungry. What’ll we do?”

“Feed her?” he suggested with a spark of amusement.

“Thanks so much.” She couldn’t keep the faint sarcasm from her voice, but she smiled as she realized how often during the night she’d caught a rare teasing note in Luke’s manner. In all the time she’d lived with Erik she’d never seen that side of Luke. He’d been brusque more often than not, curt to the point of rudeness. His attitude might have intimidated her, if she hadn’t seen the occasional flashes of something lost and lonely in his eyes. In the past few hours, she’d seen another side of him altogether—strong, protective, unflappable. The perfect person to have around in a crisis. The kind of man on whom a woman could rely.

“Anytime,” he teased despite her nasty tone.

Once again he’d surprised her, causing her to wonder if the quiet humor had always been there, if it had simply been overshadowed by his brothers’ high spirits.

Still, Jessie was in no mood for levity, as welcome a change as it was. “Luke, I’m serious. She’s going to start howling any second now. I can tell. And this diaper you cut from one of your old flannel shirts is sopping. We can’t keep cutting up your clothes every time she’s wet.”

“I have shirts I haven’t even taken out of their boxes yet,” he said, making light of her concern for his wardrobe. “If I lose a few, it’s for a good cause. Besides, I think she looks festive in red plaid.”

As he spoke, he approached the bed warily, as if suddenly uncertain if he had a right to draw so close. He touched the baby’s head with his fingertips in a caress so gentle that Jessie’s breath snagged in her throat.

“As for her being hungry, last I heard, there was nothing better than a mama’s own milk for a little one,” he said, his gaze fixed on the baby.

“I wasn’t planning on nursing her,” Jessie protested. “It won’t work with the job I have. She’ll have to be with a sitter all day. I need bottles, formula.” She moaned. There were rare times—and this was one of them—when she wondered how she would cope. She’d counted on Erik to be there for her and the baby. Now every decision, every bit of the responsibility, was on her shoulders.

“Well, given that she decided not to wait for you to get to a hospital or to arrange for a fancy set of bottles,” Luke said, still sounding infinitely patient with her, “I’d say Angela is just going to have to settle for what’s on hand for the time being. Don’t you suppose you can switch her to a bottle easily enough?”

“How should I know?” she snapped unreasonably.

Luke’s gaze caught hers. “You okay?”

“Just peachy.”

His expression softened. “Aw, Jessie, don’t start panicking now. The worst is over.”

“But I don’t know what to do,” she countered, unexpectedly battling tears. “I have three more classes to take just to learn how to breathe right for the delivery, and a whole stack of baby books to read, and I was going to fix up a nursery.” She sobbed, “I…I even…bought the wallpaper.”

Her sobs seemed to alarm him, but Luke stayed right where he was. Her presence here might be a burden, her tears a nuisance, but he didn’t bolt, as many men might have. Once more that unflappable response calmed Jessie.

“Seems to me you can forget the classes,” he observed dryly, teasing a smile from her. “As for the wallpaper, you’ll get to it when you can. I doubt Angela will have much to say about the decor, as long as her bed’s warm and dry. And babies were being born and fed long before anybody thought to write parenting books. If you’re not up to nursing her yet, it seems to me I heard babies can have a little sugar water.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

“I was trapped once in a doctor’s office with only some magazines on parenting to read.”

His gaze landed on her breasts, then shifted away immediately. Jessie felt her breasts swell where his gaze had touched. Her nipples hardened. The effect could have been achieved because of the natural changes in her body over the past twenty-four hours, but she didn’t think that was it. Luke had always had that effect on her. A single look had been capable of making her weak in the knees. She had despised that responsiveness in herself. She was no prouder of it now.

“I have a hunch that left to your own devices, the two of you can figure it out,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone. I’ve got chores to do, anyway.”

He headed for the door as if he couldn’t get away from the two of them fast enough. Jessie glanced up at him then and saw that, while his cheeks were an embarrassed red, there was an expression in his eyes that was harder to read. Wistfulness, maybe? Sorrow? Regret?

“You’ll holler if you need me?” he said as he edged through the doorway. Despite the offer of help, he sounded as if he hoped he’d never have to make good on it.

“You’d better believe it,” she said.

A slow, unexpected grin spread across his face. “And I guess we both know what a powerful set of lungs you’ve got. I’m surprised the folks on every other ranch in the county haven’t shown up by now to see what all the fuss was about.”

“A gentleman wouldn’t mention that,” she teased.

“Probably not,” he agreed. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, his expression turned dark and forbidding. “It would be a mistake to think that I’m a gentleman, Jessie. A big mistake.”

The warning startled her, coming as it did on the heels of hours of gentle kindness. She couldn’t guess why Luke was suddenly so determined to put them back on the old, uneasy footing, especially since they were likely to be stranded together for some time if the snow kept up through the day as it seemed set on doing.

Maybe it was for the best, though. She didn’t want to forget what had happened to Erik. And she certainly didn’t want to be disloyal to her husband by starting to trust the man who rightly or wrongly held himself responsible for Erik’s death. That would be the worst form of betrayal, worse in some ways perhaps than the secret, unbidden responses of her body. Luke had delivered her baby. She might be grateful for that, but it didn’t put the past to rest.

“Well, Angela, I guess we’re just going to have to make the best of this,” she murmured.

Even as she spoke, she wasn’t entirely certain whether she was referring to her first fumbling attempt at breast-feeding or to the hours, maybe even days she was likely to spend in Luke’s deliberately ill-tempered company. Days, she knew, she was likely to spend worrying over how great the temptation was to forgive him for what he’d done.

* * *

An hour later, the chores done, Luke stood in the doorway of his bedroom, a boulder-size lump lodged in his throat as he watched Jessie sleeping. The apparently well-fed and contented baby was nestled in her arms, her tiny bottom now covered in bright blue plaid. Erik’s baby, he reminded himself sharply, when longing would have him claiming her—claiming both of them—for his own.

Sweet Jesus, how was he supposed to get through the next few days until the storm ended, the phone lines were up and the roads were cleared enough for him to get word to his family to hightail it over here and take Jessie off his hands? He’d gotten through the night only because he’d been in a daze and because there were so many things to be done that he hadn’t had time to think or feel. Now that his head was clear and the crisis was past, he was swamped with feelings he had no right having.

He forced himself to back away from the door and head for his office. He supposed he could barricade himself inside and give Jessie the run of the house. He doubted she would need explanations for his desire to stay out of her path. Now that her baby was safely delivered, she would no doubt be overjoyed to see the last of him.

Last night had been about need and urgency. They had faced a genuine crisis together and survived. In the calm light of today, though, that urgency was past. He could retreat behind his cloak of guilt. Jessie would never have to know what sweet torment the past few hours had been.

He actually managed to convince himself that hiding out was possible as morning turned into afternoon without a sound from his bedroom. He napped on the sofa in his office off and on, swearing to himself that he was simply too tired to climb the stairs to one of the guest suites. The pitiful truth of it was that he wanted to be within earshot of the faintest cry from either Jessie or the baby. A part of him yearned to be the one they depended on.

Shortly before dusk, he headed back to the barn to feed the horses and Chester. The wind was still howling, creating drifts of snow that made the walk laborious. Still, he couldn’t help relishing the cold. It wiped away the last traces of fog from his head. He vowed then and there that no matter how bad things got, he would never, ever try to down an entire bottle of whiskey on his own again. The brief oblivion wasn’t worth the hangover. And he hoped like hell he never again had to perform anything as important as delivering a baby with his brain clouded as it had been the night before.

He lingered over the afternoon chores as long as he could justify. He even sat for a while, doling out pieces of apple to the goat, muttering under his breath about the insanity of his feelings for a woman so far beyond his reach. Chester seemed to understand, which was more than he could say for himself.

When he realized he was about to start polishing his already well-kept saddle for the second time in a single day, he forced himself back to the house and the emotional dangers inside. Chester, sensing his indecisiveness, actually butted him gently toward the door.

The back door was barely closed behind him when he heard the baby’s cries. He stopped in his tracks and waited for Jessie’s murmured attempts to soothe her daughter. Instead, the howls only escalated.

Shrugging off his coat and tossing it in the general direction of the hook on the wall, Luke cautiously headed for the bedroom. He found Jessie still sound asleep, while Angela kicked and screamed beside her. Luke grinned. The kid had unquestionably inherited Jessie’s powerful set of lungs. Definitely opera singer caliber.

Taking pity on her worn-out mama, he scooped the baby into his arms and carried her into the kitchen. Once there, he was at a loss.

He held the tiny bundle aloft and stared into wide, innocent eyes that shimmered with tears. “So, kid, it looks like it’s just you and me for the time being. Your mama’s tuckered out. Can’t say I blame her. Getting you into the world was a lot of hard work.”

The flood of tears dried up. Angela’s gaze remained fixed on his face so attentively that Luke was encouraged to go on. “Seems to me that both of us have a lot to learn,” he said, keeping his voice low and even, in a tone he hoped might lull her back to sleep. “For instance, I don’t know if you were screaming your head off in there because you’re hungry or because you’re soaking wet or because you’re just in need of a little attention.”

He patted her bottom as he spoke. It was dry. She blew a bubble, which didn’t answer the question but indicated Luke was definitely on the right track.

“I’m guessing attention,” he said. “I’m also guessing that won’t last. Any minute now that pretty little face of yours is going to turn red and you’re going to be bellowing to be fed. Seems a shame to wake your mama up, though. How about we try to improvise?”

Angela waved her fist in what he took for an approving gesture.

“Okay, then. A little sugar water ought to do it.” Cradling her in one arm, he ran some water into a pan, added a little sugar and turned on the burner to warm it. Unfortunately, getting it from the saucepan into the baby required a little more ingenuity.

Luke considered the possibilities. A medicine dropper might work. He’d nourished a few abandoned animals that way as a kid, as well as an entire litter of kittens when the mother’d been killed. One glance into Angela’s darkening expression told him he was going to have to do better than that and fast.

“Chester,” he muttered in a sudden burst of inspiration. When the old goat had wandered into the path of a mean-spirited bull, Luke had wound up nursing him with a baby bottle for months while he recovered. Where the hell had he put the bottle?

Angela whimpered a protest at the delay.

“Shhh, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be just dandy,” he promised as he yanked open every single cupboard door in the kitchen. Consuela had the whole place so organized that a single old baby bottle should have stood out like a sore thumb. If it was there, though, he couldn’t find it, which meant it was probably out in the barn. He couldn’t very well take the baby out there looking for it.

“Damn!” he muttered under his breath.

Huge tears spilled down the baby’s cheeks. Obviously she sensed that his plan was falling apart. Any second now she was clearly going to make her impatience known with angry, ear-splitting screams.

“Hey,” Luke soothed. “Have I let you down yet?”

Spying Consuela’s rubber gloves beside the sink, he had another flash of inspiration. He snatched them up, put another pot of water on to boil, then tossed the gloves in to sterilize them. He found a sewing kit in a drawer, extracted a needle and tossed that in as well.

So far, so good, he reassured himself. The problem came when he judged everything to be sterile. He couldn’t poke a hole in one of the glove’s fingers and then fill it with warm water while still holding the baby. He grabbed a roasting pan that looked to be about the right size, padded it with a couple of clean dish towels and settled the baby onto the makeshift bed. Judging from the shade of red that her face turned, she was not happy about being abandoned.

“It’s only for a minute,” he promised her as he completed the preparations by tying a bit of string tightly around the top of the glove. He eyed the water-filled thumb of the glove with skepticism, waiting for the contents to gush out, but it appeared the hole he’d made was just right. He held it triumphantly where Angela could see it. “There! Now didn’t I tell you we could manage this? We’re a hell of a team, angel.”

He picked her up, then sank onto one of the hard kitchen chairs and offered her the improvised bottle. Her mouth clamped on it eagerly and within seconds she was sucking noisily. Luke regarded her with pride.

“You are brilliant,” he applauded. “Absolutely the smartest baby ever born.”

“You’re pretty smart yourself,” a sleepy—and damnably sexy—voice commented.

Luke’s heart slammed against his ribs. He refused to look up, refused to permit himself so much as a single glance at the tousled hair or bare legs or full, swollen breasts he’d dreamed about too many times to count.

Unfortunately Jessie pulled out a chair smack in his line of vision. She was still wearing his shirt, which came barely to mid-thigh. Her shapely legs were in full view. How many times had he envisioned those legs clamped around him as he made love to her? Enough to condemn his spirit to eternal hell, no doubt about it.

“Feeling rested?” he inquired huskily, keeping his eyes determinedly on the baby he held.

“Some. When did the baby wake up?”

“About a half hour ago. She was hungry.”

“So I see.”

He could feel a dull, red flush climbing into his cheeks. “I didn’t want to wake you. I figured we could manage. It gave me a chance to test that theory I read. Seems to be working. She likes it.”

“I’m impressed.”

He stood so suddenly that the makeshift bottle slid from Angela’s mouth. She protested loudly. Luke shoved both baby and water into Jessie’s arms.

“I have work to do.” There was no mistaking the sudden expression of dismay in Jessie’s eyes, the flicker of hurt at his harsh tone. He managed to grit out a few more words before fleeing. “Help yourself to whatever you need. I’ll be in my office.”

“Luke, you don’t have to run off,” she said quietly.

Something in her tone drew his gaze back to her face. The longing he read there shook him more than anything that had happened so far. “Yes, I do,” he said tightly.

“Please, I’d like the company.”

“No.” He practically shouted the word as he bolted.

Her expression stayed with him. Had it truly been longing, he wondered to himself when he was safely away from the kitchen, a locked oak door between him and temptation. Surely he’d been mistaken. No sooner had he reached that conclusion than he cursed himself for a fool. Of course, Jessie was yearning for something right now, but not for him.

No, he told himself sternly, that look had been meant for her husband. It was only natural at a time like this that she would be thinking of Erik, missing him, wishing that he were the one beside her as she fed their first precious baby. Luke was nothing more than a poor substitute.

There was only one way he could think of to keep from making another dangerous mistake like that one. He had to stay inside this room with the door securely locked…and temptation on the other side of it.

Chapter Four

Unfortunately, temptation didn’t seem inclined to stay out of Luke’s path. Only one person could be tapping on his office door not an hour after he’d stalked off in a huff and left her all alone with her baby in the kitchen. Since that display of temper obviously hadn’t scared her off, he wondered if she’d have sense enough to take the hint and go away if he didn’t answer. He waited, still and silent, listening for some whisper of movement that would indicate she’d retreated as he desperately wanted her to do.

“Luke?” Jessie called softly. “Are you asleep?”

Apparently she didn’t have a grain of sense, Luke decided with a sigh. “No, I’m awake. Come on in.”

She opened the door and stood at the threshold, shifting uneasily under the glare he had to force himself to direct her way. Despite his irritation, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.

She’d wound her long hair up into some sort of knot on top of her head, but it threatened to spill down her back at any second. Luke stared at it in fascination, wondering what she’d do if he helped it along, if he tangled his fingers in those silky strands and tugged her close. An image of their bodies entwined flashed in his head with such vivid intensity it left him momentarily speechless—and racked with guilt.

“Are you hungry?” she asked quietly, ignoring the lack of welcome. “I’ve fixed enough supper for both of us. I hope you don’t mind.”

Luke thought of all the reasons he should reject the gesture. If not that, then tell her to bring the food to him in his office. Sharing a meal seemed like a lousy idea. He had no business sitting down across from her, making small talk, acting as if they were a couple or even as if they were friends. Every contact reminded him of the feelings he’d had for her while she’d been married to his brother. Every moment they were in the same room reminded him that those feelings hadn’t died. He owed it to her—to both of them—to keep his distance.

Just when he planned to refuse her invitation to supper, he caught the hesitancy in her eyes, the anxious frown and realized that Jessie was every bit as uncertain about their present circumstances as he was. There apparently wasn’t a lot of protocol for being stranded with the man responsible for a husband’s death, especially when those feelings were all tangled up with feeling beholden to him for delivering her baby.

“Give me a minute,” he said with a sigh of resignation.

He watched as she nodded, then closed the door. He shut his eyes and prayed for strength. The truth of it was it would take him an hour, maybe even days to be ready for the kind of time he was being forced to spend with his brother’s widow. He had only seconds, not enough time to plan, far too much time to panic, to think of all the dangers represented by having Jessie in his home.

As soon as he’d gathered some semblance of composure, he got to his feet, gave himself a stern lecture about eating whatever she’d fixed in total, uncompromising silence, and then racing hell-bent for leather back to the safety of his den. That decided, he set out to find her.

When he reached the kitchen, where she’d chosen to serve the dinner on the huge oak table in front of a brick fireplace that Consuela had persuaded him to build, the first words out of his mouth were, “I don’t want you waiting on me while you’re here.”

It was hardly a gracious comment, but he had to lay down a few rules or it would be far too easy to fall into a comfortable pattern that would feed all the emotions that had been simmering in him for years now.

She leveled her calm, blue-eyed gaze on him. “We both have to eat. It’s no more trouble to fix for two people than it is for one,” she said as she dished up a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes. She passed the bowl to him.

Luke didn’t have an argument for that that wouldn’t sound even more ungracious than he’d already been, so he kept his mouth clamped shut and his attention focused on the food. The potatoes were creamy with milk and butter. The gravy was smooth and flavored with beef stock, just the way he liked it. The chicken fried steak was melt-in-the-mouth tender. The green beans had been cooked with salt pork.

“When did you have time to do all this?” he asked. He studied her worriedly, looking for signs of exhaustion. She looked radiant. “You’re not even supposed to be on your feet yet, are you?”

“There wasn’t much to do. Consuela saw to most of it. I’ve never seen so many little prepackaged, home-cooked meals. She must have been stocking your freezer for a month. How long is she going to be gone, anyway? Or has she abandoned you for good, because of your foul temper?”

“I wouldn’t blame her if she had, but no.” Luke allowed himself a brief, rueful grin. “She figured company might be dropping by during the holidays, but I doubt she imagined it happening quite this way.”

“Neither did you, I suspect.” Jessie’s penetrating gaze cut right through him. “You’d holed up in here for the duration, hadn’t you? You were planning to spend the holidays with your buddy Jack Daniel’s.” She gestured toward the cabinets. “I saw your supply.”

Luke winced at the direct hit. “I’ve only touched one bottle and I smashed it halfway through,” he said defensively.

“Too bad you didn’t do it sooner,” she observed.

“If I’d known you—and especially Angela—were coming, I would have.”

“Now that we are here, what happens next?”

He regarded her cautiously. “What’s your real question, Jessie? You might as well spit it out.”

Her glance went back to the cabinet. “Are you planning to finish off the rest?”

“Not unless I’m driven to it,” he said pointedly.

This time Jessie winced. “Believe me, I know what an imposition this is. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as the roads are passable.” She glanced toward the windows, where the steadily falling snow was visible. “When do you suppose that will be?”

Luke shrugged. “Don’t know. I haven’t heard a weather report.”

“Are the phones still out?”

“Haven’t tried ’em since last night.”

“Don’t you have a cellular phone? That ought to be working.”

To be perfectly honest, Luke hadn’t given his cellular phone a thought. He still wasn’t used to carrying the damned thing around with him. Keeping track of it was a nuisance. It was probably outside on the seat of his pickup. “I’ll check next time I have to go to the barn.”

“I could get it. I need to get the rest of my clothes from my car.”

Luke cursed himself for not thinking of that. Of course, she’d had luggage with her if she’d been intending a stay at White Pines for the holidays.

“I’ll get ’em,” he said, pushing away from the table, leaving most of his food uneaten. The excuse was just what he needed to escape this pleasure-pain of sitting across from her in a mockery of a normal relationship between a man and a woman.

“Finish your supper first.”

“I’m not hungry,” he lied. “I’ll get something later. Besides, I’m sure you’re anxious to call the folks with the good news. They’ll be thrilled to know that you and Erik have a daughter. Doubt they’ll be quite so thrilled to hear where you had it though. Dad will want to fly in a specialist to check you and the baby out. He’ll probably have a med-evac copter in here before the night’s out.”

Though he couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of his tone, Jessie grinned at his assessment. “He probably will, won’t he? But not even Harlan Adams can defy nature. Nobody’s going to be taking off or landing in this blizzard.”

“They will if Daddy pays them enough,” Luke retorted dryly.

“Well, I won’t have it,” Jessie retorted with a familiar touch of defiance. “Nobody needs to risk a life on my account. The baby and I are perfectly fine here with you and I intend to tell Harlan exactly that.”

Luke had to admire the show of gumption. Obviously, though, Jessie hadn’t had to stand up to his father when he got a notion into his head. To save her the fight she couldn’t win, he found himself saying, “Maybe it would be best not to make that call, then.”

Jessie actually looked as if she was considering it. “But they’ll be worried sick about me not showing up last night,” she said eventually. “I have to let them know I’m okay.”

So, reason had prevailed after all. Luke was more disappointed than he cared to admit.

“Darlin’, they’ve seen the weather,” he said, beginning a token and quite probably futile argument, one he had no business making in the first place. Perversity kept him talking, though. “Their phone lines are probably down, too. They’ll understand that you probably had to stop along the way and can’t get through to let them know.”

“Not five seconds ago you were telling me I didn’t know your daddy. Now who’s kidding himself? Harlan probably has a search party organized. The Texas Rangers are probably out on full alert, sweeping the highways for signs of my car.”

There was no denying the truth of that. Luke stood. “Then I suppose we’d better head them off at the pass. I’ll get the phone.”

He grabbed his heavy sheepskin jacket from the peg by the back door, realizing as he did that Jessie must have hung it there. As he recalled, he’d merely tossed it in that general direction when he’d heard the baby crying earlier. As he pulled it on, he could almost feel her touch. He imagined there was even the faint, lingering scent of her caught up in the fabric.

Outside, the swirling snow and bitter cold cleared his head and wiped away the dangerous sense of cozy familiarity he’d begun to feel sitting at that old oak table with Jessie across from him. He took his time getting Jessie’s belongings from her car, then lingered a little longer in the cab of his truck.

As he’d suspected, the cellular phone was on the passenger seat. All he had to do was pick it up and dial home. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that his father would find some way to get Jessie out of his hair before dawn. He would be alone again and safe.

Christmas was only three days away, New Year’s a week after that. Surely he could get through so few days without resorting to his original plan of facing them stinking drunk. And heaven knew, Jessie would be better off with his family where the celebrations would be in high gear despite the weather, despite his family’s private mourning, where there would be dozens of people to fuss over Angela.

Feeling downright noble about the sacrifice he was making, he actually managed to pick up the phone. But when it came to dialing it, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He thought of the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime miracle he and Jessie had shared. He remembered how it had felt to hold Angela in his arms, to have those trusting, innocent eyes focused on him. Jessie and Angela’s unexpected presence had been a gift from a benevolent God, who apparently didn’t think his soul was beyond repair.

Would it be so wrong to steal a few more hours, maybe even a day or two with Jessie and Angela? Who could possibly be hurt by it?

Not Erik. He was way past being hurt by anything, not even the knowledge that his brother coveted his widow.

Not Jessie, because Luke would never in a million years act on the feelings she stirred in him.

Not the baby. There was no way he would ever allow anything or anyone to harm that precious child. His paternal instincts, which he’d not even been aware he possessed, had kicked in with the kind of vengeance that made a man reassess his entire existence.

So the only person who might be harmed by his deception would be himself. He stood to lose big time by pretending for even the briefest of moments that Jessie and Angela were a part of his life. Emotions he’d squelched with savage determination were already sneaking past his defenses. The mere fact that he was considering hiding the cellular phone was proof of that.

And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to let them go just yet. He’d fallen for Angela as hard as he’d fallen for her mother. Looking into those big blue eyes, he’d felt a connection as strong and powerful as anything he’d ever felt before in his life. He couldn’t sever it, not until he understood it.

Likewise, he couldn’t watch Jessie disappear until he had finally processed this terrible hold she had on him. From the moment he’d set eyes on her, he’d been riveted. If a bolt of lightning had struck him at that instant, he doubted he would have noticed.

Over time he’d grown to admire her sharp wit, bask in her sensitivity, but in that first instant there had been only a gut-deep attraction unlike anything he’d ever experienced before or since. She had the same effect on him now. He was a man of reason. Surely he could analyze their relationship with cold, calculating logic and finally put it to rest.

He gripped the phone a little tighter and glanced around at the drifts of snow that were growing deeper with each passing minute. A quick toss and no one would find the sucker before spring.

Just as he was about to act on his impulse, that reason of which he was so proud kicked in. What if there was a genuine emergency? The cellular phone might be their only link to the outside world. Instead of burying it in snow, he tucked it into the truck’s glove compartment, behind the assortment of maps and grain receipts and who-knew-what-else had been jammed in there without thought. Then he turned the lock securely and glanced guiltily back at the house, wondering if Jessie would guess that he was deliberately keeping her stranded, wondering what her reaction would be if she did know.

Even through the swirling snow, he could see the smoke rising from the chimney, the lights beckoning from the windows. An unexpected sense of peace stole over him. Suddenly, for the first time since he’d built it simply to make a statement to his father—a declaration of independence from Harlan Adams and his need to maintain a tight-fisted control over his sons—the huge, far-too-big monster of a house seemed like a home.

* * *

Jessie couldn’t imagine what was taking Luke so long. Surely Luke hadn’t lost his way in the storm. Though the snowfall was still steady, it was nowhere near as fierce and blinding as it had been.

And he knew every acre of his land as intimately as he might a woman. His voice low and seductive, he’d boasted often enough of every rise and dip, every verdant pasture. He’d done it just to rile his father with his independence, but that didn’t lessen the depth of his pride or his sensual appreciation for the land. No, Luke wasn’t lost, which meant he was dallying intentionally.

While he was taking his sweet time about getting back, she was tiring quickly. The last burst of adrenaline had long since worn off. She had already cleaned up the remains of the supper they’d barely touched, washed the dishes and put them away. For the past five minutes she’d been standing at the backdoor, peering into the contrasting world of impenetrable black and brilliant white.

She thought she could see Luke’s shadow in the truck and wondered for a moment if he had a bottle stashed there. That array she’d found in his cupboard had worried her. She had never known him to take more than a social drink or two before, had never seen him as on-his-butt drunk as he’d been the night before when she’d arrived.

When at last he climbed out of the truck and headed for the house, she watched his progress with a critical eye. He didn’t seem to be staggering, no more so than anyone would be in the deep snow. Shivering at the blast of frigid air, she nonetheless planted herself squarely in the middle of the open doorway, so he couldn’t pass by without her getting a whiff of his breath.

“Everything okay?” she called as he neared.

“Fine. Get back inside before you freeze.”

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