LITMIR.BIZ

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head. No. The last thing she needed right now was to doubt herself. She couldn’t, not with another life depending on her to be the adult here.

      “It’s not as if I’m deliberately denying my daughter a father,” Darcy suddenly blurted into the silence that had settled between them. “I’m not trying to make some politically correct feminist statement here. Being a single mother wasn’t exactly in the game plan, remember.” To her distress, Darcy’s chin quivered.

      Her mother reached out, laying a hand on Darcy’s arm. “Oh, baby, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

      Darcy squeezed her mother’s hand…and felt worse. Now she’d upset her mother too. “I know. God, Mother, the hormones. I’m all over the page with this. One second I’m mad, the next crying. Is this normal?”

      Margie Alcott nodded, her smile returning. “Oh, sure it is, baby. You’re a mess, and you’re fine. It’s all normal.” Her mother squinted, as if in thought…which she promptly shared. “Well, honey, as normal as you’ve ever been. You always have been a little bit different, you know. Special, I like to say.”

      “Thanks,” Darcy replied. It was moments like these that reminded Darcy that the reason her mother knew where all her buttons were and how to push them was because she’d installed them.

      “Now, Darcy, don’t you make that face that says I don’t know what I’m talking about. Because I do.”

      Knowing she and her mother would never agree about Darcy needing a man in her life, she sighed and changed the subject. “Isn’t your little granddaughter the sweetest thing you ever saw?”

      At the mention of the baby, Margie Alcott put her hand to her bosom, and her smile turned beatific. “She’s so beautiful, Darcy. I think she looks a little like that cowboy who brought you in yesterday.”

      Well, that hadn’t worked. Here they were…back to the cowboy. Darcy shifted…painfully…in her bed. “Oh, stop that, Mother. He delivered her. He didn’t father her.”

      “Well, I wish he had. I saw him when he brought you in yesterday, you know. A handsome man, with that white hat and white truck. It’s all just unbelievable, Darcy. And in the newspaper. You can see it for yourself right here. Big headlines. And a nice picture.” She handed Darcy the folded newspaper she brought with her.

      “A picture?” In her mind, Darcy again saw the camera light flashing as she and her baby, wrapped in that Indian blanket, were being carried in by the cowboy whose unbuttoned chambray shirt had bared his chest to her cheek. “Dear God. Was I covered?”

      “Well, I should say so. Look for yourself. It’s right there on page one.”

      “Page one? Great. Slow news day in Buckeye, Arizona?”

      Margie Alcott puffed up sanctimoniously.

      “It was until you decided to deliver your baby out in the desert. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my whole life, Darcy. Why, it’s a wonder your…stuff didn’t get all sunburned, just hanging out there like that. What if someone had come by and seen you?”

      Darcy could only stare at her mother, and fight the heat staining her cheeks. “Someone did come by and see me, Mother.”

      “I know. It’s all there. On page one. Look at it.”

      Against her better judgment, Darcy finally looked. Yep, there she was. On the front page. Atop a gurney and being wheeled into surgery for stitching. The look on her face was probably the same one she’d have if she’d just escaped an alien abduction. But the accompanying picture was of her proud and grinning mother, fresh from the beauty shop, holding her new grand-baby, whose tiny little face was scrunched up in a scream. Darcy flopped the daily paper down. “Lovely. You look great, Mother.”

      Margie patted her silver-gray hair. “You think? Let me see that.” She reached for the paper, and Darcy gave it to her, lovingly watching her mother scan the photo. “Well, I do, don’t I?” Then she began turning pages, perusing them carefully. “But I’m going to get after that Vernon Fredericks. After all, he’s the editor. And there’s not one picture in here of your hero.”

      “My hero? You mean the Lone Ranger?”

      Margie looked up from today’s copy of the Buckeye Bugle. “Is that what you call him? The Lone Ranger?”

      Darcy shrugged, seeing again, in her mind’s eye, the man’s blue eyes and hearing his calm voice. “I have to call him something. In all the excitement, I forgot to ask him his name. And then, once we got here, he just drove off.”

      Margie folded the paper and tossed it on the floor. “Well, who do you think he is?”

      “Just some turned-around cowboy from Montana. At least, that’s what he said.”

      Her mother pulled her chair closer. “I hope you at least thanked the man, honey. He did save your life. And your baby’s.”

      “I know, Mother. And I did thank him.”

      “What’d he say to that?”

      Darcy exhaled her frustration sharply. The woman wanted all the details. “He said it was nothing, as I recall.”

      Her mother sighed romantically. “Cowboys. They’re just the most polite breed of man around.”

      Darcy shrugged. “I suppose.”

      Her mother’s raised eyebrow said she’d detected something in Darcy’s shrug that she didn’t like. “Now, don’t go blaming him for what that stupid old professor of yours did to you.”

      Darcy crossed her arms defensively. “Oh, you mean ask me to marry him, get me pregnant and then run off…for a second honeymoon with his wife?”

      “I told you he was a married man.”

      “You told me nothing of the sort. You didn’t even know him.”

      “I know his big-city kind.”

      “You do not. Buckeye’s the only place you’ve ever lived. And Dad was the only man you’d ever known.”

      Her mother’s chin rose a notch. “That may be. But I read a lot. And I watch those talk shows on TV. I’ve learned a few things.”

      What a sweet, confined little world her mother lived in—one Darcy had hated to intrude on, last Christmas at semester’s end, with her own harsh reality. “I’ll bet you have.”

      “I have. Now I’ve been thinking about something else, too.”

      “Dear God.”

      “Don’t be disrespectful, Darcy Jean Alcott. I’ve been thinking about your cowboy. I think this whole thing—him being there when you needed him—is not just chance or luck. No, he was supposed to be here at that time for you. That’s all there is to it. After all, his home state is off the beaten path.”

      Darcy remembered him saying the same thing yesterday. But she wasn’t about to tell her mother that. “Off the beaten path? Like Buckeye, Arizona isn’t? We’re fifty miles southwest of nowhere, Mother.”

      “Hardly. Phoenix is just down the road. I swear, Darcy, you act like you left civilization when you came here from Baltimore. But anyway, what was I talking about?”

      Darcy sighed. It was pointless to fight. “My screwed-up life.”

      “That’s right.” With that, Margie Alcott opened her sack lunch, arranging everything atop Darcy’s bedside tray. She pulled a roast beef sandwich from a plastic bag. Darcy had to grin. It was ten-thirty in the morning. Volunteering was a hungry business.

      “So. What was he doing down here? That cowboy, I mean.”

      Relentless, the woman was. Darcy could only stare at her sweet mother in her pink hospital uniform as she bit into her early lunch. “You mean besides delivering your granddaughter?”

      “I

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