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“We’re all family around here,” she told him, her voice laced with pride.
“I see,” he said. “And she helps take care of the twins while you’re doing this?” He gestured around the large stable.
The way he said this made it sound as if she were no better than a common ditch digger. And she suddenly decided it was a shame the inside of this man wasn’t as nice as the outside. But then, in her experience, men were usually lacking beneath the surface.
“She does,” Chloe answered his question. “Aunt Kitty loves the twins as much as me and my sisters.”
He didn’t say anything to that and Chloe wondered what he was thinking and why he was really here. She somehow knew she hadn’t heard everything from him yet
“Well, right now I have to get the horses off the walker. If you’d rather not wait, you can go on up to the house without me,” she told him.
Wyatt figured if he was smart, he wouldn’t wait. He’d go see the babies without this woman’s interference. But he didn’t always do the smart thing. Believing Belinda’s happy stories proved that much.
“I’ll wait. Is there anything I can help you with?”
Surprised by his offer, she looked at him. Not as a threat, but simply as a man. “I wouldn’t want you to dirty yourself.”
There wasn’t anything he needed to prove to this woman. Her opinion of him didn’t matter at all. Yet the idea that she thought of him as soft, pricked his ego as nothing had in years. “I’ve been known to get a little dirt under my fingernails before.”
She gave him a dry little smile. “Scratching and clawing your way to the top, I suppose?”
“You find something wrong with ambition, Ms. Murdock?”
“Not when it’s aimed in the right direction, Mr. Sanders.”
Brushing past him, she walked out of the stable to leave Wyatt standing by the empty stall. For a moment he considered following her, but then he decided there wouldn’t be much point in it. This was her turf, and she obviously figured he’d be more of a hindrance than a help.
It took her only a matter of a few minutes to return the four horses to their stalls. Wyatt stood silently by, watching her work and wondering if this was how she spent all of her time here on this isolated New Mexican ranch. In his opinion it was a shame to see a beautiful woman like her buried in such a place.
Once she was ready to go, Wyatt followed her out of the stable and along the beaten path leading back to the house. Along the way they passed several barns and a maze of connecting metal pens.
Wyatt didn’t see any cattle except one bull lying near a mound of alfalfa hay. Closer to the house, in a small wooden corral, a black calf poked its head through the fence and bawled loudly.
“You’ll get your bottle soon enough, Martin,” Chloe told the calf. “You’re not the only one around here who’s hungry.”
“Where’s his mother? Can’t she feed him?” Wyatt asked as they walked on at a brisk clip. Did the woman move at this pace all day, he wondered. If she did, she had to feel like hell by nightfall. And weren’t there any cowboys around to help?
“His mother is dead. My sister Rose and I take turns hand-feeding him.” Chloe didn’t go on to tell him that Martin’s mother was killed when Belinda torched a section of the ranch. It was a horrible scene she hated to think about, much less relate to him.
A few moments later, the two of them entered a small courtyard landscaped with an assortment of desert plants, a couple of piñon pines and redwood lawn furniture.
A ground-level porch made a square with the back of the house. Wyatt followed her across one end of it, through a screen door and into a warm, cluttered kitchen. Two steps inside the room, Wyatt stopped dead in his tracks as he spotted two red-headed babies sitting side by side in a pair of high chairs.
These were his sister’s children, the only close relatives he had left. Yet incredibly they looked like the woman standing next to him.
“Aunt Kitty, this is Wyatt Sanders.”
Wyatt tore his gaze away from the babies to see the petite gray-haired woman had joined them. She was wiping her hands on a tea towel and looking Wyatt over with open suspicion.
“Yes, he told me his name when he came to the door. I see you found Chloe,” she told him.
He nodded politely toward the older woman, but before he could get a word out, Chloe said, “Did he tell you he’s Belinda Waller’s brother?”
Kitty’s face grew ashen and her wide gaze flew from her niece to the dark-haired stranger. “Belinda’s brother?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. “We didn’t know she had a brother! What are you doing here?”
Wyatt turned to Chloe and wondered, not for the first time, what his next words were going to do to her.
“I’m here to take the twins home. With me,” he said quietly.
Now was not the time for Chloe to panic or lose her temper. She had to show this man he didn’t scare her. The twins were hers! He couldn’t simply walk in and take them away from her!
Her gaze didn’t waver as she met his cool gray eyes. “The twins are home, Mr. Sanders. Like I said earlier, they’re Murdocks, and the Bar M has been our home for more than thirty years.”
She’d already told him her intention of adopting the twins, so it hardly surprised Wyatt to hear her calling this ranch their rightful home. But he had other ideas. The quicker Ms. Chloe Murdock realized that the better off they’d all be.
“I think you’re forgetting the babies are half Sanders.”
Like a mammy dog guarding her litter, Chloe stood her ground. “Excuse me, but your sister’s name was Waller, not Sanders.”
He grimaced as though Chloe’s point had little consequence on the matter. “She was married and divorced several years ago. But by any name, her babies are my niece and nephew.”
“And they’re my half brother and sister. I think even you can admit that.”
Groaning, Kitty reached for a nearby chair and wilted into it.
Wyatt turned his gaze back to the twins who were busily concentrating on eating graham crackers. Soggy crumbs dotted their bibs and cheeks and clung to their fingers in gooey clumps. They seemed perfectly contented and their sweet, intelligent faces went straight to Wyatt’s heart.
“How old are they?” he asked.
“Ten months,” she answered, then volunteered. “They can crawl and pull up now.”
Fascinated by the sight of them, Wyatt walked over and hunkered down to their level. The babies weren’t exactly identical, but close to it. They both had green eyes, chubby round faces and dimpled cheeks. The girl’s hair was a bright red cap of curls while the boy’s was the very same dark auburn as Chloe Murdock’s.
Even to him, it was plain to see they were her brother and sister. Wyatt couldn’t deny that. Yet they were a part of him, too. He couldn’t forget or dismiss that fact.
“Hello, you two,” he said, suddenly feeling awkward and foolishly emotional. “I’m your Uncle Wyatt.”
The sound of his voice caught the twins’ attention and both children stopped their chewing to give him a closer look.
“We named them Adam and Anna,” Chloe said as she came up behind the three of them.
He