LITMIR.BIZ

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I should have called, but it was late when we got into Salt Lake.”

      Again, no real explanation about what he was doing there with a strange baby. He had become even better at evasive tactics, it that were possible.

      “I didn’t know where else to go,” he continued. “Any chance you have room for us here at the ranch for a few days?”

      She wanted to shut the door firmly against him—and especially against this little girl in her arms who dredged up old sorrows. But she straightened her spine. She was tougher than this. If she could run a cattle ranch by herself, surely she could handle a few days with Cisco del Norte and this mysterious child.

      “You know you don’t have to ask. It’s only me in this big rambling house. There’s plenty of room. And anyway, you know you own a part share of the ranch, just like Brant and Quinn. I can’t kick you out.”

      “Even when you’d like to?”

      She opted to ignore his wry tone as the baby beamed at her with a grin that showed off two tiny pearl teeth on her bottom gum.

      “Is she yours?”

      She was relieved to see a little color return to the gray cast of his tired features.

      “No. Hell, no!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you think I would have told you guys if I had a kid somewhere?”

      She refused to think about the bitter irony of that. “You keep everything else from us. Why not this, too?”

      Anger briefly broke through the exhaustion and flickered in his hot cocoa eyes. “She’s not mine.”

      “Then where did she come from and what are you doing with her?”

      His mouth pursed. “That is a really long and complicated story.”

      She said nothing, just waited for him to expound. That was a trick she had learned long ago from her Aunt Jo, who had always been eerily effective at letting her foster children dig their own graves with their words.

      Cisco apparently wasn’t immune to the technique. After a moment he released a heavy breath. “Her parents were friends of mine. Her father was killed right before she was born and her mother died last week. Belle’s paternal aunt lives in Boise. Before she died, her mother begged me to bring her to the States to her family. Only problem is, the aunt’s not available to take her for a couple of days.”

      She could find enough holes in his story for her to drive her shiny new Kubota through, but he was literally swaying on his feet. She had a feeling that meager information was all she would be able to squeeze out of him for now.

      She really didn’t want him here. Most days, she liked to think she was strong and capable, in full control of her little world here. Cisco only had to walk back through the door to dredge up all those feelings she worked so hard to fight back the rest of the time. She would have liked to tell him to find a hotel room somewhere, but she couldn’t. Winder Ranch was as much his home as hers, even if he seemed to want to forget that.

      “We can talk about this after you have a chance for some rest,” she said. “Let me run up and put fresh sheets on your bed. Tess and Quinn have turned Brant’s old room into a guest nursery for Little Joe when they visit and Abby uses it when she naps. Isabella should be able to stay in the crib there.”

      “You don’t have to make the bed. I can take care of it. And right now I’m so tired, I would stretch out right here on the tile floor of the kitchen if I had half a chance.”

      “I know where everything is and you know you’ll sleep better on clean sheets. Just relax for a few minutes while I take care of it, if you can stay awake that long.”

      “Thanks, East.”

      He gave her a guarded smile that didn’t reach his eyes and she hated all over again the awkwardness between them, the tension that always seemed to hum between them like a tightly strung electric fence.

      Nothing she could do about that now. She had lived with it for the last five years, since her uncle’s death and the events surrounding it. She could live with it for a few more days in order to provide Cisco and the baby a place to crash.

      She took a moment to take off her nightgown and robe and throw on a pair of Wrangler and a T-shirt, then brushed her teeth and pulled her hair into a quick braid before she headed for his old room.

      Her Aunt Jo and Uncle Guff hadn’t had the dozen children they had dreamed about to fill all the bedrooms of the old ranch house, so they had instead taken in troubled boys. Cisco hadn’t been the first or the last, but the three of them—Quinn Southerland, Brant Western and Cisco—had been closer than real brothers. Their rooms had always been kept at the ready for their visits home.

      She purposely didn’t come into Cisco’s room often. She paid a young mother in town to come in once a month to keep the worst of the dust at bay throughout the house, which allowed her to leave his space largely untouched.

      The room wasn’t much different than it had been when he lived here with her aunt and uncle. Plaid curtains in dark greens and blues, a utilitarian chest of drawers, a desk and chair, a full-size bed with the log frame her father and Guff had made.

      It was nothing luxurious, just good-quality furnishings in a comfortable space. How must it have appeared to him when he showed up, the orphaned child of migrant farmworkers who had moved him from town to town with them according to the harvest?

      She had a vivid memory of the day he arrived. She had been just a kid. Nine, maybe. Her parents had been alive then and she had lived in the foreman’s house just down the drive toward the canyon road. She had been sitting on the horse pasture fence rail watching Brant and Quinn work a new colt under Jo’s supervision waiting for Guff. She remembered how her heart had leaped when Guff pulled up in the old pickup he kept scrupulously clean. He wasn’t alone. A moment later, the passenger side opened and out stepped a dark-haired Latino boy in faded Levi’s that were a couple inches too short and a thin T-shirt in worse shape than the rags her mother used to wash the windows.

      They had known he was coming. Jo had told them all about the kid who had been found a week or two earlier living in a tent by himself in the mountains, where he’d hidden away from authorities after his father’s death in a farm accident.

      While she knew Brant and Quinn were a bit apprehensive about a new arrival, Easton was excited to add another honorary brother to her growing collection.

      She remembered sliding down from the fence rail and walking with Jo toward Uncle Guff’s pickup truck, vaguely aware Brant and Quinn had followed.

      Guff had come around the truck and placed a protective arm around Cisco’s narrow shoulders. For a moment, Easton’s heart had squeezed inside her chest at the expression in his eyes—lost and grief-stricken and frightened.

      But then he suddenly gave a cocky grin that encompassed all of them. And she fell in love.

      She still didn’t know whether it was that quick glimpse of vulnerability in his eyes or his valiant attempts to hide it, but she vowed that night to herself that she would love Cisco del Norte forever.

      Easton snapped one corner of a clean fitted sheet over the mattress. What kind of idiotic female holds to a vow she made when she was nine flipping years old? Twenty years later, she still couldn’t get over the man.

      She had been telling herself for years that this tangled morass of emotions wasn’t love. She had tried to talk herself out of it—or more accurately into letting herself love someone else. It was only a girlhood crush, something most sane women put away when they reached an age of reason, for crying out loud.

      Yes, they had a history together. She drew a shaky breath and tucked in the bottom sheet, her mind drifting back five years to that surreal, painful time.

      Plenty of people with difficult histories were able to move on. She was trying. She was even dating again, something she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do with any serious intent since the summer night after her Uncle

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