Page 30 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
He did, gently, and the baby held on.
“That’s not her choosing to do that. She can’t help it. You touch her palm, she grips. That’s all she knows right now.” She paused. “But she knows it very well.”
Logan looked down at his finger locked in the baby’s fist.
“She’ll let it go eventually, don’t worry,” Grace said.
The baby tipped her head back against his chest and looked straight up at him. Upside down from this angle, all round cheeks and those big eyes catching the afternoon light.
On the porch, Pa picked up his whittling knife and went back to carving.
“You know what?” Grace leaned back on her heels and surveyed the flower bed. “I think that last rose bush on the end might actually bloom this year. The buds are startin’ to swell.”
Logan looked at the bush. The baby still held his thumb.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “I reckon it might.”
Chapter Nine
Two weeks, and not a soul had come looking for the baby.
Grace wiped the last supper plate and set it on the stack, turning the cloth over in her hands while the kitchen dimmed toward evening. Through the window above the basin, the sun dropped behind the ridge in that way it did out here, slow at first, and then all at once, like it got tired of holding itself up and just gave in.
Logan had gone out to check the south fence right after eating. Something about a post that’d shifted overnight, which, sure, maybe it had, or maybe the man just needed a reason to leave a room whenever the conversation drifted anywhere near the topic of the baby and what came next, because they’d all been circling itfor days.
Every supper, somebody almost said it. Mason would open his mouth and then shove cornbread in it instead. Thomas would get thatlookon his face, the contemplative one he wore when his brain worked ahead of his tongue, and then Rafe would clear his throat and ask somebody to pass the salt.
So tonight, with Logan’s chair empty and the kitchen still holding the warmth of the stove, Grace hung the towel on its hook and turned around.
Mason sat at the table, whittling a piece of pine into something that could’ve been a horse or a dog or maybe just a lump. Thomas leaned back in his chair with both boots propped on the rung of the one beside him, which Logan would’ve had words about if he’d seen it. Rafe occupied his usual spot at the head, working a knot out of a piece of leather harness by lamplight.
The baby slept in the dresser drawer. Of course she did. This child had the supernatural ability to doze off the second anything important needed discussing, and wake up screaming the instant everybody settled down for the night.
“So,” Grace pulled out her chair and sat. “We gonna talk about it or we gonna keep pretendin’ the elephant ain’t standin’ in the middle of the room?”
Mason’s knife stopped mid-stroke.
Thomas brought his boots down off the rung.
Rafe kept working the leather, but his fingers slowed.
“Two weeks.” Grace folded her hands on the table. “Your brothers rode out twice askin’ at every homestead and farm for a day in each direction. Nobody’s come forward. Nobody’s sent word. Nobody’s posted a notice in town or asked at the general store or the church.”
“Could still happen.” Thomas picked at a scratch on the table. “Folks move slow out here. Could be the mother’s in another county and the news ain’t reached her yet.”
“And it could be the mother left her on purpose, Thomas. Because she couldn’t care for her. Or didn’t want to. Or both.”
The lamp on the sideboard flickered in a draft from somewhere under the door, and the shadows in the kitchen shifted.
Mason set down his whittling and brushed the shavings off the table into his palm. “What’re you gettin’ at, Gracie?”
“I’m gettin’ at the fact that we got a baby in this house who needs more than a dresser drawer and borrowed blankets and a family that keeps callin’ her ‘the baby’ because nobody wants to get attached.”
She glanced at the dresser drawer. One tiny fist poked out from under the quilt.
“We should keep her,” Logan said.
Four words, and the room changed temperature.
