Page 53 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Miriam screamed and screamed andscreamed, and Grace paced the kitchen floor holding her against one shoulder, bouncing on each step, making thatshh-shh-shhnoise until her own lips went numb from the effort.
The clock on the mantel ticked past three in the afternoon.
Outside, the men worked somewhere on the far side of the property, which meant the house belonged to Grace and one furious baby. The ringing that’d set in Grace’s ears about an hour ago showed no signs of leaving. Her arms burned from the shoulders down. A headache had planted itself behind her left eye and pulsed in time with Miriam’s wails.
And somewhere in the back of her brain, in that ugly corner where the worst thoughts lived, a voice whispered something she’d never say out loud.
You can’t do this.
She bounced harder. Shushed louder.
You don’t know what you’re doing. You never did. You’re a girl from a slum who answered a newspaper ad, and now you’re pretending to be a mother to a baby that isn’t even yours, and you can’t even get her to stop crying.
“Come on, little bird.” Grace’s voice cracked on the second word. “Come on, sweetheart, please. Just... gimme somethin’ here.”
Miriam arched her back and wailed.
Grace stopped pacing.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen with the baby pressed to her chest, her jaw locked tight, and her eyes burning from the inside. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth the way she’d done back in New York when the rent came due, and the cupboard held nothing but mouse droppings and a half-empty bag of barley.
You can do this. You’ve done harder things than this. You’ve gone three days without eating. You’ve slept on a floor in January with ice on the inside of the windows. You survived all of that. You can survive a baby with sore gums.
But the thing about surviving, the thing nobody told you, was that it just meant you got to the next day. It said nothing about how you got there. Or what shape you arrived in.
Grace had figuredthatout somewhere around age fourteen, sitting on the floor of that miserable hut, wrapping her feet in newspaper because her shoes had worn through, and Jonah couldn’t afford new ones.
Boots on the porch.
Grace’s stomach dropped because Rafe Foster had exactly two settings when it came to noise in his house. The first involved that mustache twitch and a slow retreat to the porch, which meant he could tolerate whatever bothered him as long as nobody asked him to participate. The second involved the voice. The low, flat, granite one that’d sent three grown sons scrambling like barn cats caught on the kitchen table.
Four hours of baby screaming at full volume would land squarely in voice territory.
And the flowerbed incident still lived fresh enough in Grace’s memory. The way he’d snapped about her touching Miriam’s garden, that sharp edge coming out of nowhere like stepping on a nail buried in tall grass. He’d apologized for that, sure. But an apology told you a man could feel sorry after the fact. It said nothing about what he’d do in the moment with his patience ground down to a nub.
The front door creaked open.
She braced. Pulled Miriam tighter against her shoulder, already angling toward the stairs, already planning the retreat. Upstairs, door shut, pillow over the gap at the bottom to muffle the sound. She could manage that. She could disappear into the back bedroom and handle this alone, the way she’d handled everything alone for the past eleven years.
Rafe appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Rafe, I’m sorry, I know she’s loud. I’ve tried every single thing I can think of and she just won’t—”
“Hold on.” He held up one hand, palm out. Then he turned and walked down the hall toward the parlor.
Miriam shrieked.
Grace bounced and shushed and stared at the doorway, bracing for him to come back with a lecture about noise and propriety and how his wife would’ve had the baby quiet hours ago.
Because of course she would’ve.
Miriam Foster, the real one, the woman these men built a shrine to in their memories, would’ve known exactly what to do.Would’ve had some secret passed down from her own mother, some magic touch Grace couldn’t replicate because she’d lost her mother at ten and never got the rest of the lessons.
Rafe came back holding a handkerchief in one hand and a brown glass bottle in the other.
He set the bottle on the kitchen table. Brandy. The good stuff, from what Grace could tell by the label, the kind one only pulled out at Christmas and special occasions. Rafe uncorked it, poured a splash onto the folded handkerchief, and held it out to Grace.
“Twist the corner into a point and let her chew on it.”
