Page 10 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
By the time Logan shouldered through the front door and set the basket on the kitchen table, his ears rang, and his nerves hummed like telegraph wire in a windstorm.
The house wrapped around them, with every beam and board in its proper place because Logan had made sure of it. He’d re-chinked the walls himself last autumn. Sanded and oiled the kitchen table until the grain shone. Hung every pot and pan on its designated hook above the stove, arranged by size, because order made life manageable.
The baby, in its wicker basket in the middle of Logan’s perfectly ordered kitchen table, represented chaos of the highest caliber.
“You reckon it’s hungry?” Mason peered into the basket, keeping a safe distance, as if the baby might lunge.
“How shouldIknow? Do I look like a man who knows what babies want?”
“You look like a man who’s about two ticks from losin’ his composure, is what you look like.”
Logan scrubbed his hand down his clean-shaven face and blew out a breath.
Fine. All right. A baby.
Onhisproperty. Inhiskitchen. Making a sound that could strip paint off a barn. He could handle this. He handled everything else around here, every broken fence and lame horse and leaking roof and stubborn brother. One baby couldn’t be that much harder.
He reached into the basket and lifted the child out.
It fit easily in his hands.
Lord, it’s so small.
The baby blinked up at him with wet and unfocused eyes. Its mouth worked up another wail on its blotchy face, and something about the weight of it, the warm, breathing, impossible fact of it resting against his roughened palms, made the kitchen go very quiet inside his own head even though the noise hadn’t changed one bit.
“Hey there.” He rocked it gently. “Hey. What’s all this fuss about, hm?”
The baby hiccupped, screwed up its face, and let out a whimper that trailed off into a shuddering sigh.
“That’s better. That’s more like it. Ain’t nobody here gonna hurt you.”
Mason and Thomas hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching him with twin expressions he chose to ignore because if either one of them said a single word, he’d put them both to work mucking out stalls until their backs gave out.
“You two.” He looked at the baby. “Saddle up and ride out. Check the road in both directions. Ask around town if anybody’s missin’ a child, or if somebody came through last night headin’ this way. Check the homesteads out past Miller’s Creek, too.”
“Both of us?” Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You fixin’ to hold down the fort with a baby all by your lonesome?”
“I’m fixin’ to find out where this child belongs and who had the sorry notion to leave it on a fence post like a sack of mail. Nowgit.”
Mason grabbed his hat off the hook by the door. Thomas followed, muttering something about how Logan had a particular knack for giving orders that conveniently left him out of the saddle, and the back door banged shut behind them.
The baby squirmed in Logan’s hands.
He shifted it up against his chest, tucking its head into the crook of his neck because that seemed like what a personoughtto do, and the baby pressed its face into his collar and made a snuffling sound.
The kitchen settled around them. Just the creak of the house and the tick of the mantel clock and the baby’s ragged little breaths against his throat.
“All right,” Logan said to the empty room, to the baby, to whatever almighty force had decided his Tuesday needed complicating. “All right. Let’s figure this out.”
Chapter Three
The Pitkin station consisted of a wooden platform, a bench with one broken slat, and a hand-painted sign that readPITKINin letters so sun-bleached they’d faded to the color of old bone.
Grace stepped off the train and into thin air that pressed against her temples, the like of which she’d never experienced at sea level, and she steadied herself on the platform railing while the world tilted and resettled.
Four days on a train.
Four days of hard wooden seats and stale bread and the endless clatter of wheels on tracks, sleeping upright with her carpetbag clutched to her chest because a woman traveling alone learned quickly to keep her belongings close.
