Page 13 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
She pushed through the gate and crossed the yard. The racket on the other side of the door could’ve peeled paint fully.
Two voices, maybe three, talking over each other in the particular cadence of men who’d long since stopped listening to a word the other had to say, and, underneath all of it, the baby screaming itself hoarse. Something thudded. Glass rattled. One of the voices rose sharply enough to cut through the wall.
She knocked. Hard. Three sharp raps with her knuckles that rattled the door on its hinges.
Nothing. The yelling swallowed the whole sound.
She knocked again.Harder. Put the heel of her palm into it until the wood stung her skin.
The voices stopped. A beat of shuffling. Heavy boots on floorboards. Then the curtain in the window beside the door twitched, and through the gap she caught a flash of an older man’s face, lined, weathered, and topped with gray hair, peering out at her with the particular squint of someone sizing up a stranger on his property and finding the stranger wanting.
The curtain dropped.
The lock clicked.
The door swung open, and Grace found herself staring straight down the business end of a Winchester rifle.
Chapter Four
The man behind the rifle had the look of someone who’d pulled that trigger before and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep pulling it again.
He filled the doorway.
Even stooped with age, he had the shoulders of a man who’d spent his whole life hauling and hammering, and a gray mustache so thick it hid most of his mouth. And the eyes on him. Lord. They bore into her from beneath a brow that jutted like a shelf of rock. He wore a flannel shirt with a yellowish stain down the front that could’ve been an egg.
“State your business, missy.” He jerked the barrel toward her. “I ain’t gon’ ask twice.”
“My name is Grace Linton and I—”
“Is that the mother?!”
A voice came from inside the house, younger, pitched high with the tone of a man who’d just connected two dots that didn’t actually belong together. A figure pushed past the old man’s shoulder into the doorway, and Grace got her first look at Logan Foster.
Had to be Logan. Nobody else could’ve matched that advertisement’s energy ofdependable, steady,andseeking a woman of good characterlike the man in front of her.
Sure, Mason had written the ad, but he must’ve done so on Logan’s instruction.
He had chestnut hair that looked like he’d combed it three times that morning, cheeks that lacked even the hint of a beard, and eyes the color of a pale winter sky. He was young, too—younger than she’d expected—though he held himself like a man with twice the years’ experience on him.
Would’ve cut a respectable figure, in fact, if not for the mashed… something smeared across the front of that crisp shirt, and the crease lines still visible beneath the mess.
And in his arms, red-faced and howling fit to wake the dead, squirmed a baby.
“You’re the one that left this young’un on our fence, ain’t you?”
“I—”
“Oh, you are, I’d wager my best saddle on it. Left it and come back when you started feelin’—”
“I didn’t leave no baby nowhere!” Grace’s voice cranked up an octave.
The rifle barrel pointed straight at a spot about three feet from her nose, and every inch of her screamed to step backward, to get off this porch and back down the road and onto any train headed in any direction at all.
But she dug her boots into those solid porch boards because underneath the screaming ran something hotter. Something that locked her knees and squared her shoulders and nailed her right where she stood.
“I just got off a train from New York, notthree hours ago! I don’t have a child, I’ve never had a child, and I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d stop pointin’ that gun at my face!”
“New York.” The old man squinted harder. “You came all the way from New York?”
