Page 25 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
She paused mid-scream. Hiccupped. Drew a shuddering breath.
Then she screamed again, louder than before, and he surrendered her back to Grace the instant she held out her arms.
“Alright, alright, come here, little bird.”
Grace tucked the baby into her practiced hold, and the crying dropped by half inside of three seconds. By ten, the baby had stuffed a fist in her own mouth and gone quiet, blinking up at Grace with those round, watery eyes that always looked half surprised to find themselves in the world.
Grace swayed on her feet with dirt still packed under her fingernails and rose-bed soil ground into the knees of her skirt, and the shift in Logan’s chest happened again. It was like itwas…rearranging. Before he could figure out what to do about it, though, the rattle of a wagon drifted up from the main road.
Pa and the boys must be back.
The wagon crested the rise and rolled through the gate with Thomas driving and Mason riding the tailgate. Pa sat up front next to Thomas, and, even from this distance, Logan caught the way the old man’s gaze tracked straight to the porch, the overturned dirt, and the pile of weeds on the step.
By the time the wagon pulled up to the house, Pa had already climbed down without waiting for the brake to set. He crossed the yard with that hitch in his stride that got worse when something other than his hip bothered him, and he stopped at the edge of the flower bed.
For a long, bad moment, nobody said anything.
Pa looked at the cleared soil. The exposed rose bushes. Grace standing there with the baby and the dirt on her hands.
“I told you not to touch them beds.”
“I saw they needed tendin’, so I—”
“Them beds ain’tyoursto tend.”
“Mr. Foster, the roses were gettin’ choked out. Another season under all that mess and they’d have—”
“Iknowwhat they’d have done!” Pa’s hand shook where it gripped the porch railing, and a vein jumped along his temple. “You think I don’t know what’s growin’ under my own porch? That I don’t see it every mornin’ when I walk out this door?”
“Pa.” Logan stepped forward. “She didn’t mean no harm by it.”
“I told her plain as day not to touch them beds, Logan. Second night she come here, I looked her straight in the eye, and I said—”
“You said not to touch the beds, and she didn’t touch ’em, sheweeded’em. There’s a difference.”
“Don’t you parse words at me, boy!”
Mason and Thomas had stopped halfway across the yard, frozen in that particular posture of men who’d walked into a room at exactly the wrong second and couldn’t decide whether to keep going or back out slowly.
“She’s tryin’ tosaveMa’s roses, Pa. That’s all. Look at ’em.” Logan pointed at the cleared bed. “They’re still alive under there. Three of ’em. And they’d have died if somebody hadn’t—”
“Your mother put those in the ground with her own two hands!” Pa’s voice cracked on the wordhands. “Every spring she’d be out here on her knees just like that, and I’d bring her coffee, and she’d get that dirt on my good cup and I never once—”
He stopped. Pressed his lips together under the mustache until they disappeared. His chin wobbled, and he turned and walked into the house.
The screen door banged shut behind him.
Thomas let out a slow breath. Mason took his hat off and held it against his chest as if somebody had just lowered a coffin. Grace stood in the middle of all of it, bouncing the baby, who’d started to fuss again, and the look on her face landed somewhere between stung and sorry, which made Logan’s gut tighten.
“Go on inside.” He kept his voice even and steady; the foreman’s voice he used when a situation needed managing, not feeling. “Take the baby upstairs and get cleaned up. I’ll handle Pa.”
She opened her mouth.
“Please, Grace.”
Something in thepleasemust’ve done it, because she nodded once and went inside, holding the baby close, and the screen door clicked shut behind her a whole lot quieter than it’d shut behind Pa.
Logan turned to his brothers. “Either of you say a word right now, and I will put you both to work muckin’ out stalls ‘til Christmas.”
