Page 31 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe that shift happened inside her own chest, right behind the breastbone, where she’d beencarrying this particular knot for about ten days now without letting it unravel because she loved that child.
She had since the second morning, if she had to pin it down, when the baby had grabbed a fistful of her collar during the bottle feeding and held on with that ferocious little grip, and Grace’s whole body had understood something her brain took a week to catch up to.
“Keep her.” Thomas blinked. “As in... for good.”
“For good. Raise her. Give her a name and a home and a family.”
“I ain’tdisagreein’with you…” Mason held up both hands. “Lord knows I ain’t. But Logan...”
“What about him?”
“He’s been sayin’ since day one that the baby’s temporary. That we’d find her people, or find a family to take her in. He even mentioned the orphanage in Gunnison last week.”
“Over mydead bodyis that child goin’ to an orphanage.”
The words came out sharper than she’d planned, carrying an edge honed on years of knowingexactlywhat happened to children nobody claimed.
Back in New York, she’d walked past the foundling home on Randall’s Island enough times to understand what that word meant. Rows of cots in drafty rooms and too many mouths and not enough hands, and the older kids with those flat stares that said they’d stopped expecting anything from anybody a long time ago.
Not this baby. Not while Grace still drew breath.
Rafe set the harness down.
“The boy’s scared.” His voice came out gravelly and quiet. “He won’t call it that, ‘cause Fosters don’t scare, but that’s what it is. He’s scared of lovin’ somethin’ he might lose.”
Which made a painful kind of sense when she lined it up against everything she’d learned about this family in two weeks. The mother they’d buried. The way Logan checked every lock twice before bed, counted heads at supper, and kept the world at arm’s length.
Grace hadn’t asked yet what had happened to Logan’s mother, but she could guess.
“He’s already attached.” Mason shook his head. “Yesterday, I caught him in the stable talkin’ to one of the mares about how the baby’d smiled at him that mornin’. Full conversation. With a horse.”
Thomas snorted.
“I’m serious! He told that mare every detail. How big the smile got and how she grabbed his thumb and how he reckoned she might be startin’ to recognize him.”
“That don’t mean he’ll agree to keepin’ her.” Thomas crossed his arms. “You know how he gets. Man’s got a head like a fence post once he sets his mind.”
“Then we gotta un-set it.” Grace tapped the table. “Because that baby deserves better than bein’ called temporary.”
“I don’t disagree with a single thing anyone in this room has said. But what happens when Logan walks through that door and we tell him we voted on his household without him bein’ present?” Thomas shuddered. “You recall how well that went with the mail-order bride situation?”
Fair point.
Thomas had more sense than he let on, buried under all the complaining and the boots-on-furniture business. He played at being lazy the way some men played cards, letting people underestimate him because it suited his purposes.
“I’ll talk to him.” Grace straightened up. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, I’ll sit him down and—”
The front door opened.
Boots thudded on the hallway floorboards. A hat swished as it slid on the hook by the door, because Logan never tossed a hat when he could hang it properly.
Then he appeared in the kitchen doorway. Sawdust on his sleeves. Dirt on his knees. That piece of hair that always escaped whatever he did to tame it, hanging over his forehead, and he pushed it back with the heel of his hand while he surveyed the room.
“Y’all look like you just got caught stealin’ the preacher’s horse.” He leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep the baby.”
He said it the way he said everything, plain and level, like he’d announced he planned to fix a hinge or re-shoe a horse. Then he pushed off the doorframe and walked past all of them to the stove, where he poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot Grace always left warming on the back burner.
Nobody made a sound.
