She got back in her car and pointed it right toward those buildings.
The dust behind the car must have told him she was coming. As she pulled up to the house, he was in the yard, if not waiting for her, at least done working the horse for a moment.
He was sitting on the edge of a water barrel in front of his house, one foot anchoring him on the ground, a dipper in his hand. His hat was on the stoop beside him. His hair was thick, the rich color of melted chocolate. He took a slow swallow of water, watching her over the edge of the dipper.
When she drew to a halt, he saluted her mildly, hung the dipper from a nail on the wall, retrieved his hat and, tugging it down over his brow, stood and came toward the car.
For a minute she was absolutely frozen where she was.
He had the lean grace of a cowboy as he moved toward her, one-hundred-percent man.
Not that Barry wasn’t one-hundred-percent man, but it was a different kind of percentage.
He was smiling, a warm smile that showed beautiful teeth and crinkles around his eyes.
Eyes a color she had seen only once before. Last night Just before the sun had gone down, the sky had turned the most incredible shade of blue. Indigo, really.
And he was smiling at her, hypnotizing her with incredible indigo eyes.
She stumbled out of the car.
“Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
She commanded herself to look way up at him, break the spell of those eyes, but she absolutely couldn’t. He was stunning.
She was suddenly aware how rumpled she must look after two days on the road. She wished she’d thought to comb her hair when she’d paused up there on the knoll—applied a little lipstick. And mascara. Eye shadow. Hair dye.
Anything so that it wasn’t plain-Jane Shayla Morrison standing there with the most spectacular man she had ever seen.
“Are you lost?” he asked, his eyes flicking from her to the car, resting for a moment, warmly, on the little bundle snoozing in the back seat.
She was lost all right, and she’d better pull out before she went any farther into the depths of those astounding eyes.
“I’ve brought you your nephew,” she blurted out.
Even before she registered the surprise in his features it occurred to her something was wrong. He should have been expecting her.
“His mother said you would be expecting me.” Her voice trembled. She’d come so far. How on earth could this be happening? She suddenly felt exhausted and confused.
Her mother and Barry had been right. What a harebrained thing to do. Now what was she going to do?
“You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, ma’am. It’s easy enough to do in this country. I don’t have a nephew. One niece.”
His voice was slow and easy, deep and wonderful. How could he say a word as proper as ma‘am and make her feel as if he’d said something deliciously indecent? How could he say something that made her feel deliciously indecent and reassured at the same time?
He didn’t have a nephew, but it was just a wrong turn.
“Wrong turn,” she stammered. “Of course, you must be right. I must have—” she thought of the big sign over the front gate “—I must have found the wrong MacLeod. Is there another one?” She felt flustered as the amusement leaped in his eyes.
“Lots of MacLeods in this country. Which one are you looking for?”
Nicky suddenly let loose a holler from the backseat, like a cat with its toenail caught in the screen door.
“Turner,” she said, pivoting from him, bending into the car to release the belt on the car seat. “I’m looking for Turner MacLeod.”
She looked back. His jaw had dropped. It was a strong jaw, deeply shadowed.
“Well, that would be me, ma‘am, but I don’t—”
Nicky exploded from his seat and pushed by her. He ran straight for the big lean man who was eyeing them now with horrified fascination.
Nicky grabbed Turner MacLeod’s blue jeans in a tight chubby fist. His head dropped. He threw up on the man’s boots.
Shayla closed her eyes in mortification. Thousands of miles of open prairie, and Nicky had chosen the man’s boot? Barry would have been furious.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
Nicky was shrieking, still holding that leg.
The man squatted down, ignoring the substance on his boot. He took Nicky’s tiny shoulders in both strong hands and scanned his face, and then touched his forehead quickly with the back of his hand.
Turner scooped up the boy with easy strength, tucked him into his shoulder. “Better come in. He’s got a bit of a fever.”
The calm in his voice quelled the panic in the pit of her stomach.
She froze, looking at them together. Nicholas’s coloring was different from Turner’s, darker and more exotic, but the bone structure was identical.
She had the sudden sinking sensation that Maria had not sent her to the boy’s uncle after all.
Turner MacLeod was Nicholas’s father.
And he didn’t know it.
Love at first sight and he was an utter cad.
She could almost see her mother sniffing triumphantly. Hear her voice in her mind saying, “Don’t you trust hormones or hearts to make those really important decisions, Shayla. This is your mother talking. Use your head. That’s what the good Lord gave it to you for.”
Well, her head was saying run, and run fast. But her feet were following his long stride toward his porch. She couldn’t very well leave Nicky here with a perfect stranger. Even if it was his father.
“I better get him to a hospital,” she said frantically.
He shot her a quick look over his shoulder. “Ma’am, the nearest hospital is a long, long way from here.”
He said it quietly, patiently, even, but she could sense a judgment, and a harsh one. Outsider. City slicker. Not aware of the realities of life in these big empty spaces.
He slipped off his boots at a jack on the porch outside his screen door. Then he opened the door and held it with a foot, indicating for her to follow him.
“I don’t even know you,” she said, hesitating.
He shot her an incredulous look. “You might have thought of that a couple of hundred miles ago.” The door squeaked and closed behind him.
“How do you know how far I’ve come?” She suddenly felt even more suspicious. Oh great, she had driven hundreds of miles to walk straight into the clutches of the only ax murderer in Montana.
“The license plates say Oregon, ma’am. That’s one hell of a pile of time to give some thought to what you’re doing.”
“Back then I thought you knew Nicky!”
“Nicky,” he repeated it slowly. He held the caterwauling boy back, and studied his face.
Nicky was making a lot of noise but not crying. Shayla had noticed the little boy had a particularly tough streak in him. He never cried.
A light came on in Turner MacLeod’s face as he studied the boy. A light, followed by a look of bewildered tenderness that completely erased her worries about the position of the nearest ax.
“Geez,” he breathed under his breath. He looked up at her,