Rummaging in the back seat, Lucy bent at the waist. The action hiked her skirt up several inches above her knees and presented him with a view of slim, smooth-skinned thighs. Outlined by the gray fabric, her rump curved sweetly: taut, yet rounded just right. He wondered how she’d look without the ugly suit. An image of a nude Lucy reclining on the navy sheets of his bed instantly flooded his mind. He found it alarmingly arousing.
Grimacing, he turned to go check on the automatic waterers. Great. Alone together in the house with an all-grown-up Lucy, and him already picturing her firm body unclothed and splayed on his bed like a centerfold.
It was crazy. He didn’t even like her. At least, he disliked what she’d forced him to do. Hated it, actually. His hands fisted.
Fortunately Fritzy was staying in the house and not in her cottage. She seemed happy living there; he didn’t think she’d mind staying on.
He entered his gelding’s stall and went to the waterer in back. The horse raised its head a brief moment from its dinner, chewing. Its dark eyes asked ancient questions.
What did Lucy want, really? Not for a minute did he believe that business about her needing the damn house and horsey smells. It was odd, though, the way she’d shied away earlier when he’d only bumped her arm. And how evasive she’d been when he asked about her husband.
Somehow he’d get the cash to buy her out. He’d work night and day, save everything. There were many ways other than raising cattle to make money on a ranch, especially one with the rich resources of the Lazy S. Ways his brothers hadn’t even begun to explore. He would tap them all.
Her ludicrous proposal of turning the ranch into a vacation spot rankled. He vowed that the public hordes would come trampling onto the Lazy S only over his dead, decomposing body. A years-old scene came vividly to his mind: his father addressing him and his brothers, each word ringing with clarity.
“We must keep the land pure,” Howard Sheffield had exhorted his three almost-grown sons. “I won’t be around forever, and the ranch’ll pass to you, just as it did to me and my brother from our daddy.”
The three teenagers sat at attention in their father’s office and listened solemnly.
“You boys have to carry on the family tradition. It’ll be hard, I know, to resist commercialism, and this new business of catering to city slickers so many of our friends have succumbed to. It brings in money, but, by God, there’s got to be other ways.”
To Rusty’s seventeen-year-old eyes, his father suddenly looked old—Howard’s sun-roughened skin was splotched with benign cancers, his eyes rheumy. For Rusty it was a small shock, yet it came abruptly. His father was the burly, iron-willed constant on the ranch, the immortal bulwark for them all against a cruel world.
However, in that instant Rusty knew the first glimmerings of maturing youth: his father wouldn’t always be there to solve problems, to repair their mistakes made from inexperience. Someday, maybe soon, he’d have to grow up, take on full adult responsibilities.
“Dad,” he said, anxious and uncomfortable with his thoughts, “don’t worry. We’re not gonna let a bunch of strangers overrun the ranch.”
Howard fixed his youngest with a particularly penetrating stare. “See that you don’t. Jim Curlan’d give ten years off his life if he could get rid of his sideline. So’d old Harley Jacobson down at the Flying J. They need the money, I can understand that. God knows there’s more lean years than fat ones running a ranch. But as a result their spreads have been spoiled. All those damned idiots from the city playing cowboy, ruining good horses, getting underfoot, pistol-shootin’ at anything that flies by.” He snorted, then paused to look thoughtfully at each of his sons.
“Now, boys, promise me you’ll never sell out. Keep the Lazy S as it’s always been. In the family. Swear it.”
The memory receded on Howard’s binding dictum and the grave vow Rusty and his brothers had made. The fact that the other two had passed away now, leaving only Rusty to uphold the promise was entirely irrelevant. He’d given his word, and failure was unacceptable.
At the end of this year he would exercise the clause he’d write into his contract with Lucy. She would be gone. It would just take time, he knew that. From the training in his former career as a contracts attorney working for major corporate accounts, he would have no trouble wording their agreement into cast-iron legal language. Every clause would be phrased to favor him—and not Lucy Donovan.
The gelding moved to nuzzle his shoulder. The waterer was working fine. Absently he rubbed the horse’s withers. Something was wrong in Lucy’s life. Something...
Again the image of her jerking away from him came back and suddenly he knew. Thinking of it, he closed his eyes and wondered how he hadn’t realized it before.
Lucy had come to the Lazy S to heal.
He hadn’t told her everything. Wait until she found out that the ranch she’d just purchased half interest in came with an added bonus. Suddenly he grinned. What would she say when he presented her with a pinkskinned, milk-swilling, diaper-wetting, loudly squalling six-month-old baby?
Chapter Two
The ear-splitting squawk behind Lucy startled her so badly she whirled. Her purse and briefcase flew from her hands, skittered across the living room’s floor and slammed into the cabbage-rose-print davenport. Lipstick, keys and a checkbook hurled from the purse while file folders and assorted legal papers spewed from the briefcase.
Fritzy stood in the kitchen doorway. Her eyebrows were raised, but she was smiling. However it wasn’t the older woman with whom Lucy had enjoyed a reunion an hour ago that had startled her, but the grinning, drooling, chortling creature Fritzy held in her arms.
A baby. Fritzy was holding a baby.
“Sorry we scared you,” Fritzy said, the apology much too offhand for Lucy’s still-pounding heart, “but Baby sure does like squealin’.”
Lucy laid a hand on her chest “So I gather. Whose, um...baby is it?” Shakily she bent to stuff papers into the briefcase.
“Oh, didn’t Rusty tell you before he went back to branding?”
It was true that less than an hour ago Rusty had informed her tersely that he was “burning daylight” and stomped off toward the corrals.
The housekeeper went on airily. “The men’ve got to get those late calves marked before cold weather sets in and then moved to low pastures. Fall roundup’s not so important as spring, but—”
“Uh, Fritzy,” Lucy gently reminded her, “the baby?”
“Oh, this is Tom’s. You remember, one of Rusty’s brothers?” The graying woman shook her head sadly. “Such a shame, him dallying with that gal. Even she said it was just one night—but when will people learn—that’s all it takes!”
The baby waved plump arms and flexed its feet, forcing Fritzy to shift the weight to one generous hip. Her soft-printed house dress bunched up a little, but Fritzy didn’t appear to notice. The infant’s blue eyes stared back at Lucy, and she noticed the rounded head was bald but for a soft bit of auburn down. The child’s body was stuffed like a sausage into a pink terry one-piece suit, the seams pulled so tight Lucy could see frayed threads threatening to burst. She shrugged; maybe that’s how baby clothes were supposed to fit. On the creature’s feet were a kind of bootie, white, with mock laces.
The tot squealed again.
“Fritzy, what do you mean it’s Tom’s?” Lucy asked warily. She straightened to place her purse and case onto the couch. She’d never had any experience with children. In the first months of her marriage, Kenneth had gone off without her knowledge and paid a surgeon to perform a vasectomy. Kids got in the way, he’d said. Kids