JACKSON REID KNEW what he liked. He liked riding the perimeter of his family ranch, liked working from sunup to sundown until his muscles ached and his body was worn out. He liked drinking. And he liked women.
Women were the reward for all that work he did.
Work hard, drink hard, fuck hard.
He had no intention of settling down, no intention of changing. If he could die on the back of a horse, or with a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, or in the bed of a beautiful woman? Any of those things would be a fitting end for him. So why in hell would he change his life? He was on the path to any one of those ends, which meant he was on the right path for him.
His stepmother didn’t approve, but she’d moved away from Gold Valley six months ago, and his father was dead. So there wasn’t anyone around to mourn the fact that he wasn’t after marriage or babies.
He’d worked damn hard that day, like he did every day. It was pouring down rain and he’d been soaked to the bone by the time he’d come in. He’d had a hot shower, and now he was about to get down to the drinking. But that was when he heard a knock on his door.
He stood up, ambled over to the door and opened it. For a moment, he thought the sex had been delivered right to him. There was a blonde on his doorstep, bundled up against the cold and the wet.
Then he realized a few things. The first being that he recognized her. The second that she was tearstained and miserable. The third...that she wasn’t as bundled as she had initially appeared.
She was holding a blanket. And in the blanket was a baby.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I thought I could, but I can’t.”
“Sasha?” That was her name. He vaguely remembered her from a liquor-soaked night quite a few months ago.
More than nine months ago, as a matter of fact.
Hell.
While that realization was rolling over him, she reached forward and thrust the baby at him, into his arms.
The bundle felt fragile, and at the same time...heavy. He looked down at the tiny thing in his arms and felt... He couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t reason or rationalize the expanding sensation in his chest, or the ever-increasing sensation of weight. In his arms. On his shoulders.
“I can’t,” she said again. “I know you can take babies to a hospital or a police station, but she’s yours. You can take her there if you want.”
“Mine?” he asked.
His. His baby. He’d never even held a baby before, and now it turned out the one he had now was...his.
“I have to go. I need to go get... I need to get out of here.”
And then Sasha turned and ran. Ran away from the front door and down the steps, through the rain and back to her car.
He should do something. Go after her. Stop her. But he was frozen in place, staring down at the bundle in his arms. He moved the blanket away from the baby’s face and something in him shifted. Changed. As he looked at that tiny, vulnerable bundle in his arms, Jackson Reid felt like he no longer knew a damn thing.
Three months later...
I have a degree in early childhood development. The daycare that I worked at recently had to close, so I’m out of a job right now. I’m also out of an apartment, but that’s a long dramatic story.
—S
Lily is four months old. She doesn’t sleep through the night and I think I’m about to die of exhaustion. Cows don’t delay their care, even if babies don’t sleep, it turns out. She doesn’t take after me. If I hadn’t had a paternity test done I almost wouldn’t have believed she was mine. Too sweet, for one thing. And she’s the prettiest little thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know a damn thing about babies.
—J
She sounds perfect.
—S
She would be, if I weren’t drowning. I need help. Room and board, plus the pay we discussed previously.
—J
I can get there in a week.
—S
I’ve got all your flight info. I’ll be at the airport to get you.
—J
You can’t miss me. I’ll be the one with the bright, flowered suitcase. I’m plain and tall.
—S
A week after that...
SAVANNAH STURM STOOD in the tiny airport and looked around. She’d come into gate number three, and it turned out it was... Well, it was gate three out of three. In the only terminal the airport had.
She had been worried that her new employer, Jackson, might need a sign to help her find him. Now she imagined she’d just look for the man with the baby, assuming he was a man with a baby and not an ax murderer. The possibility was there that all of this was a scam of some kind. She was counting on him ringing alarm bells while they were here in public if she needed to be scared of him.
She adjusted the strap on her carry-on bag and stuffed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets, walking in line with the people who had just gotten off the very small plane and through a revolving door that led to...
What looked like the lone baggage carousel.
She stopped and looked around. The waiting area had a smattering of people in it. Not many, but that wasn’t terribly surprising since her plane couldn’t have had more than fifty people on it.
She didn’t see a man with a baby.
The main doors to the outside slid open. The man who walked in was head and shoulders above everyone else in the room, a black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up, revealing muscular forearms that had lumberjack-caliber definition.
And he was holding a little pink bucket seat with a lacy blanket draped over the top.
Fathers of infants should not look like that. They should not look like every bad boy fantasy she’d never allowed herself to have. Fathers of infants shouldn’t look like fantasies at all. They should look softer. Less angular. And he certainly shouldn’t make her stomach tighten, and her body remember that it had been a very, very long time since she had been touched by a man.
And even longer since she had particularly wanted to be.
She blinked, grabbing hold of herself and retrieving her consciousness from that strange space it had just been in. She wasn’t here to check out a hot man. She was here to do a job. To reclaim the broken pieces of a life that hadn’t even been hers anymore