Читать книгу Twins On The Doorstep - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

Chapter One

“What the...?”

At the last moment, despite his shock, Cole swallowed the expletive that was about to burst out of his mouth. Given that he had almost stepped on not one but two infants lying in a basket on the doorstep, it would have been understandable, but inappropriate—at least, to his way of thinking.

It took him a moment to come to grips with the situation, not exactly a run-of-the-mill one by a long shot.

“Okay,” Cole announced, looking around in the pre-dawn light. “This isn’t funny. You just can’t leave babies in a basket like this.” Getting no response, he raised his voice. “You’re not being responsible.”

Nobody answered.

Not one to lose his temper in general, he felt himself losing it now. These were babies, not toys or props to be used in a prank.

He tried again.

“Okay, you’ve had your fun, come out, come out, whoever you are. I’ve got to get going and babies shouldn’t be left outside like this in September. Or any other month of the year, either, for that matter.” Again, Cole had to bite back a few choice words meant for the knucklehead who was behind this practical joke.

Cole looked around.

Nobody came out of the shadows.

One of the babies made a sound, catching his attention.

Crouching down, Cole looked at the two infants wedged together in the basket. They appeared blissfully unaware that they were completely out of their element.

“Where’s your mama, guys? Or girls,” Cole amended. “Sorry, your blankets don’t exactly give me a clue what gender you are.”

He looked around again, but there was still no one coming out to claim the babies or own up to the rather poor joke.

This didn’t make any sense.

With a sigh, Cole picked the basket up and rose to his feet with it.

“Well, you can’t stay out here,” he said to the infants. “No telling what might come by.” Just then, he heard a coyote howling in the distance. “Like that fella. He’s probably hungry. Whoever left you here deserves to be taken behind the barn and given a solid thrashing,” he said fiercely.

He thought about just walking into the bunkhouse with the babies to demand whose idea of a joke this was, but leaving the infants outside like that was beyond some foolish joke. It was damn dangerous. This didn’t really feel like something one of the boys would do.

What if he hadn’t come out when he did? Or if he’d decided, just this once, to walk through the bunkhouse to go outside instead of using his own door? There was no telling how long the babies would have remained out here, unprotected.

“Who left you out here like this?” he asked the small faces looking up at him as he made his way to the main house.

“You know, you are awfully cute,” he commented to the infants. “Too bad you can’t talk and tell me who your mama is, because she needs a serious talking-to. No offense,” he added.

One of the infants sounded as if he—or she—was mewling in response.

Reaching the ranch house, Cole realized that he couldn’t safely balance the basket and knock on the door so he used his elbow instead. When he didn’t get an immediate response, he did it again, harder this time. Because he was jostling the basket and therefore the infants inside of it, he stopped and waited for someone to come to the door.

He was just about to try again when he saw the door finally being opened.

Garrett White Eagle was not usually at a loss for words but this was one of those few times when his mind seemed to go blank.

Recovering, Garrett opened the door to the main house wider and asked Cole, “Have you taken up selling babies door-to-door? Because I’m pretty sure that your brother Cody will tell you that’s illegal.”

Perturbed, Cole didn’t bother commenting on Garrett’s assessment. Instead, he told the man, “I almost tripped over these two when I was leaving this morning. Some brainless jackass left them on my doorstep.”

“Cute little things,” Garrett observed. “Bring them into the living room.”

He gestured into the house, then led the way to where he, his brother and their wives gathered in the evening, usually with at least a few of the boys who were making progress in the program.

Cole placed the basket on the wide, scarred coffee table just as Garrett called out toward the kitchen, “Hey, Jackson, could you come in here? You’ve just got to see this.”

A minute and a half later Jackson White Eagle, taller and slightly more muscular than his younger brother, walked into the living room.

“What’s all the commotion abou—” Jackson stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes went straight to the basket on the coffee table. “Garrett, what are two babies in a basket doing on our coffee table?”

“Don’t look at me,” Garrett protested. “They belong to Cole.”

“Cole?” Jackson asked incredulously. His eyes shifted to the cowboy he’d hired to work part-time on their ranch.

“No, they don’t,” Cole denied with feeling. “I just stumbled over them on the doorstep as I was leaving this morning.”

“Your doorstep,” Garrett pointed out, obviously thinking that was the key word.

Cole shook his head, trying to distance himself from any responsibility. “I’m beginning to think that was just a mistake.”

“Your mistake?” Garrett asked, eyeing his friend closely. “Did you get some ladylove in the family way, Cole?”

Garrett sat down on the old brown-leather sofa in front of the babies. He made a few cooing noises at the infants, which seemed to entertain them sufficiently to get them to stop whimpering.

“Forever is just a little larger than a postage stamp,” Cole pointed out, referring to the nearby town. “I think if something like that had happened, everyone in Forever would have known—if not immediately, then soon enough.”

“So, these little cuties aren’t yours?” Garrett asked, just to make sure.

If they had been his, Cole would have owned up to it without any hesitation and done the right thing by the babies’ mother. Cole felt that his friend knew him well enough to know that.

Cole frowned at Garrett. “No.”

“You’re sure about that?” Jackson asked, looking at Cole closely.

“Absolutely,” Cole answered, but just the slightest note of hesitation had entered his voice.

What if...?

No, no way. It wasn’t possible.

The only woman he’d been intimate with in the last year had been Stacy Rowe. But Stacy had suddenly taken off not too long after that, leaving without a single word to him. Leaving as if the evening they had spent together had filled her with regrets.

Or maybe, according to the rumor he’d heard later, her Aunt Kate had insisted Stacy come with her on “the vacation of a lifetime,” then whisked her off on a prolonged tour of Europe.

Having her leave like that, without warning, had really hurt him, although he’d said nothing to anyone, not even his family. He’d thought that he and Stacy had something unique going, but obviously she hadn’t shared his feelings.

In time, he got over it.

Or so he told himself.

“Well,” Jackson was saying, turning to look at him. “What are you going to do with them?”

Cole looked at the other man, stunned. “Me?”

“Well, yes,” Jackson replied. “They were left on your doorstep.”

Cole still doubted that had been the person’s actual intention. He didn’t always stay over the same days. He could just as likely have not been here. “Undoubtedly by mistake.”

“Maybe not,” Jackson said thoughtfully.

“What are you talking about?” Cole asked.

“Your brother Cody came to his future wife’s rescue and wound up delivering a baby,” Jackson reminded him. “And didn’t Cassidy rescue that baby from the river not too long after that?”

“Yes,” Cole answered cautiously, not sure where Jackson was going with this.

“Can’t be a coincidence,” Jackson told him. “Somebody probably feels that your family’s good with babies. Want my suggestion?” Before Cole could say anything in response, Jackson told him, “Take the babies home with you until you can sort this whole thing out.”

“Wait,” Cole said, feeling as if this whole thing was just spinning out of control. “You’re forgetting one important thing. You’ve got a ranch full of teenage boys, all of them old enough to father a child—or two,” he pointed out.

Jackson studied the infants for a moment. “My guess is that these babies are about three or four weeks old. Maybe less.”

“Okay,” Cole said, waiting for Jackson to make a point.

“That means that if they were fathered by one of the boys on the ranch, it would have had to have happened about ten months or so ago,” Jackson told him.

“Right,” Cole agreed, still waiting for Jackson’s point.

“Well, we’ve only got three boys who have been here that long,” Jackson concluded. “The rest have been here for less time than that.” There were several who had graduated the program and returned home in that time frame, but for now, he decided not to mention that. He still felt that the infants might be Cole’s.

“Okay!” Cole was on his feet. “Let’s go talk to those three hands.”

The babies were making more noise. Jackson’s attention shifted to them. “Well, before we do that, I think these two little people need to be fed first.”

Feeling suddenly, totally, out of his depth, Cole looked around.

“Is Debi here?” Jackson’s wife, Debi, was a registered nurse who worked at the town’s only medical clinic.

Jackson shook his head. “She went in early today. It’s her turn to open the clinic.”

“What about Kim?” Cole asked hopefully, looking at Garrett.

“Sorry, out of luck there,” Garrett told him. “Kim’s away on assignment. She left last week. She still keeps her hand in,” he explained proudly, “doing occasional stories for the magazine that brought her out here in the first place.”

Obviously taking pity on Cole, Jackson volunteered, “However, Rosa’s here,” referring to the Healing Ranch’s resident housekeeper.

Cole was immediately hopeful. “Do you think that she could...?”

“She might, if we ask her nicely,” Jackson speculated.

“She’s probably in the kitchen. I’ll go get her,” Garrett volunteered, taking off.

The babies were beginning to fuss in earnest now. Cole looked at Jackson. “You don’t think that these belong to one of those boys you mentioned, do you?”

“Highly doubtful,” Jackson said. Moving toward the basket, he picked up the louder of the two infants and began rocking it in an attempt to quiet the baby. “You’ve seen the hands. By the end of the day, they’re all too tired to chew, much less try to romance some little lady. Besides, so far this is still an all-male program we have going here. To find a girl his age, our Romeo would have to ride all the way out to town or the reservation. I’d probably know about it if that happened,” Jackson assured him.

“Where did these babies come from?” Rosa Sanchez asked as she walked into the living room.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Jackson told the woman.

Maternal instincts rose to the surface. Rosa picked up the other infant from the basket and held it against her ample bosom.

“Oh, the poor little thing,” she cooed. “He is hungry.”

Cole stared at her, surprised. “You can tell it’s a he? How?” he asked, then pointed out, “The baby’s all bundled up. They both are.”

Rosa merely smiled. “He is noisier. Men usually are,” Rosa told him knowingly. She looked at Jackson. “Bring the other one,” she instructed the man who was technically her boss. And then she turned toward Cole. “You bring the basket. There is no place to lay them down while I take turns feeding them, so the basket will do.”

“Rosa, how are you going to feed them? We don’t have any baby bottles,” Garrett asked.

“Boil a cloth,” Rosa instructed Jackson.

He looked at her in confusion. “And just how is that going to...?”

“When it is clean, we will dip a corner of the cloth into a cup of warm milk and the baby will suck on that.”

“Won’t that take a long time, feeding him that way?” Cole asked.

Rosa gave him what passed for a patient smile. “Just until one of you comes back from the general store in town with two baby bottles,” she replied. “Now go, go,” she urged them. “These babies are getting hungrier by the minute.”

“I’ll go to the general store,” Garrett volunteered, no doubt thinking that was the safest thing for him to do.

“I’ll make breakfast for the boys,” Jackson told his housekeeper, handing off the baby he’d been holding to Cole. “You stay here with Cole and the babies, and do what needs to be done.”

Rosa smiled at him patiently. “Yes, Mr. Jackson.”

* * *

THE PROCEDURE WAS slow and tedious, but, to Cole’s surprise, feeding the infants Rosa’s way seemed to satisfy them, at least for the time being.

“I think this one’s going to suck in the cloth,” he marveled, watching the infant in his arms going at the milk-soaked cloth he was bringing to its lips.

“Don’t forget to keep soaking the cloth,” Rosa prompted. “You don’t want it getting dry.”

“Right,” Cole murmured, taking the cloth he had wrapped around his index finger away from the infant’s mouth and dipping it into the milk he had standing in one of the coffee mugs.

“Mr. McCullough?” Rosa said.

Cole raised his eyes away from the infant he was attempting to feed. It was touch and go at the moment. “Yes?”

“You are sure you are not the father of these babies?” she asked in a low voice. Before he could say anything, she assured him, “It is just the two of us here right now. You can tell me.” She leaned her head in toward him and said in a low voice, “I will not tell anyone.”

“I’m sure, Rosa,” Cole said patiently.

And, for the most part, he was. There was just this tiny little inkling of doubt left, but he knew he was needlessly torturing himself. If there had been a baby—or babies—because of that one wondrous night, Stacy would have told him.

Wouldn’t she?

“Then why would someone leave them on your doorstep?” Rosa asked, dipping the edge of her cloth in the warm milk. “Why not with the sheriff or on the clinic’s doorstep?”

“I really don’t know, Rosa.” The next moment, he exclaimed, “Wow! I sure am glad this baby doesn’t have teeth yet. He’s got really strong lips for an infant.”

He carefully maneuvered his finger out of what appeared to be a steely rosebud mouth.

“She,” Rosa corrected.

He looked at the housekeeper, confused. “She?”

Rosa nodded her head.

He gazed at the infant. She was all bundled up in yellow. Both of the babies were. Yellow was neutral. It didn’t indicate either male or female. “How would you know that?”

Rosa smiled. “I have a gift,” she told him calmly.

His eyes narrowed just a little. “You unwrapped this one, didn’t you?”

The corner of Rosa’s eyes crinkled just a little more as she laughed. “Perhaps I did, a bit,” she admitted.

Rosa’s laugh was infectious and Cole caught himself laughing, as well. Doing so made him feel just a little better—at least, for now.