Читать книгу The One Winter Collection - Rebecca Winters - Страница 40

TY Halliday was beyond exhaustion. The driving mix of sleet and snow had soaked through his oilskin slicker hours ago. Icy water was sluicing off the back of his hat’s brim, inside his upturned collar and straight down his spine.

The horse stumbled, as exhausted as his rider, dark setting in too fast.

But beneath all the discomfort, Ty allowed himself satisfaction. He’d found the entire herd. The three cows that shuffled along in front of him were the last of them.

It had been sixteen hours, roughly, since he’d found the broken fence, the cougar tracks. He counted himself lucky most of the herd had petered out and allowed themselves to be herded home, long before these three.

Tracks in fresh snow told the story of the herd splitting in a dozen different directions, the cougar locking in on these three, finally giving up and prowling away down Halliday Creek. These cows, in a panic, had kept on going, almost to the summer range, way up the mountain.

Below him, Ty could see the lights of his house winking against the growing darkness. It made him impatient for hot food, a stiff drink, a scalding shower and his bed.

But the horse, Ben, was young and had already demonstrated great heart, had given everything he had, and so Ty did not push him, but let the young gelding set his own pace down a trail that was slick with new snow.

Finally, finally, the cows were back with the herd, the pasture fences secured, Ben fed and watered. Ty followed a path from the barn, worn deep by a hundred years of Halliday boots, to where the “new” house sat on the top of a knoll of land, in the shadow of the mountain behind it.

The house was called new because it shared the property with the “old” homestead place, which his father had built for his first wife twenty-five years before Ty had been born.

Ty swayed on his back porch, his hand going to the doorknob.

Where it froze.

What had he heard?

Silence.

He cocked his head, listening hard, but heard only the lonely whistle of a December wind under the rafters of the house.

Ty felt he was suffering the delusions of a man who had pushed himself to his limit, and then a mile or two beyond it.

But he was frowning now, thinking of the lights inside his house that had winked him home. He lived alone. He was pretty damned sure that he had not left any lights on when he’d left way before dawn this morning.

The sound came again, and he took a startled step back, nearly tumbling down his back-porch steps.

The sound was definitely coming from inside his house. It was an almost shockingly happy sound. His tired mind grappled with it. He hadn’t had a television for years. He didn’t own a computer. Had he left the radio on?

No. He had not turned on anything this morning, some distress note in the faraway bawl of a cow letting him know something had been amiss. He had scrambled out of bed and out of the house in total darkness and in a hurry.

There was only one thing that made a sound like the one he had just heard.

And there was absolutely no chance it was coming from inside his house.

No, it was exhaustion. An auditory hallucination. Ears straining, picking up noises that did not exist.

Just as Ty was about to dismiss the sound he thought he had heard as a figment of an exhausted mind—clearly it was impossible—it came again. Louder. A babbling sound, like cold creek water tinkling over the first thin shards of ice.

And even though he was not a man with much experience in such things, Ty knew exactly what it was.

There was a baby inside his house.

Ty backed off his porch on silent feet, took a deep breath, felt a need to ground himself. He paused at the corner of his house, surveying the rolling land of the foothills, black against the midnight-blue of a rapidly darkening sky.

Snow-crusted pasture rolled away from him, beyond that a forested valley, all of it ringed by the craggy magnificence of the Rocky Mountains. The rugged sweep of his land soothed him, though it was not “safe.” A man could die—or be injured—in this country fast and hard. The arrival of the cougar was a case in point, though getting wet and lost in December was far more dangerous than an old mountain lion.

Still, for all its challenges, if ever a place was made to put a man’s soul at ease, wasn’t it this one? He had gone away from here once, and nearly lost himself.

The baby’s happy squawking from inside the house was revving up a notch and he felt the simple shock of it down to his wet, frozen toes inside his boots.

A baby?

The truth be told, the danger of the cougar that had passed through his pastures appealed to him more than the mysterious presence of an infant inside his house.

Ty moved along the side of the house until he stood at the front. At the top of a long, long drive that twisted endlessly up the valley from Highway 22—sometimes called The Cowboy Trail—a car was parked in the gravel turnaround.

It was not the kind of car anyone in these parts would be caught dead driving.

No, folks around here favored pickup trucks, diesel, big enough to haul cattle and horses and hay. Trucks that could be shifted into four-wheel drive as the seasons changed and the roads became more demanding. People around here drove vehicles that were big, muddy and ugly.

No one Ty knew drove a car like this: bright red, shaped like a ladybug, impractically low to the ground.

Cute.

No surprise that a baby seat sat in the back, cheerfully padded with a bright fabric that had cartoon dogs and cats on it.

Ty placed his hand on the hood. Cold. The car had been here for a time.

He checked the plate. Alberta. A Calgary parking sticker was in the left-hand corner of the windshield. Not so far from wherever home was, then, maybe one and a half, two hours, if the roads had been good.

It would be easy enough to slide open the door and find the paperwork, but when he tried the door, it was locked. Under different circumstances he might have seen that as hilarious. Locked? He allowed his eyes to sweep the unpopulated landscape again. Against what?

He turned back to the house. Then he saw his front window.

For the second time in less than five minutes, Ty felt himself stumble backward in shock. His sense of being in an exhausted state of distorted reality increased. He made himself stand very still, squint through the sleet and snow, demanding it go away.

It was a Christmas tree. And it was real, because when he blinked hard and looked again, it was still there. Behind plate glass, bright lights winked against dark boughs, sent little splashes of color onto the gathering snow in his front yard.

He checked his driveway again, seeking familiar landmarks. Turned and studied his house, reassured himself that had been his pasture the cows had been shepherded into, his barn where he had put up his horse.

His eyes went back to the tree.

As far as Ty knew, there had never been one set up in the new Halliday house.

Or at least not in the twenty-six years he had lived here.

And in Ty’s exhausted mind, a single, vulnerable hope crept in, a wish that he had made as a small boy.

Maybe his mother had come home.

He shook off the thought, irritated that it had somehow breached the wall of his adult world. Wishes were for children, and there had been no chance of his ever coming true, thanks to his father.

In his tired mind it did not bode well that the car in the yard, and the baby in his house, and the tree in his window had stirred something up that was better left alone, that he had not given any power to for years.

He went around to the back door again, habit more than anything else. In these parts the front door was rarely used, even by company. The back entrance was built to accommodate dirty boots and jackets, hats, gloves, bridles hung indoors in cold weather to keep the bits warm.

Ty Halliday took a deep breath, aware that the pit of his stomach felt exactly as it had in his days on the rodeo circuit when you gave that quick nod, the chute door opened, and suddenly you were riding a whirling explosion of bovine motion and malice.

He put his hand on the doorknob and felt it resist his flick of the wrist. At first he thought it was stuck, but then in an evening where he could have done without one more shock, he was shocked again. His door was locked.

Okay. Maybe one of his neighbors was playing a practical joke on him. Unlocked doors invited pranks. It was a tightly knit community and they all loved to have a laugh. Melvin Harris had once come home to find a burro in his living room. When Cathy Lambert had married Paul Cranston some of the neighbors had snuck into their house and filled every single drawer with confetti. They’d been married six years, and sometimes you still saw a piece of it sticking to one of Cathy’s sweaters.

Ty lifted a worn welcome mat and found a rusty key. Sometimes he locked up if he was going to be away for a few days.

He slid the key in the door and let himself in, braced for some kind of battle, but what greeted him was enough to make him want to lay down his weapons.

His house, which he had always seen primarily as providing shelter, felt like home.

First, it smelled good. There was a light perfume in the air, woman, baby, underlying the smell of something wonderful cooking.

Second, the sound was enough to break every barrier a man had placed around his heart—and Ty would be the first to admit in his case, that was many. The baby was now chortling with glee.

Ty took the bridle he had slung over his shoulder and hung it on an empty peg. Then he took off his wet gloves and tossed them on the floor. He slid his sodden feet from muddy boots, and then took a deep breath—gladiator entering the ring to face unexpected horrors—and went up the stairs off the landing and surveyed his kitchen.

A fat baby with a shock of impossibly curly red hair sat dead center of Ty’s kitchen on a blanket surrounded by toys. The baby, a boy, if the dump trucks and fire engines that surrounded him were any indication, was gurgling joyously.

The baby turned at his entrance, regarded him solemnly with gigantic soft brown eyes.

Instead of looking alarmed by the arrival of a big, irritated stranger, whose long Aussie-style riding coat was dripping water on the floor, the baby’s eyes crinkled happily, and the joyous gurgling increased.

“Papa,” he shouted.

Ty said a word he was pretty sure it was against the law to use in the presence of babies.

Or ladies.

Not that she looked like a lady, exactly. Through a wide archway, the kitchen opened onto the living room, and first a crop of hair as curly as the baby’s appeared from behind the boughs of the tree. And then eyes, like the baby’s, too, large and soft and brown, startled now.

Startled?

It was his house.

Cute. Just like the car. She had a light dusting of freckles across a delicate nose, curly hair the color of liquid honey in a jar. At first, he thought she had a boyish build, but Ty quickly saw her curves were just disguised in a masculine plaid shirt.

She didn’t have on a speck of makeup and was one of those rare women who didn’t need it, either.

“Who are you?” she demanded, a tiny tremor in her voice.

What kind of question was that to be asked in his own house? He could tell, from the way her eyes skittered around—looking for something to hit him with if he moved on the baby or her—that she was not just startled, she was scared. Any remaining thought that this might be a prank disappeared.

Her pulse beat frantically in the hollow of her slender neck.

Ty had to fight, again, the notion that he was somehow dreaming, and that he was going to wake up very soon. He didn’t like it one little bit that exhaustion would make it way too easy to appreciate this scene.

That exhaustion was making some childhood wish try to push out of a dark corner of his mind.

Annoyed with himself—a man who believed in his strength and his determination, a man who put no faith at all in wishes—Ty planted his legs firmly apart, folded his arms over his chest.

She darted out from behind the tree, dropped the tangle of Christmas tree lights that were in her hand and grabbed a lamp. She yanked it off the side table and stood there holding it like a baseball bat.

Ty squinted at her. “Now, what are you going to do with that?” he asked mildly.

“If you touch my baby or me, you’ll find out!”

The lamp was constructed out of an elk antler. It was big and heavy and it was already costing her to hold it up. It made him very aware of how small she was.

He had to fight to get beyond the exhaustion and the irritation that came with the weariness, to the same calm energy he tapped into to tame a nervous colt. He thought of the locked car and the locked back door.

He said, “I’m way more scared of a baby than that lamp. Especially one who calls me Papa.”

He thought maybe her hold on the lamp relaxed marginally.

“How did you get into my house?” she demanded. “I locked the door.”

“I used a key,” he said, his voice deliberately quiet, firm, calm. “I happen to have one. I’m Ty Halliday. And last time I looked, this was my place.”

The lamp wavered. Doubt played across her features for a second. Then she brought her weapon back up to batting position, glaring at him.

“Why don’t you put that down?” he suggested. “Your arms are starting to shake. We both know I could take it from you if I had a mind to.”

“Just try it,” she warned him.

It was a little bit like an ant challenging an aardvark, but somehow he didn’t think pointing that out to her was going to help the situation, and he reluctantly admired her spunk.

Something yanked on the hem of his coat. He looked down. The baby had crawled over and had grabbed a fistful of the wet oilskin of Ty’s jacket. He was pulling himself up on it.

“Papa!” he crowed.

“Don’t touch him!”

“Believe me, I’m not going to.”

In a flash, she had set down the lamp, crossed the room, pried her baby’s fist loose of his jacket and scooped him up into her arms.

This close he could smell them both. Her scent was subtle. Some flower. Lilac? No. Lavendar. It was mingled with baby powder. He wasn’t sure how he recognized either of those scents, not common to his world, but he did, and it felt as if they were enveloping him.

She took a step back, eyeing him warily.

“You’re in the wrong place,” he said. “This really is my house. I’m cold and I’m wet and I’m dead tired, so let’s get this sorted out so you can move on and I can go to bed.”

Apparently the fact that he wanted to get rid of her rather than steal either her baby or her virtue reassured her in some way.

She pondered him. “If this is really your house, what’s in the top drawer in the kitchen?”

“Knives and spoons and forks.”

“That’s in the top drawer of every kitchen!”

“You asked the question,” he reminded her.

“Okay, second drawer.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m losing patience,” he warned her, but then gave in. The sooner he got that scared look off her face, the sooner she would realize her error and get on her way.

“Tea towels, once white, now the color of weak tea. One red oven glove with a hole burned right through it. Next drawer—potato masher, soup ladle, rolling pin, hammer for beating the tough out of rough cuts of beef.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

“How long have you been here that you know what’s in my drawers?”

Her eyes shifted guiltily and made him wonder exactly what other drawers she had been investigating.

He swore softly. “Have you made it as far as my bedroom?”

“Oh, God,” she said again.

The fear drained out of her, leaving her looking pale and shaky. She actually wobbled on her feet.

“Don’t faint,” he said. “I don’t want to have to catch the kid.”

“Oh,” she said sharply, drawing herself up, annoyed, “I am not going to faint. What kind of weak ninny do you take me for?”

“Weak ninny? How about the kind that reads Jane Eyre? How about the kind who is lost in the country, setting up housekeeping in someone else’s house?” he said smoothly.

The truth was he liked her annoyance better than the pale, shaky look. He decided it would be good, from a tactical standpoint, to encourage annoyance.

“You don’t look like you would know the first thing about Jane Eyre,” she said.

“That’s right. Things are primitive out here in the sticks. We don’t read and can barely write. When we do, we use a tablet and a chisel.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking hard. “Now I’ve insulted you. I’ve moved in to the wrong house and I’ve insulted you. But I’m not going to faint. I promise. I’m not the fainting kind.”

“Reassuring,” he said drily. “And just for the record, I’m not easily insulted. It would take a lot more than the insinuation that I’m not up on my literary classics.”

She sucked in a deep, steadying breath. “This isn’t the McFinley residence, is it?”

Her face was crumpling, all the wariness and defiance seeping out of it. It was worse than pale and shaky.

He had the most ridiculous notion of wanting to comfort her, to move closer to her, pat her on the shoulder, tell her it would be all right.

But of course, he had no way of knowing if it would be all right, and he already knew if you moved too fast around a nervous colt, that little tiny bit of trust you had earned went out the window a whole lot faster than it had come in.

“But you know the McFinleys?” she asked, the desperation deepening in her voice. “I’m housesitting for them. For six months. They’ve left for Australia. They had to leave a few days before I could get away….”

He shook his head. He had the horrible feeling she was within a hairsbreadth of crying. Nervous colts were one thing. Crying women were a totally different thing. Totally.

The baby had sensed the change in his mother’s tone. His happy babbling had ceased. He was eyeing his mother, his face scrunched up alarmingly, waiting for his cue.

One false move, Ty warned himself, and they would both be crying.

Ty checked the calendar in his mind. It was six days before Christmas. Why did a woman take her baby and find a new place to live six days before Christmas?

Running.

From what, or from whom, he told himself firmly, fell strictly into the none-of-his-business category.

“Mona and Ron?” Her voice faded as she correctly read his expression.

He was silent.

“You’ve never heard of them,” she deduced. She sucked in another deep breath, assessing him.

Ty watched, trying not to let amusement tug at his mouth, as she apparently decided he was not an ax murderer, and made the decision to be brave.

She moved the baby onto her hip and wiped her hand—she’d been scared enough to sweat?—on slacks that weren’t made for riding horses. Like the shirt, the slacks emphasized the surprising lushness of such a slight figure.

All the defiance, all the I’ll-lay-my-life-down-for-my-baby drained out of her. She looked wildly embarrassed at having been found making herself at home in someone else’s house. Still, blushing, she tried for dignity as she extended her hand.

“I’m Amy Mitchell.”

The blush made her look pretty. And vulnerable. He didn’t want to take her hand, because despite her effort to be brave she still looked a breath away from crying, and the baby was still watching her intently, waiting.

“Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, even though she wore no wedding band. He took her hand.

Ty knew instantly why he had resisted taking it. Amy Mitchell’s hand in his felt tiny, soft beyond soft. The touch of her hand, his closeness to her, made him aware of his bleak world in ways that made him uncomfortable.

Her eyes were not brown, as he had initially thought from across the room, but a kaleidoscope of greens and golds, shot through with rich, dark hints of coffee color.

Now that she didn’t feel she had her back against the wall, with a home invader coming at her, her eyes were soft and worried. Her honey-in-a-jar hair was scattered about her face in a wild disarray of curls that made him want to right it, to feel its texture beneath his fingertips.

Ty Halliday’s world was a hard place. There was no softness in it, and no room for softness, either. There was no room in his world for the tears that shone, unshed, behind the astounding loveliness of her eyes; there was no room in his world for the bright, hopeful lights of the Christmas tree.

The baby, eyes shifting from him to his mother and back again, suddenly relaxed. “Papa,” he cooed, and leaned away from his mommy, reaching for Ty.

Ty took a defensive step backward.

There was no room in his world for such innocence or trust. All these things were as foreign to Ty as an exotic, unvisited land.

He realized he was still holding Amy Mitchell’s hand. She realized it, too, and with a deepening blush, slipped it from his.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered. “I have GPS.”

She said that as if her faulty system or reading of it was the cause of the stain moving up her cheeks, instead of her awareness of him.

And maybe it was.

But he didn’t think so.

Still, he focused on the GPS, too, something safe in a room that suddenly seemed fraught with dangers of a kind he had never considered before.

The faith city folk put in their gadgets never failed to astound him, but aware she was still terrifyingly close to the tear stage, he tried to think of a way to phrase it that wouldn’t wound her.

“It wouldn’t be the first time GPS got people into trouble in this country,” he said after some thought.

“Really?”

Obviously, she was pleased that hers was not an isolated case of being misled by her global positioning system, and he could have left it at that.

Instead, he found the worry lines dissolving on her forehead encouraging enough to want to make them—and the possibility of tears—disappear altogether.

“One of the neighbors found an old couple stranded in George’s Pass last year. They’d been on the news. Missing for a week.”

But instead of being further reassured that her mistake was not all that uncommon, Amy looked aghast. He remembered the locked doors and saw her considering other scenarios. Disastrous possibilities flashed through her eyes as she considered what could have happened to her if she had followed her GPS instructions somewhere other than his driveway.

Which just served as a reminder that he could not really be trusted with soft things or a woman so frightened of life she locked everything all the time and was ready to defend herself with a lamp if need be.

She marshaled herself and turned away from him. She plunked the baby down on his padded rear and began to whip around the room, picking up baby things, putting them in a pile. Given the short amount of time she had been here, the pile grew to a mountain with astonishing swiftness.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Halliday. We’ll go right away. I’m so embarrassed.”

If he had thought she was blushing before, that had only been a hint of the main event.

Amy Mitchell was turning a shade of red that matched some of the lights on the tree. Was that a smile tickling around the edges of his mouth? He tried to remember the last time he had smiled.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town had made him smile, he decided. He’d reread that a week or so ago.

No doubt his current good cheer was because his visitor was so intent on leaving. There was no need to tell her to pack her baby and get the hell out of his house. She was doing it all on her own.

“It will take me a minute to gather my things,” she said, all business and flurrying activity. “I’ll leave the groceries.”

“Groceries?”

“Oh, I stocked the fridge. I thought I was going to be living here, after all.”

“You’re not leaving the groceries,” he said.

“Oh, no, really. You didn’t have a thing in your fridge. That’s part of why I thought I was in the right place. Nothing in the fridge, no tree up, no socks on the floor.”

She had been in his bedroom.

“Really, I didn’t think anyone had lived here recently.” She shot him a look that was faintly accusing and faintly sympathetic. “It certainly didn’t look as though anyone lived here.”

“I don’t need your groceries,” he said a bit more tightly than he intended. He was so hungry, and whatever she had in the fridge would be better than the tin of stew he had planned on opening. But to admit that might invite more sympathy, and he definitely didn’t need her sympathy.

So his place looked unlived in. So it wasn’t going to be the featured house on Cozy Country Homes. So what? It was a place to hang his hat and lay his head. He didn’t need more than that.

Or at least he hadn’t felt as if he had for a long, long time. But there it was again, unwanted, uninvited emotion whispering along his spine.

Yearning. A wish he had managed to bury deep to have something that he did not have.

“I started to unpack. I’ve got some things in the bedroom,” she explained as she scurried around the room, the remnants of her embarrassment making her awkward. She dropped a baby puzzle on the floor, and the wooden pieces scattered.

He just knew she had been in there, in his bedroom. And he knew, suddenly, why it bothered him, too. That could move yearning in a whole other direction if he let it, which he wasn’t going to.

He hadn’t allowed himself feelings for a long, long time. It must be the Christmas tree, the baby, the scents, the astonishing discovery of a woman in his house, his own exhaustion, making him oddly vulnerable, making him aware of a hole a mile deep where his soul should be.

He watched Amy Mitchell, on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces of the puzzle, stuffing them into a box. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the baby roll off his rear end onto all fours.

With startling speed and unsettling determination, he crawled across the floor, making a beeline for Ty.

Ty stepped out of his way. The baby followed like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.

“Papa!” he yelled.

“Where is his papa?” he asked, deftly sidestepping the baby one more time.