Christmas On The Ranch: The Rancher's Christmas Baby / Christmas Eve Cowboy

Dixon couldn’t help a sudden fascination with the infant and went to look over his mother’s shoulder. “Can’t believe I have a sister.”

“I don’t know why not,” Jackie said brightly, holding up the baby for him to view. “She looks just like you.”

Dixon narrowed his eyes at the plump-faced infant. “No, she doesn’t.”

“She does,” Jackie insisted. “Except for the dark hair, she looks just like your baby pictures.”

“And your baby pictures look just like your mother’s baby pictures,” Fawn put in from the sink, which was full of suds.

“I have a dishwasher, you know,” he pointed out, aware that he sounded surly but unable to help himself.

She shot back with, “It’s full.”

Surprised, he lifted an eyebrow. It took him days to fill up the dishwasher. Looking back to his mother, he asked, “Is that true? Are my baby pictures that much like yours?”

“Why do you think your father tried to name you after me?”

Now that was a surprise. “Dad wanted to name me Jack?”

She nodded. “We settled on my mother’s maiden name and his middle name. I think he did it partly to curry favor with her. If I’d been a boy, she’d have named me Dixon. So, Greg decided you would be my mom’s Dixon. Didn’t matter. She still hated him.”

“Hate is a strong word,” Dixon muttered, but it wasn’t far off the mark. His grandmother had been the driving force keeping him from his father. She’d always said it was to protect him, but Dixon could never figure out what she’d been trying to protect him from. Greg was a solid citizen, never missed a child support payment, attended church regularly, kept his nose clean and ran a successful business. Yes, he’d gotten her daughter pregnant too young, but he’d married her and tried to be a good parent, which was more than could be said for his mother.

Jackie lifted Bella onto the edge of the table, holding her there in a sitting position. “Would you put her into her carrier, son? She’ll need a dry diaper soon. Then she’ll go down for several hours.”

“I haven’t handled many babies,” Dixon hedged, wiping his palms on his jeans.

“Just pick her up under her arms and lay her in the carrier,” Jackie said with a chuckle. “She holds her head up well now.”

Dixon wiped his hands once more then placed them just above his mother’s. He lifted gently and was shocked by how little the baby weighed. “She’s light as a feather!”

“Duh. She’s a baby.”

“What does she weigh?” he asked, gingerly laying the infant in her padded carrier seat.

“A little over fourteen pounds.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, she only weighed five pounds when she was born.”

“Was she early?”

“About three weeks.”

“But she’s healthy,” Fawn said.

“Perfectly healthy,” Jackie confirmed, smiling.

Bella kicked a foot, and Jackie pretended to gobble her toes, which made the baby smile, her eyebrows dancing.

“She’ll be laughing before long,” Fawn predicted.

“Remember when I used to do that with you?” Jackie asked Dixon. “You used to howl with laughter.”

“I remember you called me your mistake,” Dixon blurted, quite without meaning to.

Jackie’s face registered shock, and she twisted around in her chair. “I did no such thing.”

“You did,” he insisted quietly. “Well, as good as.”

“I don’t know what you heard,” Jackie insisted, “but I never would have said that.”

He told her then exactly what he remembered, and she shook her head sadly. “Son, son. You weren’t the mistake. Yes, I got pregnant and married too young, and it was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, just as my parents predicted, but that wasn’t the mistake. My real mistake was divorcing your father.”

“But...you hated Dad as much as Grandma did!”

“No. No, no.” Jackie shook her head, smiling sadly. “I was heartbroken when Greg came home married to Lucinda. Frankly, Dix, until Harry, I never thought I’d love again.”

“I...I don’t understand any of this.”

She sighed. “Pride and pain make us do foolish things, Dix. I have no pride left, and Harry took care of the pain. He was a good Christian man. He forgave all my mistakes, loved me in spite of them and made me happy, even though I didn’t have you with me.” She looked at Bella, smiling. “We never expected to have a child of our own. He thought he couldn’t. Imagine our joy last Christmas when the doctors told us we were expecting.”

“I confess I’m surprised,” Dixon said, looking at his now drowsy-eyed baby sister. “I wouldn’t have thought you even wanted more children.”

Jackie looked up, obviously surprised. “Why would you think that?”

“It’s not like you were around a lot,” Dixon pointed out. He didn’t say that some folks would have called her neglectful. His grandmother had.

“I needed to work to help pay the bills, Dixon, and that meant either driving long distances on a daily basis or moving you away from your grandparents, which was exactly what your father wanted me to do. That was our main problem, actually. Eventually he gave me an ultimatum. And I made the wrong choice. He left, and I stayed here with you, which meant that I had to work even more, and that just made your grandmother even more critical. Eventually she was raising you, and I was...inconvenient.”

Dixon hadn’t realized that she’d felt that way, but he could see now how she might have. His grandmother had been a strong-willed woman of firm opinions. He didn’t doubt that she’d loved him, but her love had been a rather possessive sort.

“How is Greg?” Jackie asked lightly, too lightly, interrupting Dixon’s thoughts.

“Fine,” Dixon answered in the same vein.

“Still married?”

“Yep.”

“That’s good.”

Something about the way she said that set off alarm bells in Dixon’s mind, which made him say, “Lucinda and the boys are fine, too.”

Jackie smiled knowingly. “Your brothers must be all grown up.”

“Sixteen and fourteen.”