A Baby on the Ranch

There were five horses in all.

Five horses might not seem like a lot to the average outsider who was uninformed about raising and training quarter horses, but it was a lengthy procedure, especially when multiplied by five and no one else was around to help with the work.

The latter, he had to admit, was partially his own fault. He didn’t have the money to take on hired help, but that still didn’t mean that he had to go it alone if he didn’t want to.

It was understood that if he needed them, he could easily put out a call to one or more of his brothers and they’d be there to help him for the day or the week. He had four older brothers, ranchers all, and they could readily rotate the work between them until Eli was finally on his feet and on his way to making a profit.

But for Eli it boiled down to a matter of pride—stubborn pride—and this kept him from calling any of his brothers and asking for help. He was determined that, as the youngest male in the Rodriguez family, he would turn the ranch into a success without having to depend on any help from his relatives.

Ordinarily he found a certain satisfaction in working with the horses and doing all the chores that were involved in caring for the animals. But today was a different story. Impatience fairly hummed through his veins.

He wanted to be done with the chores, done with the training, so that he could go back to the house and be with Kasey. He really didn’t like leaving her alone like this for the better part of the day.

He sought to ease his conscience by telling himself that she could do with a little time to herself. What woman couldn’t? His being out here gave her the opportunity to get herself together after this enormous emotional roller-coaster ride she’d just been on—gaining a child and losing a husband.

Not that losing Hollis was really much of a loss.

In addition Eli was fairly certain that Kasey wouldn’t want him around to witness any first-time mistakes that she was bound to make with the baby. In her place, he certainly wouldn’t want someone looking over his shoulder, noting the mistakes he was making.

Even if he wanted to chuck everything and go back up to the house to be with her, he couldn’t just up and leave the horses. Not again. Not twice in two days. He’d already neglected their training segment yesterday when he’d gone to bring Kasey and the baby home from the hospital in Pine Ridge.

Not that he actually neglected the horses themselves. He’d made sure that he’d left food for the stallions and God knew they had no trouble finding the feed, or the water, for that matter. But the stalls, well, they were decidedly more ripe-smelling than they should have been. Breathing had been a real problem for him this morning as he mucked out the stalls.

Raising horses was a tricky business. He knew that if they were left on their own for too long, the horses could revert back to their original behavior and then all the hours that he’d put into training them would be lost.

Now they wouldn’t be lost, he thought with a wisp of satisfaction. But he was really, really beginning to feel beat.

He was also aware of the fact that his stomach had been growling off and on now for the past couple of hours. Maybe even longer. The growling served to remind him that he hadn’t brought any lunch with him.

Usually, when that happened, he’d think nothing of just taking a break and going back to the house to get something to eat. But he really didn’t want to risk just walking in on Kasey. What if she was in the middle of breast-feeding Wayne?

The thought generated an image in his head that had him pausing practically in midstep as his usually tame imagination took flight.

He had no business thinking of her that way and he knew it, but that still didn’t help him erase the scene from his brain.

Taking a deep breath, Eli forced himself to shake free of the vivid daydream. He had work to do and standing there like some oversexed adolescent, allowing his mind to wander like that, wouldn’t accomplish anything—except possibly to frustrate him even further.

Silver Streak, the horse he was currently grooming, suddenly began nudging him, as if clearly making a bid for his attention. The horse didn’t stop until he slowly ran his hand over the silken muzzle.

“Sorry, Silver,” Eli said, stroking the animal affectionately. “I was daydreaming. I won’t let it happen again.”

As if in response, the stallion whinnied. Eli grinned. “Always said you were smarter than the average rancher, which in this case would be me,” he added with a self-deprecating laugh.

Since it was summer, the sun was still up when Eli fed the last horse and officially called it a day. He had returned all five of the quarter horses to their stalls and then locked the stable doors before finally returning to his house.

Reaching the ranch house, Eli made as much noise as he could on the front porch so that Kasey was alerted to his arrival and would know that he was coming in. He didn’t want to catch her off guard.

Satisfied that he’d made enough of a racket to raise the dead, Eli finally opened the front door and called out a hearty greeting. “Hi, Kasey, I’m coming in.”

“Of course you’re coming in,” Kasey said, meeting him at the door as he walked in. “You live here.”

Eli cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable with the topic he was about to broach. “I thought that maybe you were, you know, busy,” he emphasized, settling for a euphemism.

“Well, I guess I have been that,” she admitted, shifting her newly awakened son to her other hip. “But that still doesn’t explain why you feel you have to shout a warning before walking into your own home.”

He didn’t hear the last part of her sentence. By then he was too completely stunned to absorb any words at all. Momentarily speechless, Eli retraced his steps and ducked outside to double check that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the wrong house—not that there were any others on the property.

The outside of the house looked like his, he ascertained. The inside, however, definitely did not. It bore no resemblance to the house he had left just this morning.

What was going on here?

“What did you do?” he finally asked.

“You don’t like it,” Kasey guessed, doing her best to hide her disappointment. She’d really wanted to surprise him—but in a good way. Belatedly she recalled that some men didn’t like having their things touched and rearranged.

“I don’t recognize it,” Eli corrected, looking around again in sheer amazement. This was his place? Really?

The house he had left this morning had looked, according to Miss Joan’s gentle description of it, as if it had gone dancing with a tornado. There were no rotting carcasses of stray creatures who had accidentally wandered into the house in search of shelter, but that was the most positive thing that could have been said about the disorder thriving within his four walls.

He’d lived in this house for the past five months and in that amount of time, he’d managed to distribute a great deal of useless material throughout the place. Each room had its own share of acquired clutter, whether it was dirty clothing, used dishes, scattered reading material or some other, less identifiable thing. The upshot was that, in general, the sum total of the various rooms made for a really chaotic-looking home.

Or at least it had when he’d left for the stables that morning. This evening, he felt as though someone had transported him to a different universe. Everything appeared to be in its place. The whole area looked so neat it almost hurt his eyes to look around.

This would take some getting used to, he couldn’t help thinking.

The hopeful expression had returned to Kasey’s face. She’d just wanted to surprise and please him. She knew she’d succeeded with the former, but she was hoping to score the latter.

“I just thought that I should clean up a little,” she told him, watching his face for some sign that he actually liked what she had done.

“A little?” he repeated, half stunned, half amused. “There was probably less effort involved in building this house in the first place.” This cleanup, he knew, had to have been a major undertaking. Barring magical help from singing mice and enchanted elves, she’d accomplished this all herself.

He regarded her with new admiration.

She in turn looked at him, trying to understand why he didn’t seem to have wanted her to do this. Had she trespassed on some basic male ritual? Was he saving this mess, not to mention the rumpled clothes and dirty dishes, for some reason?

“You want me to mess things up again?” she offered uncertainly.

“No.” He took hold of her by her shoulders, enunciating each word slowly so that they would sink in. “I don’t want you to do anything. I just wanted you to relax in between feedings. To maybe try to rest up a little, saving your strength. Taking care of a newborn is damn hard enough to get used to without single-handedly trying to restore order to a place that could easily have been mistaken for the town dump—”

She smiled and he could feel her smile going straight to his gut, stirring things up that had no business being stirred up—not without an outlet.

Eli struggled to keep a tight rein on his feelings and on his reaction to her. He succeeded only moderately.

“It wasn’t that bad,” she stressed.

She was being deliberately kind. “But close,” he pointed out.

Her mouth curved as she inclined her head. “Close,” Kasey allowed. “I like restoring order, making things neat,” she explained. “And when he wasn’t fussing because he was hungry or needed changing, Wayne cooperated by sleeping. So far, he’s pretty low maintenance,” she said, glancing at her sleeping son. “I had to do something with myself.”