Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) (7 page)

She pushed from his kiss, from his arms, sidestepped away from him and, without looking at him, said, “You’d better go.”

He didn’t move, but she could feel him staring at her again; she could feel his confusion, his anger. After a moment he said, “I’ll clean up here first. You’ve had a long day. Put your feet up and watch some TV or go to bed.”

It was a direct order, given in a voice tight with control. But Beth decided to obey it just to finally put the needed distance between them.

She didn’t say good-night or thank him for lunch or dinner or clearing the mess. She simply straightened her shoulders and walked out.

Because to say anything else, to do anything else, to even raise her eyes to his one more time, could all too easily have put her back in his arms.

Where a part of her wanted much too badly to be.

“R
obert Yazzie here.”

“That sounded very official, old man,” Ash answered his grandfather’s telephone greeting affectionately, when he reached the elderly Indian at the offices of the Blackwolf Foundation early the next morning.

Robert laughed as if he’d just pulled off a good joke. “It’s this big chair of yours. Makes me feel like the president.”

Ash had asked his maternal grandfather to oversee the foundation during his absence. Robert Yazzie was not a businessman, but he had common sense and an easygoing nature that let him handle things without panicking. Plus, Ash knew he wouldn’t try tackling anything beyond figurehead status. And the elderly man enjoyed brief interruptions to his retirement.

“How’s that bum knee of yours?” Ash asked, settling down on his unmade bed to talk.

“It’s keeping me off the golf course or I wouldn’t be making your apologies for you to all those people you’re standing up,” Robert answered with yet another laugh that made him sound as jolly as Saint Nick.

Ash had been raised by both his grandfathers, but his relationship with Robert was the closer of the two. He’d stayed with Robert the majority of the time, going to work with him on weekends and during vacations from school. As the less temperamental of the two grandfathers, Robert had seemed to enjoy having his grandson’s company, and Ash had preferred to be with him, too.

It was Robert who had instilled in Ash the importance of family and Indian ways and community. But most of all, the old man was just plain fun to be around. His love of life was infectious. Ash counted him not only as grandfather, mentor and teacher, but also as his best friend.

“You aren’t driving Miss Lightfeather too crazy, are you?” Ash teased him back, sitting against the headboard and swinging his feet onto the mattress to cross them at the ankle.

“I don’t think that woman likes me,” Robert confided in a lowered voice as if the secretary might overhear.

That made Ash laugh. “Miss Lightfeather doesn’t like anybody.”

“Except you. I think she had a crush on you. But I told her about the baby the way you wanted me to and it didn’t sit well with her. She even asked me if I was sure it was yours, like she was hoping it wasn’t.”

“It’s mine.”

“That’s what I told her and I got cold coffee the rest of the afternoon yesterday because of it.”

“Don’t let her get away with that. Be firm with her.”

“Ha! She might hurt me.”

Again Ash laughed. His grandfather was over six feet tall and weighed upward of two hundred pounds. Compared to that, even the pudgy Miss Lightfeather was a bantamweight. “How’s everything else going?”

“Fine, but where is everybody? Don’t you have a staff of some kind?”

“Not really, you know that.”

“I knew you didn’t have any full-time help, but I thought you at least had some part-time people. Nobody’s been around but Miss Lightfeather and me.”

“I don’t schedule my part-timers regularly, only as I need them. I do as much as I can myself—or should I say, Miss Lightfeather and I do as much as we can. It cuts costs, and that way, rather than putting a lot of money in salaries, I can spread it around where it can do more good.”

“Ahh. I’ve been hearing a lot about cost effectiveness and money, that’s for sure,” Robert said. From there the elderly Indian brought him up-to-date on the proceeds from a benefit dinner the night before to raise money for the homeless. He told him about a bequest that had been left to the foundation by a Native American woman who had just died, and related several other, smaller events, as well as news of the trial of the boy in Alaska whom Ash had hired legal counsel for.

“So how’s our little Beth?” Robert asked when he’d finished.

Ash knew his grandfather and Beth were close. They’d shared interests in several things and Robert had taken her under his wing. “She’s too skinny.”

“That’s not good. We’re a family of big babies. She’s going to need her strength and some meat on her bones when it comes time to deliver your son.”

Ash smiled. “You’re sure it’s a boy, are you?”

“Just hoping. It’s good to have a boy to carry on the name.” Robert paused and then ventured cautiously. “Now that the shock has worn off, how do you feel about this?”

“A little giddy,” he admitted what he wouldn’t admit to anyone but his grandfather.

Robert chuckled. “Then you’re not unhappy about it?”

“I’ve surprised myself by how excited I am.”

“Babies will do that. There’s something magical about them.” This time Robert cleared his throat. “So, uh, what’re you going to do about it?”

“What am I going to do about what?”

“Well, you know, babies have a right to be born into a loving house complete with a mother and a father.”

“This one will be born into two loving homes, one with a mother and one with a father. It gets a bonus,” Ash said, trying to make light of what he really didn’t see that way.

“Is that how you want it?”

“We’re divorced, Pap, that’s just how it is.” Ash didn’t have to be in the same room with his grandfather to see him nodding his head in that sage way that accepted what he said and still managed to disagree with it.

“I surely do miss that girl,” Robert said. “She plays a mean gin rummy. Haven’t had as good a game as she gives me since she left.”

“Are you telling me you’re sorry she didn’t get custody of you in the settlement?” Ash joked.

“Just saying I miss her. Thought you did, too, the way you were grumbling around here when you moved in. You sleepin’ nights yet?”

“I sleep fine,” Ash lied.

“And here I was thinking all those times I heard you up walkin’ around were because your bed was too lonely without her.”

“I’ve slept in plenty of beds without her.”

“Humph. Maybe too many. Sometimes it seemed like she spent more time with me than she did with you.”

“She never complained about it. But if you have something to say to me, old man, spit it out.”

“Only thinking that with a baby coming now, maybe she’d take you back.”

“She acts like she can’t stand the sight of me.”

“Must have kept her eyes closed to get that baby in her belly, is that what you’re tellin’ me?”

“She must have.”

“So what’re you doing there?”

“Claiming what’s mine.”

“The baby, you mean.”

“The baby.”

“Are you sure that’s all that’s yours? Maybe Beth could be, too, if you handled things right.”

“Maybe you ought to come here and
handle
things and I should just stay on the reservation and run the foundation. I think she likes you better anyway.”

“Maybe. We had some good times together, me and that little girl.”

Ash said, “Look, Pap, I have to go. You have the number here at the lodge and the one at the ranch, in case you need me, right?”

“We’ll be fine. Between Miss Lightfeather and me, we could run the world. It’s Beth who needs you now.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“Don’t be too sure of it.”

Ash exchanged goodbyes with his grandfather rather than comment on that and hung up, thinking as he did that if there was one thing he
was
sure of, it was that Beth Heller didn’t think she needed him. For anything.

Except maybe making this baby. She hadn’t been able to do that alone. And there was one other thing he was sure of, though he wouldn’t have admitted it even to his grandfather. He was still more attracted to her than to any woman he’d ever met.

He leaned his head back and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about the night before.

He couldn’t believe he’d actually kissed her.

After the day they’d had together, with her letting him know his very presence irked her, he’d kissed her, of all things.

And worse than that, he’d wanted to do a whole lot more than kiss her.

Old habits die hard, he told himself. That was all it was.

Sex had always been good. Toward the end of their marriage, it was the only time he ever felt close to her. The only time it seemed that he could reach her, understand her and what she wanted and needed and would accept from him. The only time he wasn’t so damn frustrated by her.

In fact, making love to her had often been a way to overcome those other, less than pleasant feelings she’d raised in him. So last night, at the height of her confusing and frustrating him and making him feel helpless and useless and all the things he hated, he’d just naturally turned to what he’d always done before.

“Right. As if you weren’t so hot for her you could have sizzled those steaks on your skin,” he said out loud.

All right, it hadn’t just been a response to other things. He’d wanted her.

She’d turned to face him and raised those big blue eyes to him, parted her lips in what had looked like an invitation, and at that moment—just as when they were married—nothing else had mattered.

And when he’d kissed her, she’d kissed him back. One hundred percent.

For a few moments, anyway. Before she’d ended it and acted as if she couldn’t even stand to look at him.

The woman drove him crazy. She really did. He didn’t know what the hell she wanted.

But he knew what he’d wanted.

He’d wanted to take her upstairs to the nearest bed and make love to her until neither of them could walk.

Ash swung his feet to the floor and jammed his hands through his hair in self-disgust at the fact that just thinking about kissing her flooded him with a fresh wave of desire.

But he knew he had to control it. She didn’t want him. She didn’t want anything to do with him. That was obvious. Hell, she hadn’t even been able to pick out baby furniture with him.

It was just too bad her total contempt of him didn’t cool things off inside of him.

Because it was pure hell to be burning up with wanting a woman who couldn’t even tolerate him.

* * *

Beth was a little surprised not to find Ash there when she went downstairs around noon that day. She’d been down much earlier, having gotten up at the crack of dawn, fixed herself a light breakfast and then gone back to her room to work on Kansas’s wedding dress. Of course he hadn’t been around then. But she’d thought that on her second trip she’d probably find him waiting, the way he had been the day before.

Not that she wanted him to be.

But she’d thought his claim that he was sticking around would last more than one day before he answered some summons from somewhere.

Or maybe he’d been as shaken as she was by that kiss and it had convinced him that their being together was not a good idea. Maybe it had driven him back to the reservation all on its own.

And if she knew just a pang of disappointment at the thought that his time here had been so short-lived?

She beat it down like a spark in a hayloft.

If he had left Elk Creek, it was for the best, she told herself as she headed for the kitchen. It was just what she’d wanted. What she’d hoped for. Now she could concentrate on the baby and carving out a new life for herself back in her old hometown without giving Asher Blackwolf another thought.

In the kitchen she went straight to the refrigerator. But as she stood in the open door and looked at her choices for lunch, she realized that somewhere between her bedroom and here she’d lost her appetite again.

Maybe if she waited awhile, it would come back. Kansas was due for a fitting anytime now, and, once her friend got here and she had some company, she might be able to eat then.

As she closed the refrigerator door a loud clanging of metal hammering metal sounded from outside.

She hadn’t realized Jackson was working nearby today and, grateful for the distraction, she went to the window above the sink to see what he was doing.

But out at the barn off the southwest corner of the house, her brother wasn’t alone. And, to Beth’s immense surprise, he wasn’t the one working the forge and bellows to form a horseshoe. Ash was.

Beth couldn’t have been more stunned if she were looking at the pope on a bucking bronco, for never had she seen her former husband do any sort of manual labor. Ash was a businessman through and through.

Or so she’d thought.

He’d hired Indian boys on the reservation to mow the lawn in the summers and shovel the snow in the wintertime, and men to paint the house and fix anything that needed it around the place.

And yet there he was, stripped to the waistband of another pair of hip-hugging blue jeans, doing the work of a burly blacksmith.

“Amazing,” she whispered to herself as she absorbed the idea.

But the sight was pretty amazing, too.

Hot weather had definitely arrived on this last day of June. The temperature was easily in the nineties. The heat emanating from the forge was so intense she could see the wavy distortion in the air, and she marveled over the physical exertion that went with melding iron into shape. Sweat glistened over Ash’s naturally bronzed flesh.

And it was something to behold.

There was a very primitive and purely masculine beauty in what her eyes feasted on. Hard, honed muscles in his shoulders, back and biceps rose and rippled and proved their power. Even the planes of his handsome face seemed sharper, the skin more taut over the chiseled bones.

For a few moments she watched in wonder as his big, black-gloved hands worked the forge bellows and then took the shoe to the anvil, where he wielded the hammer with a skill she hadn’t known he possessed. But appreciation for his workmanship couldn’t keep her gaze from sliding up the tensed tendons of his forearms, all the way to his back again.

As always, he wore his coarse, straight hair in a queue that reached to the middle of his spine, clinging to it and pointing downwards like a shaft and arrow to where two slight dimples winked at her from just above his jean pockets.

Holding the finished shoe in long pincers, he plunged the hot metal into a bucket of water, sending a loud sizzle through the air. Beth thought cold water thrown against her own skin at that moment might have made the same sound.

And something in the pit of her stomach knotted and twisted with yearning.

Her hands itched to glide along his ribs, to feel the power in his arms beneath her palms, to absorb the heat and the potency of him. She wanted to bury her face in the slight valley of his pectorals, to taste the saltiness of his flesh, to feel the hardness of those muscles against her softer parts, to kiss a path down the center line of his torso to his navel, and maybe lower...