Finally Home (2 page)

“Stew?” Colt questioned, voice level as if he didn't realize the girl's diabolical plans.

“Potato beef.”

“With cheesy dumplings?”

“And honeyed carrots.”

He sighed dreamily. “We'll be back,” he repeated, then opened the door.

“Don't rush,” Emily said, and kissing Bliss's forehead, hugged her even closer. “I'm going to feed the baby first anyway.”

Colt cupped the infant's duckling-down head for a second, then stepped back, motioning Casie to precede him. She skittered her gaze away. Chivalry always made her twitchy. Maybe it would be different if she hadn't been dressed like a backwoods yeti, but maybe not.

Jack, border collie and resident security guard, smiled as he slunk toward them from the barn. He seemed impervious to the weather, but the brittle air snapped against Casie's cheeks and chilled the back of her neck, finding every chink in her well-insulated armor. She hunched her shoulders a little, trying to block out the South Dakota cold.

Reaching up, Colt tugged her hood out from under her overalls and snugged it over the experimental stocking cap Emily had knit last month. It was lumpy in the back and saggy in the front, but Casie didn't believe in looking gift horses in the mouth, especially when they were given by fragile teenagers intent on acting tough.

“Thanks,” she said, and barely glancing at him, trudged through the snow toward the sheep barn. The wind was gusting from the northwest, making it a relief to reach the door, but Colt was already slipping past her to pull it open.

“After you,” he said.

Casie flipped on the lights. Overhead bulbs illuminated scores of dozing sheep. Lying in clusters upon the straw, they looked soft and cushy in their reclining positions, but experience assured her they were not always as docile as they appeared.

“Where was she when you saw her last?” Casie asked.

“Near the corner over there,” he said and motioned toward the east. He wasn't wearing gloves. His hands looked broad and sturdy. On the underside of his russet-colored wrists, the veins stood out in sharp relief.

Casie cleared her throat and pulled her gaze from his arm. She was fairly certain the sight of his wrists shouldn't made her feel faint. “I'll see if I can find her,” she said. “You don't need to come along.”

“But you don't know how she looks,” he argued.

“Dirty white, I think you said,” she reminded him and hopelessly scanned the endless animals that dotted the barn like so many moguls.

Colt chuckled quietly, careful not to frighten the ewes. “Come on,” he said. “I might recognize her if I see her.”

Perhaps she should have argued, but if there truly was a ewe about to lamb, it was imperative that they find her soon. The guilt involved in losing a newborn was something she tried to avoid at all costs, and the thought of looking for one pregnant sheep in this sea of gestating ovines was overwhelming at best. She was sure she wasn't allowing him to assist for any reasons other than practicality.

“Look for a red mark on her spine,” he said as they moved cautiously through the woolly waves.

“What?”

“I intended to mark her with a big X so we could find her later, but all I managed was a little swipe of red before she got away from me.”

“You could have told me that before,” Casie said.

“And missed this chance at such a romantic interlude?” he asked, then grinned across the backs of a dozen ruminating sheep.

She caught his gaze. For months they had been dancing these same steps. It seemed as if he was always present, repairing equipment, doctoring livestock, cleaning cattle yards. There were times, entire minutes, in fact, when she was absolutely positive he was enamored of her. Why else would he stick around? But despite the entirely unpaid hours he put in at the Lazy, he had never once asked her on a date. Why was that . . . unless he was merely ever-present so that he could spend time with Emily? The two of them had formed a special bond early on. When the girl had first arrived, her relationship with older men had bordered on hero worship. Colt's presence seemed to be eroding that weird scenario. Although Em still periodically gazed at him as if he were an integral part of the Second Coming, she no longer acted as if the entire male populace held the key to the universe. Was that intentional on Colt's part? Did he arrive at the Lazy every single day in an attempt to foster a healthier attitude in the wayward teenager? Or did he have other reasons?

There were times when Casie was convinced that Colt was simply killing time. After all, he'd spent a good many years on the rodeo circuit. Maybe he was just enjoying some time off. But every once in a while, when she least expected it, he would look at her as he was now, making her heart leap into her throat and every flighty molecule she possessed scream for caution. Despite his irresistible wrists, she was nowhere near ready for a relationship. If her failed engagement had taught her nothing else, she had learned this much: She was a terrible judge of men. Always had been. And this one was looking at her as if his interest in the Lazy had nothing to do with boredom or needy teenagers or a dozen other reasons she had invented over the long winter months. It made her heart seize up and her palms sweat.

“Colt . . .” she began, desperate to clear the air, but he interrupted her.

“There she is.”

“What?”

“The mother-to-be,” he said, pointing toward the east door. “I think that's her.”

She turned reluctantly away, knowing she should voice her concerns before her nerve abandoned her completely. “Where?” she asked instead.

“Just to the right of that trio there. See her?”

She scowled into the poorly lit distance. Colt had risked life and limb propping a twenty-foot ladder against the rafters to replace the burned-out bulbs only a few weeks earlier, but the barn seemed to absorb the sparse light like a black hole, casting most of the building into shadow. Half the ewes seemed to have a mark of something or other on their backs. “I think so. Maybe.”

“It's a little hard to tell. But you head around that way. I'll cut to the right. We'll trap her between us and check it out. Easy as pie.”

It was a decent plan, Casie thought, and did as suggested.

In the end,
easy
wasn't exactly the term she would have used, but the ewe with the red mark had been captured. The animal stood motionless, pink-tipped nose held high by Colt's right hand as his left kept her from backing away.

“Whatcha think?” he asked. He was breathing a little heavily. The ewe had not been partial to being captured and stood wide-eyed and resentful in his grasp. Her comrades had scattered to the edges of the barn like chaff in the wind, leaving a wasteland of scattered straw between them and the intruders.

Casie scowled down at the ewe in question. She was almost identical to the others, round as a barrel with spindly legs sticking out below her like a woolly hors d'oeuvre on toothpicks. But maybe her belly was a bit more distended than her peers'. Casie dropped to her knees, the better to examine the animal's udder, and sure enough, it did look engorged.

She pursed her lips as she rose to her feet.

Colt grinned. “You can cuss if you want to.”

She
did
want to, but her cursing ability had been impugned in the past, and with three teenagers ensconced on the Lazy, this probably wasn't the perfect time to try to improve her prowess.

“How could this happen?” she asked instead.

Colt straightened a little, careful not to loosen his grip on the ewe. “Maybe you should talk to Em about that.”

She scowled at him. “I meant, they weren't supposed to be cycling in . . .” She counted back on her fingers. Sheep were considered short-day breeders, which meant they shouldn't be ready to mate until fall. “July.”

Colt shrugged. “Maybe she got her months confused.”

She gave him a look.

He grinned. “Life'll make a liar out of you nine times out of ten.”

“Let's get her in the pen,” she said, but in the end Colt did most of the work. She merely followed behind and shut the gate once the ewe had entered a small wooden cell at the north end of the barn.

“When do you think she'll drop?” she asked.

Colt shook his head as he stepped through the makeshift gate. During the regular lambing season, dozens of these little crates would be set up along the walls, but right now only a few remained for this type of emergency. “Couple of days maybe. A week on the outside. Least that's my guess.”

She blew out a breath. “Hope she waits till this cold snap ends,” she said and hurried toward the hydrant in the corner, but Colt stepped past her.

“I'll get that,” he said, and grabbing a nearby pail, filled it to a few inches from the top before carrying it to the crate.

Casie bent over a nearby fence to retrieve a slab of alfalfa, but as she did so, her exposed wrist scraped along the sharp end of a stray wire.

She jerked back with a rasp of pain, and Colt was beside her in a second, water bucket abandoned.

“What happened?” His brows were low, his tone concerned.

“Nothing.” She shook her head and hugged her arm against her overalls. “It's no big deal.”

“Then let me see it,” he insisted, and tugging her hand toward his chest, made a hissing noise as the wound was revealed.

“It's fine,” she said, though it stung like the devil. Three inches long, it was little more than a thin pink stripe except toward the distal end where a single drop of blood bubbled against her pale flesh.

“Nothing!”
He tugged off her right glove. It was worn through on the index finger. “Are you kidding me?” he asked, tone rife with drama.

“No, I'm not. It's—” she began, but he interrupted her.

“Buck Creger had an injury just like this in Laramie last fall. Lucky for him there was a medic on hand so they didn't have to amputate,” he said and skimmed his thumb down her wrist.

Feelings shimmied away from his touch, making her nerve endings twitter like over-stimulated songbirds. She searched wildly for something to say.

“That's comforting,” was all she could come up with.

“Is it?” he asked and raised his eyes to hers. It struck her hard, causing heat to rise in her cheeks and seem to begin a slow melt down the center of her being.

“I meant . . .” She swallowed. “I meant . . . it's comforting that he didn't . . .” For one wild second she couldn't remember what she was going to say. Hell, she could just barely recall they were standing in a sea of sheep instead of on a tropical beach somewhere, waves lapping at their ankles. “That he didn't lose his hand.”

“Oh.” He grinned a little, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “Yeah, but they had to take drastic measures.”

She made a face at him. Colt Dickenson had been a wild-eyed risk taker long before he had become a nationally ranked bronc rider. Rarely had a year passed that he hadn't broken, lacerated, or bruised something near and dear to his heart. Three months ago, after his latest return from the rodeo circuit, there had been a new scar bisecting his right brow. She raised her gaze breathlessly to that area.

“I . . .” she began, but when she glanced up, the words froze on her lips. His eyes were dark, glowing with warmth and promise and a thousand emotions she dared not consider. “I can . . .”

“Can what?” he asked and raised his attention from her lips to her eyes.

She swallowed hard. “Listen, Colt . . . I just . . .” She tried to hold his gaze, but it was too steady, too bold, too appealing. And she couldn't afford to be appealed to. “You don't have to be so nice to me.”

“I know.” He grinned. His smile was little more than a slash of diabolical white beneath the rim of his dark Stetson. Rain, sleet, or arctic blast, he looked comfortable in a felt hat and canvas jacket while Casie needed what amounted to an insulated onesie and mukluks to keep the cold from seeping into her bones like permafrost. “It's not as if someone's holding a pistol to my head,” he said and raised her wrist to his lips.

She tried to pull away. “I don't—” she began, but in that instant his lips touched her flesh.

Dynamite ignited someone near her solar plexus, causing shock waves to reverberate over the landscape of her body.

He smiled. “We'd better get you inside.”

“But Red Stripe needs—”

“Less attention than you do,” he said and swept his thumb across the palm of her hand.

She felt her eyes fall closed at his mesmerizing touch and yanked them wide open. Holy cats, what did it mean that she almost swooned when he touched her palm? “Listen!” she said. Her voice was marvelously brusque. “I'm perfectly fine. I don't have to go to the house. I can—”

“Not to the house,” he said, and bending slightly, lifted her into his arms.

She made some kind of babbling sound that defied description. Marvelously brusque it was not. On the brink of unconsciousness? Perhaps.

“To the bunkhouse,” he said. “I'm afraid you may not be able to make it all the way to the house.”

“But . . .” Their faces were inches apart. His was full of such indescribable character that it made her tongue feel heavy and her head light. “The bunkhouse is farther than the—”

“Shhh,” he chided. “You don't want to strain yourself.”

“I'm not going to—”

“Hit the lights, will you?” he asked.

She did so, reaching to the side to throw the barn into darkness. “This is ridiculous,” she said, but his breath felt soothing and warm against her check, his chest hard and capable against her shoulder. “I can walk to the house.”