A Daddy for Dillon (11 page)

“Well, if Maura is anything like her sister she must be a very kind lady. But I wouldn’t feel good about you imposing on her.”

He shot her an impatient look. “There you go again. Remember what I told you about everyone helping each other around here?”

“Yes. But that’s not good unless it goes both ways. It’s not right for me to always be on the receiving end. And I don’t know of anything I could do to help a woman like Maura Cantrell.”

“Just be a good employee and a friend. That’s enough, Leyla. You don’t need money to do that.”

“Boots. I gonna wear boots and hat.” Dillon emphasized the last statement by plopping the palms of his hands atop his dark brown hair. “I gonna be cowboy.”

The happiness on her son’s face made everything else seem insignificant, and she smiled at him. “Okay, if you’re going to be a cowboy, what is Mommy going to be?”

Tilting his head to one side, Dillon contemplated her question for a moment. “You gonna be Mommy.”

“Smart kid,” Laramie said with a laugh.

* * *

After several more minutes of Dillon riding the pony, Laramie suggested it was time they stop for lunch. Because cowboys had to eat and stay strong, he explained to Dillon. But the riding instruction continued as he showed the child how the horse had to be taken care of by removing his bridle and saddle and brushing down his coat.

“Cocoa is hungry,” Dillon told Laramie as the two of the walked out of the corral.

“I’m sure he would agree with you,” Laramie said with a chuckle. “But it’s not time for him to eat yet. It would give him a belly ache if he ate too much.”

“Me no belly ache,” Dillon said, then rubbed a hand across his tummy. “Me hungry.”

“I am, too, partner.”

After giving Leyla a hand down from the fence, he ushered the two of them over to a white pickup truck. After the three of them had climbed into the dusty cab, Leyla asked, “Where are we going? Back to the house to eat lunch?”

“Not the house,” Laramie answered. “You and Dillon see plenty of that place. I have our lunch in the back of the truck in an insulated chest. The bunkhouse cook threw some things together for us.”

Since she’d come to work on the ranch, the only people she’d met other than Laramie were Quint, Sassy and Reena. She had a natural curiosity about the crew that worked with Laramie, especially because she never heard him say a bad word about any of them. “That was very thoughtful of the cook. Especially since it’s Sunday.”

“Ernesto is a good guy. Doing for others makes him happy.”

“Have you known him for a long time?”

Laramie started the engine and backed the truck away from the corral fence. “He was here on the ranch for a couple of years before I came.”

His remark took her by surprise. “You’ve lived here on the ranch for that long?”

“Nearly eighteen years.”

As he set the truck in forward motion, she glanced across the bench seat at him. “You must have been very young when you moved here. What about the man who raised you? Didn’t you want to stay with him until you reached adulthood?”

“Diego had diabetes in the worst kind of way. When his health began to really fail, he made me promise that once he died I would come here to the Chaparral and speak to Lewis about work. I was sixteen when Diego passed on. Just a kid, more or less. Lewis, that was Quint’s father, was still alive back then. And I was fortunate that he took me under his wing. He gave me a job and a place to stay in the bunkhouse.”

Trying to picture Laramie at that young, vulnerable age, she asked, “Did you know how to do ranch work back then?”

“Quite a bit. Diego had always had cattle and horses and goats. He’d taught me how to care for them and handle myself around livestock. So it wasn’t like I was a greenhorn. I had lots to learn, though. And over the years, I have.”

Many times in the past Leyla had felt ignored and forsaken by her family. And when she was really having a pity party for herself, it felt like she didn’t have a family at all. Yet being estranged from her family was far different than not having any family at all. If she really wanted to see her folks, she could swallow her pride and go back to Farmington and stand up to her father. Laramie didn’t have even that option and that reality bothered her greatly.

“So as a teenager you must have really taken to this place,” she said.

“At first I missed Diego something awful. Besides that, the other ranch hands were quite a bit older than me, and that made me feel out of place. But they were all kind enough to put up with a wet-nosed kid and after a while it started feeling like home. Now, it is home.”

“Do you ever get the urge to leave?” she asked. “To build a place of your own?”

He frowned. “Why should I do that when I’m perfectly happy here?”

There was a testy note in his voice, one that told Leyla he didn’t appreciate her question. She didn’t let it deter her, though. Not when Laramie didn’t think twice about plying her with personal questions.

“Because you don’t own this place,” she answered. “It belongs to someone else. You work very hard and you’re so devoted to your job. Seems like you’d want your efforts to benefit you.”

“Is that what’s important to you? Owning things?”

“A home isn’t just a ‘thing,’” she said defensively.

He slanted her an annoyed look. “Well, my home is here. I don’t care about the name on the deed.”

The man was satisfied with what he was and where he was. And that was well and good for him, Leyla thought. As a teenager he’d lost his father and his home. He deserved to be happy and contented now. She only wished that her and Dillon’s future was as settled as Laramie’s and that once they left this ranch they would have a decent home waiting for them.

“It’s nice that you feel so deeply about this ranch. Everyone needs a place where they feel like they belong,” she said quietly.

He turned his head slightly to look at her, and this time she could see that his features had softened.

“Maybe you and Dillon belong here, too.”

His subtle suggestion set her heart to pounding, and she purposely turned her gaze away from him and out to the passing landscape.

“Only for a while,” she murmured and wondered why those words put an ache in her heart.

* * *

For the next ten minutes Laramie drove the truck on a westerly dirt track that took them away from the ranch yard and close to the river’s edge. Along the way, Laramie remained quiet and preoccupied and Leyla got the impression that he was disappointed in her for some reason.

Maybe he’d not appreciated her question about him leaving the Chaparral to build a ranch of his own. Or maybe he’d expected her to say more about her future plans. She didn’t know what the man was thinking and she tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. But that would be a lie. Laramie was beginning to matter to her. Very much.

“Cow, Mommy! Cow!”

Dillon’s excited shouts pulled Leyla out of her thoughts and turned her gaze toward the windshield. Her son had spotted a large herd of red cattle with white faces.

“Yes, I see. The cows are eating grass.” She responded to her son, then glanced at Laramie. “I’ve only seen black cows at the ranch yard. These are different.”

“They’re Herefords. Normally we only run Angus, but we decided to invest in a couple hundred of these just to see how they play out on the cattle market. After we eat, I’ll take Dillon for a closer look,” he told her.”

“I’m sure he’ll like that,” she murmured.

A short distance on down the road, the hard-packed dirt track split in two directions. Laramie took the one that climbed a short distance up a foothill covered with juniper and piñon pine. When they reached the top of the incline, Leyla let out a gasp of delight.

“Oh, how beautiful!”

Below them, the river valley stretched for miles. To their right a ridge of tall pine-covered mountains stood sentinel over the herds of grazing cattle.

“I thought you and Dillon might enjoy eating here,” Laramie spoke up. “It’s a pretty view and there’s plenty of open space here for Dillon to safely explore.”

“It’s great, Laramie,” she said. His thoughtfulness left her feeling somewhat awkward. She’d never had anyone go to this much trouble to give her and her son an enjoyable outing, and she could only wonder if he was expecting something from her in return.

No, she mentally argued. He wasn’t the sort of man who expected payment for doing a thoughtful deed. She needed to quit worrying about his motives and simply focus on enjoying this special time with Laramie and Dillon.

After parking the truck, Laramie lifted the chest with their lunch out of the back of the truck and carried it over to a flat area sheltered on one side by a stand of juniper. Two fallen logs had created a natural L shape perfect for seating.

“Looks like someone has built fires up here before,” Leyla commented as she spotted a ring of blackened rocks.

“Me and a few of the guys stop here sometimes and brew a pot of coffee. It’s a nice place to rest before we finish the ride to the ranch yard.”

The ranch yard was a good five or six miles away from this spot, she calculated. She couldn’t imagine herself staying in the saddle for that long, but when she looked at Laramie’s tough, sinewy body, it was clear he had the stamina to keep going far beyond a normal person’s endurance.

To Leyla’s utter surprise, the bunkhouse cook had gone to the trouble of cooking them a meal of fried chicken and the usual picnic additions to go with it. Dillon ate everything she placed on his paper plate, then asked for more.

Once his tummy was finally full, the boy wandered a few steps away to dig in the dirt with a stick. As Laramie watched him form a shallow trench and fill it with tiny pebbles, he said, “I believe Dillon is enjoying all of this, don’t you?”

On the smooth, bleached-out log, Laramie was sitting no more than a hand’s width away from Leyla and as she turned her face toward his, the distance between them seemed even closer. His nearness caused her pulse to skitter and her breathing to quicken.

“Very much. Other than me taking him to the park, no one has ever bothered to take him on a picnic before. You’re giving him all sorts of new adventures.”

A faint smile grooved his cheeks and Leyla couldn’t help thinking that for such a rugged man, his blue eyes looked so soft and tender, so very tempting.

“What about you? Have you ever been on a picnic before?”

“My sisters and I used to have play picnics in the backyard. We’d pretend we were in a big city park with lots of people in fancy clothes strolling around. And we’d have wonderful things to eat, like exotic fruit that we’d never even seen, much less eaten.” She let out a wistful sigh. “But that was when we were little girls. We didn’t understand what being poor really meant. It’s funny how I look back on those times now and think of us as being rich. At least, us being all together made it feel that way. But it will never be like it was when we were little girls pretending to have a picnic.”

Reaching over, he slipped his big hand over hers. “Nothing stays the same, Leyla. Children grow up. Some day Dillon will be a man and he’ll strike out on his own—away from you.”

“Maybe that’s why my mother stays with my father,” Leyla replied on a pensive note. “She doesn’t want to be alone when all of her children are gone.”

“No one wants to be alone,” he said.

The warmth of his hand and the soft, husky sound in his voice pulled at her, and she couldn’t stop her gaze from settling on his lips or her memory from reliving his kiss.

“Laramie, when I talked to you earlier about building a ranch of your own, it wasn’t my intention to offend you.” The urge to touch him was so great, she couldn’t stop herself from laying her hand on his forearm. “I was... I guess I’m just curious as to why a man as gifted as you doesn’t strike out on his own.”

Something flickered in his eyes before his gaze dropped to her hand resting on his arm. “Someday I’ll try to explain everything better—why this ranch means so much to me.”

“Is living here the reason you’ve not married?” she asked.

That brought his eyes back up to hers. This time there were shadows in the blue depths.

“Partly. It’s hard to get interested in a woman when right off the bat she wants to change me—move me away from all the things I love. I used to tell myself there had to be a woman out there somewhere who’d take me as I am and be happy to live on this isolated ranch. But I gave up looking.”

“You said partly. What’s the other reason you haven’t wanted to marry?”

His gaze flickered back to hers and Leyla’s breath caught in her throat. She’d expected to see defiance in his eyes, not a lost and hungry look that made her want to wrap her arms around him and hold him close to her heart.

“Like I told you, Diego was an old bachelor. It was a long time before I ever knew what a husband was, and even then it was just a word to a kid. I went from a bachelor’s home to living in a bunkhouse with a bunch of other bachelors. Lewis was a husband, but I never saw him interacting with his wife, Frankie. I guess I learned more about what it means to be a husband after Quint married Maura. And that was just a few years ago.”

“So you didn’t grow up with a role model,” she stated.

“That exactly what I’m saying.”

She shook her head. “I thought maybe you weren’t married because you’d had your heart broken or something like that.”

His lips twisted to a wry line. “A few little breaks. Nothing like what you went through.”

Her gaze swung to Dillon. “Having a child changed my life and I don’t regret it. Dillon is my life. Just like the ranch is yours.”

And she’d be crazy to think they could all blend together. She wanted a home for Dillon and herself. She wanted permanence and security. She wasn’t yearning for riches, or things or a fancy house. She only wanted a home. One that couldn’t be taken away from her.

Suddenly it dawned on her that her hand was still resting on Laramie’s arm and his hand hadn’t moved from hers. Being close to him felt almost natural. But where was all of this going to take her? she wondered. Straight to another heartbreak?

The thought had her easing away from him and rising to her feet.