Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) (9 page)

It was clear she’d insulted him and it left her feeling very small and petty as the third strike seemed to end his attempt to make this evening pleasant.

But it wasn’t only
this
evening, she thought as his attention turned to his driving and left her to consider her recent behavior toward him.

With the exception of that first day they’d seen each other and argued, he’d been working to keep things between them calm and easy for her. Even when she knew she’d annoyed him, he hadn’t vented it; he’d merely turned his anger inward, like now. But she’d been acting like a spoiled child or some sort of prima donna.

Of course she had a good reason—anything was better than succumbing to her softer, warmer, sexier feelings for a man who didn’t want her. But still, she wasn’t proud of herself. Hormones or no hormones, roller coaster emotions or not, she wasn’t handling things well and she vowed to curb the hostility she used like a shield. Fighting the attraction she felt to him was no excuse for flinging all his efforts in his face or offending him. In the future she had to find a way to control her own feelings without being so prickly, or she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

Besides, she honestly didn’t believe he’d be here for long and it seemed silly now to make it so miserable for them both. And she also realized that trying to establish a more amiable relationship would serve the two of them and the baby in the long run.

But they’d reached Kansas’s house by the time she’d come to that conclusion, and Ash was out of the car before she’d thought of a way to make amends. She did, however, thank him for opening her door, venturing the first smile she’d allowed him since he’d been in Elk Creek.

Unfortunately, he didn’t see it; his gaze seemed to go over the top of her head, as if that were the only way he could refrain from letting her know what he thought of her and her contrariness.

He took the wedding dress out of the back, and as Beth accepted it from him, she reconsidered an attempt to rectify things before they went inside.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she tried on the way up the porch steps, but apologies were no easier for her than sharing any other feelings, and it came out sounding impatient and uncontrite.

“Forget it,” he said as he rang the doorbell, still not looking at her, his own tone clipped as he stood there as straight and stiff as any cigar-store Indian.

And Beth couldn’t help wondering if ever there were two people worse together than they were.

Before she could say any more, her nephew answered the door.

All two and a half feet of Jackson’s same brand of solemn stoicism, Danny regarded them seriously, his big green eyes taking in Beth and then rolling slowly up the full length of Ash.

Linc kept Danny with him most of the time, either at the honky-tonk he was building or here at Kansas’s house. When Ash had been at the ranch, Danny had either not been there, or been in bed asleep. This was his first sight of the big man.

Beth opened the screen. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said to the little boy. “I’ll bet you don’t remember Ash, do you? You were barely more than a baby the last time your dad brought you to see us.”

Danny stepped out of the way so they could go in; he stared at Ash the whole time. “He gots lo-ong hair,” the three-year-old marveled.

“Hi, Danny. It’s good to see you.” Ash held out his hand to shake Danny’s much, much smaller one, but Danny snatched his behind his back rather than let Ash touch him, and dived for Beth’s side, where he wrapped his other arm around her legs as if he needed protection.

Ash only smiled, took something from his pocket and hunkered down on his heels so he was nearer to eye level with the little boy. “I brought you something,” he said, upturning his closed fist and opening it. “An Indian arrowhead.”

Danny merely frowned at Ash and then at the arrowhead lying in his palm.

Ash picked it up between two fingers and held it out to him in a way that it could be taken without there being any contact between them. “Just carrying it around with you makes you strong. See, I wear one all the time,” he added, pulling his from inside his shirt.

That seemed to interest the little boy, who carefully reached for the arrowhead, comparing the polished stone to Ash’s burnished copper.

“What do you say?” Beth urged gently.

“Thanks,” Danny muttered. Then he let go of Beth’s leg and made a beeline down the hallway that led to the kitchen, shouting for his father.

Kansas appeared at the doorway through which Danny had gone, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Come on in,” she said, before noticing the wedding gown Beth carried. When she did, she hurried to them instead. “Oh, I don’t want Linc to see the dress. Let me take it upstairs.”

She did just that, sending Beth and Ash into the kitchen, where they found Linc studying the arrowhead Danny seemed very impressed with in spite of his leeriness of the man who had given it to him.

Linc sent him out to play then and turned his attentions to Beth and Ash, and the evening got under way.

Danny’s wariness didn’t lessen through most of the dinner they ate on the picnic table in the backyard to escape the heat of the house. The little boy kept a close eye on Ash, warming up to him only at a snail’s pace.

But by the time Linc rounded his son up to be put to bed in Kansas’s guest room, the three-year-old had overcome his trepidation enough to make a muscle to show Ash the arrowhead was already working its magic.

While Linc was gone, Kansas, Beth and even Ash did the dishes. Then Linc came back and the four of them had dessert outside, too, settling into more of the easy conversation that was making it a pleasant visit.

It was after eleven before Beth knew it, and though she hadn’t had much of a chance to prove to Ash directly that she intended to be nicer, things between them had eased her in that direction.

Linc and Kansas walked them out, their arms wrapped around the small of each other’s backs, and Beth knew a sharp tug of regret that she and Ash didn’t share that kind of closeness and affection. But she reminded herself that it was only the hormones causing her to envy them, probably coupled with the weariness that came with the late hour, and she forced the feelings away as they all went out onto the front porch.

“Jackson tells me you’re having trouble finding a roofer,” Ash said to Linc just as they were winding up for good-nights.

“The guy who was going to do it for me broke his leg,” Linc confirmed.

“I’ve done some roofing. Between you and Jackson and me I think we could handle it.”

“No kidding? That’d be great. It would save me losing two months or having to get somebody in from Cheyenne at double the expense.”

While they went on to arrange a time to do the work, Kansas was thanking Beth for making her wedding dress, but Beth heard only a portion of either conversation as she stared at Ash in her second surprise of the day.

He was a roofer, too?

She was still having trouble believing it when they finally got around to saying good-night and went out to his car.

This time it was Beth who studied Ash as they headed for the ranch.

“Okay, who are you, and what have you done with Asher Blackwolf?”

He frowned at her as if she’d lost her mind. “What?”

“I was married to you for five years, remember? You didn’t polish your own shoes, let alone make them for a horse. And I didn’t think you knew which end of a hammer hit the nail. But here you are claiming you can roof the honky-tonk.”

His frown turned into a slow, satisfied smile. “Did you think I was born in a three-piece suit?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“So how come you always hired other people to do everything?”

“Because I was also fortunate enough to find myself in a position that afforded it, and hiring other people helped spread some of that around.”

Of course that sounded like him. He’d put a number of Native American men and kids to work. And here she’d always just thought of him as too much of a desk jockey to dirty his hands.

Once again she was ashamed of herself.

“Where did these hidden skills come from?” she asked in a quiet voice that was the best she could do to convey her admiration of what he’d done while she’d been giving him less credit than he was due.

“Where else? My grandfathers.”

“Your Grandfather Blackwolf was a sculptor,” she reminded.

“He didn’t start out there, though. He was a blacksmith and welder by trade before that.”

“And he taught you?”

Ash nodded. “The Indian way is to pass things down. Stories, customs, skills. I knew my way around a forge and an acetylene torch by the time I was nine. But I preferred the construction work Pap did. Or maybe it was just that being around Pap was a better time,” he added pointedly, tossing her a sidelong glance.

Since she’d already blown an apology for that earlier comment, she didn’t think she ought to try a second. Instead she said, “I knew Robert worked in construction before he retired, but I didn’t know you did, too.”

“It paid my way through college.”

For a moment Beth was lost in the image of Ash in completely different scenarios than she had ever pictured before. She was aware that his two grandfathers had shared in raising him after both his parents were killed in a drunk-driving accident when he was seven—his father having been the drunk driver, his mother the drunk passenger. Each of them had had serious alcohol problems. But he’d never said much else about his growing-up years.

“Amazing,” she muttered to herself for the second time that day.

“What? That I can actually work with my hands and back, along with my brain?” he asked as if he expected another insult from her.

“No. That I could be married to you for five years and actually know so little about you.”

He pulled up in front of the ranch house just then, but he left the motor running. Even so, Beth didn’t move to get out and neither did he. Instead he turned toward her much the way he had when they’d begun the evening; this time, though, he stretched his arm across the back of the seat, close enough to her neck for her to feel the heat of him.

She looked up into the dark shadows of his eyes. “What else don’t I know?”

He shrugged as if he weren’t sure what to tell her.

“Were you a bed wetter? Did you suck your thumb until you were twelve? Were you an unruly teenager who got arrested a dozen times before you settled down? Did you lead a madcap college life? Do you knit?”

He laughed at her suggestions, and the deep, rich sound seeped in through her pores to sluice along her nerve endings like warm honey.

“I was not a bed wetter or a thumb sucker, but yes, I was a pretty bad teenager. I smoked and drank and gave my grandfathers fits. I never got arrested, but there were a few times that the cops brought me home or showed up on the doorstep. Either they were warning me to stop drag racing or they had a pretty good hunch I’d been a part of a bunch of kids who’d vandalized mailboxes in a drunken spree. And college—well, that started out as one big party, but by my senior year I cleaned up my act.”

Beth blew a wry sigh and shook her head. “I can’t even imagine you like that. Especially the drinking part. You rarely even have wine or a beer, and I’ve always thought that because of your parents’ problem you had an aversion to it.”

“More like because of my parents’ weakness to booze, I was drawn to try it, too. I don’t know. As a kid maybe drinking and being as wild as I’d heard they were was my way of feeling connected to them. It proved I was their son.”

“What straightened you out?”

“Not what. Who. Pap. My other grandfather died just before the end of my junior year in college and I was about to inherit everything he had. I thought it meant life from then on was going to be one big party. Or one big drunken brawl, which was what the parties always turned into.”

“So why didn’t it mean that for you?”

“Pap kicked my butt, to be blunt. And then he met with the elders of the tribe—a number of men in key positions in the community who Pap happens to be close to—and they devised a plan for how I was going to spend my summer vacation that year.”

“Not as a kids’ camp counselor, I take it.”

“Hardly. They managed to temporarily delay my getting my hands on any of the inheritance. I couldn’t get a soul on the reservation to hire me, and Pap refused to let me live with him, turned his back on me completely. All of a sudden I was on the streets, literally, forced to sleep with the derelicts, eat at the soup kitchen, clean toilets at the bathhouse in exchange for an occasional shower. And more than once I was picked up by a cop friend of my grandfather’s so I could get a firsthand look at a drunk driving accident or the corpse who came out of it.”

Having lived on the reservation herself, Beth understood enough about the Native American community to believe this closing-of-ranks to scare one of their own and save him if they could.

“Sounds awful,” she said. “But it turned you around?”

Ash nodded. “I really saw how tough life could be. And how easy I’d had it. It lit a fire under my conscience. Plus, having Pap turn his back on me was terrible. I knew it was only a matter of time before the inheritance had to be released to me, but I also knew that if I didn’t stop drinking, he’d disown me for good.”

“So you stopped.”

“I did. Luckily I wasn’t to the point yet where it was an addiction. And then I decided to do what I could with my other grandfather’s money, to help out where I’d witnessed the need for that help. And that’s how I turned into this boring guy you see before you.”

Beth knew it was another reference to her earlier comment and this time she thought she’d better address it. “I didn’t say you were boring—”

“Just no fun. And maybe you’re right. You know what they say about all work and no play...”

But at that moment his overworking wasn’t what was on her mind. It was still difficult for her to believe that she was hearing so much about him that she’d never known before. It was as if they’d just met.

“Amazing,” she repeated.

“That I was once a wild man?”