One Man and a Baby. SUSAN MEIER

needed what Rick was offering her. The chance to prove she believed they were all equal. Family.

      He was right. She had to do this.

      “Let’s go.”

      Ashley wasn’t in the shower until six o’clock that night. The hot water that sluiced over her was like a soothing balm to muscles that ached from the strain of manual labor.

      She pressed her face into the steady stream of hot water. Even her cheeks were tired. Her hair smelled like manure. Her legs were so overworked that her thighs quivered. Her hands had blisters.

      She looked down and tears filled her eyes. Her hands had blisters. Real blisters. No matter how much she had enjoyed the camaraderie of the farmhands with whom she worked, she couldn’t muck stalls again tomorrow. Not unless she wanted to get blisters on top of her blisters and she did not. Somehow or another she had to get out of mucking tomorrow without giving the employees the impression she thought she was better than they were. Because if she couldn’t she might as well quit…

      She squeezed her eyes shut and groaned. That was what Rick wanted. He wanted her to quit! It made sense that he would be trying to get her to give up before she was trained so that when her dad came home in February he’d be the only one in the running for her job.

      With water sluicing over from her hair to her neck and aching shoulders, she realized that even if it wasn’t Rick’s intention to get her to quit, he would still win when her dad came home. If he kept her mucking stalls instead of involved in what she needed to learn, he would remain the better choice to run the farm when her dad’s fixation with sailing turned into full-blown retirement next summer. Because she knew it would. She’d already accepted that her dad had moved on. Officially retiring was just the next step. He might come home in February after this three-month sailing excursion, but when he did, she suspected it would only be to pick a replacement.

      And that meant there was no way she could let Rick win.

      She stepped out of the shower, toweled off, blew her hair dry and brushed her teeth. But instead of sliding into the pair of pink silk pajamas—long pants and a shirt in case Rick decided to wake her again—that she’d laid out on the bed, she marched to her dresser and grabbed a pair of jeans and a clean chambray shirt. She pulled on socks and boots and even got out one of her old cowboy hats, deciding that it couldn’t hurt to look the part of the job she wanted, then she ran downstairs and out the back door to her SUV.

      It was only about a quarter mile to the guesthouse. On a day when her legs weren’t still rubbery from exertion, she probably would have walked. But in order to assure that she didn’t crumble on Rick’s doorstep, Ashley drove, pulling her SUV beside his extended cab pickup, then dragging herself up the three steps to the wood plank porch.

      A screen door protected the open front door of the living room. The glow from one of the end table lamps provided enough light that she could see no one was on the floral sofa. There appeared to be a lot of “stuff” on the floor, but nobody around.

      She glanced down the hall and noticed the kitchen light was on and decided somebody had to be inside. Mustering energy she absolutely didn’t have, she lifted her hand to the door and rapped twice.

      No one answered.

      “Rick?” she called through the open screen.

      No answer.

      She knew he was in there. Only an idiot left a house with so many lights on. She frowned. Or maybe he was on the back porch?

      Not about to walk down the three porch steps, around the front of the house to the side and down the length of the house to get to the back porch on her shaky, achy legs, she opened the door, stepped into the living room and nearly tripped over a little chair.

      She peered down at it and frowned. It looked like a baby seat of some sort. One of those carrier things? Maybe a car seat?

      Confused, she stooped down to examine it more closely and two seconds later she heard the sound of feet pounding down the steps. She glanced up to see Rick frozen about midway on the staircase.

      Their gazes caught and held. The shadow of beard on his chin and cheeks said he hadn’t yet had time to shave, but his clean jeans and shirt, and slicked-back wet hair said he’d showered.

      “I thought this house was mine, for my use.”

      Ashley took a breath and rose. “It is. I’m sorry. I saw the lights and assumed you were home.”

      He finished his walk down the stairs. “If you’ve come here to tell me that you’re done playing farmhand,” he said, scooping up the chair Ashley was now positive was some sort of baby chair and tossing it behind the overstuffed green sofa in the corner of the room. “Then I’m okay with you just walking into my house. If not—”

      “If not what?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “I seem to remember you coming straight into my bedroom this morning, without my permission, when there were no lights on…oh, and, in a house you don’t own.”

      His face hardened. “You might own this one, princess, but you assigned it to me. It’s just like a rental. You can’t come in without my permission.”

      “And you can’t come into my bedroom without my permission.”

      He crossed his arms on his chest. “So, I guess we’ll just call it even?”

      She smiled and strolled over to the floral sofa. “I don’t think so,” she said, pulling the baby seat from behind it. “What’s this?”

      He didn’t say anything.

      She held it up to inspect it. “I’m not a genius. I’m not even a woman who’s particularly familiar with babies, but I’m guessing this belongs to a baby.”

      He still said nothing.

      “And if you didn’t have a baby around here somewhere, right now you’d be saying something. Anything. Like maybe, yeah, it’s a baby seat. I bought it for my sister Tia for when her baby is born.”

      “It’s a baby carrier. I bought it for my sister Tia.”

      She smiled. “Too late. Too, too, late.” She took a breath, glanced at the seat again. “So where is she?”

      “She?”

      “I know it’s a girl.” She pulled a tiny hair clip from a fold in the plastic padding of seat. “There’s no way in hell you’d put one of these on a boy.”

      “She’s upstairs.”

      Ashley’s aching muscles all but cheered with relief. “So, you and I are about to start a little bargaining session.”

      “I don’t think so.”

      “Oh, I do. The very fact that you slid this chair behind the sofa like I was some sort of ninny who would forget she saw it if you got it out of my sight, proves that you’re hiding your child.” She paused, tilted her head. “It is your child, right?”

      He said nothing.

      “You know,” she said, walking around Rick as if he were a thoroughbred at an auction. “I’m not that good at ferreting out information, but I bet if I called Rayne Fegan and I told her you had a baby in here, she could figure it all out.”

      “Don’t.”

      “So we are bargaining.”

      “What do you want?”

      “I don’t want to have to muck out stalls.”

      “Your job can’t be on the table.”

      “My job is the only thing I want on the table!”

      “Forget it. If you really do get to be manager of Seven Hills, the people who work for you have to see you don’t think you’re above them.”

      “Nice try, but one day of sweating and making friends with the staff got that point across. If you keep