Mail Order Cowboy. Maisey Yates

USDA-approved beef to a large distributor.”

      “It keeps you pretty busy?”

      He chuckled. “You could say that. In fact, I’d say my life was packed full before I found out I had a kid.”

      He hadn’t given her the full story of why he was a single dad, but his choice of words just now was odd. She didn’t know if he was divorced, but it had been pretty clear based on the tone of his messages that there was no one else involved. Maybe his wife had died. But then, he hadn’t mentioned that. He hadn’t mentioned a woman at all. It was like...

      Like he had just found a baby on his doorstep.

      “I see,” she said, not really seeing all that clearly.

      Neither of them said anything else for a while, and Savannah turned her focus to the scenery. It wasn’t completely unlike Colorado. Mountainous and full of pine trees. She liked that. She loved the mountains. Compared to the exceedingly tame neighborhood she’d grown up in on the East Coast, she really liked the way that things were out West. She hadn’t wanted to leave Colorado, per se. She had just needed to escape a town dominated by her ex, where he was still making choices about her life even when he wasn’t directly in it. The way he manipulated things in town...

      She’d had to get out.

      She had thought that Oregon might be a natural place to get to. It had either been that or Montana, maybe Wyoming. But Oregon was where the opportunity had arisen, and she was also attracted to the idea that she would be able to drive out to the beach. Something she hadn’t been able to do living in Colorado.

      They drove through the small town of Gold Valley, all redbrick buildings and Wild West aesthetic, which burned a bright spot inside of her soul. Made her feel like—in spite of the initial awkwardness—she had made the right choice.

      They continued on out of town, down a winding two-lane highway lined with thick trees, ferns and thickly carpeting the floor of the forest encroaching over the side, nearly to the road.

      He was right, the ranch was quite a ways outside of the town itself, and if not for the two wooden posts holding up a sign over a narrow driveway that said Box R, she wouldn’t have known there was even a ranch there at all.

      They turned onto that dirt road. The trees cleared and revealed pastures, several empty, and one with a herd of cattle, before the road narrowed and the pines thickened again. It was just remote enough, just isolated enough that a jolt of adrenaline shot through her. Maybe she’d been stupid to come out here. Maybe there was no cabin and she was just on a dirt highway to murder.

      But then they came to the end of the drive and she saw a little cabin. It was rustic, and rough, but then, it was what she’d expected a cabin to be, she supposed. She sat there while he got out, watched as he tended to his daughter. As strange as it all was, the way that those large, battered hands cradled the tiny infant when he took her out of her car seat made her feel...

      A whole jumble of things. Most of them centered down deep in the pit of her stomach.

      “I’ll just get Lily laid down in her crib, and then I’ll show you to your room and get your things,” he said.

      She nodded and watched as he walked up the steps to the front porch and disappeared inside the cabin.

      She climbed out of the car. She supposed she could follow him in, but he hadn’t said to, so she just stood there out in the gravel drive, turning a half circle and looking around the isolated place. What in hell had she gotten herself into? She realized it didn’t much matter. She didn’t have anywhere to go back to. She had no real friends left to speak of, no family that wanted anything to do with her.

      For better or for worse, this was the place from which she was starting over.

      So she had to make it work.

      At least for a while.

       CHAPTER TWO

      PLAIN AND TALL.

      Jackson played those words over and over in his head as he prepared his coffee and breakfast the next morning.

      After he and Savannah had arrived at the cabin, he’d given her a quick rundown on Lily’s schedule and where everything was. He’d shown her to her room—which was across the house from his, and next to its own bathroom—and he’d told her not to worry about taking care of Lily that night, because while he was an ogre sometimes, he wasn’t enough of one to make her interrupt her sleep on a night when she’d been traveling all day.

      She’d gone to bed early, early enough that he was pretty sure she was avoiding spending time in his company. Not that he minded. But he didn’t think she’d eaten at all. Which meant he was making up a double portion of bacon this morning.

      He hoped she wasn’t a vegetarian, because everything was cooked in the bacon grease, and it was too late for him to do anything about that.

      Probably would have been a good idea to ask.

      There were some aspects to having a stranger in his house that he hadn’t fully considered. He had just been desperate for the help. And since he needed round-the-clock help, offering room and board had seemed like the smartest thing to do. Of course, that meant sharing his space. Which he didn’t like to do. But then, he was already sharing it with a woman, a bigger diva than he’d ever encountered before in his life.

      Apparently, the tinier the female, the more willing a man was to submit to her whims. He couldn’t explain the way that having Lily made him feel. He didn’t like babies. He didn’t like kids. He’d never wanted any of his own. He wasn’t sure he did now. But the fact of the matter was he had a child, and he would die for her. Hell, he’d kill for her.

      He didn’t know what exactly the feeling was that had invaded his chest, but it was intense. He wasn’t...content or happy, necessarily. No, the kind of feeling that Lily gave him wasn’t settled in the least. It was entirely opposite to the way he had always imagined domestic life would go. Which he had imagined as death by monotonous inches.

      The appearance of Lily in his life had taken everything he thought he’d known about himself, and about what he wanted, and turned it all on its side. He was sleep deprived, his chest ached when he looked at her, and every damned morning when his feet hit the floor, he had no idea what he was doing.

      He’d been a rancher all of his life. When it came to working the land he knew what he was about. Backward and forward. He’d lost his virginity at fifteen to a pretty, older teenage girl who’d shown him exactly what to do, and hadn’t been shy about demanding he do it better. Since then, he’d considered himself something of an expert on women. Everything he did in his life, he had a firm handle on.

      Until now.

      Feeling like a greenhorn was a total mind fuck, and apparently caused him to make decisions he might not have otherwise made. Like inviting this so-called plain, tall nanny to come live with him.

      That was a far cry from reality. She was... She was stunning. It was a problem. Leggy and blonde, with sea green eyes and full, gorgeous lips.

      He hadn’t been with a woman in quite some time. And that was playing havoc with him. The messed-up thing was he hadn’t even thought about it. Not since Lily. He hadn’t had the energy to even consider that kind of thing. He’d been so busy coping with the new life he found himself with he hadn’t spared a thought to his old life.

      But then the nanny had shown up, and he wanted to fuck her, which told him everything he needed to know about what kind of asshole he would be in a more conventional life. Because wasn’t it only asshole husbands who wanted the nanny? Yeah, he knew that it was.

      He wondered why she thought of herself as plain. Maybe because she wasn’t fussy. She didn’t have any makeup on when he picked her up at the airport. She had been wearing a T-shirt and a pair of leggings, but that seemed par for the course