A Baby on the Ranch. Marie Ferrarella

out a hearty greeting. “Hi, Kasey, I’m coming in.”

      “Of course you’re coming in,” Kasey said, meeting him at the door as he walked in. “You live here.”

      Eli cleared his throat, feeling uncomfortable with the topic he was about to broach. “I thought that maybe you were, you know, busy,” he emphasized, settling for a euphemism.

      “Well, I guess I have been that,” she admitted, shifting her newly awakened son to her other hip. “But that still doesn’t explain why you feel you have to shout a warning before walking into your own home.”

      He didn’t hear the last part of her sentence. By then he was too completely stunned to absorb any words at all. Momentarily speechless, Eli retraced his steps and ducked outside to double check that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the wrong house—not that there were any others on the property.

      The outside of the house looked like his, he ascertained. The inside, however, definitely did not. It bore no resemblance to the house he had left just this morning.

      What was going on here?

      “What did you do?” he finally asked.

      “You don’t like it,” Kasey guessed, doing her best to hide her disappointment. She’d really wanted to surprise him—but in a good way. Belatedly she recalled that some men didn’t like having their things touched and rearranged.

      “I don’t recognize it,” Eli corrected, looking around again in sheer amazement. This was his place? Really?

      The house he had left this morning had looked, according to Miss Joan’s gentle description of it, as if it had gone dancing with a tornado. There were no rotting carcasses of stray creatures who had accidentally wandered into the house in search of shelter, but that was the most positive thing that could have been said about the disorder thriving within his four walls.

      He’d lived in this house for the past five months and in that amount of time, he’d managed to distribute a great deal of useless material throughout the place. Each room had its own share of acquired clutter, whether it was dirty clothing, used dishes, scattered reading material or some other, less identifiable thing. The upshot was that, in general, the sum total of the various rooms made for a really chaotic-looking home.

      Or at least it had when he’d left for the stables that morning. This evening, he felt as though someone had transported him to a different universe. Everything appeared to be in its place. The whole area looked so neat it almost hurt his eyes to look around.

      This would take some getting used to, he couldn’t help thinking.

      The hopeful expression had returned to Kasey’s face. She’d just wanted to surprise and please him. She knew she’d succeeded with the former, but she was hoping to score the latter.

      “I just thought that I should clean up a little,” she told him, watching his face for some sign that he actually liked what she had done.

      “A little?” he repeated, half stunned, half amused. “There was probably less effort involved in building this house in the first place.” This cleanup, he knew, had to have been a major undertaking. Barring magical help from singing mice and enchanted elves, she’d accomplished this all herself.

      He regarded her with new admiration.

      She in turn looked at him, trying to understand why he didn’t seem to have wanted her to do this. Had she trespassed on some basic male ritual? Was he saving this mess, not to mention the rumpled clothes and dirty dishes, for some reason?

      “You want me to mess things up again?” she offered uncertainly.

      “No.” He took hold of her by her shoulders, enunciating each word slowly so that they would sink in. “I don’t want you to do anything. I just wanted you to relax in between feedings. To maybe try to rest up a little, saving your strength. Taking care of a newborn is damn hard enough to get used to without single-handedly trying to restore order to a place that could easily have been mistaken for the town dump—”

      She smiled and he could feel her smile going straight to his gut, stirring things up that had no business being stirred up—not without an outlet.

      Eli struggled to keep a tight rein on his feelings and on his reaction to her. He succeeded only moderately.

      “It wasn’t that bad,” she stressed.

      She was being deliberately kind. “But close,” he pointed out.

      Her mouth curved as she inclined her head. “Close,” Kasey allowed. “I like restoring order, making things neat,” she explained. “And when he wasn’t fussing because he was hungry or needed changing, Wayne cooperated by sleeping. So far, he’s pretty low maintenance,” she said, glancing at her sleeping son. “I had to do something with myself.”

      “Well, in case you didn’t make the connection, that’s the time that you’re supposed to be sleeping, too,” Eli pointed out. “I think that’s a law or something. It’s written down somewhere in the New Mother’s Basic Manual.”

      “I guess I must have skipped that part,” Kasey said, her eyes smiling at him. His stomach picked that moment to rumble rather loudly. Kasey eyed him knowingly. “Are you all finished working for the day?” Eli nodded, trying to silence the noises his stomach was producing by holding his breath. It didn’t work. “Good,” she pronounced, “because I have dinner waiting.”

      “Of course you do,” he murmured, following her.

      He stopped at the bedroom threshold and waited as Kasey gently put her sleeping son down. Wayne continued breathing evenly, indicating a successful transfer. She was taking to this mothering thing like a duck to water, Eli couldn’t help thinking. He realized that he was proud of her—and more than a little awed, as well.

      He looked around as he walked with her to the kitchen. Everything there was spotless, as well. All in all, Kasey was rather incredible.

      “You know, if word of this gets out,” he said, gesturing around the general area, “there’re going to be a whole bunch of new mothers standing on our porch with pitchforks and torches, looking to string you up.”

      She gazed at him for a long moment and at first he thought it was because of his vivid description of frontier justice—but then it hit him. She’d picked up on his terminology. He’d said our instead of my. Without stopping to think, he’d turned his home into their home and just like that, he’d officially included her in the scheme of things.

      In his life.

      Was she angry? Or maybe even upset that he’d just sounded as if he was taking her being here for granted? He really couldn’t tell and he didn’t want to come right out and ask her on the outside chance that he’d guessed wrong.

      His back against the wall, Eli guided the conversation in a slightly different direction. “I just don’t want you to think that I invited you to stay here because I really wanted to get a free housekeeper.”

      Kasey did her best to tamp down her amusement. “So, what you’re actually saying is that I could be as sloppy as you if I wanted to?”

      He sincerely doubted if the woman had ever experienced a sloppy day in her life, but that was the general gist of what he was trying to get across to her. She could leave things messy. He had no expectations of her, nor did he want her to feel obligated to do anything except just be.

      “Yes,” he answered.

      Kasey shook her head. The grin she’d been attempting to subdue for at least five seconds refused to be kept under wraps.

      “That’s not possible,” she told him. “I think you have achieved a level of chaos that few could do justice to.”

      Somewhere into the second hour of her cleaning, she’d begun to despair that she was never going to dig herself out of the hole she’d gotten herself into. But she’d refused to be defeated and had just kept on going. In her opinion,