Jingle-Bell Baby. Линда Гуднайт

      The child stuck his legs straight out from the couch and tapped the toes of his boots in a steady rhythm. “Noah’s mama had a baby. They got to bring it home and keep it. Now he gots two brothers. But a sister would be okay, too.”

      Dax sighed. He and Gavin had this conversation every time one of the boy’s schoolmates welcomed a new sibling. How did he explain to a five-year-old that his daddy wasn’t the kind of man women wanted to have babies with?

      “Is she from around here?” Rowdy’s question gave Dax an excuse not to answer the boy. “The woman. Anybody we know?”

      “No. Not even a Texan.” He knew that for certain. Her buttery voice with its clipped syllables was upper-class Eastern, a Yankee. He’d stake his ranch on it. Even her clothes were different.

      “What was she doing out here on a remote county road all by herself? Visiting someone?”

      “Can’t say.” Though he’d been asking himself the same question. “We didn’t exactly have a conversation.”

      “No, I guess not.” Rowdy ran a thumb and forefinger along his chiseled jawline. “What did she look like? Is she pretty?”

      Dax shot him a frown. His top ranch hand liked the ladies and had a new one on his arm every week. Women seemed to like him right back. Still, the question didn’t sit well with Dax.

      “She was a scared kid.” Scared but tough and courageous. He couldn’t get that out of his head or the thought of the tiny, mewling baby that had been born in his hands.

      “I’m sad for her, Daddy, if she’s scared. Can we go see her?”

      “I told you she’s all right.” The words came out a little harsher than he’d intended. Gavin blanched and sat back against the couch.

      Dax patted the boy’s knee, letting him know the sharp retort wasn’t aimed at him. Gavin was tenderhearted to his old man’s hard-hearted, plain and simple. But Dax refused to feel guilty about wanting the strange day to end here and now. He’d done his part to help the woman. He’d played the good Samaritan. She was receiving expert care and the hospital would contact her family. He had a ranch to run and a downed fence to fix. He’d heard the last of the mysterious young mother and her baby. And that’s the way he wanted it.

      Jenna heard voices. She opened her eyes in a semidarkened room that smelled of antiseptic and oversteamed food. She faced a wall and a wide pair of windows covered by blinds. The morning sun sliced through, shedding strips of pale yellow across a white woven blanket. Memory flooded in with the sunlight.

      The pain, the car, a tall, gruff-talking rancher with gentle hands.

      “Oh.” Her hands shot to her belly. The baby. The man had delivered her little girl and brought them to the hospital. A mix of embarrassment and wonder filled her. She’d had her baby in a car with only a stranger to help. Mother would be mortified.

      She shifted in the narrow hospital bed. Her body was sore and stiff, but not painfully so, a fact that surprised her. After the torture in the car she’d expected to be half-dead today.

      She rolled to her side, eager to hold her new daughter.

      The baby was gone.

      A tremor rippled through her as the possibilities played through her head. The nurses had left the newborn here, at the bedside, in an Isolette. Jenna was positive.

      Had the Carrington machine already discovered her whereabouts?

      Fighting the stiff sheets, she sat upright, only to tumble sideways onto the pillow, light-headed and weak. Blood roared in her temples. She took deep breaths, waiting until the black dots dissipated.

      For a long moment, she remained still, frustration in every breath. Had someone recognized her and called her family? Was her baby girl even now in the smothering bosom of the Carrington clan?

      The heavy wooden door opened with a swish. Jenna braced to face her censuring mother, determined to stand strong for her baby.

      When a nurse appeared, backside first, Jenna wilted against the pillow in relief.

      “Everything looks great with your little princess,” the woman said, rolling the Isolette into the room. “Doctor checked her all out, gave her the requisite medications and said she was perfect.”

      “I didn’t know where you’d taken her.” Her voice sounded breathless and scared.

      The nurse, a young woman with a long, black ponytail, whose tag read Crystal Wolf, RN, gave her a sympathetic pat. “Sorry, hon, you were sleepin’ like a rock, so I didn’t want to disturb you. Not after what you went through. You ready for her? Or are you too tired? You look a little pale.”

      Jenna held out her arms. Color would return now that she knew her mother wasn’t on the premises. “Yes, please let me hold her.”

      “She’s a darling. So pretty with all that fine golden hair and her little turned-up nose.”

      Jenna thought her daughter looked like an alien. A withered old lady alien. “Will her head always be pointed like this?”

      With a shake of dangly white earrings, the nurse laughed. She reached over, flipped the soft pink blanket back and gently massaged the baby’s head with a cupped hand. “You do that every day and before you know it, the cone head will be gone.”

      “Thank goodness.” Jenna gave a shaky laugh.

      She’d read books and searched the Internet on the topic of parenting and felt competent to be a mother, but now that the moment was upon her, the idea of caring for another human being frightened her. She had no home, no job, and no one to help. For a person who’d never been allowed to do anything for herself, she had a great deal to learn—fast.

      “Do you have a name for this little princess?”

      A gentle smile lifted Jenna’s mouth. “Sophie. Sophie Joy because she is the greatest joy I’ve ever known.”

      “Oh, hon, that’s beautiful.”

      Sophie stretched, her tiny face screwing up in an adorable expression. Jenna’s whole body seized up with an overwhelming love, a love so powerful tears filled her eyes. This was why she’d run away. This precious bit of humanity deserved to love and be loved for the right reasons. She deserved to grow up free from fear and the hovering, controlling influences that had stymied Jenna’s life since birth.

      Her family, particularly Elaine Von Gustin Carrington, would not control this baby’s life the way they’d controlled hers.

      People who envied her opulent lifestyle had no idea what it was like to live in an ivory tower surrounded by hired bodyguards and nannies and private tutors. They had no idea the sadness of a child never allowed to play outside or with other children who were “not like us.” They’d never sat with their faces pressed against the window watching others play in the snow while wondering what it would be like to build a snowman with someone other than a hired nanny and a burly bodyguard.

      The world considered her a spoiled rich princess, but they were wrong. Elaine Carrington’s elitism and her kidnapping paranoia had made her only daughter a lonely child, a prisoner of her family’s enormous wealth.

      Which was exactly the reason Jenna wanted Sophie Joy to grow up in a normal home, in a normal town, doing normal things. She’d play with other children and go to a real school and maybe even join a soccer team if she wanted to. When she was a teenager, she’d hang out at the mall and have sleepovers and attend school dances with friends of her own choosing.

      Sophie would have a childhood her mother had only dreamed of, a wish that sounded foolish to most people—even her late husband, though he’d pretended something far different in the beginning. Early in their secret relationship, Derek had nurtured Jenna’s longing to be a regular wife living in the suburbs. But the Carrington money had followed her in marriage, corrupting the boy who’d claimed to love her, and the few weeks of normalcy