A Conard County Baby. Rachel Lee

Gage.”

      Remembering her manners, Hope summoned a smile and offered her own hand for a shake. “Thank you for your time.”

      “Good luck to you,” Gage said. “Both of you.”

      Cash laughed, but didn’t sound quite happy. “We shall see, I suppose.”

      Hope guessed they would.

      * * *

      Hope’s sporty little silver car looked out of place on the street where she had parked it. It might have had a sign flashing Outsider on it. She couldn’t even sell it because it was in her father’s name. Entirely too dependent, she thought. Dependent on that man for everything, about to be handed off to a man who had a streak of cruelty she never would have imagined until that night when he took her virginity against her will. A bubble of anger burst in her, but she held it back. Not now. Maybe never. There were more important things than indulging fury about how she had been treated.

      Cash had driven her to her car and he climbed out to help her. A gentleman’s manners in one who looked like anything but a gentleman. Of course, gentlemen weren’t always, were they.

      “You won’t get to drive that much around here,” he said after she climbed in behind the wheel. “You probably won’t want to, anyway. It’ll take a beating on the roads, especially out toward my place. Speaking of which...”

      She looked up, waiting, gripping her keys until they bit into her hand.

      “My ranch is pretty isolated. I’m serious. You might go a week or longer without seeing a soul but me, my daughter, my housekeeper and my hired hands. Can you handle that?”

      Tension suddenly let go. Isolated. “Right now that sounds wonderful.”

      “Right now it probably does. Anyway, I’ve got an old pickup you can use so you won’t be stuck out there when Angie’s in school. You can run on into town if you need to. But most of the time—” he shrugged “—I hope you like horses and cows.”

      “I love horses. I haven’t been close to too many cows.”

      “Now’s your chance. Well, if you’re not changing your mind, follow me. We should get home a little before Angie gets off the bus, so you’ll have a chance to settle in and look around.”

      “Thank you. Sincerely.”

      His eyes crinkled in the corners. “Tell me that again after you’ve met my daughter.”

      That almost sounded like a threat, Hope thought as she turned on her car and pulled out to follow his truck. Then her mood shifted abruptly. It had been doing that a lot lately, but all of a sudden she felt almost giddy. Relief for starters. She had a job.

      A bubble of laughter escaped her, and a genuine smile softened her face for the first time in months. And for the first time, she actually noticed that it was a pretty September day.

      * * *

      Leading the way, Cash wondered if he’d lost his marbles. On the other hand, asking this woman to be a companion to Angie seemed better than having Angie racketing about all by herself too much of the time. All that seemed to do was heighten her hostility.

      But if her anger with him had a dial to turn it down a notch or two, he hadn’t found it.

      He was, he admitted, totally at a loss. When Sandy had left him, Angie had still been in diapers. In one fell swoop, he’d lost wife and daughter to distance. He couldn’t make as many visits as he might have liked because of the demands of work, and Sandy had moved all the way to Arizona. He still felt guilty about that, but over the years as Angie had distanced him, even during his visits, the guilt had become easier to live with. Now she was in his house and broken connections, or at least damaged ones, stared him in the face.

      He quite simply didn’t know how to reach her.

      Which brought him to this moment in time. Leading a strange woman, a pregnant runaway, home in the hopes that she might be able to at least keep the girl safer. That maybe she could reach Angie at least a bit.

      That she could somehow find a way around all his screwups as a father. Because he really did hold himself responsible for this. Clearly he’d failed in some essential way, and blaming it on distance didn’t excuse him. He wondered if he was missing some basic instinct or knowledge. Wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have changed things. No answers arrived.

      He reminded himself that his daughter was still grieving her mother. That was killer all by itself. But in the meantime, he had to do something. He couldn’t just leave her alone for long stretches of time to brood and hurt and fuel her anger. She needed someone, and he was working long hours. The ranch demanded almost all he had in these hard times and didn’t leave a whole lot of room for so-called bonding experiences. Not that Angie would let him get that close.

      His life had turned into a snarled mess. He wasn’t blaming his daughter for it, but she was a problem he couldn’t evade. He had to help her somehow.

      Hence a young woman from Dallas. He just hoped he hadn’t misjudged Hope Conroy, because she was the first person to answer his ad who wasn’t even older than he was. He felt he needed someone closer to Angie in age, someone who might actually be able to be her friend instead of her guard.

      Although Angie probably wouldn’t note the difference. He could hear what was coming already.

      * * *

      The ranch was beautiful, Hope thought. As they at last turned into what she supposed must be his driveway, she took in the wide-open space with its backdrop of high mountains. They were turning purple as the afternoon sun sank toward them.

      There weren’t a whole lot of cattle in sight but she still saw clusters of them scattered like a natural blessing in the open fields. They looked fat and happy.

      The house itself rose two stories amid a stand of tall trees. White clapboard gleamed in the sunlight and a wide porch covered the entire front side. Wooden chairs dotted the porch and to one side hung a wooden bench swing.

      Inviting. More inviting than the perfect showplace in which she had grown up with its manicured lawns and tall pillars, as if it were trying to imitate an antebellum plantation.

      This house looked as if it belonged, and apart from it, the fences provided the only sign that man was here.

      She pulled up on the gravel beside Cash’s truck and climbed out. No sound greeted her except the soft sigh of the breeze. It was chillier here than at home, but she found it invigorating.

      Cash approached her. “Welcome,” he said. “Let’s go inside and get you settled. You have bags, I presume?”

      “I’ll get them.”

      “I’ll help.”

      Hope opened her trunk, revealing her set of matched Louis Vuitton bags. She thought she saw his eyebrows lift, but it was hard to be sure under that battered cowboy hat.

      She’d never thought about that luggage before, but she thought about it now. Those bags shrieked status and money as they were intended to do. She actually felt embarrassed by them. Boy, her worldview was undergoing some radical shifts.

      She followed him willingly up the steps, across the porch and in through the front door. She tugged her rolling carry-on and hung her personal care bag over her shoulder. Cash hefted the two larger ones as if they weighed nothing at all.

      Inside she was surprised by a large foyer with heavily polished wood floors and a wide wood staircase leading upstairs. Clearly this ranch had known some good times. Either that or someone was very much into carpentry. He led her up the stairs.

      “My housekeeper comes three times a week so I’m not asking you to clean or cook.”

      Hope was glad to hear it because she’d never seriously cleaned or cooked in her life. Yeah, she’d done bits of both, especially when she wanted to try out her baking skills in high school, but mostly all of