A Cold Creek Baby. RaeAnne Thayne

the past month, she had been dating the Pine Gulch police chief. On paper, Trace Bowman was everything she wanted. He was great-looking, he was funny, he adored his own family who had a ranch on the other side of town.

      She was trying as hard as she could to let her fondness for him grow into something more. She wanted a husband, a family. Seeing Quinn and Tess together with their darling little boy and now Brant and Mimi and Abigail only intensified that ache to watch a child of her own grow and learn, to have someone else in this big rambling house to fill all the empty spaces.

      She loved the ranch and found great joy in the hard work needed to make it a success. But she was ready for something more, something she knew she would never be able to find while she was hung up on Cisco del Norte.

      She knew darn well she needed to move on. It was long past time. But every time she thought she was on her way, he showed up with that tired, cocky grin and those secrets in his dark eyes and she tumbled head over heels again.

      Not this time. She pulled the thick Star of David quilt she, her mother and Jo had worked on the summer after Cisco came. She looked at the kaleidoscope of colors, the vivid blues and bright purples and greens. She could still see where her stitches had been crooked, amateurish compared to her mother’s and Jo’s.

      She smoothed a hand over the stitches, remembering the time with two strong, wonderful women. After a moment, she tucked the edges in at the bottom.

      She wanted to be tough like her mother and her Aunt Jo, to just forget him and move on. She almost thought she would have an easier time of it if he would only settle down somewhere instead of wandering from country to country in Latin America, doing heaven knows what.

      If he ever stopped running, maybe she could relax a little, but she was never free from worrying about him. In all these years, he obviously hadn’t managed to find whatever he’d been looking for or he would have given up that life long ago.

      And when he was tired of wandering, he would come back to the ranch for a few days or a week, dredging up all these feelings again.

      She wished she could just tell him to stay away until she got her head on straight. But how could she? Winder Ranch was his home, the first and only really secure haven he had ever known.

      As much as her heart cried out for him to give her a little peace and leave her alone, she couldn’t deprive him of that connection.

      She couldn’t turn him away, but she could control how deeply she allowed her heart to become entangled with him. This time things would be different.

      She couldn’t lose all the progress she had made to fall out of love with him. This time she wasn’t going to let those feelings suck her back down again. She needed to move on with her life, to accept that, like that mountain lion she had seen prowling the edge of her property a few days earlier, Cisco del Norte would always be a wild, roving creature she couldn’t contain.

      Chapter Two

      He shouldn’t have come here.

      Cisco sat at the kitchen table in the Winder Ranch kitchen, fighting his way through the strange and twisted mix of guilt and regret and pain tempered by the sweet peace that always seemed to engulf him whenever he drove through the gates.

      He was so damned tired and the raw, gaping hole just under his left rib cage tugged and burned like a son of a bitch.

      Like he’d told Easton, he wanted to just lie down right here in the middle of the kitchen floor and sleep for a week or two.

      Belle banged her sippy cup on the tray of the high chair Easton had pulled from the utility room off the kitchen. “For Joey and Abs,” she had informed him before she took off upstairs to do whatever she was doing with the bedrooms.

      He shouldn’t have come here, but he had spoken the truth to her earlier. He hadn’t known what else to do, where else to go.

      Like an idiot, he had been so sure he had everything figured out. He had originally planned to catch a direct flight to Boise, hand Belle over to her relatives, then head back without anybody knowing he was even in the country.

      But when he finally was able to reach John Moore’s sister just before his flight left Bogotá to let her know about Soqui’s death and that he was on his way with her niece, she had been both shocked and distraught.

      Seems that even as he called her cell number—information retrieved with no small degree of caution from the careful documentation Soqui had hidden away as insurance—Sharon Weaver was on her way to her father’s funeral in Montana and wouldn’t be back in Idaho for several days.

      The news had thrown his plans into considerable disarray. He wasn’t too proud to admit he’d been terrified. Yeah, he had somehow managed the wherewithal to take care of Belle in Bogotá for a couple of days after her mother’s death without accidentally sending her to the hospital or himself to the nuthouse. But the idea of an indefinite stay with a nine-month-old baby in some hotel in Boise while he waited for Sharon to return sent him into a stone-cold panic.

      Coming home to the ranch to spend those few days while he regained his strength seemed the logical choice.

      Easton would know what to do. That had been the mantra he clung to. She was always so in control of every complication. Even when she was a little kid, she had been great at handling any difficulty that came along, whether in school, with his foster brothers or on the ranch.

      He refused to admit that he returned to Winder Ranch like the swallows at Capistrano because this was home.

      She was his home.

      He touched the compass rose tattoo on his left forearm, the little squiggly E right over his radial artery that connected directly to his heart, while Belle banged her sippy cup on the edge of the table and giggled.

      “You think this is funny, young lady?”

      His voice was raspier than normal from exhaustion and that stupid pain he couldn’t control, but she didn’t seem to mind.

      “Ba ba ba ba,” she blabbered and he again thanked heaven she was such an easygoing baby. He didn’t know the first thing about kids and wouldn’t have been able to endure even a few days on his own if not for Isabella’s sweet disposition.

      Even though she quite obviously missed her mother, she still was a sunny, good-natured little girl.

      “You’re glad not to be moving for a minute, aren’t you?”

      She beamed at him, her tiny silver stud earrings glinting in the early morning light.

      Bringing her to the States was the right thing to do, no matter how hard the journey to get her here had been. With her last breath, Soqui had begged him, as she lay dying from a gunshot wound to the stomach, to take care of Belle, to bring her here to John’s family in Idaho.

      He owed her this. She had faced danger with astonishing bravery, had risked her life to finish her husband’s work and to avenge his death against the drug lord who had killed him the year before.

      Cisco had failed to protect her—big surprise there, since he had failed just about every woman unlucky enough to find herself in his life. But he would not fail in this. Soqui wanted Belle to be raised by her relatives in the United States and by damn, that is exactly what she would get.

      Even if it meant he had to spend a few days at Winder Ranch fighting his demons.

      Or fighting Easton, anyway.

      Same thing.

      As if on cue, she returned to the kitchen, bringing that elusive scent of mountain wildflowers that always clung to her skin. She had changed out of her night-clothes and into jeans and a T-shirt and pulled her hair back into a braid that hung down her back like a shiny wheat-colored rope.

      She looked as sweet and innocent as the first pale pink columbines in a mountain meadow in springtime.

      Ah, Easton. For a moment, the regret swamped everything else, even