The Rancher's Christmas Promise. Allison Leigh

difference between me and Tina is that I won’t take off while your back is turned.” She grabbed a cloth and started wiping up Layla’s face. The baby squirmed, trying to avoid the cloth just like she’d tried to avoid the green muck. But Mrs. Pyle prevailed and then tossed the cloth aside. “You don’t need a nanny around the clock, anyway. You’re here at night.” She lifted the baby out of the high chair. “You can take care of her yourself. Then just get some help during the day. Preferably someone who doesn’t have to drive farther than from Braden, or once the winter comes, you’re going to have problems all over again.” She plopped Layla into his arms and hustled to the sink where she wet another cloth. “But it won’t be me. I have my own family I need to look out for, too. My grandson—” She broke off, grimacing. She squeezed out the moisture and waved the rag at him. “I won’t apologize for not wanting to be tied down to a baby all over again. Not at my age.” She sounded defensive.

      “I don’t need an apology, Mrs. Pyle. I need someone to take care of Layla!”

      The baby lightly slapped his face with her hands and laughed.

      Mrs. Pyle’s expression softened. She chucked Layla lightly under the chin. “Maybe instead of looking for a nanny, you should start looking for a mama for this little girl.”

      Ryder grimaced.

      “There are plenty of other fish in the sea. All you need to do is cast your line. You’re a good-looking cuss when you clean yourself up. Someone’ll come biting before you know it.”

      “I don’t think so.” One foray into so-called wedded bliss was one disaster enough.

      The look in Doreen’s eyes got even more sympathetic. “I know what it’s like to lose a spouse, hon. Single parents might be all the rage these days, but I’m here to tell you it’s easier when two people are committed to their family. You’re still young. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life alone. I’m sure your poor wife wouldn’t have wanted that, either. She’d surely want this little mite to have a proper mama. Someone who won’t toss aside caring for Layla on some flighty whim the way Tina just did.”

      He managed a tight smile. His “poor wife” had been exactly that. A poor wife. But not in the way Doreen Pyle meant. Abandoning Layla had been a helluva way to show off her maternal nature. Tina’s quitting out of the blue was a lot more forgivable. “Would you at least stay until I find someone new?” He had to finish getting the hay in before the weather turned. And then he and his closest neighbor to the east were helping each other through roundup. Then he’d be sorting and shipping and—

      “I’ll stay another week,” she said, interrupting the litany of tasks running through his mind. “But that’s it, Ryder.”

      Layla grinned up at him with her six teeth and smacked his face again with her hand.

      He looked back at his housekeeper. “A week.”

      “That’s all the time I can give you, Ryder. I’m sorry.”

      A week was better than nothing.

      And it was damn sure more than Tina had given him.

      “I don’t suppose you could stay and watch Layla for another few hours or so?” As his housekeeper began shaking her head no, he grabbed the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside, so he could pretend he didn’t see. “Got a friend—” big overstatement there “—who needs help towing her car back to town. Broke down up near Devil’s Crossing.” He grabbed the bottle of ketchup that Layla latched onto and stuck it back on the refrigerator shelf. She immediately reached for something else and he quickly shut the door and gave Mrs. Pyle a hopeful look. The same one he’d mastered by the time he was ten and living with Adelaide.

      Instead of looking resigned and accepting, though, Mrs. Pyle was giving him an eyebrows-in-the-hairline look. “Her car? Is this female friend single?”

      Warning alarms went off inside his head. “Yeah.”

      She lifted Layla out of his arms. “Well, go rescue your lady friend. And give my suggestion about a wife some thought.”

      He let her remark slide. “Thank you, Mrs. Pyle.”

      “Not going to change my leaving in a week,” she warned as she carried the baby out of the kitchen. “And you might think about washing some of the day off yourself, as well, before you go out playing Dudley Do-Right.”

      * * *

      He hadn’t showered, but he had washed up and pulled on fresh clothes. And he still felt pretty stupid about it.

      It wasn’t as if he wanted to impress Greer Templeton. Not with a clean shirt or anything else. And it damn sure wasn’t as if he was giving Mrs. Pyle’s suggestion any consideration.

      Marrying someone just for Layla’s sake?

      He pushed the idea straight out of his mind and shifted into Park at the top of the hill as he stared out at the worn-looking Victorian house.

      The white paint on the fancy trim was peeling and the dove-gray paint on the siding was fading. The shingle roof needed repair, if not replacement, and the brick chimney looked as if it were related to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But the yard around the house was green and neat.

      Not exactly what he would have expected of the lady lawyer. But then again, she worked for the public defender’s office, where the pay was reportedly abysmal and most of her clients were supposedly the dregs of society.

      He turned off the engine and got out of the truck, walking around to the trailer he’d used to haul Greer’s little car. He checked the chains holding it in place and then headed up the front walk to the door.

      The street was quiet, and his boots clumped loudly as he went up the steps and crossed the porch to knock on the door. The heavy brass door knocker was shaped like a dragonfly.

      If he could ever get Adelaide to come and visit Braden, she’d love the place.

      When no one came to the door, he went back down the porch steps. There was an elderly woman across the street making a production of sweeping the sidewalk, though it seemed obvious she was more interested in giving him the once-over.

      He tipped the brim of his hat toward her before he started unchaining Greer’s car. “Evenin’.”

      The woman clutched her broom tightly and started across the street. A little black poodle trotted after her. “That’s Greer’s car,” the woman said suspiciously.

      He didn’t stop what he was doing. “Yes, ma’am.”

      “What’re you doing with it?”

      “Unloading it.”

      She stopped several feet away, still holding the broom handle as if she was prepared to use it on him if need be. “I don’t know you.”

      “No, ma’am.” He fit the wheel ramps in place and hopped up onto the trailer. “I assure you that Greer does.” He opened the car door and folded himself down inside it.

      Maybe Greer—who was probably all of five two or three without those high heels she was always wearing—could fit comfortably into the car, but he couldn’t. Not for any length of time, anyway.

      He started the car, backed down the ramp and turned into the driveway. Then he shut off the engine, crawled out from behind the wheel and locked it up again before sticking the key back into the magnetic box he’d found tucked inside the wheel well.

      The woman was still standing in the middle of the street.

      He secured the ramps back up onto the trailer and gave her another nod. “If you see her, tell her she’s got a thermostat problem.”

      “Tell her yourself.” The woman pointed her broom handle at an expensive black SUV that had just crested the top of the hill. “Bet that’s her now.”

      He bit back an oath. He still didn’t know what had possessed him to haul