The Cowboy's Secret Baby. Karen Smith Rose

analogy brought an unexpected chuckle from him. “Okay.” He’d held on to baby calves before.

      Jordan was wearing a red shirt and denim overalls. One of the straps had slipped down his shoulder. Ty slipped his forefinger under it and straightened it.

      Marissa was close enough that he caught the scent of her shampoo. Oh, how he remembered that scent. The night he’d made love to her, her hair had smelled like flowers, and that’s the scent he caught now. It triggered a response in his body that was totally inappropriate for this situation. He willed himself to block off any attraction to Marissa. He knew how to concentrate. He’d had to focus hard when he got up on those bulls. Now he focused hard on Jordan.

      “How’d you pick his name?” Ty asked to fill the air with more than the vibrations between the two of them.

      “I liked it,” she said simply.

      He remembered again, no mom, no family, just The Mommy Club helping her, strangers helping her, and she was making a life for herself. Marissa Lopez was stronger than he ever imagined.

      Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, he slid his large hands under Jordan’s little arms. Then he lifted the little boy from Marissa’s hold. Jordan went perfectly still as Ty didn’t know what to do with him once he had him. Then he remembered how Marissa had tucked him into the crook of her arm. So he tried that. His little boy’s body was solid and warm.

      His little boy.

      Ty’s chest constricted and his throat tightened. Just what in the blue blazes was happening to him?

      Jordan looked up at him, seemingly mesmerized by Ty’s face, and Ty was just as mesmerized with his son. Jordan reached out his hand and his fingers touched Ty’s jaw. Ty now wished he’d shaved this morning. Would that little hand get scratched by beard stubble? His hand covered Jordan’s to make sure it wouldn’t.

      Jordan smiled at him, the baby’s eyes bright with the discovery of something new to do.

      However, the quiet didn’t last long. Jordan pulled his hand away and began squiggling, kicking his legs, rocking to and fro. Ty had to be quick to hold him securely.

      “He’s an armful,” he mumbled.

      “Especially when he wants to be somewhere else,” Marissa confessed. “You can put him down.”

      “He can walk?”

      “He has been since August. He was a fast crawler, but now he gets around even faster. Some days I think he can move like lightning.”

      Not wanting Jordan to be unhappy in his high perch, or squiggling away and falling, Ty said, “Whoa, little guy. I’ll put you down.” But Ty realized that wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He would have liked to keep holding the baby for a while, studying the face that seemed to be a mixture of his and Marissa’s. Jordan definitely had her eyes, deep dark chocolate brown. But the mouth? That could have been Ty’s.

      Jordan toddled over to a laundry basket filled with toys. He lifted out a plastic bucket and threw it to the kitchen floor. Then he pulled out a stuffed dog and that landed next to the bucket.

      “Will he empty the basket?” Ty asked, fascinated now by the baby’s behavior.

      “He’ll empty it until he finds what he wants, or he’ll empty it just because he wants to. I’m trying to teach him to put everything back in again, but you know how that goes.”

      “No, I don’t.”

      Marissa blushed. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I just meant—” She threw up her hands. “Oh, never mind.”

      “You meant that teaching him how to put toys away is hard. I get it, Marissa. But now I would like you to understand something. Jordan is my son, and I want to be his father. No, I’m not sure how that’s going to play out yet, but I do know I want to spend time with him.”

      “What kind of time?” she asked, a bit shakily.

      “I don’t know. I want to think about it. Can I have numbers where I can reach you?”

      After giving him a good long look, apparently deciding whether she wanted to acquiesce or not, she opened a drawer and took out a pad of paper and a pen.

      Then she said, “I’ll give you my cell number and my work number.”

      “Are you still waitressing at the diner?”

      “Oh, no,” she said, her pen stopping midnumber. “The Mommy Club helped me there, too. I needed a job with good insurance benefits. They hooked me up with Raintree Winery. Jase Cramer needed an assistant.”

      Jase Cramer was almost a celebrity in town. Ty read about him once when he’d accessed the local newspaper online. Cramer had been a photojournalist who’d won a Pulitzer. But he’d been shot while he was doing work in Kenya, and he’d come home to become general manager of Raintree Winery.

      “Sara, his wife, is a physical therapist. You saw her talking to me,” Marissa explained.

      He thought how fortuitous it was to run into her at the facility. “Would you have ignored me if I hadn’t called you over?” Ty couldn’t help wondering just how long she would have kept his son from him.

      “I don’t know,” Marissa said honestly. “I never expected to see you there. I never expected to see you back in Fawn Grove.”

      “So you don’t know if you would have ended up on my doorstep with Jordan once the Cozy C is up and running? Certainly you would have heard I was back by then.”

      “I don’t know, Ty. I can’t tell you what I would have done and when.” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “I didn’t know you were back. Nobody knows that we’re...connected in any way. No one but Sara and Kaitlyn, and they’re as busy as I am and don’t have time for gossip.”

      So she had two confidantes now. “They’re close friends?” he asked.

      “The best.”

      “And all three of you are involved in The Mommy Club?”

      “We are.”

      Jordan banged a spatula he’d found in the wash basket against his bucket. As Ty tried to wrap his mind around Marissa’s life, Marissa finished jotting down the numbers, and then she handed him the slip of paper so he could input them into his cell phone contacts. Their fingertips touched and Ty felt the electricity all over again—the quickening of his blood that had told him one night with this woman wasn’t enough. But one night had led to a baby. Jordan had to be his main concern now. Not the chemistry he and Marissa might have.

      When he stepped back, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Because he was leaving?

      “You might have kept me out of your life for two years, Marissa, but that’s not how it’s going to go now. I’m going to think about all this, then we can have a real discussion about what we’re going to do next.”

      He crossed to Jordan and bent down to him. “Hey, little guy. I’m going to see you again soon.”

      Jordan studied him for a moment, then went back to slapping the spatula against the bucket. Maybe he was going to be a drummer.

      Ty straightened and tucked Marissa’s numbers into his shirt pocket. Then he crossed to the door and left.

      His head was spinning as he stood outside Marissa’s door feeling like the outsider he was. But that wouldn’t be true for long. Nope. He was going to be Jordan’s father. He just had to figure out how to do it.

      * * *

      As soon as Ty closed the door behind him, and Marissa heard his boots descending the steps, she scooped up Jordan and held him close. Tears came to her eyes because she didn’t know what was going to happen next. What lengths would Ty go to in order to spend time with his son? Was he going to upset the steady balance she’d found?

      Besides