The One Winter Collection. Rebecca Winters

wasn’t admitting that to anyone, least of all not himself.

      Dinner was delicious, ambrosia to a man who ate out of a can and a freezer, unless one of the neighbors took pity on him and delivered a casserole. Ty had ordered himself not to say one more revealing thing to Amy, but he needn’t have worried. She didn’t bring up the subject of his reading material.

      She had her hands full with the baby. Ty did not have a great deal of experience being around babies, eating, or otherwise.

      Ty had no high chair in his house, so the squirming Jamey was on his mother’s lap, seemingly doing his best to dodge the spoon his mother held for him and eat with his hands.

      Between food being thrown on the floor to exuberant shouts of “oops” and food being smashed to a chant of “Odam,” the baby kept his mother hopping and Ty thoroughly entertained.

      “Wow,” Ty said, when the baby’s bowl was finally empty. “I don’t know if any of that got in his mouth. There’s goo in his ears, eyes and nose, and between his toes, and all over you, but as far as I could see not a single crumb made it to his mouth. Not that he looks undernourished.”

      She brushed crumbs off her blouse and shook them out of her hair, then rose, baby on her hip, and began to clear plates.

      “Stop it. I’ll do that.”

      For a moment, she looked as if she was going to protest, but then she looked at the baby, and his head-to-toe covering of chicken potpie.

      “Are you sure you don’t mind? I could pop him in the bath before bed. You don’t mind if I put him in your tub?”

      “Of course not. Thank you for the dinner. It was the best thing I’ve had in a long time.”

      “You’re welcome. Come on, Jamey, bath time.”

      After he’d cleared the dishes, he took a quick look through the open door of the bathroom and said goodnight to them both. Ty was done, physically finished, and worried his exhaustion might get him blabbing again. He did not want a quiet moment alone with her once the baby was in bed.

      Jamey, wet and pink, was now as covered with bubbles as he had been with chicken potpie. He leaned forward, arms upstretched, making loud smacking noises.

      “He wants a kiss.”

      “He might as well learn now that what he wants and what he gets are two different things.”

      “Did you learn that from the ranch hands?” she shot back at him.

      “Yeah. I did. The cowboy way. And it has stood me in good stead, too.”

      “I can clearly see you radiate happiness,” she said sweetly.

      He gave her a sour look and went into his bedroom, away from that look in her eyes, knowing and sympathetic. Well, he had no one to blame but himself, blabbing his life history to her.

      From behind his closed bedroom door, Ty slipped off his jeans and rolled into bed. He could hear the bath noises. Someone was obviously radiating happiness.

      The baby’s bath time was imbued with the same level of enthusiasm and joy as eating had been. There was gleeful chortles, splashing, motorboat noises, gurgles, clapping and games.

      Ty tried putting his pillow over his head.

      All it did was muffle the happiness that had invaded his house.

      And then the invaders were in the bedroom beside his. Ty had moved Amy’s suitcase off his bed and in there. He only had two bedrooms, so she was going to have to share the space she had set up for the baby. There was a twin bed, she had a playpen set up with a little nest of pale blue blankets and stuffed toys in its confines for the baby to sleep in.

      Ty realized how thin the walls were. He gave up on the pillow. She didn’t ever have to know he was eavesdropping on story time.

      She read three stories, and Ty found himself hanging on every word. He recognized the stories, ones he had begged the kindergarten teacher to lend him, in love with stories from the first encounter. That teacher had been a kind woman, and lent the little motherless boy all the books he could haul home.

      He had shown his father the books hopefully, but his dad had looked baffled by them. He’d flipped through them impatiently, looking at the pictures of little creatures dressed in human clothes and living in human houses with amazed dismay. Then he’d shoved the precious books back at Ty.

      “I don’t have time for make-believe,” he’d said gruffly.

      And so, carefully, greedily, looking at pictures and sounding out the words to Curious George and others by himself in his bed at night, long after his exhausted father had gone to sleep, he would read by flashlight.

      Only years later did Ty figure out his father’s reading skills were only rudimentary. His father had always known Halliday Creek Ranch would be his life, just as it had been his father’s before that. He had not seen a use for education, and school had been a painful experience for him, one he could not wait to leave behind.

      Now, listening to the stories, Ty wondered if his father had wanted to read to him. He dismissed the thought as quickly as it came.

      Amy finished the bedtime stories with a tale Ty had not heard, called Love You Forever, and Ty felt the emotionally evocative words pull on someplace in him like a gathering storm.

      He could hear her putting the baby in the playpen, imagined her covering him with a blanket. There was not a single protest.

      And then he knew why.

      She had saved the best for last.

      She began to sing Jamey lullabies. Her voice was clear and true, shining like stars coming out in an evening sky.

      And suddenly Ty’s heart was heavy, and his eyes were heavy, and her soft voice was soaring in his ears. A yearning was sitting on his chest like a weight. It was for a wish unrealized. It was for all the things that had never been.

      And that he had long since accepted would never be.

      He slept when the songs were done, instantly and deeply, the sleep of an exhausted man.

      When he awoke in the morning, he was aware of two things. First, it had snowed through the night, and probably hard. The house had that quiet to it, outside sounds of cattle and birds and horses muffled by a layer of snow on the ground and on the roof.

      Second, he was intensely and instantly aware he was not in the house by himself. He was not sure why that awareness was so sharp. The child and the woman were making no sound, almost certainly still asleep in these predawn hours that he habitually woke in.

      So, how did he know? The smells from last night’s dinner, the chicken potpie scorched on the burner and the baby’s bath lingering in the air?

      No, those smells seemed to be gone, replaced by more tempting ones. Ty was sure he could faintly smell popcorn, and something else. Surely she hadn’t got to baking after she’d put the baby to bed?

      But more than smells, he knew it was being a man alone that had made him sensitive to the presence of others in his house. He could feel it tickling along his skin, almost as if the notes from her song had left something shivering in the air long after her voice had died away and both he and the baby had slept.

      Ty rose quickly, dressed quietly and went on silent feet from his room.

      The house was still, as he had known it would be, the guest room door slightly ajar.

      He tiptoed through to the kitchen, put on coffee. He would take a travel mug with him, go outside and do chores without awakening his visitors. When he got back they would be up, and he could help her pack her stuff in her little car and wave at her as she went down the driveway.

      She’d probably ask for an email address so she could keep in touch. And he didn’t have one, so that would be the end of that.

      He turned to the back porch,