The One Winter Collection. Rebecca Winters

when he’d heard Amy reading stories and wondered if his dad had wanted to read to him.

      Funny that he would feel sympathy when the letters had resurfaced. Rationally, that should make him angry all over again.

      He thought of Amy singing last night, and seeing the tree, and putting the blanket on her this morning. He thought of her tears and his hands in her hair. He thought of the exquisite softness of her lips taking his.

      “Up!”

      “All right, already.”

      Taking a deep breath, he leaned over and picked up the baby.

      It was not a tender moment. The baby stank to high heaven.

      And yet as that stinky baby snuggled into him, Ty was aware for the first time that that long ago girl who had accused him of not having a heart, had not been right after all.

      Because he did have a heart. He could feel it beating as Jamey pressed deeper against him, sighed happily, as if it were a homecoming.

      It was that he had built walls around it, an impenetrable fortress.

      It was obviously Amy’s fault, even before the complication of her lips touching his, that the walls were being compromised, the fortress being threatened. Softness was flowing through the barriers like water onto parched earth. Allowing that softness in was why, without warning, he felt sympathy for a man he had barely spoken to for years.

      And he didn’t know how, in the end, any of this could possibly be a good thing.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       WHAT had she done?

      Amy sank back in her chair, listened to the gruff masculine melody of Ty talking to Jamey down the hallway in the guest bedroom.

      She had kissed him. She had kissed Ty Halliday. That’s what she had done. There were excuses of course: the pain of the burn had knocked down her normal quota of reserve. Still, she waited for regret to swim around her like a shark sensing blood. Giving in to the temptation to taste his lips was just more evidence of her stupidity.

      But the regret did not come.

      How could she regret that? Taking his lips in hers had felt like a conscious decision, entirely empowering. And she could still feel the shiver of pure sensation. She thought she might remember it as long as she lived.

      She was leaving, anyway. As soon as the roads were passable, she would be gone. So what did it matter that, when he had put his arms around her, she had felt for the first time in a long, long time as if she had fallen and there had been a net waiting to catch her?

      That’s what the kiss had been about.

      Pure gratitude.

      Instead of agreeing with her that she had indeed been stupid about burning herself, about winding up here when she needed to be somewhere else, his voice had been deep and calm and reassuring.

      Hey, it’s going to be okay.

      Instead of pointing out to her all the different ways she could have avoided the situation, and all the trouble she had caused, he had just said, simply, I’ll fix it.

      If something other than gratitude had shivered to life in that brief second when her lips had touched his and her world had tilted crazily, so what? Again, she was leaving. Whatever else had been there—some primal awareness, some wrenching hunger—would have no opportunity to blossom to life.

      Whatever that had been, he had felt it, too. Right down to the toes of his wet cowboy boots. He’d pulled away from her as if he’d got a jolt form a cattle prod.

      Amy chided herself. She should have the decency at least to be embarrassed. But she did not feel embarrassed.

      She felt, again, oddly and delightfully empowered. That big, self-assured cowboy was just a little bit afraid of what had happened between them. He had built a world where he had absolute control, and it could be nothing but a good thing for that attitude to be challenged now and then!

      Ty came back into the kitchen with Jamey. The baby looked ridiculously happy to find himself in Ty’s arms.

      There was something terrifyingly beautiful about seeing a tiny child in the arms of such a man.

      It was a study in contrasts. The man’s skin etched by sun and wind and a hint of rough, dark whisker, the baby’s skin as tender as the fuzzy inside of a creamy rose petal. The man had easy certainty in his own rugged strength, the baby was like a melting puddle of skin and bone. The man’s eyes held shadows, the baby’s innocence. The man’s mouth was a stern line of cynicism, the baby’s a curve of pure joy.

      And of course, the man was totally self-reliant, the baby totally the opposite. And in this moment, Ty had assumed the mantle of responsibility for the baby’s reliance.

      It surprised her that, given his reluctance to hold the baby yesterday, Ty looked relatively comfortable with his little charge. He dodged the pudgy finger trying to insert itself in his nose with the ease and grace of a bullfighter who had done it all a thousand times.

      Then Amy caught a whiff of her charming offspring. She was amazed that Ty had him in the crook of his arm, nestled against his chest, that Jamey wasn’t being held at arm’s length like a bomb about to go off.

      “I don’t expect you to deal with that,” she said.

      “Oh, really?” He raised that dark slash of a brow at her. “Who do you expect to deal with it?”

      That silenced her. Who did she expect to deal with it? Her hand felt as if it was on fire. It actually hurt so bad that she felt nauseous. She was not sure she could do a one-handed diaper change, even if she could fight through the haze of physical pain. And then there was the question of infection.

      Ty set Jamey down on the baby blanket, still spread out on the kitchen floor. “Where’s his stuff? You’ll have to give me step-by-step instructions.”

      She directed Ty to the diaper bag, watched him set it down on the floor and get down on his knees between the baby and the bag.

      “Prepare yourself,” she said. “This is not going to be pretty.”

      Ty leveled a look at her. “Lady, I’ve been up to my knees in all kinds of crap since I was old enough to walk. I’ve watched animals being born, and I’ve watched them die. And I’ve seen plenty of stuff in between that wasn’t anything close to pretty. So if you think there’s anything about what’s about to happen that would faze me, you’re about as wrong as you can get.”

      “I’m just saying men aren’t good at this.”

      “Look, there are things a man wants to be good at.”

      Did his eyes actually linger on her lips as he said that before he turned his attention to the diaper bag?

      “In my world,” he informed her, digging through the bag, “a man wants to be good at throwing a rope. He wants to be good at riding anything that has four legs. He wants to be good at turning a green colt into a reliable cow horse.”

      His words were drawing rather enticing pictures in her mind.

      “He wants to be good at starting a fire with no matches and wet wood. He wants to be good with his fists if he’s backed into a corner and there is no other way out. He wants to be good at tying a fly that will call a trout out of a brook.”

      “This—” he gestured at her son, lying down, legs flaying the air and releasing clouds of odor “—is not something any man aspires to be good at. The question is, can he get the job done?”

      “I may have stated it wrong. I simply meant it’s not something men do well.”

      “Are you going to be grading me on this?”