Double Duty For The Cowboy. Brenda Harlen

there had been hints of something growing between them—aside from the girth of her belly—tempting Regan to hope that the marriage they’d entered into for the sake of their babies might someday become more.

      Then a movement in the bassinet caught her eye. “It looks like Poppy’s waking up.”

      He followed the direction of her gaze and smiled at the big yawn on the little girl’s face. “Are you sure that’s not Piper?”

      “No,” she admitted.

      Although the twins weren’t genetically identical, it wasn’t easy to tell them apart. Poppy’s hair was a shade darker than her sister’s, and Piper had a half-moon-shaped birthmark beside her belly button, but of course, they were swaddled in blankets with caps on their heads, so neither telltale feature was visible right now.

      He chuckled softly.

      “Do you think she’s hungry?” Regan asked worriedly.

      The nurse had encouraged her to feed on demand, which meant putting the babies to her breast whenever they were awake and hungry. But her milk hadn’t come in yet, so naturally Regan worried that her babies were always hungry because they weren’t getting any sustenance.

      “Let me change her diaper and then we’ll see,” Connor suggested.

      She appreciated that he didn’t balk at doing the messy jobs. Of course, parenthood was brand new to both of them, and changing diapers was still more of a novelty than a chore. With two infants, she suspected that would change quickly. The doting daddy might be ducking out of diaper changes before the week was out, but for now, she was grateful for the offer because it meant that her weary and aching body didn’t have to get out of bed.

      “She’s so tiny,” he said again, as he carefully lifted one of the pink-blanketed bundles out of the bassinet.

      They were the first words he’d spoken when newborn Piper had been placed in his hands, his voice thick with a combination of reverence and fear.

      “Not according to Dr. Amaro,” she reminded him.

      In fact, the doctor had remarked that the babies were good sizes for twins born two weeks early. Piper had weighed in at five pounds, eight ounces and measured eighteen and a half inches; Poppy had tipped the scale at five pounds, ten ounces and stretched out to an even eighteen inches. Still, she’d recommended that the new mom spend several days in the hospital with her babies to ensure they were feeding and growing before they went home.

      But Regan agreed with Connor that the baby did look tiny, especially cradled as she was now in her daddy’s big hands.

      “And you were right,” he said, as he unsnapped the baby’s onesie to access her diaper. “This is Poppy.”

      Which only meant that the newborn didn’t have a birthmark, not that her mother was particularly astute or intuitive.

      Throughout her pregnancy, Regan had often felt out of her element and completely overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. When she was younger, several of her friends had earned money by babysitting, but Regan had never done so. She liked kids well enough; she just didn’t have any experience with them.

      She’d quickly taken to her niece—the daughter of her younger brother, Spencer. But Dani had been almost four years old the first time Regan met her, a little girl already walking and talking. A baby was a completely different puzzle—not just smaller but so much more fragile, unable to communicate except through cries that might mean she was hungry or wet or unhappy or any number of other things. And even after months spent preparing for the birth of her babies, Regan didn’t feel prepared.

      Thankfully, Connor didn’t seem to suffer from the same worries and doubts. He warmed the wipe between his palms before folding back the wet diaper to gently clean the baby’s skin.

      “Did you borrow that plastic baby from our prenatal classes to practice on?” she wondered aloud.

      He chuckled as he slid a clean diaper beneath Poppy’s bottom. “No.”

      “Then how do you seem to know what you’re doing already?”

      “My brother’s eight years younger than me,” he reminded her. “And I changed enough of Deacon’s diapers way back when to remember the basics of how it’s done.”

      There was a photo in Brielle’s baby album of Regan holding her infant sister in her lap and a bottle in the baby’s mouth, but she didn’t have any recollection of the event. She’d certainly never been responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. Instead, the routine childcare tasks had fallen to the family housekeeper, Celeste, because both Margaret and Ben Channing had spent most of their waking hours at Blake Mining.

      But Connor’s mom hadn’t had the help of a live-in cook and housekeeper. If even half the stories that circulated around town were true, Faith Parrish worked three part-time jobs to pay the bills, often leaving her youngest son in the care of his big brother. Deacon’s father had been in the picture for half a dozen years or so, but the general consensus in town was that he’d done nothing to help out at home and Faith was better off when he left. But everything Regan thought she knew about Connor’s childhood was based on hearsay and innuendo, because even after six months of marriage, her husband remained tight-lipped about his family history.

      Which didn’t prevent her from asking: “Your father didn’t help out much, did he?”

      “Stepfather,” he corrected automatically. “And no. He was always too busy.”

      “Doing what?” she asked, having heard that a serious fall had left the man with a back injury and unable to work.

      “Watching TV and drinking beer,” Connor said bluntly, as he slathered petroleum jelly on Poppy’s bottom to protect her delicate skin before fastening the Velcro tabs on the new diaper.

      “I guess you didn’t miss him much when he left,” she remarked.

      He lifted the baby, cradling her gently against his chest as he carried her over to the bed. “I certainly didn’t miss being knocked around.”

      She felt her skin go cold. “Your stepfather hit you?”

      “Only when he was drinking.”

      Which he’d just admitted the man spent most of his time doing.

      “How did I not know any of this?” she wondered aloud, as she unfastened her top to put the baby to her breast.

      He shrugged again and turned away, as if to give her privacy.

      If the topic of their conversation hadn’t been so serious, Regan might have laughed at the idea of preserving even a shred of modesty with a man who’d watched the same baby now suckling at her breast come into the world between her widely spread legs.

      “It’s not something I like to talk about,” he said, facing the closed blinds of the window.

      “So why are you telling me now?” she asked curiously.

      It was a good question, Connor acknowledged to himself.

      He’d tried to bury that part of his past in the past. He didn’t even like to think about those dark days when Dwayne Parrish had lived in the rented, ramshackle bungalow with him and his brother and their mother. To Dwayne, ruling with an iron fist wasn’t just an expression but a point of pride most often made at his stepson’s expense.

      He turned back around, silently acknowledging that if he was going to have this conversation with his wife, they needed to have it face-to-face.

      “Because part of me worries that, after living with him for seven years, I might have picked up his short fuse,” he finally confided.

      Regan immediately shook her head. “You didn’t.”

      “We’ve only been married for six months. How can you know?”

      “Because I know you,” she said. “You are gentle