Finally Home

Book 3: Hope Springs

by Lois Greiman

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Wild horses, wild hearts—and a diapered lamb under the Christmas tree…

Could life get any more hectic at the Lazy Windmill? With the holidays reminding Casie of every mistake she’s ever made, and her assistant Emily struggling to be a single mom, it’s anyone’s guess what the New Year will bring. Then bad boy Colt Dickenson shows up with a ring. No one has ever gotten under her skin like he has, but Casie can’t believe a rough stock cowboy will stick around for the long haul.

Still, the heart wants what it wants; love is as stubborn as family, foals, and farm equipment. And sometimes you have to face your fears to find the happiness only coming home can bring.

Release date: December 1, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Money can’t buy happiness.

Casie Carmichael reminded herself of that comforting little maxim as she smoothed a hand over her newly purchased but slightly battered copy of A Mano. The author was a cowboy poet whose work had touched something deep inside Ty Roberts. And as Emily Kane said, she’d give a kidney to see the boy smile. Especially at Christmas.

So hopefully the scholars were correct, and happiness wasn’t up for sale, because Casie couldn’t even afford a down payment. The Lazy Windmill, the ranch she’d inherited less than a full year ago, was making a comeback, but the upswing was uncertain at best, and she knew enough to keep her expectations humble. Aiming too high brought nothing but trouble. In her mind, Casie called it the hungry horse syndrome: Eat too much and you were certain to come down with a bellyache.

She glanced out the window toward the sculpted white hills that rolled into forever. Her mother had not been a subscriber to any such belief. Kathy Carmichael had been a mover and a shaker. Perhaps others had seen her differently. But to Casie, she had been an undiminished dynamo until the day she died. At age forty-seven, when her only child was still trying to negotiate the slippery trail of her own future, Kathy had declared her intentions of returning to the rodeo circuit. Her husband had objected, but she’d merely laughed and paraphrased Calamity Jane: It wasn’t too late to become a legend. That was three days before she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma. Perhaps it had also been the inauguration of Casie’s hungry horse theory. But whatever the case, a host of events since that moment had done nothing to diminish her belief that asking for too much would destroy—

“No!” The single word rasped through the house, shattering Casie’s introspection.

She jerked away from her bedroom window, catastrophe reflexes twitching. “What’s wrong?” she called, but there was no answer. Racing through the doorway, she torpedoed downstairs.

“Don’t!” Emily’s voice was breathy with desperation.

“I’m coming!” Casie skittered down the stairs, stocking feet slipping on every worn tread, heart thundering in her chest. “What’s wrong? What—” she began and shot into the family room, sure she would find the baby catatonic or Sophie dead on the floor.

But instead, Baby Bliss was slouched in her cushy swing like a tiny angel, and their intern Sophie was nowhere to be seen. Casie’s mind absorbed those little factoids long before her body could adjust to this shocking lack of emergency. Her feet slowed gradually, carrying her farther into the room where Emily Kane, seemingly with all limbs attached and no arterial blood spattering onto the faded wallpaper, was valiantly trying to shoo an unrepentant cowboy back into the kitchen.

“What are you trying to hide?” he asked. Colt Dickenson had that dark, slow timbre to his voice and a steadier-than-earth stance passed down through his Native American roots. The girl tried yet again to shove him out of the room, but he simply leaned into her palms and shifted his diabolical gaze to the right. “Oh, hey, Case. What’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” Her heart was just now settling into a more sedate pace in her over-taxed chest. “I thought someone was getting murdered. That’s what’s going on.”

“Nope,” he said. Beneath the shadow of his ubiquitous Stetson, his jaw looked square and rough with a couple days’ beard. “Em here’s just excited about Christmas.”

“Someone is going to get murdered,” Emily said, “if you don’t get out of here.”

“Is that any way to talk to your baby’s godfather? Hey,” he said, leaning left to peer past Emily, who stood her ground like a small, mixed race soldier. “That looks real nice.” The blue spruce they’d cut from the shelterbelt just a few hours before stood smack-dab in front of the window adjacent to the porch. “A little sparse on the left side and kind of tall for the room, but I could fix that if you’d just let me . . .” He took a step forward, at which time Emily smacked him in the chest with her fist. Her unruly dreadlocks swung with the force of her punch.

“Ouch,” he said, though it seemed unlikely he felt the blow through the insulation of his canvas jacket. “Is that any way for a mother to act in front of her own baby?”

“Get out!” she insisted, then turned narrowed eyes toward Casie. “Tell him to mind his own business.” But Casie’s heart was still working on returning to its pre-emergency rhythm.

“Holy Hannah,” she said, exhaling finally. “You scared about twenty years off my life expectancy.”

“Oh.” Emily’s cheeks reddened a little. Eight months earlier, when she’d first arrived at the ranch, homeless and pregnant, Casie would have sworn the girl didn’t know how to blush, but motherhood or some other form of ineffable magic had changed that and a host of other things. “Sorry,” she said. “But he can’t come in.”

“I just want to see my goddaughter,” Colt said. His eyes gleamed with mischief and something Casie didn’t dare consider. She and Colt had known each other since grade school, when he had tormented her to distraction. During high school the torments had morphed into something closer to titillation. But only a fool would forget the wild-eyed boy’s penchant for stuffing grasshoppers into chocolate milk cartons. “I’d better come in and make sure her momma’s screaming didn’t scare her.”

“Your goddaughter is fine,” Emily said. “You’re the one who’s going to need attention if you don’t shape up.”

“What’s going on?” Casie asked and stepped cautiously into the breach. It was probably a mistake. Being close to Colt Dickenson was always fraught with a dozen dangers she could neither catalog nor fully understand. His tilted grin, for instance, made her intestines twist in an unacceptable manner. But a girl would have to be brain-dead to forget about sodden grasshoppers, or the adult equivalent, which she wasn’t entirely sure she was capable of identifying at this juncture.

“I’m wrapping his gift,” Emily said, nodding vaguely toward a box half enclosed in environmentally responsible newspaper. “And he’s trying to peek.”

“I’m not!” Colt said. He sounded genuinely offended, but despite the fact that he had spent a good deal of every day on the Lazy over the past several months, Casie wasn’t positive he was genuinely anything. He was male, after all. And a rodeo cowboy. And inexplicably fond of insects. None of which suggested constancy.

“You just want to know what I got you,” Emily insisted.

“Are you accusing me of lying?” he asked, and spread brown fingers over the place on his chest where a normal person’s heart would reside. Colt Dickenson was not a normal person. Casie had decided that twenty years earlier, upon the discovery of a wood frog in the pocket of her denim jacket.

“Yes!” Emily said.

“How can you wound me like that?” Colt asked, eyes tragic. “I’m little Bliss’s—”

“Seriously,” Casie said, seeing no end to the drama in sight. “I thought the roof was coming down when you yelled.”

“I know it. She’s so loud,” Colt chided, shaking his head at the little mother. “You’ve probably upset the baby. I’d better check on her.”

“The baby’s fine. It’s you—” she began, but just then little Bliss woke with a bleat of despair. One tiny hand had escaped her swaddling and waved abruptly in the air. Emily glanced toward her with that wild expression reserved for new mothers and prey animals. “You stay out,” she ordered, and went to console her infant.

Colt watched her go, then leaned one canvas-clad shoulder against the doorjamb as she lifted Bliss from her swing. His eyes, Casie noticed, were soft and warm now, and though his smile had ramped down from mischievous demon to happy sprite, it rarely disappeared completely. Maybe that was why it was so pathetically difficult to think like a rational person when he was near. But maybe there were other reasons. Reasons she was far too wise to explore, she thought, and turned away, but his next words stopped her.

“Hey, you’re not expecting any new lambs, are you, Case?”

“What?” She pivoted back toward him, already on the alert for trouble. The ancient thermometer above the bunkhouse door hovered just above zero. She scowled. “No. No one should lamb for a couple of months yet.” The thought of bringing new life into such inhospitable temperatures made her blood run cold. Literally. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged, a slow movement of his left shoulder. A small hole punctuated his jacket’s clay-colored sleeve, and the brown corduroy collar was beginning to fray. She had no idea why those foolish details drew her attention.

“It was pretty dark in the barn. I probably imagined it,” he said and turned back toward the kitchen. “I’ll do one more check before I head home.”

“Home?” Emily asked and glanced over Bliss’s silky head at him. “What are you talking about? Supper’s almost ready.”

“You don’t have to check,” Casie said and felt guilt twist in her stomach. Tending sheep wasn’t Colt Dickenson’s job. Then again, neither were any of the other tasks he undertook on a daily basis. “I’ll take care of it.”

“You don’t know how she looks,” Colt said.

“You didn’t get a tag number?” Casie was already hurrying toward the front entry. Worry made her steps quick and her chest tight.

“I don’t think she had one.”

She winced. “I meant to get them all numbered last summer.”

“Well . . . you can’t rope no steer before you build your loop.”

She glanced at him.

“Ty told me that,” he admitted and grinned.

Tyler Roberts was barely sixteen years of age, but he was chockablock full of cowboy wisdom and proof positive that while hard knocks bowled some people over, they merely made others learn to stand on their feet.

But Casie put Ty out of her mind as she hurried toward the tiny foyer where outerwear was packed in a primitive wardrobe like kosher dills. “How’d she look?” she asked and snagged a pair of insulated overalls from a hook in the back. The floor creaked as she shoved her right foot into the appropriate leg. The foyer had seen some renovations in the past few months; the roof above the tiny alcove had been repaired and the front door replaced, but the floor needed work and a fresh coat of paint would not be amiss.

“Well . . .” Colt watched her as she shoved her second foot into the worn garment. “She was kind of a dirty white with a really short tail and a sassy look about her.”

Casie rolled her eyes. The Lazy was home to two hundred and twelve sheep. Trying to distinguish one from another put finding a needle in the haystack in a far more favorable light.

“I meant . . .” She bent to guide her foot through the tattered fabric at the bottom of the overalls, then turned to see Colt drag his gaze up her body as she straightened. She felt her face flush and her breathing accelerate, but she ignored both. She didn’t have time for untamed cowboys and feral hormones. “Why did you think she might be ready to lamb?”

His eyes were bright with nefarious thoughts to which she planned never to be privy. “I thought maybe she was bagging up.”

“Oh no.” Grabbing the end of the sleeve of her South Dakota State hoodie, she crammed her right fist into her overalls, then did the same with her left. “It’s way too early for them to be lactating,” she said, and after shimmying into the abused garment, struggled with her zipper. It was stuck again. No big surprise there. Apparently, overalls weren’t necessarily meant to be passed from generation to generation like a family heirloom. And truth be told, she wasn’t entirely sure to whom this particular article had belonged in the first place. It may well have been her father’s. Growing up, his somber standoffishness had made him seem larger than life, but posthumously she realized he hadn’t been much taller than her own five feet ten inches.

“Unless some were bred earlier than we intended,” Colt suggested.

She gritted her teeth against such an unfavorable suggestion and pulled harder on the zipper.

“Here,” he said, stepping forward. “Let me do that.”

“I can dress myself,” she said and yanked again, but just then the tab came away in her fingers. She glared at it in frustration and he laughed.

“You’re such a bully,” he said and pushed her hands away.

They were standing extremely close.

“I’m not a bully.”

“You have to finesse things a little,” he said, and gripping the garment near her crotch, seized the nub of the zipper in his right hand.

She stood absolutely still. Her face felt warm and her body fidgety. “I can get my own zipper.” Her words were little more than an irritable mumble.

“I know you can.” His voice was soft and deep as he tugged the tab effortlessly along her abdomen and over her chest. His index finger brushed her chin. His eyes were laughing as he lowered his voice. “Which makes me wonder if you secretly want my help.”

“I don’t—” she began, but he was already raising his voice to address the girl in the living room.

“Hey, Em, do you need me to lock the chickens up or anything?”

“I didn’t let them out today.” Her feet rapped quietly against the kitchen’s old linoleum, coming closer. “Too cold.”

“All right.” He lowered his gleaming gaze to Casie’s. She shifted hers away, feeling foolish. “We’ll be back in a few.”

“No hurry,” Emily said and appeared in the doorway with Bliss hugged snug and content against her shoulder. She smiled, first at Colt, then at Casie, who refrained from rolling her eyes like a disgusted teenager. If the girl’s matchmaking schemes were any more obvious, she’d lock them in the tack room together until their firstborn arrived. “The stew’ll keep.”

“Stew?” Colt questioned, voice level as if he didn’t realize the girl’s diabolical plans.

“Potato beef.”

“With cheesy dumplings?”

“And honeyed carrots.”

He sighed dreamily. “We’ll be back,” he repeated, then opened the door.

“Don’t rush,” Emily said, and kissing Bliss’s forehead, hugged her even closer. “I’m going to feed the baby first anyway.”

Colt cupped the infant’s duckling-down head for a second, then stepped back, motioning Casie to precede him. She skittered her gaze away. Chivalry always made her twitchy. Maybe it would be different if she hadn’t been dressed like a backwoods yeti, but maybe not.

Jack, border collie and resident security guard, smiled as he slunk toward them from the barn. He seemed impervious to the weather, but the brittle air snapped against Casie’s cheeks and chilled the back of her neck, finding every chink in her well-insulated armor. She hunched her shoulders a little, trying to block out the South Dakota cold.

Reaching up, Colt tugged her hood out from under her overalls and snugged it over the experimental stocking cap Emily had knit last month. It was lumpy in the back and saggy in the front, but Casie didn’t believe in looking gift horses in the mouth, especially when they were given by fragile teenagers intent on acting tough.

“Thanks,” she said, and barely glancing at him, trudged through the snow toward the sheep barn. The wind was gusting from the northwest, making it a relief to reach the door, but Colt was already slipping past her to pull it open.

“After you,” he said.

Casie flipped on the lights. Overhead bulbs illuminated scores of dozing sheep. Lying in clusters upon the straw, they looked soft and cushy in their reclining positions, but experience assured her they were not always as docile as they appeared.

“Where was she when you saw her last?” Casie asked.

“Near the corner over there,” he said and motioned toward the east. He wasn’t wearing gloves. His hands looked broad and sturdy. On the underside of his russet-colored wrists, the veins stood out in sharp relief.

Casie cleared her throat and pulled her gaze from his arm. She was fairly certain the sight of his wrists shouldn’t made her feel faint. “I’ll see if I can find her,” she said. “You don’t need to come along.”

“But you don’t know how she looks,” he argued.

“Dirty white, I think you said,” she reminded him and hopelessly scanned the endless animals that dotted the barn like so many moguls.

Colt chuckled quietly, careful not to frighten the ewes. “Come on,” he said. “I might recognize her if I see her.”

Perhaps she should have argued, but if there truly was a ewe about to lamb, it was imperative that they find her soon. The guilt involved in losing a newborn was something she tried to avoid at all costs, and the thought of looking for one pregnant sheep in this sea of gestating ovines was overwhelming at best. She was sure she wasn’t allowing him to assist for any reasons other than practicality.

“Look for a red mark on her spine,” he said as they moved cautiously through the woolly waves.

“What?”

“I intended to mark her with a big X so we could find her later, but all I managed was a little swipe of red before she got away from me.”

“You could have told me that before,” Casie said.

“And missed this chance at such a romantic interlude?” he asked, then grinned across the backs of a dozen ruminating sheep.

She caught his gaze. For months they had been dancing these same steps. It seemed as if he was always present, repairing equipment, doctoring livestock, cleaning cattle yards. There were times, entire minutes, in fact, when she was absolutely positive he was enamored of her. Why else would he stick around? But despite the entirely unpaid hours he put in at the Lazy, he had never once asked her on a date. Why was that . . . unless he was merely ever-present so that he could spend time with Emily? The two of them had formed a special bond early on. When the girl had first arrived, her relationship with older men had bordered on hero worship. Colt’s presence seemed to be eroding that weird scenario. Although Em still periodically gazed at him as if he were an integral part of the Second Coming, she no longer acted as if the entire male populace held the key to the universe. Was that intentional on Colt’s part? Did he arrive at the Lazy every single day in an attempt to foster a healthier attitude in the wayward teenager? Or did he have other reasons?

There were times when Casie was convinced that Colt was simply killing time. After all, he’d spent a good many years on the rodeo circuit. Maybe he was just enjoying some time off. But every once in a while, when she least expected it, he would look at her as he was now, making her heart leap into her throat and every flighty molecule she possessed scream for caution. Despite his irresistible wrists, she was nowhere near ready for a relationship. If her failed engagement had taught her nothing else, she had learned this much: She was a terrible judge of men. Always had been. And this one was looking at her as if his interest in the Lazy had nothing to do with boredom or needy teenagers or a dozen other reasons she had invented over the long winter months. It made her heart seize up and her palms sweat.

“Colt . . .” she began, desperate to clear the air, but he interrupted her.

“There she is.”

“What?”

“The mother-to-be,” he said, pointing toward the east door. “I think that’s her.”

She turned reluctantly away, knowing she should voice her concerns before her nerve abandoned her completely. “Where?” she asked instead.

“Just to the right of that trio there. See her?”

She scowled into the poorly lit distance. Colt had risked life and limb propping a twenty-foot ladder against the rafters to replace the burned-out bulbs only a few weeks earlier, but the barn seemed to absorb the sparse light like a black hole, casting most of the building into shadow. Half the ewes seemed to have a mark of something or other on their backs. “I think so. Maybe.”

“It’s a little hard to tell. But you head around that way. I’ll cut to the right. We’ll trap her between us and check it out. Easy as pie.”

It was a decent plan, Casie thought, and did as suggested.

In the end, easy wasn’t exactly the term she would have used, but the ewe with the red mark had been captured. The animal stood motionless, pink-tipped nose held high by Colt’s right hand as his left kept her from backing away.

“Whatcha think?” he asked. He was breathing a little heavily. The ewe had not been partial to being captured and stood wide-eyed and resentful in his grasp. Her comrades had scattered to the edges of the barn like chaff in the wind, leaving a wasteland of scattered straw between them and the intruders.

Casie scowled down at the ewe in question. She was almost identical to the others, round as a barrel with spindly legs sticking out below her like a woolly hors d’oeuvre on toothpicks. But maybe her belly was a bit more distended than her peers’. Casie dropped to her knees, the better to examine the animal’s udder, and sure enough, it did look engorged.

She pursed her lips as she rose to her feet.

Colt grinned. “You can cuss if you want to.”

She did want to, but her cursing ability had been impugned in the past, and with three teenagers ensconced on the Lazy, this probably wasn’t the perfect time to try to improve her prowess.

“How could this happen?” she asked instead.

Colt straightened a little, careful not to loosen his grip on the ewe. “Maybe you should talk to Em about that.”

She scowled at him. “I meant, they weren’t supposed to be cycling in . . .” She counted back on her fingers. Sheep were considered short-day breeders, which meant they shouldn’t be ready to mate until fall. “July.”

Colt shrugged. “Maybe she got her months confused.”

She gave him a look.

He grinned. “Life’ll make a liar out of you nine times out of ten.”

“Let’s get her in the pen,” she said, but in the end Colt did most of the work. She merely followed behind and shut the gate once the ewe had entered a small wooden cell at the north end of the barn.

“When do you think she’ll drop?” she asked.

Colt shook his head as he stepped through the makeshift gate. During the regular lambing season, dozens of these little crates would be set up along the walls, but right now only a few remained for this type of emergency. “Couple of days maybe. A week on the outside. Least that’s my guess.”

She blew out a breath. “Hope she waits till this cold snap ends,” she said and hurried toward the hydrant in the corner, but Colt stepped past her.

“I’ll get that,” he said, and grabbing a nearby pail, filled it to a few inches from the top before carrying it to the crate.

Casie bent over a nearby fence to retrieve a slab of alfalfa, but as she did so, her exposed wrist scraped along the sharp end of a stray wire.

She jerked back with a rasp of pain, and Colt was beside her in a second, water bucket abandoned.

“What happened?” His brows were low, his tone concerned.

“Nothing.” She shook her head and hugged her arm against her overalls. “It’s no big deal.”

“Then let me see it,” he insisted, and tugging her hand toward his chest, made a hissing noise as the wound was revealed.

“It’s fine,” she said, though it stung like the devil. Three inches long, it was little more than a thin pink stripe except toward the distal end where a single drop of blood bubbled against her pale flesh.

“Nothing!” He tugged off her right glove. It was worn through on the index finger. “Are you kidding me?” he asked, tone rife with drama.

“No, I’m not. It’s—” she began, but he interrupted her.

“Buck Creger had an injury just like this in Laramie last fall. Lucky for him there was a medic on hand so they didn’t have to amputate,” he said and skimmed his thumb down her wrist.

Feelings shimmied away from his touch, making her . . .