Cowboy's Baby. Victoria Pade

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      But she couldn’t do that and she knew it. She couldn’t even stay in her bedroom hiding out from everyone. From him. She was going to have to go out there and look him in the eye again. And pretend she wasn’t more confused, more scared, more worried, more muddled than she’d ever been in her life.

      Good luck….

      “Kate? Are you comin’ out? You didn’t fall asleep in there, did you?” Matt called through her door.

      “I’ll be right there,” she answered, hoping her brother didn’t hear the uncertainty in her voice.

      She straightened her posture in hopes that a stiff spine might lend her courage, and took a look at herself in the mirror on the dresser.

      The clothes she had on were okay—jeans and a heavy-gauge mock-turtleneck sweater with a single diamond knit into the front. But her face was so pale.

      She pinched the high crests of her cheekbones until they turned color but that didn’t help the wide, deer-caught-in-headlights look of her light green eyes.

      “Buck up,” she ordered her reflection as she ran a brush through her chin-length, riotously curly brown hair pulled back with a headband.

      Then she applied a light shade of lipstick and massaged some lotion into her hands and up her arms to her elbows in hopes that that would help alleviate some of the skin-prickling tension that was still attacking her.

      “You have to go out there,” she told her image in the mirror as she did. “You don’t have a choice.”

      But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, she tried to convince herself, picturing in her mind how the next several hours were likely to play out.

      She would slip into the living room and say a simple hello from the sidelines—which was also where she would stay.

      Brady would be involved with Matt, catching up, trading stories. He would probably hardly know she was anywhere around. He definitely wouldn’t whip out the divorce papers in the middle of her whole family and demand that she sign them on the spot.

      They would all have dinner and she’d keep herself as busy in the kitchen as she could so she wouldn’t have to spend too much time in the same room with Brady. Then the evening would end and he’d go off to his rooms and she’d go off to hers and that would be that. He probably wouldn’t even have a thought about their rash wedding or what had followed it.

      And he also wouldn’t have the slightest inkling of what she’d found out only four days earlier.

      That the consequence of their single night of abandon was that at this very moment she was pregnant with his baby.

      Chapter Two

      Everyone in the living room was laughing when Kate finally ventured back there. She was only guessing, but she assumed they were laughing at something Brady had said. He could tell a joke as well as any professional comedian, which had made him the life of the party the whole time they’d all been in Las Vegas two months before.

      Her family was so caught up in him, in fact, that no one noticed her standing in the arched entry from the foyer, and it gave her a chance to take a look at him.

      How could he be more handsome than she remembered?

      But he was.

      He was as tall as her brothers—at least six foot three. A tower of long legs, narrow hips, flat stomach, wide chest, broad shoulders and big biceps.

      There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, but there were muscles galore. Muscles his clothes couldn’t hide. Especially since he was wearing jeans tight enough to show off his great thighs, and a long-sleeved knit shirt that hugged his perfectly veed torso like shrink-wrap.

      And as if the body wasn’t enough to give her heart palpitations, he had a face to die for, too.

      He had swarthy good looks. His hair was the color of French roast coffee beans—not quite coal-black but close. He wore it just a touch long and combed it with a hint of a part on the right side, sweeping all of it casually away from his face.

      His skin had a natural tan to it, a golden glow that would brown up in the summer but merely gave him the look of robust health and vitality now.

      And there were his features to top it all off.

      Oh, he was gorgeous!

      But not pretty-boy cute. He had a masculine, rugged, almost craggy kind of beauty that said he was born that way and didn’t do anything to accentuate it.

      His chin was strong and well defined, his lips turned up at the corners as if he were in perpetual good humor. His nose was straight and perfect, his eyebrows slightly full, and his eyes were a pale blue-gray beneath long lashes.

      And when he smiled the way he did right then, there were creases that animated his face. Creases that hammocked his chin from dimples in his cheeks, creases that crinkled the corners of those eyes that glimmered with vibrancy, creases that bracketed that lissome mouth full of blindingly white teeth.

      It all made for a powerful package. Powerful enough not to help the muddle Kate was already in and making something flutter inside her that had nothing to do with the baby she was carrying and everything to do with that baby’s daddy and the pure animal magnetism he exuded.

      A magnetism that made her step farther into the room even as another part of her wanted to run in the opposite direction just so she could get things under control.

      “There she is!” Matt said from the center of the group when he spotted her. “We thought you’d gotten lost.”

      She had. For a moment. In the sight of Brady Brown.

      But now she struggled to find her way back to some semblance of normalcy so she could play the charade she needed to play to keep her secrets.

      “Say hello to Brady,” her brother urged.

      “Hello, Brady,” she parroted, trying to make a joke out of the obvious return of Matt’s overt matchmaking attempts.

      But there was no joke in that first moment Brady’s eyes rested on her.

      Her heart started to beat double time, she felt her face flush, and although her skin still felt prickly, it didn’t seem to originate in tension anymore but in something entirely different.

      “Hi, Kate,” Brady said in the lush baritone voice she’d forgotten about. His tone was edged with formality, though. A formality she thought might indicate he was leery of her.

      But then why wouldn’t he be leery of her after the way she’d treated him New Year’s morning?

      “Brady was just telling us about being stranded in a one-runway airport in the middle of nowhere for the past twenty-four hours,” Matt said to update Kate.

      “Which is why I need a shower before keepin’ company with civilized people,” Brady added, directing the comment at Kate. “How ’bout you show me where you folks want me to bunk? Let me clean up some?”

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