The Rancher's Christmas Baby. Cathy Thacker Gillen

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      Amy only wished she could sit down and eat dinner and watch some TV. Not sports. But maybe something else she didn’t get, like the Home and Garden or the Cooking channel.

      Unfortunately, she had cookies to bake. “That’s going to have to wait,” she warned, getting weary just thinking about it.

      “Not necessarily,” Teddy replied smugly.

      Before she could formulate a response, a high-pitched beeping began inside her trailer.

      “What the…?” Amy said, dread springing up inside her as she recognized the sound. “That’s my smoke alarm!”

      Looking equally stunned and on edge, Teddy dropped her grocery sacks. Together, they raced for the door. Teddy got there first and swung it open. Choking swirls of dark gray smoke poured out.

      “What in the world…?” Amy swore, waving the smoke away so she could see. She hadn’t left anything on that she knew of.

      Only Teddy seemed to have a clue how this could be happening.

      “Stay there…” He pushed her back and entered the trailer ahead of her.

      He charged past the sofa and table, straight to the tiny galley kitchen. Muttering a string of words that weren’t fit for polite company, he jerked open the miniscule oven door. More smoke poured out, along with a noxious smell.

      Grabbing a pair of mitts, he pulled a charred black pie pan from the oven and set it on top of the stove.

      Amy grabbed a chair, climbed on top of it and yanked the smoke alarm from the wall. Blessed silence followed.

      Teddy leaned across the kitchen sink to open a window. Then another. While Amy could only stare at the ruins in mounting disbelief.

      OKAY. THIS WAS DEFINITELY NOT going the way he had planned, Teddy thought, staring into Amy’s brown eyes. But then, so far nothing about their hasty marriage was meeting expectations.

      Which didn’t mean he couldn’t set things to right. Eventually.

      He watched her pick up an aluminum cookie sheet and wave smoke toward the open window with big imperious motions that only seemed to underscore what a moron she thought he was.

      Glad she wasn’t crying—crying would have made things worse—he explained calmly, “I wanted to surprise you.”

      Her expression remaining unreadable, Amy frowned at the foot of countertop she had on either side of her two-burner stove. “You’ve done that, all right.”

      Okay, she was mad. But she had a right to be. Figuring she might as well get it all out, he prodded her deliberately, “Now what’s wrong?”

      Amy looked at him as if to say, You even have to ask? Then she pointed at the carcass of the rotisserie chicken on the cutting board, the empty containers of cream and chicken broth, and the sack of frozen vegetables, before turning to the place where he’d unrolled the refrigerated pie dough.

      He shrugged off the messy countertop, not sure why that should be so grating. “I clean up after I eat,” he explained mildly, knowing it was the only time-efficient way to proceed. “That way I only have to do it once.”

      “Clearly,” she said, as if to a four-year-old.

      Wishing she didn’t look so hot and bothered and totally hypercritical, he grabbed the kitchen wastebasket and began piling things into the plastic sack inside of it. He hadn’t expected Amy to be the kind of wife who would be on his case about mundane things. Or really, anything. Not that she didn’t have a right to be ticked off over the ruined meal. He was disappointed about that, too…and hungry, to boot.

      Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her run both her hands through her short blond hair, rumpling the wind-tossed strands even more. Her cute-as-a-pixie features were tinged an emotional pink. He had the oddest desire to take her in his arms and hold her till the tension in her slender body dissipated. Not that he imagined she would warm to such an action, either.

      Teddy exhaled his frustration. “I don’t know what happened to the chicken pot pie.” He checked the oven’s temperature dial. It was right where it should be. “I’ve made it dozens of times. I’ve never burned it. Never.” Stymied, he looked inside the oven.

      Worse than the charred black remains sitting on the stovetop was the mess it had left inside the stove. The pie had obviously boiled over and burned a horrendous black mess on the bottom of her oven.

      “You should have asked me first,” Amy said dully, running her hands through her hair yet again. Abruptly, her anger faded and she looked like she was going to start crying.

      Feeling worse than ever for the screwup, Teddy finished dumping things into the trash and looked around for a dishrag. “I was trying to make up for last night. I know that was an inauspicious start to our marriage, at best.”

      “It’s nothing compared to this.” Two tears slid down Amy’s cheeks. Her body limp with the weariness that came from a long day at work, she sagged against the opposite wall.

      The need to protect her pouring through him, Teddy held up a reassuring hand. “I’ll clean this up. Though I still don’t know why our dinner burned.”

      Amy rubbed the moisture from her face and seemed to pull herself together, every bit as suddenly as she had started to fall apart. She took a deep breath that lifted the soft swell of her full breasts. “My oven doesn’t calibrate properly, Teddy.” She looked him in the eye. “It heats one hundred and fifty degrees above whatever the dial indicates.”

      “So three hundred fifty degrees was…?”

      “Five hundred degrees.”

      Teddy swore. “No wonder it burned.” He was lucky he hadn’t set the whole place on fire while blithely installing a satellite dish she didn’t seem to want any more than his company.

      Spine stiff, Amy walked back outside and retrieved her groceries. Knowing a change of scene would help, Teddy suggested, “We could forget cooking and go out to dinner.”

      Again, Amy shook her head, discounting both his invitation and his help. “I don’t have time. I have to bake twelve dozen cookies tonight.”

      Taking charge, Teddy replied, “Then you’re going to have to do it at my place.”

      AMY WOULD HAVE LIKED TO turn down Teddy’s offer. She couldn’t. She had to honor her commitment to the organizers of the cookie swap. So for the second night in a row, she packed a bag, got in her pickup truck and drove to the Silverado while Teddy stayed behind to finish the satellite dish and clean up.

      Once at his place, she couldn’t help but compare his abode to hers. At just under fifteen hundred square feet, his one-story, sand-colored brick ranch house was roughly three times the square footage of her trailer.

      Dark-brown shutters adorned the windows and a covered porch lent shelter to the solid oak front door. The exterior landscaping was sparse, leaving the impression that the person who lived here hadn’t gone to much trouble to add plants or trees, although the lawn was thick and well maintained.

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