The Rancher's Christmas Promise. Allison Leigh

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      “The situation is complicated enough,” the cop interrupted, “without the two of you taking potshots at each other.” Her expression was troubled, but her voice was calm. And Ryder couldn’t miss the way she’d wrapped her hand familiarly around Grant’s arm. “Ray is right. What’s important here is the baby.”

      “Yes. The baby under our protection.” Ray was obviously hoping to maintain control over the discussion. “There is no local record of the baby’s birth. Our only way left to establish who the child’s parents are is through you, Mr. Wilson. We’ve expended every other option.”

      “You don’t even know the baby was hers?”

      Ray looked pained. Grant looked like he wanted to punch something. Hell, maybe even Ryder. The cop just looked worried.

      “The assumption is that your wife was the person to have left the baby at the home her former employer, Jaxon Swift, shared with his brother, Lincoln,” she said.

      “Now, that does sound like Daisy.” Ryder knew he sounded bitter. “I only knew her a few months, but it was still long enough to learn she’s good at running out on people.”

      Maybe he did feel a little bad about Daisy. He hadn’t gotten around to divorcing his absent wife. Now, if what these people said were true, he wouldn’t need to. Instead of being a man with a runaway wife, he was a man with a deceased one. There was probably something wrong with him for not feeling like his world had just been rocked. “But maybe you’re wrong. She wasn’t pregnant when she left me,” he said bluntly. He couldn’t let himself believe otherwise.

      “Would you agree to a paternity test?”

      “The court can compel you, Mr. Wilson,” Ray added when Ryder didn’t answer right away.

      It was the wrong tack for Ray to take. Ryder had been down the whole paternity-accusation path before. He hadn’t taken kindly to it then, and he wasn’t inclined to now. “Daisy was my wife, loose as that term is in this case. A baby born to her during our marriage makes me the presumed father, whether there’s a test or not. But you don’t know that the baby was actually hers. You just admitted it. Which tells me the court probably isn’t on your side as much as you’re implying. Unless I say otherwise, and without you knowing who this baby’s mother is, I’m just a guy in a picture.”

      “We should have brought Greer,” Grant said impatiently to the cop. “She’s used to guys like him.”

      But the cop wasn’t listening to Grant. She was looking at Ryder with an earnest expression. “You aren’t just a guy in a picture. You’re our best hope for preventing the child we believe is Grant’s niece from being adopted by strangers.”

      That’s when Ryder saw that she’d reached out to clasp Grant’s hand, their fingers entwined. So, she had a dog in this race.

      He thought about pointing out that he was a stranger to them, too, no matter what sort of guy Grant had deemed Ryder to be. “And if I cooperated and the test confirms I’m not this baby’s father, you still wouldn’t have proof that Daisy is—” dammit “—was the baby’s mother.”

      “If the test is positive, then we know she was,” Ray said. “Without your cooperation, the proof of Karen’s maternity is circumstantial. We admit that. But you were her husband. There’s no putative father. If you even suspected she’d become pregnant during your marriage, your very existence is enough to establish legal paternity, DNA proof or not.”

      The cop looked even more earnest. “And the court can’t proceed with an adoption set in motion by Layla’s abandonment.”

      The name startled him. “Layla!”

      The three stared at him with varying degrees of surprise and expectation.

      “Layla was my mother’s name.” His voice sounded gruff, even to his own ears. Whatever it was that Daisy had done with her child, using that name was a sure way of making sure he’d get involved. After only a few months together, she’d learned enough about him to know that.

      He exhaled roughly. Slapped his leather gloves together. Then he stepped out of the way so he wasn’t blocking them from the rest of his home. “You’d better come inside and sit.” He felt weary all of a sudden. As if everything he’d accomplished in his thirty-four years was for nothing. What was that song? “There Goes My Life.”

      “I expect this is gonna take a while to work out.” He glanced at the disheveled room, with its leather couch and oversize, wall-mounted television. That’s what happened when a man spent more time tending cows than he did anything else. He’d even tended some of them in this very room.

      Fortunately, his aunt Adelaide would never need to know.

      “You’ll have to excuse the mess, though.”

       Chapter One

       Five months later.

      The August heat was unbearable.

      The forecasters kept saying the end of the heat wave was near, but Greer Templeton had lost faith in them. She twisted in her seat, trying to find the right position that allowed her to feel the cold air from the car vents on more than two square inches of her body. It wasn’t as if she could pull up her skirt so the air could blow straight up her thighs or pull down her blouse so the air could get at the rest of her.

      She’d tried that once, only to find herself the object of interest of a leering truck driver with a clear view down into her car. If she’d never seen or heard from the truck driver again, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, she’d had the displeasure of serving as the driver’s public defender not two days later when he was charged with littering.

      “I hate August!” she yelled, utterly frustrated.

      Nobody heard.

      The other vehicles crawling along the narrow, curving stretch of highway between Weaver—where she’d just come from a frustrating visit with a new client in jail—and Braden all had their windows closed against the oppressive heat, the same way she did.

      It was thirty miles, give or take, between Braden and Weaver, and she drove it several times every week. Sometimes more than once in a single day. She knew the highway like the back of her hand. Where the infrequent passing zones were, where the dips filled with ice in the winter and where the shoulder was treacherous. She knew that mile marker 12 had the best view into Braden and mile marker 3 was the spot you were most likely to get a speeding ticket.

      The worst, though, was grinding up and down the hills, going around the curves at a crawl because she was stuck behind a too-wide truck hogging the roadway with a too-tall load of hay.

      Impatience raged inside her and she pushed her fingers against one of the car vents, feeling the air blast against her palm. It didn’t provide much relief, because it was barely cool.

      Probably because her car was close to overheating, she realized.

      Even as she turned off the AC and rolled down СКАЧАТЬ