A Conard County Baby. Rachel Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ had to come first. With trembling hands, she once again pulled out her driver’s license and turned it over to Gage.

      “I can check on this in about ten minutes,” Gage said to Cash. “If you want me to go in depth, that might take a couple of days, and Ms. Conroy will have to sign a release.”

      “Let’s just start with this,” Cash said. “I can probably find out more of what I need to know online.”

      Hope looked down at her hands, feeling like a bug under a microscope. But what had she expected? This man was talking about trusting her with his daughter. It wasn’t enough to meet over a piece of pie, with her telling a crazy story, and assume everything was copacetic. No way. She understood that.

      But she also wasn’t used to this. She had come from a world where everyone who mattered knew who she was. She had never had to prove herself in this way. Or in most ways, she realized. Not for the first time in the past few weeks she faced how sheltered she had been. Now all the shelters were gone.

      Time to grow up, she thought as they waited for the results of her record to come back. She had a child to think about now, and there was going to be no support from any direction as far as she could tell. Escape meant freedom. Freedom meant responsibility. Simply running wasn’t, and would never be, enough.

      Ten minutes later, as Gage had promised, a deputy returned her license announcing she was clean, not so much as a parking ticket.

      Gage and Cash had been talking generally about people they knew, the local economy and ranching. With a start she realized she hadn’t even remotely paid attention.

      Not only was that rude, but they must be wondering what was wrong with her. All she knew was that she was tired, frightened, alone and embarking on a task she wasn’t sure she could handle.

      But then she stiffened herself internally and told herself to stop being a wuss. She’d had three paths out of that situation, and two of them led directly to hell as far as she was concerned. Flight was all that was left to her...and to her child.

      Cash rose and shook the sheriff’s hand. “Thanks, Gage.”

      Remembering her manners, Hope summoned a smile and offered her own hand for a shake. “Thank you for your time.”

      “Good luck to you,” Gage said. “Both of you.”

      Cash laughed, but didn’t sound quite happy. “We shall see, I suppose.”

      Hope guessed they would.

      * * *

      Hope’s sporty little silver car looked out of place on the street where she had parked it. It might have had a sign flashing Outsider on it. She couldn’t even sell it because it was in her father’s name. Entirely too dependent, she thought. Dependent on that man for everything, about to be handed off to a man who had a streak of cruelty she never would have imagined until that night when he took her virginity against her will. A bubble of anger burst in her, but she held it back. Not now. Maybe never. There were more important things than indulging fury about how she had been treated.

      Cash had driven her to her car and he climbed out to help her. A gentleman’s manners in one who looked like anything but a gentleman. Of course, gentlemen weren’t always, were they.

      “You won’t get to drive that much around here,” he said after she climbed in behind the wheel. “You probably won’t want to, anyway. It’ll take a beating on the roads, especially out toward my place. Speaking of which...”

      She looked up, waiting, gripping her keys until they bit into her hand.

      “My ranch is pretty isolated. I’m serious. You might go a week or longer without seeing a soul but me, my daughter, my housekeeper and my hired hands. Can you handle that?”

      Tension suddenly let go. Isolated. “Right now that sounds wonderful.”

      “Right now it probably does. Anyway, I’ve got an old pickup you can use so you won’t be stuck out there when Angie’s in school. You can run on into town if you need to. But most of the time—” he shrugged “—I hope you like horses and cows.”

      “I love horses. I haven’t been close to too many cows.”

      “Now’s your chance. Well, if you’re not changing your mind, follow me. We should get home a little before Angie gets off the bus, so you’ll have a chance to settle in and look around.”

      “Thank you. Sincerely.”

      His eyes crinkled in the corners. “Tell me that again after you’ve met my daughter.”

      That almost sounded like a threat, Hope thought as she turned on her car and pulled out to follow his truck. Then her mood shifted abruptly. It had been doing that a lot lately, but all of a sudden she felt almost giddy. Relief for starters. She had a job.

      A bubble of laughter escaped her, and a genuine smile softened her face for the first time in months. And for the first time, she actually noticed that it was a pretty September day.

      * * *

      Leading the way, Cash wondered if he’d lost his marbles. On the other hand, asking this woman to be a companion to Angie seemed better than having Angie racketing about all by herself too much of the time. All that seemed to do was heighten her hostility.

      But if her anger with him had a dial to turn it down a notch or two, he hadn’t found it.

      He was, he admitted, totally at a loss. When Sandy had left him, Angie had still been in diapers. In one fell swoop, he’d lost wife and daughter to distance. He couldn’t make as many visits as he might have liked because of the demands of work, and Sandy had moved all the way to Arizona. He still felt guilty about that, but over the years as Angie had distanced him, even during his visits, the guilt had become easier to live with. Now she was in his house and broken connections, or at least damaged ones, stared him in the face.

      He quite simply didn’t know how to reach her.

      Which brought him to this moment in time. Leading a strange woman, a pregnant runaway, home in the hopes that she might be able to at least keep the girl safer. That maybe she could reach Angie at least a bit.

      That she could somehow find a way around all his screwups as a father. Because he really did hold himself responsible for this. Clearly he’d failed in some essential way, and blaming it on distance didn’t excuse him. He wondered if he was missing some basic instinct or knowledge. Wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have changed things. No answers arrived.

      He reminded himself that his daughter was still grieving her mother. That was killer all by itself. But in the meantime, he had to do something. He couldn’t just leave her alone for long stretches of time to brood and hurt and fuel her anger. She needed someone, and he was working long hours. The ranch demanded almost all he had in these hard times and didn’t leave a whole lot of room for so-called bonding experiences. Not that Angie would let him get that close.

      His life had turned into a snarled mess. He wasn’t blaming his daughter for it, but she was a problem he couldn’t evade. He had to help her somehow.

      Hence a young woman from Dallas. He just hoped he hadn’t misjudged Hope Conroy, because she was the first person to answer his ad who wasn’t even older than СКАЧАТЬ