The Triplets' Cowboy Daddy Read online

  The words were coming out of his mouth before he had a chance to think better of them. “You can stay with me, Nora. It’s not a problem.”

  Nora and Dina turned toward him, relief mingled with guilt written all over both faces. There had always been tension between mother and daughter, and the current situation hadn’t improved things.

  “You sure?” Nora asked.

  “You bet. It’ll be fine. There’s lots of room. Just for a few days, until you and your mom figure this out.” He was making this sound like a weekend away, not a complete invasion of his privacy, but he was already entangled in this family and had been for years. This was for old time’s sake—for the friendship that used to mean so much to him. And maybe this was also a guilt offering for having inherited that house to begin with.

  The next few minutes were spent gathering up baby supplies and getting the car seats back into Nora’s four-door pickup truck. As Nora got into the driver’s seat, Dina visibly deflated from where she stood at the side door. She’d been holding herself together for her daughter’s sake, it seemed, and she suddenly looked small and older.

  Cliff may have been many things, but he had been a good man at heart, and no one would convince Easton otherwise. A good husband? Perhaps not, given the recent revelation. But a man could be good at heart and lousy with relationships. At least Easton hoped so, because he seemed to fall into that category himself. If it weren’t for Cliff, Easton’s life would have turned out a whole lot differently. Loyalty might be in short supply, but Easton knew where his lay.

  He got into his own rusted-out Ford and followed Nora down the familiar drive toward his little house. His house. Should he feel so territorial about the old place? He’d fixed it up a fair amount since taking ownership, and the work had brought him a lot of comfort. He’d grown up in a drafty old house in town filled with his dad’s beer bottles and piles of dishes that never got washed. So when he found out that Cliff had left him the house and the land, something inside him had grown—like roots sinking down, giving more security than he’d ever had. He’d stared at that deed, awash in gratefulness. He’d never been a guy who let his feelings show, but he had no shame in the tears that misted his eyes when he shook the lawyer’s hand.

  I shouldn’t have gotten attached. And that was the story of his life, learning not to get attached, because nothing really lasted.

  The farmhouse was a small, two-story house with white wooden siding and a broad, covered front porch. He hadn’t been expecting company when he’d headed out for his morning chores, and he hoped that he’d left it decently clean. But this was his home, and while the situation was emotionally complicated, the legalities wouldn’t change. Mr. Carpenter had left it to him. The deed was in a safety deposit box at the bank.

  After they’d parked, Easton hopped out of his truck and angled around to her vehicle, where she was already unbuckling car seats.

  “Thanks,” Nora said as she passed him the first baby in her seat. “I don’t know how to balance three of them yet. I should probably call up Mackenzie Granger and see if she has any ideas. She’s got the twins, after all.”

  He held the front door open for her with the heel of his boot and waited while she stepped inside. The sun was lowering in the sky, illuminating the simple interior. Nora paused as she looked around.

  “It’s different than I left it.”

  “Yeah...” He wasn’t sure how apologetic he should be here. “I got rid of the old furniture. It was pretty musty.”

  Easton hadn’t put anything on the walls yet. He had a few pictures of his mother, but they didn’t belong on the wall. She’d run off when he was eight—left a letter stuck to the fridge saying she couldn’t handle it anymore, and that Easton was now his father’s problem. He’d never seen her again. Considering the only family pictures he had were a few snapshots of his mom, the walls had stayed bare.

  “Why did my dad leave this house to you?” Nora turned to face him. “I can’t figure that part out. Why would he do that?”

  Easton hadn’t been the one to hurt her, but he was the one standing in front of her, regardless, and he felt an irrational wave of guilt. He was caught up in her pain, whether he meant to be or not.

  “I don’t know...” It had been a kind gesture—more than kind—and he’d wondered ever since if there were hidden strings. “A while ago, he said that he needed someone to take care of it, put some new life into it. I’d assumed that he wanted to rent it out or something. I didn’t expect this.”

  “But this is my great-grandparents’ home,” she said. “I loved this place...”

  She had... He remembered helping the family paint the old house one year when he was a teenager, and Nora had put fresh curtains in the windows in the kitchen—she’d sewn them in home economics class. She did love this old house, but then she’d gone to college and gotten a city job, and he’d just figured she’d moved on.

  “You had your own life in the city. Maybe your dad thought—”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t have roots here in Hope!” she shot back. “This house is mine. It should have been mine... My father should never have done this.” She had to point her anger at someone, and it was hard to tell off the dead.

  “What he should have done is debatable,” Easton said. “But he made a choice.”

  She didn’t answer him, and he didn’t expect her to. She hated this, but he couldn’t change facts, and he wasn’t about to be pushed around, either. They’d just have to try to sort out a truce over the next few days.

  “I’m making some tea,” he added. “You want some?”

  They’d been friends back in the day, but a lot had changed. Easton grew up and filled out. Nora had gone to college and moved to the city. He was now legal owner of a house she was still attached to, and an old friendship wasn’t going to be cushion enough for all of this.

  “Yes, tea would be nice.” Her tone was tight.

  “Nora.” He turned on the rattling faucet to fill up the kettle. “I don’t know what you think I did, but I never asked for this house. And I never angled for it.”

  “You didn’t turn it down, either.”

  No, he hadn’t. He could have refused the inheritance, but it had been an answer to midnight prayers, a way to step out from under his past. Mr. Carpenter’s gift had made him feel more like family and less like the messed-up kid who needed a job. Mr. Carpenter had seen him differently, but he suspected Nora still saw him the same way she always had—a skinny kid who would do pretty much anything she asked to make her happy.

  And as dumb as it was, he also saw her the same way he always had—the beautiful girl whom he wished could see past his flaws and down to his core. He was a man now—not a boy, and most certainly not a charity case. Nora was a reminder of a time he didn’t want to revisit—when he’d been in love with a girl who took what he had to offer and never once saw him as more than a buddy. It hadn’t been only her...he’d been an isolated kid looking for acceptance anywhere he could get it, and he didn’t like those memories. They were marinated in loneliness.

  That wasn’t who he was anymore. Everything had changed around here. Including him.

  Chapter Two

  Easton heard the soft beep of an alarm go off through a fog of sleep, and he blinked his eyes open, glancing at the clock beside him. It was 3 a.m., and it wasn’t his alarm. The sound filtered through the wall from the bedroom next door. He had another hour before he had to be up for chores, and he was about to roll over when he heard the sound of footsteps going down the staircase.

  Nora was up—though the babies were silent. It was strange to have her back...to have her here. She’d stayed away, made a life in the city where she had an office job of some sort. She would come back for a weekend home every now and then, but she’d spent her time with friends, cousins, aunts and uncles. Easton didn’t fit i
nto any category—not anymore. He was an employee. He’d worked his shifts, managed the ranch hands and if he got so much as a passing wave from her, he’d be lucky.

  Now she was in his home. Her presence seemed to be a constant reminder of his status around here—employee. Even this house—legally his—felt less like his own. There was something about Nora Carpenter that put him right back into his place. For a while he’d been able to forget about his status around here, believe he could be more, but with her back—

  He wasn’t going to be able to sleep listening to the soft sounds of a woman moving around the house anyway. He swung his legs over the side of his bed, yawning. The footsteps came back up the narrow staircase again, and he rose to his feet, stretching as he did. He was in a white T-shirt and pajama bottoms, decent enough to see her. He crossed his bedroom and opened the door.

  Nora stood in the hallway, three bottles of milk in her hands, and she froze at the sight of him. Her blond hair tumbled over her shoulders, and she stood there in a pair of pajamas—a tank top and pink, pin-striped cotton shorts.

  She’s cute.

  She always had been, and no matter how distant or uninterested she got, he’d never stopped noticing.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “I was trying to be quiet.”

  He hadn’t actually been prepared to see her like this—her milky skin glowing in the dim light from her open bedroom door, her luminous eyes fixed on him apologetically. She was stunning, just as she’d always been, but she was more womanly now—rounder, softer, more sure of herself. They should both be sleeping right now, oblivious to each other. That was safer by far.

  “The babies aren’t crying,” he pointed out.

  “I’m following the advice of the social worker who gave me the lowdown on caring for triplets. She said to feed them on a schedule. If I wait for them to wake up, we’ll have three crying babies.”

  It made sense, actually. He’d never given infant care—let alone infant care for triplets—much thought before. He should leave her to it, go back to bed...maybe go downstairs and start breakfast if he really couldn’t sleep.

  “Need a hand?” he asked.

  Where had that come from? Childcare wasn’t his domain, and frankly, neither was Nora. He’d been through this before with her—he knew how it went. She batted her eyes in his general direction, he got attached, she waltzed off once her problems were solved, and he was left behind, wrung out. Letting her stay here was help enough. As was picking up the crib for the babies after he brought her to the house. He couldn’t be accused of callous indifference, but he also couldn’t go down that path again.

  She smiled at his offer of help. “I wouldn’t turn it down.”

  Well, that took care of that. He trailed after her into the bedroom. The crib sat on one side of the room, Nora’s rumpled bed on the other side. A window, cracked open, was between the two, and a cool night breeze curled through the room. The babies lay side by side along the mattress of the crib. Rosie and Riley looked pretty similar to his untrained eye, but he could pick out Bobbie. She was considerably bigger than the other two. But “big” was relative; they were all pretty tiny.

  “I was hoping my mom would be able to help me with this stuff,” Nora said as she picked up the first baby and passed her to him along with a bottle. “That’s Rosie,” she added.

  She proceeded to pick up the other two and brought them to her unmade bed, where she propped them both up against her pillow. She wiggled the bottle nipples between their lips.

  “Time to eat,” she murmured.

  The babies started to suck without any further prompting, and Easton looked down at the infant in his arms. He followed Nora’s lead, teasing the bottle into Rosie’s tiny mouth, and she immediately began to drink. It felt oddly satisfying.

  “So this is how it’s done,” he said with a soft laugh.

  “Apparently,” Nora replied.

  They were both silent for a few moments, the only sound babies slurping. He leaned an elbow against the crib, watching the tiny bubbles move up the bottle and turn into froth at the top of the milk. He’d done this with calves on a regular basis, but never with a baby.

  “I don’t blame your mom,” Easton said.

  “Me, neither,” she replied quietly. “I just didn’t know where else to go. When you feel lost, you find your mom.”

  Easton had never had that pleasure. His mom had abandoned them, and his dad...well, his dad could barely keep his own life together, let alone help Easton.

  “Sorry...” She winced. “I forgot.”

  Yeah, yeah, his pathetic excuse for a family. Poor Easton. He was tired of that—the pity, the charitable thoughts. Be thankful for what you have, because someone else thinks you’re lucky. It was a deep thought for the privileged as they considered how bad they could truly have it, before they breathed a sigh of relief that they still retained their good fortune.

  “So why didn’t you come back more often?” Easton asked, changing the subject.

  “I was busy.” She shot him a sidelong look. “Why?”

  “It just seems to me that two weekends a year isn’t much time with your family.”

  “We talked on the phone. What’s it to you?”

  He’d struck a nerve there, but she had a point. Who was he to lecture her about family bonds? He didn’t have any of his own that counted for much. Besides, his complaint wasn’t really about how much time she spent with her family. He’d missed her, too. His life kept going in Hope, Montana, and hers had moved on in the wider world. He resented her for that—for forgetting him.

  “Mom and I—” Nora sighed. “We locked horns a lot.”

  “Yeah...” He hadn’t expected her to open up. “I noticed it, but I never knew what it was about.”

  “Everything.” She shook her head. “Politics, religion, current events...you name it, we land on opposite sides of it. When I left for college, it gave me a whole new freedom to be me, without arguing with Mom about it. So I stayed away a lot.”

  “Is that why you didn’t tell her about your half sister?” he asked.

  He was watching her as she sat on her bed facing the babies, one leg tucked under herself. Bobbie finished her bottle first, and Nora put it down, still feeding Riley with the other hand. She was oddly coordinated as she bottle-fed two infants. Maybe it came from bottle-feeding orphaned farm animals. If you could wrangle a lamb or a calf into taking a bottle, maybe it was a skill like riding a bike.

  “I needed to sort it all out in my own head before I told her about it,” Nora said, oblivious to his scrutiny. “It was like anything else. I thought I could have a sister—some semblance of a relationship with her—but I was pretty sure Mom would see that as a betrayal.”

  “I get it.”

  In fact, he understood both sides of it. It had to be hard for Dina to see her one and only daughter bonding with her late husband’s love child. Yet he could understand Nora’s desire to know her sister. The whole situation was a painful one—the sort of thing that made him mildly grateful for his lack of family coziness. At least he couldn’t be let down any more than he already had been. Rock bottom was safe—there was no farther to fall.

  Rosie was almost finished with her bottle, but she’d stopped drinking. He pulled it out of her mouth, leaving a little trail of milk dribbling down her chin.

  “Is she done?” Nora asked.

  “She stopped drinking.” He held up the bottle.

  “Okay. Just burp her, then.”

  Burp the baby. Of course. He knew the concept here—he wasn’t a Neanderthal. He lifted Rosie to his shoulder, and she squirmed in her sleep, letting out a soft cry. Great, now he’d done it.

  “Just pat her back,” Nora said.

  Easton gently tapped Rosie’s back and she burped almost immediately, leaving a warm, wet sensati
on on his shoulder, dripping down toward his chest. He cranked his head to the side and could just make out the mess.

  Nora chuckled. “Sorry.”

  Riley had finished her bottle, and Nora reached for Bobbie. It was an odd sort of assembly line as she burped them and he laid them back in the crib. He pulled the white T-shirt off over his head, getting the wet material away from his skin. He wadded up the shirt and gave his shoulder an extra scrub. It was then that he realized he was standing in front of Nora shirtless. Her gaze flickered over his muscular chest, and color rose in her cheeks.

  “I’ll just—” He pointed toward the door. He needed to get out of there. He’d fed and burped a baby—mission accomplished. He wasn’t supposed to be hanging out with her, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to be this casual with her, either.

  “Okay. Sure—”

  Nora’s gaze moved over his torso once more, then she looked away quickly. She was uncomfortable, too. Soiled T-shirt in hand, he headed out of the room. That hadn’t been the plan at all, and he felt stupid for not thinking ahead. Who knew what she thought now—that he was hitting on her, maybe? That couldn’t be further from the truth.

  Blast it, he was up now. He might as well go down and make some breakfast. An early start was better than a late one.

  * * *

  NORA HADN’T EVER seen Easton Ross looking quite so grown-up. And she hadn’t imagined that under that shirt were defined muscles and a deep tan. He had a six-pack—that had been hard to miss—and it left her a little embarrassed, too. A good-looking man might be easy enough to appreciate in a picture or on TV, but when he stood in your bedroom in the moonlight... She laid Bobbie next to Riley and Rosie in the crib and looked down at them for a moment, watching the soft rise and fall of their tiny chests.

  It wasn’t because she’d never seen a man without a shirt before. She’d always had a pretty healthy romantic life. But this was Easton—an old buddy, a quiet guy in the background. If he’d looked a little less impressive, she wouldn’t have felt so flustered, but my goodness... When exactly had skinny, shy Easton turned into that?