Put three feet between them.
“I can never go home,” Ash said. “I’m staying here.” She looked at the sleeping babies with a sweet smile, then looked up at him. “How are my brothers? And Aunt Fiona? Uncle Burke? Grandfather Running Bear?”
He’d made love to this woman so many times that he practically knew her every thought, and right now, he knew she was avoiding his mission, dismissing it, as Ash dismissed everything that didn’t square with her worldview. Ash had always been fiercely independent, despite her six doting older brothers, and in a strange way, they depended on their sister more than she depended upon them.
Ash was the spirit of the Callahan clan.
She had to learn that she didn’t have to carry the weight of the world on her delicate shoulders forever.
And anyway, a man was only as good as his promises.
He picked her up, tossed her over one shoulder and marched her to the front door.
“Put me down!”
He spanked her bottom once lightly with a satisfying smack! against her jeans, drawing another outraged protest. She pinched him smartly under his arm, hard enough to force a grunt from him.
“Put me down!” she commanded again, as if he would have listened when he finally had her in his arms.
Two squad cars pulled in front of the house, and the next thing he knew, a couple of Wild’s finest were yelling at him to put the little lady down.
“I forgot to call and tell the sheriff it was a false alarm,” Ash said, apologetic, as he set her gently on the ground. She was breathless and a bit tousled from being upside down. “You’d better go.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you agree to go with me.” He could be just as stubborn as she. “Go tell the sheriff and his friends that their services aren’t needed.”
“It would be better if you go.”
She gazed up at him, and he caught a funny bit of desperation from her. “Nope,” he said, still wearing stubborn like a badge.
“Ash, is there a problem?” the sheriff asked, and Ash looked at Xav.
“Is there a problem?” she asked Xav, and he realized she was holding him hostage to her demand that he leave.
Well, he’d never been one to go down without a fight.
“Hell, yeah, there’s a problem, Sheriff. This woman won’t accept my marriage proposal. I drove all the way from Rancho Diablo in New Mexico to propose to her. Xav Phillips,” he said, shaking the sheriff’s hand.
The sheriff and his deputies snickered a little at his conundrum. Then the sheriff perked up. “Xav Phillips, Gil Phillips’s son, from Hell’s Colony?”
“Yes, sir,” Xav said politely.
“I knew your daddy before you were even a twinkle in his eye,” the sheriff said, drawing a groan from Ash. The sheriff turned to her.
“Ashlyn Callahan, you hit the panic button because some man has proposed to you? Again?” The sheriff shook his head. “He drives a nice truck, comes from a great family, practically Texas royalty. If Santa brings you a father for those four children of yours, you might treat him a little nicer than calling the law on him.” He tipped his hat to Ash, shook Xav’s hand again, and he and his deputies got back in their squad cars. “Good luck,” the sheriff said to Xav through his open window. “Probably five men in the county have offered to marry this lady, and she’s turned them all down flat.”
He nodded. “Forewarned, Sheriff. Thanks.”
“Are all of you through enjoying a manly guffaw at my expense?” Ash demanded. “Because if you are, I need to get back in the house. I have children who need me.”
“Good night, Sheriff.” He followed Ash back inside, his mind niggling with discomfort and alarm. Five men had proposed to her? Ash picked up a baby that was sending up a gentle wail and sat down on the old-fashioned sofa situated across from the Christmas tree.
He sat next to her. “Hey, Ash,” he said, “the sheriff said something about you needing a father for your children, that Santa had sent you one for Christmas. It was a figure of speech, right?” He looked at her, surprised but not displeased in the slightest that she was undoing the pearl buttons on her white sweater. She tossed a baby blanket over her shoulder, obscuring the baby’s face—and suddenly, it hit Xav like a thunderclap that Ash was nursing that baby.
Which would not be the slightest bit possible unless these were her children. He stared at Ash, and she looked back at him calmly, her denim-blue eyes unworried and clear.
“You’re a mother,” he said, feeling light-headed, and not from the crack Mallory had landed on his skull. “These are your babies?”
She nodded, and he got dizzy. The woman he loved was a mother, and somehow she’d had four children. This perfect four of a kind was hers.
It wasn’t possible. But he could hear gentle sucking sounds occasionally, and he knew it was as possible as the sun coming up the next day. He felt weak all over, weak-kneed in a way he’d never been, his heart splintering like shattered glass.
“Damn, Ash, your family...you haven’t told them.”
“No, I haven’t.”
A horrible realization sank into him, painful and searing. “Who’s the father?”
She frowned. “A dumb ornery cowboy.”
“That doesn’t sound like you. You wouldn’t fall for a dumb ornery cowboy.”
“Yes, I would,” Ash said. “I would, and I did.”
He looked at the tiny bundles of sweetness in their bassinets. Two girls, a boy, and he presumed that was a boy underneath the blanket at his mother’s breast, because each bassinet had colored blankets, two pink, two blue. Two of each. He felt sad, sick, really, that the woman he adored had found someone else in the nine months she’d been gone. He felt a little betrayed, sure that the two of them had shared something, although neither of them had ever tried to quantify exactly what it was they’d shared. “He really is dumb if he’s not here taking care of you,” Xav said, and it had to be the truth or she wouldn’t be living with the woman with the wicked swing who’d tried to crush his cranium. “Ash, I’ll marry you, and take care of you, and your children,” he said suddenly, realizing how he could finally catch the woman of his dreams without even appearing to be the love-struck schmuck that he was.
If anyone was father material, it was he.
* * *
“YOU’LL MARRY ME?” Ash repeated, outraged. “You’ll marry me, you big, dumb, ornery—”
He held up a hand. “Of course I will. I’d do anything for a friend, and I consider you one of my dearest friends. A sister. I’ll give your children my name, and I’ll protect you, Ash.”
If she hadn’t been nursing Thorn, she’d have given the gorgeous sexy hunk next to her another knock on the head to match the
