Why had he said that? She did not need to know he had a top twenty list. She did not need to know one more thing about him! He was pretty sure that’s how attachments were formed, these little bits of information knitting together into a chain.
Kissing didn’t help, either.
“I only have the vaguest notion what you are talking about.” Was she staring at his lips? With longing?
Buck up, cowboy.
“It’s not the arrow that finishes the main character, it’s infection. I’ll get the baby.”
“Yesterday, you didn’t even want to pick him up!” she reminded him. “You could barely give him a pat on the head.”
“Well, yesterday I didn’t have to. Today, I do.”
Ty left her, shrugged off his coat and boots in the porch, and then went to the bedroom door and looked in at the baby.
Jamey had hauled himself up on the rails of the playpen, and was jumping up and down, howling his outrage at being imprisoned.
“Hey, that’s enough out of you.”
Jamey stopped jumping up and down and stopped howling. He smiled, and made a little goo-goo sound, instantly charming.
“Papa Odam,” he declared. His arms shot out. “Up.”
Ty went in. This was how old he had been when his mother had walked out the door and scarcely looked back. Or at least that was what he had believed. Until the letters.
Is this what his father had felt that day?
Terrified? As if he’d been left in charge of something breakable and didn’t have a clue what to do?
“Up.” It wasn’t a request, the charm dissolving. It was a command.
“Are you always so bossy?” he said to the baby.
Ty felt a nudge of sympathy for his dad, just like he had felt last night when he’d heard Amy reading stories and wondered if his dad had wanted to read to him.
Funny that he would feel sympathy when the letters had resurfaced. Rationally, that should make him angry all over again.
He thought of Amy singing last night, and seeing the tree, and putting the blanket on her this morning. He thought of her tears and his hands in her hair. He thought of the exquisite softness of her lips taking his.
“Up!”
“All right, already.”
Taking a deep breath, he leaned over and picked up the baby.
It was not a tender moment. The baby stank to high heaven.
And yet as that stinky baby snuggled into him, Ty was aware for the first time that that long ago girl who had accused him of not having a heart, had not been right after all.
Because he did have a heart. He could feel it beating as Jamey pressed deeper against him, sighed happily, as if it were a homecoming.
It was that he had built walls around it, an impenetrable fortress.
It was obviously Amy’s fault, even before the complication of her lips touching his, that the walls were being compromised, the fortress being threatened. Softness was flowing through the barriers like water onto parched earth. Allowing that softness in was why, without warning, he felt sympathy for a man he had barely spoken to for years.
And he didn’t know how, in the end, any of this could possibly be a good thing.
WHAT had she done?
Amy sank back in her chair, listened to the gruff masculine melody of Ty talking to Jamey down the hallway in the guest bedroom.
She had kissed him. She had kissed Ty Halliday. That’s what she had done. There were excuses of course: the pain of the burn had knocked down her normal quota of reserve. Still, she waited for regret to swim around her like a shark sensing blood. Giving in to the temptation to taste his lips was just more evidence of her stupidity.
But the regret did not come.
How could she regret that? Taking his lips in hers had felt like a conscious decision, entirely empowering. And she could still feel the shiver of pure sensation. She thought she might remember it as long as she lived.
She was leaving, anyway. As soon as the roads were passable, she would be gone. So what did it matter that, when he had put his arms around her, she had felt for the first time in a long, long time as if she had fallen and there had been a net waiting to catch her?
That’s what the kiss had been about.
Pure gratitude.
Instead of agreeing with her that she had indeed been stupid about burning herself, about winding up here when she needed to be somewhere else, his voice had been deep and calm and reassuring.
Hey, it’s going to be okay.
Instead of pointing out to her all the different ways she could have avoided the situation, and all the trouble she had caused, he had just said, simply, I’ll fix it.
If something other than gratitude had shivered to life in that brief second when her lips had touched his and her world had tilted crazily, so what? Again, she was leaving. Whatever else had been there—some primal awareness, some wrenching hunger—would have no opportunity to blossom to life.
Whatever that had been, he had felt it, too. Right down to the toes of his wet cowboy boots. He’d pulled away from her as if he’d got a jolt form a cattle prod.
Amy chided herself. She should have the decency at least to be embarrassed. But she did not feel embarrassed.
She felt, again, oddly and delightfully empowered. That big, self-assured cowboy was just a little bit afraid of what had happened between them. He had built a world where he had absolute control, and it could be nothing but a good thing for that attitude to be challenged now and then!
Ty came back into the kitchen with Jamey. The baby looked ridiculously happy to find himself in Ty’s arms.
There was something terrifyingly beautiful about seeing a tiny child in the arms of such a man.
It was a study in contrasts. The man’s skin etched by sun and wind and a hint of rough, dark whisker, the baby’s skin as tender as the fuzzy inside of a creamy rose petal. The man had easy certainty in his own rugged strength, the baby was like a melting puddle of skin and bone. The man’s eyes held shadows, the baby’s innocence. The man’s mouth was a stern line of cynicism, the baby’s a curve of pure joy.
And of course, the man was totally self-reliant, the baby totally the opposite. And in this moment, Ty had assumed the mantle of responsibility for the baby’s reliance.
It
