“Onesies, one-piece jumpers, so you undo all the snaps down the front and right down his leg and slip him out.”
“Like slipping a banana out of a peel,” he said. “It’s even yellow.”
“Well, yes, kind of—”
“Except bananas don’t leak, uh, brown blotches.” He grimaced, but there was no gagging, no drama.
In one swift movement he had plump limbs out of the pajamas, and had them off. In another move, he slipped off the soiled diaper. He dispensed with both items with nary a flinch.
Jamey kicked wildly, and Ty caught the little feet easily in one hand.
“Hey,” he warned, “cut it out.” But it was a mild warning. He also did not flinch from cleaning Jamey up. He was methodical and thorough, and as he had promised, unfazed by the task. The minefield of petroleum jelly and diaper tabs did not claim him as a victim.
In fact, in short order, the baby was in a new diaper, gurgling happily and kicking his legs.
Ty picked up the messy items and disappeared. The diaper went out the back door, and then she heard him washing his hands in the bathroom.
When he came back, he had a new Onesies and had snitched one of the cookies off the tree. He slipped the baby into the new jammies, and handed the cookie to him.
“That should keep him busy while I look at your hand. I put the banana peel in the sink to soak the brown blotches until we have time to run a load of laundry.”
She wasn’t running a load of laundry. She was leaving. The need to go was feeling increasingly urgent.
Because watching him, and the apparent ease with which he adapted to what life threw at him—a baby and a woman invading his bachelor cave and the woman now nearly completely incapacitated—she felt sudden awareness of the tall self-assured cowboy shiver up her spine.
As he came and sat in the chair opposite her, and then pulled it so close their knees were touching, she was totally aware of Ty Halliday as pure man.
“Let me see your hand again.”
This time she just gave it to him willingly, watched as he took it and steadied it on his own knee. He bent his head over it, and she felt a deep thrill at his physical closeness. His scent filled her world—clean, mysterious, masculine. The overhead kitchen light danced in the rich, pure gold of his hair.
His touch was exquisite.
After inspecting the damage thoroughly, he surrendered her hand back to her and got up. She followed him with her eyes as he reached up above his fridge and retrieved a first-aid kit.
Amy felt as if she was in a lovely altered state of awareness where she could appreciate the broadness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, the slight swell of his rear under the snug fit of his jeans, the impossible length of his legs.
He turned back to her, his expression one of complete calm and utter confidence.
He knew what to do. And he was not the least bit afraid or hesitant to do it.
It struck her, as he moved back toward her, his grace and strength unconscious, that Ty had all the ingredients that had made men men since the beginning of time.
As he sat back down, she saw the intensity of his focus in the amazing sapphire of his eyes. She saw him as a warrior, a hunter, a protector, an explorer, a cowboy and a king.
Obviously, changing diapers and dressing wounds had not been in his plan for the day.
But Ty Halliday had no whine in him. No complaint.
What she saw was a stoic acceptance of what it meant to be a man, an unconscious confidence in his ability to rise to any occasion and do what needed to be done, whether that was putting in long hours doing rugged ranch work, or whether it was nursing something—or someone—injured.
The diaper had not been pretty. Neither was her wound.
And yet he did not shirk from either one. She suspected there was very little he would not face head-on.
She was not sure why, but that simple competence left her almost breathless with awe, tingling with a physical awareness of him, and of the space he was taking up in her world.
On the kitchen table that was beside them he again laid things out with the precision of a solider taking apart a familiar weapon. From the first-aid kit he removed individually packaged disinfectant wipes, antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, gauze wrap, scissors, tiny metal clips.
He surveyed the lineup of materials, remembered something, got up and reached into the cabinet above the fridge again. He came back with one more thing.
Amy gasped when he set it down, her awareness of his considerable masculine charm competing with this latest item. At the very end of his line of first-aid items, he had added a very large needle, attached to an even larger syringe.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Penicillin. Don’t worry about it.” He picked up her hand, cradled it in his. With his other hand and his teeth, he opened a package and removed an antiseptic wipe from it.
She barely registered that. She was not sure she had ever seen such a large needle. She gulped. “You can’t just give a person a needle, you know.”
He swabbed the burn.
“You can’t?” he asked, unconcerned. She watched him as he tore open a second antiseptic wipe with his teeth and cleaned the whole area again. She glanced back at the needle.
“You have to be a doctor.”
“I didn’t know that.” He tossed aside the used wipes, opened the tube of ointment, squeezed some out onto the palm of her hand.
Gently, he smoothed the ointment over the burn.
At any other time, she might have appreciated the gentle certainty of his touch. But she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off that needle, and its place in the lineup.
“Or at least a nurse.”
“I’ve given thousands of needles.” He inspected her hand, and then satisfied, covered the burn with a gauze pad, item number three. The needle and syringe were item number seven and he was making his way steadily toward them.
“Thousands?” she asked with jittery skepticism.
“Literally. Thousands. To cows and horses, but I’m pretty sure the technique is the same. Or similar.”
He took the roll of gauze, item number four, and began to unwind it firmly around the pad in the palm of her hand.
“It isn’t,” she told him. “It’s not the same technique. It’s not even similar.”
“How do you know? How many horses have you given needles to?” He was making a neat figure eight over her burned palm, around her thumb
