for Terese to sign.
Hunter stood to give the stool over to her. “I’ll get out of the way so you can go home. But I’ll call you as soon as I get Johnny out of here and we can set up a time for you to come to the ranch.”
“I can’t wait,” Terese answered.
Hunter gave her a little wave then and left her to the nurse who showed her where to sign the release forms and then told her she was free to go.
“You’ll probably want to put on that sweater,” the nurse said as she left. “It’s feeling very Octoberish out there tonight.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that.”
Terese slipped the sweater over her head and then went to the small mirror on the wall to pull her shirt collar up and make sure she was presentable.
But as she smoothed her hair into place something else flashed through her mind—the image of Hunter Coltrane. The image of Hunter Coltrane with her.
“Now that’s a pipe dream,” she muttered to herself.
And no one knew it better than Terese.
Because Hunter Coltrane was handsome enough to stop traffic and she, as proven by the reflection in the mirror, was hardly the kind of woman who would so much as turn his head.
Her stepmother had always said it. So had Eve. Eve had alluded to it today. And it was an irrefutable fact—Terese Warwick was a Plain Jane.
The kind of Plain Jane who didn’t attract even moderately attractive men on her own merits, let alone men like Hunter.
“And don’t you forget it!” she commanded her reflection as if it were another person.
Then she left the hospital room, telling herself just to be glad she was going to get to meet her nephew.
She worked hard to erase the lingering mental image of her nephew’s father, a mental image that had things inside her sitting up and taking notice.
Just the way the man himself had….
Two
“Uh, Johnny? What do we have going on there?”
It was Sunday evening and Hunter was expecting Terese to arrive at his ranch any minute. He’d had his son home from the hospital since Thursday and after some soul-searching, on Friday night he’d kept his word and called her to arrange a time for her to come out and stay so she could meet Johnny and get to know him.
She’d said she had charity functions to attend this weekend, so would it be all right if she got there around nine o’clock. Hunter had agreed. But she was late and since it was already past Johnny’s bedtime, Hunter had gotten the boy ready for bed, complete with bath and pajamas. But the little boy had just disappeared upstairs for a while and now that he’d returned to the living room, Hunter was surprised to see the results of that trip.
“You look nice and I wanted to, too,” Johnny informed him.
Leave it to his son to notice that he’d taken a second shower and shaved again today, and that he was wearing slacks and a polo shirt rather than the jeans and sweatshirt he would normally have been in on a lazy Sunday evening.
“Come over here and let me see what you’ve done,” Hunter said, trying not to laugh.
Johnny had just turned four last month and was very intent on proving that he was more independent than he had been before. But as Hunter sat on the coffee table and pulled his son to stand between his legs, the boy seemed small and fragile to him.
“So what did you do to yourself?” Hunter asked, surveying how his son had spruced himself up.
Johnny had flaming red hair that Hunter kept short on the sides and in back. But he let the barber leave a little on top and now Johnny had done something to make only the front part stick straight up.
Hunter lightly patted the stiff-looking tips with his palm. “How’d you do this?” he asked, careful to sound impartial so as not to offend what his son was clearly proud to have accomplished.
“My friend Mikey showed me. You wet your hair and then you kinda comb it up with the bar of soap till it stays. Then you let it get dry.”
That was a relief. Hunter was afraid he’d used super-glue.
“It makes you cool,” Johnny informed him.
“Cool,” Hunter repeated. “Uh-huh.”
Accepting the hairstyle for the moment, he lowered his gaze to his son’s chubby-cheeked face with the sprinkling of freckles across his tiny nose.
“And did you wash your face again since your bath?” he asked, surprised since it was always a struggle to get his son to wash his face once, let alone twice.
“I din’t wash it. I shaved just a little bit,” Johnny informed him, rubbing a hand along his peach-skin jawline.
“You must have pressed kind of hard,” Hunter observed. “Your cheeks are all red. You made sure you used the special razor I gave you, didn’t you? It’s more important than ever that you never touch mine, you know?”
“I know. ’Cuz yours has a really sharp thing in it and ’cuz of the hemolilia I got now.”
Hunter had tried to get him to pronounce hemophilia correctly but it was a losing battle.
“Right. And did you put some of the soap in your eyebrows to make them stand up, too?” Hunter asked, seeing that the pale brows over his son’s blueberries-and-cream colored eyes were going in all directions.
“No, I think they musta just getted that way when I dried off my face ’cuz the water in my hair dripped.”
“So can I fix them?”
Johnny nodded and Hunter licked his thumbs and smoothed his son’s eyebrows into place.
Then he glanced down at Johnny’s rodeo pajamas. And the way his son had accessorized them.
“That’s one of my best ties, isn’t it?”
“Yup. I wanted to look nice.”
“And you do,” Hunter assured him. He couldn’t stop the smile that escaped. The tie was knotted into a wad at his throat and hung nearly to his knees. “I’m just thinking that this might not be a necktie kind of night. See? I don’t have one on.”
“Maybe you should put one on.”
“I don’t think so. And you know, a tie is sort of fancy for pajamas. Even for the good rodeo pajamas.”
“I look nice,” Johnny insisted.
“You do. You do. I’m just thinking that our company might not have dressed up quite that much and we wouldn’t want her to feel bad, would we?”
Johnny creased his forehead and looked down at the striped tie. “We could tell her it was okay
