toddled over to a laundry basket filled with toys. He lifted out a plastic bucket and threw it to the kitchen floor. Then he pulled out a stuffed dog and that landed next to the bucket.
“Will he empty the basket?” Ty asked, fascinated now by the baby’s behavior.
“He’ll empty it until he finds what he wants, or he’ll empty it just because he wants to. I’m trying to teach him to put everything back in again, but you know how that goes.”
“No, I don’t.”
Marissa blushed. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I just meant—” She threw up her hands. “Oh, never mind.”
“You meant that teaching him how to put toys away is hard. I get it, Marissa. But now I would like you to understand something. Jordan is my son, and I want to be his father. No, I’m not sure how that’s going to play out yet, but I do know I want to spend time with him.”
“What kind of time?” she asked, a bit shakily.
“I don’t know. I want to think about it. Can I have numbers where I can reach you?”
After giving him a good long look, apparently deciding whether she wanted to acquiesce or not, she opened a drawer and took out a pad of paper and a pen.
Then she said, “I’ll give you my cell number and my work number.”
“Are you still waitressing at the diner?”
“Oh, no,” she said, her pen stopping midnumber. “The Mommy Club helped me there, too. I needed a job with good insurance benefits. They hooked me up with Raintree Winery. Jase Cramer needed an assistant.”
Jase Cramer was almost a celebrity in town. Ty read about him once when he’d accessed the local newspaper online. Cramer had been a photojournalist who’d won a Pulitzer. But he’d been shot while he was doing work in Kenya, and he’d come home to become general manager of Raintree Winery.
“Sara, his wife, is a physical therapist. You saw her talking to me,” Marissa explained.
He thought how fortuitous it was to run into her at the facility. “Would you have ignored me if I hadn’t called you over?” Ty couldn’t help wondering just how long she would have kept his son from him.
“I don’t know,” Marissa said honestly. “I never expected to see you there. I never expected to see you back in Fawn Grove.”
“So you don’t know if you would have ended up on my doorstep with Jordan once the Cozy C is up and running? Certainly you would have heard I was back by then.”
“I don’t know, Ty. I can’t tell you what I would have done and when.” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “I didn’t know you were back. Nobody knows that we’re...connected in any way. No one but Sara and Kaitlyn, and they’re as busy as I am and don’t have time for gossip.”
So she had two confidantes now. “They’re close friends?” he asked.
“The best.”
“And all three of you are involved in The Mommy Club?”
“We are.”
Jordan banged a spatula he’d found in the wash basket against his bucket. As Ty tried to wrap his mind around Marissa’s life, Marissa finished jotting down the numbers, and then she handed him the slip of paper so he could input them into his cell phone contacts. Their fingertips touched and Ty felt the electricity all over again—the quickening of his blood that had told him one night with this woman wasn’t enough. But one night had led to a baby. Jordan had to be his main concern now. Not the chemistry he and Marissa might have.
When he stepped back, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Because he was leaving?
“You might have kept me out of your life for two years, Marissa, but that’s not how it’s going to go now. I’m going to think about all this, then we can have a real discussion about what we’re going to do next.”
He crossed to Jordan and bent down to him. “Hey, little guy. I’m going to see you again soon.”
Jordan studied him for a moment, then went back to slapping the spatula against the bucket. Maybe he was going to be a drummer.
Ty straightened and tucked Marissa’s numbers into his shirt pocket. Then he crossed to the door and left.
His head was spinning as he stood outside Marissa’s door feeling like the outsider he was. But that wouldn’t be true for long. Nope. He was going to be Jordan’s father. He just had to figure out how to do it.
* * *
As soon as Ty closed the door behind him, and Marissa heard his boots descending the steps, she scooped up Jordan and held him close. Tears came to her eyes because she didn’t know what was going to happen next. What lengths would Ty go to in order to spend time with his son? Was he going to upset the steady balance she’d found?
Besides all that was the pull she still felt toward Ty Conroy. When they made eye contact, it was so hard for her to look away. It was so hard for her not to feel breathless, as if they’d started something they’d never finished.
Jordan had had enough of being held. He wiggled and squirmed until Marissa once more set him on the floor. Then he dug into that toy basket for something on the bottom.
Marissa needed advice and calm reason. Since Sara already knew Ty was back, she picked up her cell phone that was charging on the counter and speed-dialed Sara. When Sara answered, Marissa asked, “Are you busy?”
“We just finished dinner. Jase is playing a game with Amy on his tablet. What’s up?”
Sara had been a widow and single mother when she’d met Jase. Now her little girl, Amy, adored him. He wasn’t a stepfather. He was a real father.
“Ty came over. He put two and two together and came up with Jordan. His uncle knew I wasn’t married and had a baby, so Ty filled in the blanks.”
“Didn’t you expect this to happen someday?” Sara asked reasonably.
“Denial’s a wonderful thing, Sara. Knowing Ty’s attitude and lifestyle, I just never expected I’d have to face it. So anytime I thought about Ty, I just pushed those thoughts away. I was living in a fool’s paradise, I guess. Now it all crashed around me.”
“What did he say?”
“His bull riding days are over. He and his uncle are turning the Cozy C into a vacation ranch. That’s going to save the ranch for his uncle and give Ty employment.”
“So he’s staying in Fawn Grove.”
“I guess. He’s so used to being on the road, so used to traveling from place to place I just can’t see him settled down. I can see him staying to get the ranch going, but then he could always find a general manager to run it if he found something else he wanted to do.”
“Maybe he’s grown wiser in the last two years,” Sara suggested.
“You’re
