shoulder one last time even though the car and the woman were gone. “You’re kidding.”
“Not something I’d kid about,” Wyatt assured the younger man.
Fox closed the door behind him and went straight to the coffee maker on the kitchen counter. He needed a hit of coffee, the stronger the better.
“What’s she doing here?” Taking a mug from the counter, he filled it to the brim with inky-black coffee. “Did she suddenly come to her senses?” he asked even though he doubted that was why Bailey had suddenly turned up.
“I don’t think that’s why she’s here.”
Fox looked at the man above the rim of steaming black liquid. “Then why is she here?” He burned his tongue and swallowed a curse. Blowing on the liquid, he waited a second before taking another sip, slowly this time.
“She came to ask if I’d make a baby with her.”
Fox had just taken another sip of coffee. He started choking and almost spit the liquid out in a spray. He managed to swallow it at the last moment.
He set the mug down on the kitchen counter, and his eyes were watery as he stared at his cousin. “I thought you just said that she asked you—”
“She did,” Wyatt said quietly.
Forgetting about the coffee, Fox focused his attention on Wyatt. He didn’t want to see the man he thought of as a brother getting hurt again. “When did all this happen?”
Wyatt nodded at the closed front door. “Just now.”
That didn’t seem possible, Fox thought. “She didn’t give you any warning?”
Wyatt shook his head as he walked back into the living room. “Nope.”
Fox was right behind him. “You’re telling me that Bailey didn’t call you first to see how you felt about this?”
Feeling suddenly drained, Wyatt sank onto the sofa. The same sofa he had just been sitting on with Bailey beside him. It almost seemed like a crazy dream now.
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
Fox was trying to get this all straight in his head. “And you haven’t heard from her in the last six years, right?”
Wyatt’s eyes shifted, slowly looking toward his brother. “Not a word.”
Fox emitted a low whistle. “Hell, Wyatt, what are you going to do?”
Wyatt laughed even though the situation was far from funny. “Damned if I know.”
Fox’s mind was racing now. “She’s not staying in town, is she?”
The corners of Wyatt’s mouth rose in an ironic smile. “As a matter of fact, she isn’t.”
Fox looked at his cousin suspiciously. “I don’t like the way you phrased that.” And then it hit him. “Wait—she’s not staying here, is she? Please tell me she’s not staying here.”
“I could,” Wyatt answered, “except that I made it a point never to lie to you.”
Astonishment nudged its way into Fox’s soul. “She’s going to be staying here,” he concluded incredulously. He stared at Wyatt, unable to believe what the other man was telling him. Maybe there was some mistake. “You’re actually considering doing what she asked?”
“Well, I—”
Wyatt got no further than that before Fox barked, “Wyatt, are you out of your mind? This woman did a tap dance on your heart, disappearing on you without even having the decency to tell you why to your face, and now she’s popped up out of nowhere, asking you to sleep with her—”
Maybe it was nerves that made Wyatt laugh at the way Fox was phrasing his narrative. “Actually, sleeping isn’t exactly a factor here—”
Fox wasn’t in the mood to see the humor in this. “You know damn well what I mean. Maybe you don’t remember what you were like after she left because most of the time you were too anesthetized with whiskey to know your own name. But I remember the whole thing. Clearly,” he emphasized. “She practically destroyed you—and I’m not going to let her get a chance to do it a second time,” Fox informed him angrily.
Wyatt knew that the other man meant well, but this was his problem to deal with. “You don’t have anything to say about it.”
“The hell I don’t,” Fox snapped. “For better or for worse, you’re my family and I care about you. Now you might not be able to say no to that woman, but I certainly can,” Fox informed him with finality.
Wyatt raised a salient point. “She didn’t ask you to father her baby, Fox. She asked me.”
Fox scowled. He was incensed and didn’t like being tripped up because of words. “You know what I mean,” he growled.
“Yeah, I do,” Wyatt replied. And then his voice softened. “And I know you mean well but, ultimately, this is my decision to make.”
“So you’re actually considering doing this?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Wyatt corrected him. To him thinking came before considering and he needed to think this all through, taking in all the ramifications, the extenuating circumstances as far as he was able. “Look, I’m the one who brought her out here and she sacrificed a lot to help me get the ranch up and running. I owe her.”
“Is that what she told you?” Fox chided angrily. “That you owe her?”
“No, that’s what I think. And it’s true. Bailey wanted to go to school to become a veterinarian and I talked her out of it, saying she could do that later because I needed her working alongside me at the time.
“I said the same thing to her when she wanted to have kids.” Wyatt went on, vividly remembering the circumstances now. “I said having kids could wait because we needed to focus our attention on the ranch and getting a herd going.”
Fox refused to allow Wyatt to blame himself. “So you wanted to build something and you did. That wasn’t a bad thing,” he insisted.
“No, it wasn’t,” Wyatt agreed. “But it wasn’t her thing,” he said, trying to see the situation from his ex-wife’s vantage point. “It was mine. Bailey didn’t get to do what she wanted, didn’t get to have the kids she wanted.”
“So she’s here to collect now?” Fox asked in astonishment. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Wyatt frowned to himself as he sighed. There were so many ambivalent feelings running through him. “Something like that.”
This still wasn’t making any sense to Fox. “Bailey’s still young,” he insisted. “She’s what? Thirty? Thirty-one?”
“Thirty-five,” Wyatt corrected him.
“Thirty-five,” Fox repeated, nodding his head as if this substantiated
