that all the connections he’d forged in the past two weeks had done him much good, Carson thought glumly as he settled into a slouch against one of the pillars that flanked the steps. It had been a crazy idea, anyway. And he shouldn’t let his lack of progress get him down. Not every gamble ended up in the win column. Sometimes a man simply had to accept that he was out of his element and going nowhere fast.
Carson was no quitter, but the plan wasn’t happening. He needed to—
His mind went dead blank as he shoved off the pillar and snapped to his full height.
Who’s that? he almost demanded of Ryan.
But he shut his mouth over the eager words and simply stared instead.
Damn. She was something. Just the sight of her had emptied his brain of rational thought and slammed all his senses straight into overload.
She rode one of the floats and was dressed as a stork. Had anyone asked him a moment before if a woman in a stork costume could be hot, he would have laughed. But she was hot.
Her thick brown hair poked out from under the long orange stork bill, escaping the white fluffy stork hood to curl around her flushed cheeks. She was perched on a box covered in white cotton batting—to make it look like a cloud, he assumed. In her wings, she held a tiny squalling baby wrapped up in a blue blanket. Her slim legs, encased in orange tights, ended in platterlike webbed orange feet. She should have looked ridiculous—and she did.
Ridiculous. Adorable.
And hot.
Giant pink-and-blue letters sprinkled with glitter proclaimed the float “The Rust Creek Falls Gazette.”
“That’s Kayla, Kristen’s twin,” Ryan said, which made zero sense to Carson.
But then he ordered his brain to start working again and noticed the other woman standing beside his beautiful stork. Rigged out to look like the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch high and wearing a pageant-style sash that read, “The Rust Creek Rambler,” Miss Liberty waved and smiled as the float drifted past. She was the one Ryan had just called Kayla. Carson deduced this because the woman with the torch was a double for Ryan’s wife, Kristen.
Ryan kept talking. “Kayla is the recently outed mystery gossip columnist known as—”
“Judging by the sash, I’m thinking the Rust Creek Rambler?”
“Right. Kayla had us all fooled. No one suspected she could be the one who knew everyone’s secrets and put them in the Gazette. Kayla’s quiet, you know? She’s the shy one. Nothing like my Kristen.”
Carson tuned his friend out. The sweet stork with the wailing blue bundle had all his attention once again.
As he stared, she actually seemed to feel his gaze on her; her slim body went perfectly still. Then, slowly, she turned her white, billed head his way—and bam! Just like in some sappy, romantic movie, their eyes collided and locked. And damned if it didn’t feel exactly as they always made it seem in the movies. As though she had reached out and touched him. As though they’d just shared a private, way-too-intimate conversation.
As if they were the only two people in the world.
He gaped, and she stared back at him with her sweet mouth hanging open, clearly oblivious in that moment to everything but him, though the band across the street played loudly and badly and some kid nearby had set off a chain of firecrackers and the baby in her arms continued to wail.
What was it about her?
Carson couldn’t have said. Maybe it was those big, shining eyes, or that slightly frantic look on her incomparable face—a face that reminded him of his perfect girl-next-door fantasy and some bold gypsy woman, both at the same time. Maybe it was the stork costume. Most of the women he knew wouldn’t be caught dead dressed as a stork.
But whatever it was about her that had him gaping like a lovesick fool, he had to meet her.
Her float rolled on past. Next came the Veterans of Foreign Wars float, with men and women in uniform holding babies in camo and waving way too many flags. As the band launched into “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” Carson tried to figure out what had just happened to him.
Slowly, reality crept in—reality wrapped in a blue blanket and wailing.
The woman had a baby, for God’s sake. Carson liked his women free and unencumbered. And there was not only the baby to consider but also the real possibility of a husband.
Was he losing his mind? He would never make a move on a woman with a baby. If she had a husband that would simply be wrong. And if she didn’t, well, there would still be the baby. If he’d wanted kids, he wouldn’t be divorced.
You’d think he’d been sampling the magic moonshine that had brought him to Montana in the first place, the magic moonshine created by a local eccentric named Homer Gilmore. Carson wanted the moonshine formula for Drake Distilleries. So far, he’d gotten nowhere near his admittedly out-there goal.
Which was why he’d just about convinced himself to give up and go home.
But the sight of the girl changed all that. The sight of the girl had him thinking that he didn’t really want to give up. He just needed something to go right; that was all. He needed a win.
Meeting the adorable girl in the stork costume would definitely cheer him up, even with the damn baby—as long as there was no husband involved.
So then. First and foremost, he needed to find out if she was already taken.
At least that was easily done.
He asked Ryan, “Did you see the girl in the stork costume?”
Ryan gave it right up. “Tessa Strickland. Lives in Bozeman. She’s visiting her grandparents at their boardinghouse.”
Tessa. It suited her. “Married to...?”
Ryan shot Carson a narrow-eyed, you-can’t-fool-a-lawyer look. “You’re interested in Tessa. Why?”
“Ryan, is she married or not?”
His friend shoved back that shock of sable hair that was always falling over his forehead. “Tessa’s single.”
“But with a baby.”
“You are interested.”
“Would that somehow be a problem?”
Ryan smirked. “No problem at all. And Tessa’s got no baby.” She’s single, no baby. Things were definitely looking up. Ryan added, “The baby is Kayla’s—you remember, Kristen’s sister, the Rust Creek Rambler in the Lady Liberty costume?”
Not that it really mattered but... “How do you know who that baby belongs to?”
“I will repeat, Tessa doesn’t have a baby, whereas Kayla is married to Trey Strickland, and they have a son. Little Gilmore is just two months old. Kayla gave up her job writing the gossip column last year. She and Trey live down in Thunder Canyon now, but they come back to visit often. Somebody else writes the Rambler column now. Nobody knows who,
