Loe raamatut: «His Shotgun Proposal»

Chapter One

A steady stream of travelers lugged baggage of every shape, size and color out of the air-cooled Austin airport and into the muggy Texas heat. Mac Coleman tugged the brim of his cowboy hat down low on his forehead, shielding his face from the blazing haze of afternoon sun as he leaned against his Silverado and watched for his passenger. Not that he had even a faint hope of recognizing her. He’d been volunteered to pick up Abigail Jones because he had business in the city on the day she was scheduled to arrive and because his cousin, Jessica, had an annoying way of getting around arguments. His last-ditch effort to avoid chauffeur duty had met with a confident “Don’t worry, Mac, Abbie will find you. I told her to look for a scowling cowboy next to a black truck.”

His wasn’t the only black truck parked outside the baggage claim area and he certainly wasn’t the only man wearing a Stetson, but if she showed, he was here. And if not? Well, he’d wait a reasonable while, then head back to the ranch. Visitors to the Desert Rose weren’t his responsibility and he planned to keep it that way.

A sassy blonde passed him, displaying enough leg and flirty tosses of her tresses to attract his attention. He watched her sashay by, caught the full effect of the smile she flashed not quite accidentally in his direction and touched the brim of his hat in the half hope she might be his pickup.

She changed direction and came back toward him, tugging her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and giving him a thorough looking over from above the tortoiseshell frames. He could all but hear her internal calculator chi-ching as her glance moved past him to note the Desert Rose crest on the side of the truck and then quickly returned to take in what his older brother, Alex, laughingly called the Coleman ask-me-the-size-of-my-ranch look. “Do you know where I might find the Four Seasons shuttle?” she asked in a sultry voice, lightly stressing the name of the hotel.

Okay, so she wasn’t Abigail Jones, who wouldn’t be asking for a ride to an Austin hotel. But that was just as well. He had enough four-legged fillies to take up his time and attention this summer, as it was, and he didn’t need any other distractions. Especially not of this variety. “No, ma’am,” he said without regret. “Can’t say that I do.”

“I suppose I could take a cab to the hotel,” she said with another toothy blaze of a smile. “Unless I get a…better offer.” She tossed her hair again…a fine, sun-streaked mane of it, too. Her legs were long and lean, her body slender and supple. No two ways about it, she was candy for the eyes, and had exactly the sort of California looks he most admired. He wished he was interested—he really did—but in truth, he wasn’t even tempted to raise the brim of his hat for a better view.

“I sure hope you get that offer, ma’am,” he drawled, not giving an inch of encouragement…or discouragement, either, for that matter. “’Cause it’s a fair piece of walking to get from here to downtown Austin.”

She pouted, as he’d expected she would, unconvinced as yet that with a bit more encouragement he wouldn’t be hers for the asking. Women, he’d discovered over the course of his thirty years, could be as predictable as a hill country armadillo and just about as faithless. “Married?” she asked point-blank.

That made him smile. “No, and never going to be.”

That made her smile. “Really? Well, it just so happens, I prefer men who have strong opinions about matrimony…one way or the other.”

Another time, another place, he might have taken her up on her thinly disguised offer, escorted this sun-bleached beauty to her hotel and stayed over for breakfast. But for the past several months, he’d been hung up on a mysterious lady who had seduced and deserted him all within the span of one incredible night. A short, sandy-haired, blue-eyed elf of a woman who continued to intrude on opportunities such as this with annoying regularity. A slip of a gal, whose name he hadn’t been able to discover, whose vanishing act was still as inexplicable to him as her appearance in his hotel room that night last winter, and whose throaty laughter had echoed in all his dreams since. He was damned tired of thinking about her, too, but somehow this just didn’t seem the right moment to prove it.

The blonde took off her sunglasses and sucked lightly on one plastic-and-wire earpiece. “Is everything in Texas this hot?” she asked, eyeing him suggestively.

Mac offered her a lazy smile, appreciating her efforts, futile as he’d decided they ultimately would be. “Oh, no, ma’am. Some things in Texas are a whole lot hotter.”

ABBIE WRESTLED her red plaid suitcase off the steel-jawed baggage carousel and let it fall with a thud on top of the two other bags she’d already rescued—one medium-sized black faux leather and one large faded sea-green paisley. Turning back, she scanned the conveyance for the remaining suitcase, a brown tweed with gray stripes. Well, in truth, the stripes were duct tape, fashioned by Tyler, the youngest of her four older brothers, as a gag gift for her graduation from grad school last December. She had a matched set of brothers and luggage at home, a four-piece, stair-step assortment of each. But for this trip, she’d had to make do with suitcases borrowed helter-skelter, because she didn’t want anyone in her family to know this time away from them was going to last considerably longer than she’d led them all to believe. The truth of the matter was she’d told some major whoppers just to get here without them finding out where she was going or why.

It was embarrassing to think she’d gone from magna cum laude in December to magna cum baby in May, losing the perfect job along the way. She’d had the world on a string, a prestigious teaching position, a future bright with promise, and independence within her grasp. But her fall from grace had been swift and humiliating, even if only a few people knew about it at this point. Everyone would know soon enough. She supposed she should have gone straight home after she’d been fired from Miss Amelia’s Academy for Young Ladies, but she just couldn’t bring herself to face her parents with the truth. Not yet, anyway.

And if her brothers knew…well, that didn’t bear thinking about. If they had even a faint suspicion of the mess she was in, the four of them would descend like warrior angels to fight for her honor and protect her from all harm, even if they suffocated her in the process. They meant well, Tyler, Jaz, Brad and Quinn, in their big-brotherly ways, but if it were up to them, she’d never make a single decision for herself. They’d do it all, they’d do it their way, and they’d do it for her own good. Oh, she loved her rowdy brothers with all her heart, and she hadn’t liked having to scheme and plan and plot her way into having a life of her own, but it had been the only way to escape their overly protective and bullheaded-times-four, brothers-know-best attitude.

Of course, practically the very second she’d managed to claim her independence and get out on her own, she’d gotten herself into quite a pickle. But the longer she could keep the family ignorant of her dilemma, the more choices she could keep open for evaluation. There were some decisions a woman had to make for herself, and it was not selfish to want a little bit of peace and quiet while she made them, either.

So if that meant traveling with borrowed and battered suitcases, and throwing herself on the kind and generous aegis of her college friend, Jessica Coleman, so be it. Sooner or later, a person had to cut those apron strings and Abbie’s time to snip, snip, snip had come. Her plans were a little loose at the moment, but a week or two at the Desert Rose would give her time to figure out what to do next and how, exactly, she was going to tell her father, mother and four burly brothers about this unexpected and completely embarrassing dilemma.

They wouldn’t kill the guy who’d gotten her pregnant, because she would never tell them who he was. Not because he deserved her protection, but because she didn’t know who he was, either. Just the thought of that night, of hot kisses and wild passion made her skin tingle with a thousand memories, made her shiver with remembered desire, made her wince with humiliation. She had never, ever, done anything so stupidly impulsive before. Would never, ever, do anything so stupidly irresponsible again. But, as it turned out, once had been plenty. One chance in a million, and she’d gotten pregnant.

If Jessica hadn’t offered her a job at the ranch…

But Jess was a good friend, and true. “Come and stay with me,” she’d said the minute Abbie had blurted out her troubles. “I could really use your help in the office. I mean it. You’ll be doing me a big favor.”

Of course, Abbie knew who was getting the most benefit out of this impromptu visit, and she loved her friend all the more for pretending otherwise. After all, how much office work could there be at a ranch? Especially anything Abbie might know how to do. She was an excellent teacher—well, had been, at any rate. She was also a whiz with math and could fill out a tax form while flipping it like a pancake, but what did she know about hay? Or horses? She wouldn’t know one end of a ranch from the other. She knew the Colemans raised Arabians on the Desert Rose, and she knew that particular breed of horse had originated in—duh—Arabia. But if she was asked to pick the Arabian out of a horse lineup, she’d be playing the odds and they wouldn’t be in her favor.

On top of being a real greenhorn, she couldn’t fit into her blue jeans anymore, either, and she’d never in her life worn a pair of cowboy boots. But, bottom line, she had nowhere else to go except her parents’ home outside of Little Rock, and since that was out of the question, she’d lug these mismatched suitcases outside and look for a cowboy with a big black truck, who was probably scowling in earnest because she was taking so long to get out there.

When all the misfit suitcases were stacked together on a woefully inadequate foldout rolling wire rack, which had been salvaged from the trash at Miss Amelia’s, she dragged them past the attendant, who barely even glanced at her baggage check. Probably figured no self-respecting thief would claim such a motley assortment. Abbie bumped her rickety pile of bags toward the exit, balancing the stack carefully and hoping a kind soul would offer some assistance in getting the bulky bundle through the automatic doors. If she’d been a month further along in her pregnancy, someone probably would have. Or if she’d been a month back, when some of that early pregnancy glow had burnished her cheeks with healthy color and given her sandy-brown hair a saucy bounce, she probably could have gotten a helping hand with nothing more than a smile and a please, would you mind? But she was five months along, past the glowing phase of impending motherhood and just rounded enough all over to look chubby. At least, she wasn’t waddling yet. Well, she didn’t think she was, anyway. Although, for all she knew, her rear end might be swaying like a duck’s tail.

She bullied the suitcases through the doorway, all on her own, only to have them tumble into an uncooperative pile just on the other side of the electronic eye, which stopped the doors from closing, which subsequently caused a backup of departing passengers and an unsettling beep, beep, beep sound. “Sorry,” she apologized to the frowning faces in the doorway behind her. “Sorry.”

No one offered to help her gather the luggage. One man stepped over the jumble of suitcases, another edged around, but Abbie finally managed to scoot the cases out of the way and off to the side until she could get them straight again. No small task that, as the paisley suitcase seemed to have lost an essential bit of hardware in the tumble and was no longer completely closed. So where was a man when she needed one?

Ah, but she didn’t need one. Wasn’t that what this entire flight to Texas was about? Wasn’t that why she’d told her parents she was spending the summer at a math and science camp in the Pocono Mountains? Wasn’t she here to escape from the men in her life? All of them. The only one she would honestly like to see at this moment was the stranger who’d gotten her into this predicament with his dark good looks and a smile that buckled her knees. And the only reason she’d like to see him was to thumb her nose and tell him she didn’t need anything from him. Well, except, maybe, some duct tape.

A glance over her left shoulder didn’t reveal any black pickup trucks or scowling ranch hands, and a glance over her right showed nothing more than a cluster of people blocking her view. She knew from past arrivals in Austin on her way to the University of Texas grad school that the airport was always crowded and that trying to find a familiar vehicle among the slow tide of cars, buses, trucks and taxis moving past the building could be a formidable task. In the past, she’d been mainly looking for the bus, but hopefully a black truck would be easy to spot. Especially one accompanied by a cowboy.

Regrouping, she shifted the paisley suitcase to the top of the luggage stack so she could keep its contents safely intact with the weight of her hand. Slinging the shoulder strap of her purse high up on her shoulder, she prepared to tilt the baggage onto the wheels of the wire rack and head out to find Jessica’s cousin, Mac. But just as she braced the rack with her foot, tipped it back on the rollers and pushed it like a baby buggy toward the curb, the crowd thinned and her heart pulled taut in a little clutch of recognition as she saw him. Him. He’d been wearing a hat that night, too, and even though she couldn’t see his face in full now, the hammering, yammering beat of her heart would allow for no mistakes. It was him. The mysterious stranger. The man of her dreams. The father of her baby.

Oh, great. Of all the times to run into him again, this seemed the worst of all possible moments. Maybe she could duck back inside the building, get a drink, visit the ladies’ room and give him time to move along. She didn’t want a confrontation here, now. Not when her hair was limp and lackluster and tethered by a rubber band in a holding pattern at the back of her neck. Not when she was wearing stretch pants and a comfortably oversize, albeit somewhat sloppy, shirt of her brother’s. Not when she’d put on an old pair of black-framed glasses instead of her contacts. Not when she looked and felt about as sexy as leftover oatmeal.

On the other hand, if she didn’t march right up to him right now and demand whatever a pregnant, practically penniless woman demanded from a man whose name she didn’t know but whose baby she was carrying, the opportunity might never come again. Then again, back to the other hand, she wasn’t exactly in the mood to be humiliated and he looked pretty engrossed in conversation with a tanned, long-legged, skinny and obviously not pregnant blonde.

Perfect, Abbie thought. She’d just waddle right over there and let him get a good side-by-side comparison of her at her dumpy, lumpy, travel-weary worst with the disgustingly slender sun goddess whose smile seemed to have him mesmerized. On second thought, laying claim to his arm and his virility would put a definite crimp in his flirting and that would serve him right. Hi, she could say brightly. Remember me? Graduation party last December? So nice to see you again. What do you think we should name our baby? Oh, yeah, that would cool the ardor in those dark Arabic eyes but good.

Arabic. Arabian.

Oh, now that was just plain silly. Just because Jessica’s family raised Arabian horses and December’s mystery man had a slight Arabic ethnicity was hardly a reason to link him to the Colemans. That was like setting out to step over a ditch and then taking a running jump at the Grand Canyon instead. There was no basis, no reason at all to jump to such irrational conclusions. She’d just steer her luggage back into the airport, where the air was cool and conducive to logic. Why, five minutes inside and she’d probably realize he didn’t even resemble the man she’d met that night. Not even close. And Jessica’s cousin would turn out to be a leathery redhead and all would be well.

The cowboy glanced up. His gaze moved past her and returned with a jerk of recognition. Abbie hadn’t known she could move so fast. Her foot shoved the base of the wire rack, a move calculated to get the wheels angled and rolling. Worked beautifully, except for that initial wrench of the castors, which caused the luggage to shift and tumble like an avalanche of untimely disaster. The paisley suitcase flew open on impact and a good deal of Abbie’s private life sprawled out across the concrete. She knelt to scoop it out of the public domain, tossing panicked looks at the stranger who was already pushing away from the big black truck he’d been leaning against, moving away from the startled blonde, coming straight toward Abbie.

Black truck. Oh, jeez…

“You?” he demanded without preamble.

Abbie shoved her belongings into the suitcase, uncaring of order or wrinkles or that her hands shook so hard she had to pick up some items twice. “You who?” she said in a strangled voice. “You, uh, must have me mixed up with somebody else.” She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t solidify the supposition with the fact that he was who she thought he was and that she was…gulp…who he thought she was. “You don’t have to help me.” Scooping up scattered items with new fervor, she kept her head bent and her face averted. “My, uh, boyfriend is here somewhere, he’ll be here to help me any minute now. I can’t imagine what held him up in there. He was right behind me. Back there. At the baggage claim. Inside.”

“Boyfriend?” His voice cracked the word like a whip.

There was probably some special corner of hell reserved for liars, but Abbie clung to the hope she would be pardoned simply because she was so very bad at lying. Boyfriend? Now, that was a stroke of insanity. “Look, whoever you are,” she said in a rush of desperation, “I’m not who you think I am, so go away.”

He stooped and stared, pushing up the brim of his hat until his familiar dark eyes were peering at her with all the warmth of polished onyx, trying to catch her in a stray glance. And just the feel of his gaze on her created a hurricane of hot remembrance inside her. She couldn’t look at him and she couldn’t not look at him. The most magical night of her entire life had been spent with this man, wrapped in his arms, clothed in his smile, naked in his bed…on the floor, the chair, the vanity…Abbie wrestled the memory into submission. She didn’t want to deny the experience, but she was scared to death to claim it, too. What if the blonde was his wife? What if he had mistaken Abbie for someone else? What if he thought she’d stolen his wallet or something? What if he believed they’d met at a bar mitzvah instead of at the street dance? What if he kissed her? Right here, right now? He was still staring at her and she struggled to locate a tone of offence. “You have mistaken me for someone else,” she pronounced defiantly.

“No,” he said coldly. “It’s you, all right.”

Abbie swallowed hard, willed him to move on, get along, disappear, as she lifted her chin with completely false bravado. “Well, I don’t know you, even if you are standing on my underwear.”

He was, too. And of course, it had to be a pair of her serviceable, sedate and completely unattractive maternity underpants. They were new, but that was about the most complimentary thing anyone could say about them.

He seemed stuck for words as he stared at the scrap of unimaginative white peeking out from beneath his boot. So Abbie gave another verbal nudge to shoo him on his way. “Would you mind moving your big foot?”

With an economy of movements he scooped up the panties without even looking at them and let them dangle, without dignity, on the end of his index finger. “With my compliments,” he said.

Abbie snatched the lingerie and stuffed it into the mangled suitcase. “Yes, well, thanks. Hope you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”

He shrugged, straightened and turned to walk away. Abbie knew she was a fool to let him go without a word. She owed him an explanation. Well, at least, she owed him the knowledge of his impending fatherhood. If she’d never seen him again, she could have lived with knowing she’d had no chance to tell him. She could have found a way of explaining to their child that one parent would always remain a mystery. But now he was here and he deserved to know, whether or not she wanted to tell him.

Gathering the rest of her scattered belongings, she closed the suitcase as best she could and stood straight, holding it tightly in her arms. She’d just stack the luggage on the rack, get it out of the way, then she’d walk over and admit she was indeed the you he’d thought she was. With a glance, she noted the well-formed shape of his backside and remembered vividly the way that same backside had looked without tight-fitting jeans. She jerked her gaze from the hip pockets of his Levi’s and checked to see if the blonde was still there. She was. As was the truck. The big, black truck with the emblem of a horse’s head stamped on the side. A horse head with full Arabian show gear—horse savvy or not, Abbie recognized the regalia—and, in case she hadn’t, the words Desert Rose circled across the top and Arabians looped up from the bottom.

Oh, no! This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be true. Fate wouldn’t play this kind of joke on her. The mystery man couldn’t be Jessica Coleman’s cousin. That would be too—she couldn’t even think of a word to describe how perfectly awful that would be. It didn’t help to think the sequence of events made an odd sort of sense now, either. The party after the graduation she’d shared with Jessica, about three hundred other grad students and whoever else had shown up to help celebrate, the fact that both their families were there, but somehow, in all the fanfare and folderol, none of the Colemans had gotten introduced to any of the Joneses. The way she’d met the mystery man at the outdoor, portable bar moments after Jessica had mentioned her cousin had gone to get a drink. It was all so impossible, and yet suddenly so completely plausible that Abbie forced her gaze up from the Desert Rose crest to the face of the man she now knew without a doubt was here to pick her up. Could this situation be any more embarrassing?

“Mac,” she whispered aloud, because she had to feel the shape of his name in her mouth, had to affirm that he was both mystery man and Jessica’s cousin, had to do something to keep from melting into a puddle of humiliation right there on the hot Austin airport pavement.

He couldn’t have heard her whisper. Yet he turned, nevertheless, still questioning her presence, her identity, her denials. But one look at her ashen face must have told the story. His gaze tracked hers to the Desert Rose insignia on the door of the truck and then returned with a flare of comprehension. His chin came up as he tugged the brim of his hat down to shade his eyes, and she noted, as if from a great distance, that his shoulders were moving up and down, up and down, in coordination with the rapid expansion of his chest as he inhaled, exhaled, inhaled.

It was a loud moment, unique in that while she was incapable of hearing anything except the frantic flutter of her own breath rasping like a bellows from her lungs, she absorbed the noise of traffic, of planes taking off overhead, of voices all around, of arrivals and welcomes, and car engines starting, revving, receding. She listened, though, only to the echoes of his voice in her mind and knew he was grappling with the same set of impossible, improbable, implacable chain of events she’d just worked her way through. She knew, too, the instant he reached the same inevitable conclusion.

“Abbie?” His voice was incredulous, hesitant with dismay, rough with amazement. “Are you Abbie?”