Daughter on His Doorstep Read online

  His hands were steady as he ran them over tiny, delicate arms, legs, ribs, neck, back. Everything felt all right, but suddenly doubts seized him. What if there was something he hadn’t caught, like an internal injury?

  Obviously such a thing wasn’t important to Amy, because she pushed his hands aside and sat up. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Can I come down now?” Carrie called from overhead.

  Trey pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll come get you.”

  “I can do it,” Carrie said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her.

  “Carrie, don’t—”

  Trey cut off Laurie’s words with a hand to her arm. “Let her try,” he said softly. “I won’t let her fall.”

  For a brief moment Laurie closed her eyes, but visions of Carrie landing beside her sister had her opening them again. She supposed she could lock her daughters in a closet to keep them safe for the rest of their lives, but what kind of life would that be for either of them? Hadn’t she herself delighted in climbing trees and riding a bike and roller-skating as a kid? Sure, a child could be hurt. Many were, some tragically, fatally. But as far as she could tell, riding in a car was one of the most dangerous activities a person could do.

  If precautions were taken, she knew, children could be saved many serious injuries. Bicycle helmets, knee pads.

  But for tree climbing? Common sense and a few firm rules would serve best there. She wanted her girls to be children, to have fun, to know the thrill of conquering that tree, finding that bird’s nest.

  So now it was time to put up or shut up. After today, with what had happened to Amy, it was quite possible that neither of her girls would want to climb a tree again for a long, long time, if ever.

  “All right, Carrie.”

  Trey took her hand and squeezed it.

  “But go slow,” she added, “and be careful. One branch at a time.”

  “You can do it, Carrie,” Amy called.

  “I know.” Carrie’s face scrunched in a look of fierce concentration.

  “I could do it, too, Mama,” Amy said, “but my shoelace came untied and I stepped on it.”

  “I’m sure you could, baby,” Laurie told her. “I’m sure both of you can. As soon as Carrie gets down we’ll go in the house and put some ice on your wrist to make it feel better.”

  “It’d feel better if you kiss it.”

  Every hurt in life, Laurie knew, felt better if it was kissed. She gladly, yet carefully, placed a kiss on Amy’s injured wrist.

  Carrie came down one branch at a time, with much coaching from all three of those on the ground. Usually conflicting advice.

  Carrie glared at them crossly. “Oh, just be quiet,” she told them. “I can get down on my own.”

  Laurie mashed her lips together. She should scold, she knew. Her daughter wasn’t allowed to sass. But Laurie feared that if she opened her mouth, laughter would come out instead.

  Besides, the poor girl had a point, what with her mother, her sister and Trey all telling her to do something different, step on this branch—no, that one. Grab there—no, over here.

  Carrie made it down on her own. Laurie grabbed her and hugged her hard.

  “Later,” she said to her daughters, “we’ll talk about what you were doing up in that tree.”

  “It was a bird’s nest, Mama.” In her excitement over telling about the nest, Amy forgot her injury. She jumped and made a wide gesture with her arm and jarred her wrist and yelped. “Oh, it hurts.”

  “You have to be careful, baby.” Laurie ached for her youngest. “Come on into the house and I’ll put some ice on it to make it feel better.”

  “While you’re doing that,” Trey said, “I need to see to Soldier.” Although it killed him to walk away when Amy was crying. “Then we’ll head into town for an X ray. That okay with you girls?”

  Laurie looked at him with gratitude in her eyes. “Thank you, Trey.”

  A man would do a lot to have a woman look at him that way, Trey thought. Lie. Steal. Kill. Tend an injured little squirrel.

  They got Amy to the hospital, where the doctor proclaimed the injury a sprain. Nothing broken except maybe a young girl’s pride.

  “Humph, are you kidding?” Laurie gave her youngest a mock scowl. “I think she’s proud of herself for falling out of that tree.”

  “The object,” the doctor said to Amy as he finished wrapping her wrist in a stretch bandage, “is to stay in the tree until you climb down and land on your feet.”

  They were sent home with instructions to put ice on Amy’s sprain for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of heat and children’s aspirin for the pain.

  It was way past suppertime, but the only one to complain was Katy. Trey took charge of his daughter while Laurie situated Amy in the living room with a pillow to prop her wrist on. By the time the meat loaf was served, both young tree climbers were showing signs of fatigue from the excitement of the day.

  But Amy was willing to milk the situation for all it was worth. After she cleaned her plate she looked up at her mother with a pitiful expression. “Mama, can we please have some ice cream? I think it would make my wrist feel better.”

  “You do, huh?” Laurie pursed her lips to keep them from curving upward.

  “Uh-huh, ’cause it’s cold. I can put my wrist against the bowl.”

  “Well now, there’s a plan,” Laurie said, giving in. It would be a miracle, she decided, if Amy didn’t fall asleep facedown in her ice cream.

  Laurie herself was running on adrenaline alone. She didn’t know what was keeping the girls going. Their bedtime wasn’t for another two hours, but she knew they wouldn’t last that long.

  “After ice cream, I’ll put a plastic bag over your hand so you won’t get it wet in the bathtub.”

  “Oh, cool,” Amy said.

  Carrie frowned. “How come she gets ice cream for falling out of the tree?”

  “Hmm.” Laurie narrowed her eyes and tapped a finger to her lips. “You’re right. Okay, here’s the deal. You’re getting the ice cream for not falling out of the tree. No.” She shook her head. “That’s not right, either. Trey and I are getting ice cream for not climbing the tree in the first place. We’re just being generous and sharing with the two of you. Providing, of course, that you promise not to climb any more trees, both of you, until I say it’s okay.”

  Carrie frowned at Amy. “I told you to be careful.”

  Trey was too wired to sleep. It was nearly eleven and the house was quiet. Everyone had long since gone to bed. He’d gone, too, an hour ago, but to no avail, as he was still wide-eyed.

  The picture of Amy falling from the tree seemed to have been nudged aside by the one of Laurie, the way she’d looked on her way to tuck the girls in, with lines of exhaustion marking her pretty face.

  He didn’t want to think about her, didn’t want to think about her daughters and what could have happened today. Amy had been lucky not to have been seriously injured.

  But hell, you had to let kids climb trees, didn’t you? It was probably written down somewhere.

  God, the thought of Katy growing up and falling out of trees left him cold with dread. How did Ace stand it when one of his boys got hurt?

  Maybe it was different with boys, but Trey didn’t think he would feel that way. A baby was still a baby. And in his book, a five-year-old was still a baby.

  Hell, he was never going to get to sleep if he kept thinking about kids and trees and accidents.

  Milk. Hadn’t his mother always sworn by a glass of warm milk? Maybe, he thought as he quietly left his room for the kitchen, he’d give it a try. But he drew the line at warming it, unless there was chocolate to go in it. And marshmallows.

  The small light over the stove was the only light in the room, but it was more than enough to allow him to see Laurie sitting at the kitchen table, slumped over a mug.

  “I thought I was the only one who couldn’t sleep.” Trey crossed the room and stood behind he
r chair.

  She craned her neck to look at him. “I was just about finished here. Can I get you something?” She started to rise.

  “Stay put. You’re off the clock.” Trey put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her gently back onto the chair. The muscles beneath his hands were stiff as boards. It seemed only natural to massage them. “You’re trembling.”

  She nodded jerkily. “I can’t seem to stop. I was fine until I put the girls to bed.”

  “Delayed reaction,” Trey told her. “You’ve had a tough day.”

  Laurie nearly melted beneath his massage. “Yeah. Oh, God, that feels good.”

  “Do I understand that this was their first tree-climbing experience?”

  “And the first time either of them has ever really been hurt.”

  “You’re kidding.” Trey paused, then resumed rubbing her shoulders. Her skin felt cold beneath her blouse. “How do kids get to be five and six years old without getting hurt? Not that I take it lightly. I’ll probably have nightmares about seeing Amy come tumbling out of that tree. But how could this be her first accident?”

  “Lack of opportunity, I suppose,” Laurie said. “Until we moved in with my parents a few weeks ago, we lived in an apartment. I took them to the park to play every chance I could, but they really never played outside much, and never on their own, until we came here.”

  “And you’re feeling guilty because you weren’t out there watching them.”

  “It’s a mother’s job to feel guilty when something happens to one of her babies.”

  “So, if you’d been out there you wouldn’t have let them climb the tree?”

  “I’ve asked myself that all evening, and I honestly don’t know. I want them to play outdoors. I want them to be normal, active kids, a little rowdy now and then. Carrie, especially, is too quiet, too reserved, since…well, for the past year or so.”

  “Am I not supposed to guess that has something to do with your divorce?”

  Beneath his hands she shrugged. “Jimmy hurt her.”

  “Your ex?”

  She nodded. “He hurt both of them, but nothing keeps Amy down for long.”

  “So I’ve noticed. Do they miss him?”

  “Even when he was home he never paid them any attention. Jimmy was—is—a master at indifference, at what you might call casual neglect. This way, with him gone, the girls don’t have to be disappointed every day when he ignores then. Now they know he doesn’t live with us, and they seem to accept his absence.”

  “Except that Carrie’s quieter, more reserved than you’d like.”

  Wrapping her hands around her lukewarm mug, Laurie tried to order her thoughts. Maybe she shouldn’t be having this conversation with Trey, but he was so easy to talk with, and she so desperately needed someone nonjudgmental to talk to. Sometimes, she knew, talking through something out loud helped you see things more clearly. She could use a little clarity these days.

  “Part of it, I think, is the typical birth-order thing. She’s the oldest. She feels she has to watch out for Amy. She wants to make sure nothing hurts her sister. She felt enormous guilt today, but I couldn’t get her to talk about it.”

  “She thinks she could have stopped Amy from going up that tree? Or falling out of it?”

  “I’d say it’s more that she thinks if anyone had to fall it should have been her.”

  “Survivor guilt.”

  “Right.” Ah. Whatever he was doing to her shoulders was sheer heaven.

  “And the other part?” Trey asked.

  Laurie’s mind was going fuzzy. She was still shaking, but not as badly as before, and she was still cold. But his hands on her shoulders felt so good. “Other part?”

  Keep her talking, that was Trey’s plan. The sexual sizzle he’d felt the night he’d kissed her was right now a warm, low hum. More important to him was the need to connect with her on another level. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and tell her everything would be okay. That her girls were healthy, that she was a wonderful mother. But he didn’t think she was ready to hear those things from him. He might have to settle for just scooping her up.

  “About why Carrie’s reserved. You said part of it was because she was the oldest.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Laurie said. “The other part, I think, is the typical reaction a child has when her parents split up. She blames herself. Wonders what she did that made her daddy go away.”

  “Have you talked to her about that?”

  “I’ve tried. I’ve told her that it was nothing she did, nothing Amy did. Really nothing I did, for that matter, or her dad. There was no one to blame.”

  “I thought you said he ignored them.”

  “It’s not something I remind the girls of. I don’t want to say bad things about Jimmy to them. No matter how I feel about him, he’s still their father, and they love him. Warts and all. And that’s as it should be. If that love ever gets fractured, it will be Jimmy’s doing, not mine.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there’s more you’re not saying?”

  “I think I’m about to fall asleep in my chair.”

  “You’re still trembling.”

  “Oh, it’ll stop. Next week sometime. Maybe.”

  Trey chuckled. “Come on.” He pulled her chair back from the table and did what he’d been wanting to do since he walked into the room. He scooped her up in his arms.

  “What are you doing? Put me down.”

  “In a minute. We’re just going right here.” He carried her to his recliner, where he sat with her in his arms. “This way you can fall asleep if you want without worrying about ending up on the floor, and we can get you warm. That will help you stop trembling.”

  “Trey, let me up. I’ll just go to bed and I’ll be fine.”

  “Humor me.” He grabbed the handwoven serape from the floor beside his chair and drew it across them, then raised the footrest and lowered the back. “There. That’s better. Now, you were going to tell me about mothers who tell their children bad things about their fathers.”

  Laurie thought about tossing off the blanket and crawling out of the chair. Out of Trey’s lap. She thought about it. For at least two seconds. But she was so comfortable, and he was so warm. He made her feel cherished and cared for, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that way.

  “Did you say I’m off the clock?”

  “I did.”

  She let out a slow sigh, and with it, whatever slight resistence remained to being held by him. “Every time my parents had a fight, my mother used to bad-mouth Dad to the boys and me. I hated it. She decided that if she was mad at him, we should be, too.”

  “Sounds rough.”

  “It wasn’t fun. I vowed a long time ago that if I ever had children I would never do that to them. Put them in the middle that way.”

  “So you won’t say anything bad about your ex.”

  “Not to the girls.”

  “But they know what he’s like.”

  “You think?”

  “Kids always know. I was seven the year Jack came to live with us. My mother never said a word against the old man, but I knew he’d ripped her heart out.”

  “What do you mean? I thought Jack was older than you.”

  “He is, by five years. He’s our half brother. His mother worked in a bar over in Cheyenne. None of us knew about him—not even the old man—until Jack’s mother died and his aunt brought him to the ranch and dumped him here.”

  Laurie leaned her head back against Trey’s shoulder and peered up at him. The light over the kitchen stove was around the corner, leaving the chair mostly in shadow, but she could make out his face. “And I thought today was rough…. That must have been quite a shock to all of you, but especially your mother.”

  “And then some.”

  “Since I think Donna would have told me about a murder in the family, I take it your mother let him live. Your father, I mean.”

  Trey’s chuckle was as dark as the shadowed room. “Yeah, but
it was touch-and-go for a few months. I don’t think she ever forgave him, but she did come to love Jack. As I recall, it was a good thing, too, because he hadn’t had much caring from his own mother.”

  Laurie snuggled her head beneath Trey’s chin and let out another small sigh.

  The sound of it, so trusting and peaceful, went through Trey like warm honey. He could get used to holding this woman in his arms. In the night. While she slept, he added, realizing she was doing just that—sleeping.

  He nuzzled his cheek against the top of her head and let himself follow her.

  Chapter Seven

  The sounds of a baby fretting and tuning up for a cry came over the baby monitor on the kitchen table and woke Trey and Laurie at four the next morning.

  Laurie was the first to rouse. Loath to leave her warm cocoon, she moaned in protest. “Not yet, Katy.”

  A tiny wail of protest emitted from the monitor.

  Beneath Laurie’s ear rumbled a deep, sleepy chuckle. “I don’t think she’s listening to you.”

  Shocked at the unmistakable sound of Trey’s voice, Laurie sprang upright, suddenly wide awake.

  Trey grunted. “Easy, there. You’re liable to make sure Katy’s an only child.”

  “What are you doing here?” Laurie demanded. Then she blinked and realized she was in the living room rather than her bed. She was in Trey’s recliner.

  More specifically, she was on his lap. “What am I doing here?”

  “Remember? Last night, the kitchen, the shakes?”

  Laurie moaned again. “Oh, God. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

  “I can.” Trey smoothed a hand along her back. “It was a hell of a day.”

  It was all Laurie could do to keep from arching into his touch with a moan of sheer pleasure. How long had it been since she’d awakened to a man’s strong hands stroking her body?

  Don’t think about it.

  Right. This was entirely different. Nonsexual. Platonic, even.

  So why was her blood singing in her veins? Why was heat pooling and throbbing low and deep in her center?