The Rancher's Surprise Daughter

Chapter Two

Six agonizing days later Luc paced back and forth near the fireplace in the small living room of his cabin. His friend Gage Frasier perched on the arm of the chair flanking the couch, grilling Luc like the lawyer he was with questions that didn’t have satisfying answers.

“Any news on the paternity test?”

“Nope.” Luc dropped to the sofa, his body no longer functioning with coherent thought or movement.

He hadn’t seen Ruby or Cate since last Saturday because he’d decided the most logical course of action was to wait until he knew for sure that she was his daughter. Though Cate hadn’t shown any doubt, she’d agreed to his suggestion that they not say anything to Ruby until they had the paternity test results back.

But waiting was as easy as living with a broken toe.

In the short time he’d spent with Ruby on Saturday while she’d ridden Buster, he’d quickly come to the conclusion that his possible daughter was captivating. Entertaining. And bubbled with as much energy as her little body could harness.

The only other time Luc had been smitten so fast was with one other female, who, when he and Ruby had returned to the corral after twenty minutes instead of ten, had been spitting mad.

Luc could admit he had fully enjoyed Cate’s disgruntled state. Currently, his guilt meter regarding anything she thought rested solidly at a zero.

Hers should be shooting through the roof.

“What’s she like?”

“Ruby’s...” How to narrow it down? “Sweet. She talks nonstop. The kind of girl who would make friends with a fly.” He’d gathered that because she had, in fact, talked to the fly that had ridden on Buster’s saddle horn for part of the ride. And she’d befriended Luc instantly, jabbering the whole time. He’d learned that she had a best friend at day care and that her mom didn’t let her do more than an hour of “lectonics” in a day even though some kids got to do bunches more.

That one had made him smile. He’d found himself silently agreeing with Cate.

Ruby had told him her mom read “lots” of books to her every night, announcing it as though she was the most special girl in the world and their reading time only confirmed it.

That information had created an uncomfortable surge of sympathy in Luc, flooding him with images of Cate juggling everything on her own. Ruby and her condition. Work. Bills. How had she managed it all? From what he knew of her parents, he couldn’t imagine them stepping in to help when Cate had found out she was pregnant. But he’d quickly stomped out the rush of concern that came with imagining Cate doing everything on her own.

He was not going to feel bad for her. Not after the decision she’d made to keep Ruby from him.

Luc had gotten a DNA test done in town first thing Monday morning. They’d sent in his sample, and Cate and Ruby had gone to the testing place in Denver. Now it was ticking toward five on Friday, and he was tormented to think he’d spend the weekend without knowing the results. So much felt undecided. And on top of his questions, Cate had texted him the date of Ruby’s procedure. One week from today.

“So Cate didn’t explain why she never told you about Ruby?” Gage’s dark hair looked as rumpled as Luc’s. At least he could count on sympathy and understanding from his friend. Gage had been through a horrible ordeal when his wife left. Sometimes Luc wondered if the man would ever recover.

“Nope. But I really didn’t let her. What does it matter? What’s done is done.” Anger boiled under the surface. Those last two comments were lies. He both wanted to know what Cate had been thinking and felt so wounded and aggravated that he didn’t believe any answer she gave would help.

“Luc.” Gage’s voice snapped with concern, but Luc wasn’t sure he could handle any more girl talk—problems that didn’t have solutions were his least favorite subject. “Your phone just buzzed.” Gage motioned to the coffee table.

Luc snagged it and opened the new email, relief tingling through his limbs when he saw it contained the results. Sawdust coated his mouth, saliva running for the hills. He clicked to read the report, the letters swimming before him. Not Excluded was typed across the top of the page in bold print. The testing facility had coached him on what this meant.

He was Ruby’s father.

The phone slipped from his grip, bouncing lightly on the sofa cushion.

“I’m a dad.”

It was as though he’d taken a horse kick to the chest, the air in his lungs instantly gone. He and Gage stared at each other. Frozen.

Unable to stay still, Luc pushed up from the couch, his strides quickly covering the small cabin’s living room. He ended up at the back window that faced open ranchland, seeing the grass-covered hills in a new light. Yesterday it had been land passed down to Luc and his sisters when their parents had moved to a warmer climate in order to accommodate his mom’s health. Today a new generation existed. A little girl with silky hair and a nonstop mouth and adorable brown eyes who was his. His.

“I have to see her.” He crossed the space and rummaged for his keys in the kitchen junk drawer.

Gage followed him. “Don’t you think you should wait? Calm down first?”

Why did he have so many scraps of paper in this stupid drawer? Items tumbled over each other as he searched for the simple metal key ring. “I don’t see a real possibility of that happening in the very near future.”

“Guess not.” Gage nudged Luc to the side, then found the truck keys in a much calmer, more methodical manner.

But then again, Gage hadn’t just found out he was positively a father.

His friend offered up the keys on the palm of his hand. “Do you want me to go with you?”

Luc appreciated Gage’s support, but he needed some time to clear his head. Maybe the drive would help, though he wasn’t confident anything would at the moment. “Nah. Thanks, though.” He snatched the metal ring that held three keys and proceeded to the front door, snagging his boots.

“What are you going to do? About custody?”

He paused to glance at Gage after yanking on the first boot. “What do you mean? What can I do?”

“File for it.”

“I don’t know.” He couldn’t think beyond seeing Ruby right now. Couldn’t deal with logistics. “I’m angry, but I’m not sure that’s the answer.”

“You need to protect yourself. She’s already kept Ruby from you for years. Who’s to say she won’t take off and disappear to another state and you’ll never see your child again?”

Red flashed, and Luc pulled on the second boot with heated force. Cate wouldn’t...would she? But the same thought had entered his mind. When they’d readied to leave on Saturday, Luc had wondered if he’d ever see them again. Cate had written down her address and phone number, almost as though proving to him she wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

Still, how could he trust her after what she’d done?

“Do you want me to look into it? See what your options are? I know someone who deals with these situations. I can ask.”

Gage was the only man Luc knew who ranched as a later-in-life choice. He’d been a smarty lawyer at some big firm until he’d inherited a ranch from his uncle. Gage and his wife, Nicole, had moved to the nearby ranch just over a year and a half ago. And then Nicole had decided a different life looked better, and she’d been gone in a blink. Gage had been on his own ever since. He ran the ranch, very quietly helping the church or people in the community out with legal matters when they required it.

Luc just never imagined he’d be in need of that advice.

“I don’t know that I have any other choice.” A stampede of hooves vibrated inside his skull. “I’m not sure if I have any rights and if she can control letting me see Ruby. So, yeah. Check it out.”

“I will.”

“Good thing I have you on retainer.”

Gage chuckled. “You don’t. You couldn’t afford me. This friend business really works in your favor.”

“True.”

Luc grabbed the piece of paper with Cate’s address from the kitchen counter. He’d left it there as a reminder to pray for Ruby—not that the trigger had been necessary. The girl and her mother hadn’t left his thoughts all week.

He’d need the details if he planned to show up on Cate’s doorstep unannounced.

It wasn’t very considerate of him to plan to ambush her at their home. But then again, he hadn’t expected Cate to show up on his doorstep with a daughter he never knew he had.

Turnabout was fair play.

* * *

“Mommy, will you play the cupcake game with me?” Ruby stood before Cate with a well-loved game in her hand that still boasted the reduced thrift-store sticker price.

Before Ruby, Cate had never stepped foot in a secondhand store. She’d never struggled for money growing up. But love and attention? Those had been harder to find.

It wasn’t as if her parents had been abusive in any way. She’d just been more...overlooked. They were simply too caught up in themselves to notice anyone around them—including the little girl left in the wake of their selfishness.

Growing up, her parents never saw eye to eye on anything, but on the subject of her pregnancy, they’d instantly been in agreement. They’d advised her that having Ruby would ruin her life. That it would be too hard. That it would crumple any chance of her being successful and she’d have to scramble to make ends meet. They’d told Cate that if she kept the baby, there’d be no help from them. Money or otherwise. Probably hoping to sway her decision. It hadn’t worked. But it had left them estranged.

They’d been right. Cate had hustled. Finished school early on an accelerated path. She’d scrounged for work, taking anything and everything she could find. Raising Ruby was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.

But her parents had also been so very, very wrong. Because the adorable munchkin standing in front of Cate hopping up and down—game pieces rattling inside the box as though agreeing with her impatience—was by far the best thing she’d ever accomplished. Worth every second of her energy and love.

“Please, Mommy?”

“Okay, Rubes. I’ll play.” After a couple of games Ruby would have a little more playtime and then Cate would read to her before bed. She still went down early—partly for Cate’s sanity and partly because she often worked the evening hours until falling into bed herself.

Removing the charcoal-framed glasses she wore for computer work, Cate set them next to her Mac computer on the desk that occupied one corner of the living room in their tiny, two-bedroom apartment.

The screen in front of her went dark as it fell asleep, but she knew what lurked behind the curtain of black. A project with a looming deadline. She was close, but she couldn’t quite get the branding package for the local cupcake shop just right. And she needed it to be perfect, because she needed the next freelance job after this. Cate loved her career as a graphic designer and the freedom it allowed her to work from home and cart Ruby to and from the small in-home day care she went to.

A majority of Cate’s jobs came from a firm in Denver who hired her as a subcontractor, and she filled in the extra income they needed with side work.

They moved over to the sofa, and Ruby set up the game while Cate covered a yawn and considered making a cup of tea. Twenty-four years old and this was what she’d come to on a Friday night. But then, getting pregnant at twenty had put a damper on any wild and adventurous life plans.

Ruby chose a blue base and began building a cupcake. She never really followed the game cards, instead creating whatever combination suited her fancy at the moment.

“Your turn, Mommy.”

Cate picked the yellow holder, choosing to add a plastic layer of chocolate, wishing, not for the first time, that this game consisted of real cupcakes and she could inhale the chocolate one in her hand...after adding a layer of buttercream frosting.

Her mouth watered just as a knock sounded at their door, causing her to jump like a popcorn kernel in sizzling oil.

Who would be at their door on a Friday night? Was it her nosy neighbor again? Millie Hintz wasn’t the landlord, but she’d appointed herself as the head of the building’s nonexistent neighborhood watch program. A spry eighty-year-old with white hair who seemed to be shrinking in height over time, her unexpected pop-overs were unnerving because she always scanned the apartment from the doorway like she was going to catch Cate with a hidden mountain lion or other unapproved item.

But even though Millie considered it her job to know what was happening in everyone’s lives, she was kindhearted. Cate had decided the visits were more about loneliness than anything else. And if anyone understood that, it was her. Talking to Millie wouldn’t cost her more than a few minutes of time.

“You go,” she told Ruby, pushing up from the sofa and crossing the few steps to the door. Sometimes Millie brought them cookies. The monster ones with M&M’s and chocolate chips. Yum.

Cate pressed her face against the peephole, squeaking in surprise when it wasn’t shrinking Millie on the other side of the door, but Luc.

What was he doing here?

All week he’d been on her mind, her thoughts zipping into overdrive... Had she done the right thing telling him about Ruby? She hoped so. It had taken all of her strength to share her daughter with him. They’d done the DNA testing earlier this week, and she’d let him know about Ruby’s procedure date, but other than that, she hadn’t heard from him. What was he thinking showing up at their apartment like this? Didn’t the man know how to use a phone?

And more important, did he know she was home and did she have to answer? Her pulse bumped along like her car had on the gravel road that led to the Wilder ranch. And of course she was in old, black, faded-to-gray yoga pants and a yellow V-neck T-shirt, her hair in a disheveled low ponytail.

Quite the package.

Frustration leaked out in a disgruntled huff. “So much for cookies.” She’d take Millie over Luc any day.

“I can hear you through the door, Cate.”

She jumped to the side as if he had X-ray vision and could also see her through the barrier.

“You really know how to creep a girl out.” Cate quickly redid the tie that held her hair and swiped under her eyes for runaway makeup.

“Are you going to open the door or are we going to keep talking through it?”

Ruby appeared next to Cate. “Is that my friend Luc?”

Ever since they’d been to the ranch, Ruby hadn’t stopped chattering about “my friend Luc.” It was all Cate could do to keep from plugging her ears, because she didn’t have a clue what was going on in Luc’s head since she’d shown up and royally flipped his life upside down.

She both wanted and didn’t want to know what he was thinking.

What he thought of her.

“Yep, it is.” Cate undid two locks with shaking fingers—not that the security mattered so much now that she knew how flimsy her door was—and twisted the knob.

Luc practically took up the whole frame. What was it about him that always made her feel like his presence sucked the oxygen out of the room? He wasn’t that tall. Maybe an inch under six foot.

His eyebrow quirked. “Can I come in?”

Was answering no a legitimate option? Ruby nudged past Cate, latched on to Luc’s hand and pulled him inside. The scent of the outdoors came with him.

“Come on. I want to show you my room and my new doll and my ponies and my pink lamp. Me and Mommy were playing a game. You can play with us if you want.”

The adoration for Ruby written on Luc’s face was enough to make Cate’s knees go swirly. Though none of it was directed at her.

An annoyed meow sounded from the top of the couch. Princess Prim rose from her favorite resting place and stretched her spine as if their ruckus had woken her and she was not pleased about it. Narrowed eyes dissected Luc, naming him an intruder in one fell swoop. Good kitty. Cate silently promised her a treat for later.

“I thought you couldn’t have pets.” Luc’s head swung from the feline to Cate.

“We can’t have dogs, but Prim is more royalty than pet. She runs the place. Ruby and I are just her lowly servants.”

Ruby giggled and gave Luc’s hand—which she hadn’t let go of—a determined tug. She yanked him across the small apartment living room and past their dining table. But at the threshold to her bedroom, Luc paused.

“You okay if she shows me her room?”

A dried biscuit had somehow gotten lodged in her throat. Considerate of him to ask, but Luc had as much of a right to Ruby as she did.

That was what scared her the most.

Cate managed a nod, and the two of them disappeared inside. She heard Ruby’s continuous chatter and Luc’s low voice rumbling back questions or answers. The whole thing made her drop to the couch and hold her head in her hands. What had she done?

God, You’d better be right. Protect her. And me. Please. You know I didn’t want to do this.

Princess Prim burrowed onto her lap, tilting her head in a way that asked questions. The royalty wanted answers Cate didn’t have.

“What are you? The press?” She scrubbed hands into the soft fur behind Prim’s ears. “I just don’t want her to get hurt. And I’m afraid of losing her.” The whisper came out forlorn, and Prim purred in sympathetic response.

What were the two of them doing in there? Moving Prim to the sofa, Cate eased to the edge of Ruby’s room, close enough to hear but not be seen.

Prim let out an incriminating meow. She’d followed Cate and now rubbed against her leg. Cate nudged her gently away with her foot and put her finger to her lips in a shushing motion—as if the cat could understand her. The move only caused Prim to meow with interest and sneak between her feet as though they were playing a game. Cate’s hiding place wouldn’t last long at this rate.

Tea. She could make that cup she’d been craving earlier. It wasn’t eavesdropping if the kitchen happened to be almost directly across from Ruby’s doorway.

Cate made her way toward the pint-size kitchen as slowly as possible, her lungs constricting at the sound of Luc’s booming laughter mingling with Ruby’s sweet giggle. She caught sight of Luc perched on the bed and Ruby on the floor, her head bent in concentration as she showed him something.

And then, instead of finding herself in the kitchen, she was standing in the doorway. Both of them looked up as if questioning the reason for her presence.

“Hey, I...” ...wanted to hear what you were saying. “Does anyone want something to drink? Luc? I didn’t even offer.” When you showed up unannounced at my door.

Good thing none of these snarky thoughts were actually coming out of her mouth.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Luc answered, and Ruby shook her head.

Dismissed without a second thought. Eerily similar to her childhood. The emotion wrapped around Cate like an old, tattered blanket she’d tried to throw out more times than she could count. But somehow every time she opened her closet, there it was.

Cate microwaved water in her favorite Anthropologie monogram mug—a fabulous thrift-store find. At the insistent beeping that the microwave had finished its work, she popped open the door and dunked her finger into the liquid to check the temperature.

Ouch. She snatched her poor skin back out. Scalding.

Ripping open the calming tea bag—like it would make a dent in her current state of mind—Cate bobbed the trapped tea leaves in the cup, her agitation sending ripples across the water.

When she’d first found out she was pregnant with Ruby, Cate had felt vindicated in not contacting Lucas. He’d never tried to fix what had gone wrong between them or answer the accusations she’d questioned him about in the end. Yes, she’d confronted him about cheating on her after a friend had tipped her off. But Cate had just wanted answers. Wanted Luc to tell her he wasn’t seeing someone else and confirm the truth she already felt in her bones. He had quickly denied doing anything of the sort...but the more she’d pushed for details, the more he’d shut down.

They’d fought and said so many horrible things to each other.

Cate sipped her tea, leaning back against the countertop, eyes closed against the memory of that night as hot liquid coated her throat. Man, they’d been young. Stubborn. And completely inconsiderate of each other.

Finally, she’d told him to leave. To never contact her again.

The strangest part was, he’d listened. Cate didn’t plan to tell the man currently one room away from her that she’d waited for him to fight for her. To love her. She’d wanted to have a calm conversation about what happened—to find out the truth and listen to Luc—not just lob accusations back and forth.

But she hadn’t heard from him after that night. Only radio silence.

Cate crumpled the tea package while blinking away unwanted moisture. She tossed it into the garbage and slammed the cupboard door shut. But the askew trash can blocked it from closing, not giving her the pleasure of a loud crash.