Colton Cowboy Standoff

Bailey had returned.

Suddenly all the old, angry feelings came rushing back to him, fast and hard, like a river overflowing its banks, practically drowning him.

Wyatt forgot about all the things he had said to Fox in her defense, remembering instead the sickening, hollow feeling in his gut when he’d realized that she was really gone.

Walking into the kitchen, he saw Bailey moving between the counter and the stove, her back to him. For a second he thought of turning around and storming out, but that wouldn’t solve anything. She was there and he was going to have to deal with it.

“You made dinner,” Wyatt observed, coming up behind her.

Startled, Bailey nearly dropped the frying pan she’d just lifted from the burner. At the last minute she managed to hold on to it and shift it onto one of the other burners that hadn’t been turned on.

Catching her breath, she turned to look at Wyatt over her shoulder.

“Well, I thought you might be hungry when you came home after working on the range, so I looked through the refrigerator to see if there was anything I could use to make dinner.” She turned around to face him and smiled. “If I remember correctly, you have a weakness for fried chicken.”

He’d once had a weakness for her, as well, Wyatt thought.

“I like it,” he replied with a measure of indifference that sounded downright chilly to Bailey.

She tried not to let him see her reaction to his tone. Instead she smiled again then went back to getting everything ready.

“Good, because dinner’s almost ready.”

The scene was all too familiar to him, vividly bringing back the early days of their marriage when they had worked alongside each other and then taken all their meals together.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he told her gruffly.

In her estimation, Wyatt looked as if he wished she hadn’t, but Bailey ignored that.

“I could say the same thing to you about letting me stay here,” she replied, transferring the side dishes from their pots to serving bowls. The bowls were the same ones she’d used when they were together, she noticed. Nothing had changed.

Except that everything had.

Opening the cabinet drawer closest to her, Bailey looked for the set of tongs she thought would be there. But they weren’t.

She opened another drawer with the same result. Looking up at Wyatt, she asked, “Where are the tongs?”

Coming up behind her, he looked over her shoulder into the drawer, as if he expected them to suddenly materialize. When he saw they weren’t there, Wyatt thought for a minute.

“I think they’re in the barn,” he told her.

“The barn?” That was an odd place for them. Her brow furrowed beneath her wayward bangs. “What are they doing there?”

Wyatt shrugged. “I needed them for something” was all he said, unable to remember the real reason the tongs had made their way out of the kitchen and into the barn.

Feeling it best not to push the matter or to question him—she’d learned long ago to pick her battles—Bailey merely nodded. “Okay.”

Bailey used a fork in lieu of the tongs and put two pieces of chicken on his plate and then one on hers. Picking up both plates, she brought them over to the table, placing one plate in front of Wyatt and one opposite him, where she used to sit. She then got the two bowls, one filled with mashed potatoes and one with green beans, and placed them next to the two plates.

Finished, she sat.

Wyatt took his seat opposite her. He looked down at her plate critically. “You just took one piece of chicken.”

Wyatt started to pick up one of the chicken legs on his plate to transfer to hers but she pulled her plate back from him.

“I was never a big eater,” she reminded him, waiting for that information to sink in and ring a bell.

It did. “That’s right, I remember. Rosa kept trying to fatten you up, said you were too skinny and you were going to waste away unless she got you to eat more,” Wyatt said, referring to his former housekeeper.

Like the property, he had inherited the housekeeper from his grandmother. For just a moment, there was a fond note in his voice as he remembered their first days at the Crooked C.

“Remember how mad she got when it started raining in the kitchen?” Bailey recalled, laughing at the memory. “That was when we found out the roof we’d just finished putting in leaked. Badly. Rosa wanted you to go out right then and there and patch it.”

He recalled the incident. “Sometimes I got the impression that she thought we worked for her.”

Bailey nodded, laughing again. “She certainly was bossy.” When she’d returned this afternoon, it had become obvious to her that the housekeeper no longer lived there. “Whatever happened to her?” she asked.

“Rosa retired three years ago,” he told her as he continued eating. “Her daughter’s husband was killed in a tractor accident and she needed help raising her three kids, so Rosa left me to become a full-time grandmother.”

He remembered how the woman had kept apologizing for leaving him high and dry like that. He’d known at the time that she’d been thinking about Bailey deserting him three years earlier. He’d told the older woman that there were no hard feelings and had even given her a large bonus to help things along with her grandchildren.

“That’s too bad,” Bailey said, genuinely saddened to hear the woman had left. “I liked her. Who cooks your meals now?” she asked suddenly.

He fielded the question without flinching. “I do.”

Bailey stopped eating and looked at him. When they were married, Wyatt couldn’t boil water. When he’d been traveling the rodeo circuit, she remembered that he’d taken all his meals at any local restaurant or diner they’d come across.

“You cook?” she asked, not bothering to hide her surprise.

“I can get by,” he answered. Saying anything more would be bordering on lying. “Mostly I heat up things out of cans. But I can make eggs,” he added.

A warm smile spread from her eyes to her lips. “I guess miracles do happen,” she said wryly.

Mesmerized by her smile, Wyatt looked at his ex-wife for a long moment.

“Maybe sometimes,” he allowed then looked away.

He was closing up again, Bailey thought sadly. She could see it.

Bailey bit her lower lip. She was never going to get him to agree to go along with her proposition if he closed up. He’d never been particularly outgoing and cheerful, even when things were going well between them, but at least there had been glimmers of joy evident every now and then.

Now what she sensed was a bitterness that hadn’t been there before.

Had she done that to him?

Who was she trying to kid? Bailey upbraided herself. Of course she had done this to him. And now it was up to her to do what she could to undo that, to get him to open up again and be the man she had once known. She didn’t want him dissolving into a bitter old man, not when he had so much to offer.

“Well, I look forward to sampling some of your cooking,” she told him after a beat, not knowing what else to say. Things were awkward between them. That, too, was her fault, she thought.

“We’ll see” was all Wyatt said in response.

Several minutes later he looked down at his plate and realized that despite the tension between them, dinner had gone down very easily. If nothing else, he mused, the woman certainly knew how to cook. But then, she always had.

He felt a pang, sitting opposite her like this. It reminded him just how much he’d missed her all these years. And just how angry he’d been that she’d left, even though, theoretically, he now understood why she had done it.

Bailey’s voice broke through his ruminations.

“What?”

“You’re grimacing,” she noted. “Was something wrong with the chicken?”

“No, not at all. It was very good actually. You always did know your way around a kitchen.”

She’d never thought of it as an accomplishment but rather a necessity.

“I had to,” she told him matter-of-factly. When they were together, she hadn’t really shared very much about her mother. She hadn’t wanted him to feel sorry for her. It no longer mattered now. “My mom left when I was little and my father was even more hopeless in the kitchen than you were.”

“I think I resent that,” Wyatt quipped with a small hint of a smile.

“It wasn’t meant as an insult, just an observation,” she told him, not wanting him to think she was trying to belittle him. “I learned to cook because I had to. Old Prairie Dog Pat wasn’t about to let me slide,” she recalled, referring to her father by the name that everyone in the circuit called him.

Patrick Norton had been a very hard man to love, but she did because he was her father and, for a long time, her only family. From a very young age, she was the one who’d looked after him instead of the other way around. And he’d returned her devotion by finding different ways to belittle her because as she’d grown, she’d looked like the spitting image of the woman who had walked out on him, leaving him with a kid to raise.

Even after she had forged a career for herself as a barrel racer, and then left it all behind her to marry Wyatt, Bailey could still hear her father’s voice in her head, telling her that she would never be good enough to be accepted in Wyatt’s world. She was acutely aware of how little her father thought of her.

She supposed that, in part, her father was responsible for her ultimately leaving Wyatt. She’d felt she needed to make something of herself so that she could respect herself. Otherwise she’d been certain that no one else ever would, especially Wyatt.

“Anyway,” she continued, shutting away the wave of hurtful memories, “I’m sure you’ve gotten very good at it.”

A dry laugh escaped his lips. “Maybe you should reserve judgment on that until after you’ve had a chance to actually sample my cooking.”

That sounded promising to her—on more than one level, she thought. For her to sample his cooking, he had to make it for her. That in turn meant she had to be here for that. In a roundabout way, he was telling her that she was staying.

“I look forward to it,” Bailey told him.

“Uh-huh,” he murmured, pushing back his chair.

Seeing that Wyatt was about to take his plate to the sink, Bailey quickly rose ahead of him. Putting out her hand for his plate, she said, “I’ll do that.”

“Don’t.” It sounded more like an order than a polite admonishment to her. Bailey dropped her hand to her side. “You did the cooking,” he told her without any fanfare. “I’ll clean up.”

It sounded more like a business deal between two strangers instead of two friends. But then, they hadn’t parted as friends, she reminded herself. He probably thought it was quite the opposite.

“It’s your house,” she murmured, letting him have his way.

His eyes met hers. There was no softness in them. “Yes, it is.”

There it was again, Bailey thought. That cold note in his voice. So cold that it could freeze an entire lake in a matter of minutes with no effort at all.

It brought back feelings of guilt to her in vivid color. She knew that there was nothing she could possibly say that would change what had happened. All she could do was try to make it up to him now by finding a way to be useful, by trying her best to find a way to get him to come around a little.

She tried talking about what she knew was dear to Wyatt’s heart. “The ranch seems to be doing well,” she observed. “You must be very proud.”

He wasn’t the type to admit things outright. “I like it,” he told her evasively and then admitted, “It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”

Well, this wasn’t going very well, she noted. “I saw Fox when I was leaving,” she said, trying again to get some sort of conversation going between them. “Does he still live on the edge of your property?”

“Fox bought that property from me,” Wyatt reminded her. “So he lives on his own place.”

“Sorry, my mistake,” she apologized. She’d forgotten about that. “But you still work together, right?” she asked.

Wyatt shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. He breeds horses. Some are mine,” he told her.

“He always did have a way with horses.” Bailey remembered. She’d missed being part of a family, even if it really wasn’t her own. She thought of Fox’s younger sister, who had also been adopted by Russ and Mara Colton after their parents perished in a car accident. “How’s Sloane doing?”

He thought about what Fox had told him regarding his sister. “A lot better now that she’s finally shed that hundred and eighty pounds that was really weighing her down.”

Bailey stared at him. “What?” That didn’t sound possible. She recalled Sloane being a petite, slender young woman when she’d left.

Wyatt explained his comment. “She divorced her no-good husband and, according to Fox, Sloane and Chloe will probably be moving back here soon.”

“Chloe?” Bailey repeated quizzically. This was a new name for her.

“That’s Sloane’s two-year-old daughter,” Wyatt told her.

“Sloane has a daughter?” she questioned, completely surprised at the news. It felt as if everyone was having children except for her. “I didn’t even know she was married until you just said that she got a divorce.”

“Yes, she did, and in her case, that’s a good thing.” He paused as he looked at her, his expression solemn. “I guess there’s a lot of that going around.”

She deserved that, Bailey thought.

“When is she thinking of coming out here?” Bailey was hoping to be able to see the woman before she had to leave.

That at least was an easy question, he thought. “Fox told me she’s going to try to be here in time for Grandpa Earl’s ninety-fourth birthday celebration.”

“When is that?” She wanted to know.

“This weekend,” he told her. Then he added a salient point. “My parents want to keep it strictly ‘family only.’ These days Grandpa Earl is pretty physically and mentally weak, and they don’t want to tax him any more than is absolutely necessary.”

That meant that she wouldn’t be allowed to come, she thought. “Oh.”

Wyatt heard the disappointment in her voice and told himself to ignore it. She’d made her bed.

But telling himself that didn’t help. She was here and he found that he just couldn’t shut her out.

“Would you want to come?” he asked her. “It’s being held at the Colton Manor,” he added. The Manor wasn’t exactly a place that was warm and welcoming despite all its opulent décor. “You remember it, right?”

“What I remember about Colton Manor was that you didn’t really like it,” she told him. “It was a beautiful place, though.”

He shrugged philosophically. “Well, if you can put up with it—and my parents—you can come with me if you’d like.”

She wanted to jump at the chance but she had a question for him first. She didn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable than she already had.

“You don’t mind your parents knowing I’m here?” Bailey asked.

“They don’t exactly figure into my day-to-day life,” Wyatt answered. “So, if you want to come along and wish Grandpa happy birthday, then sure—why not? Come.”

She smiled widely. “Thank you,” she told him. “I will.”

He found that he was unable to look away. Heaven help him, though he tried to deny it, he was still a sucker for that smile.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.