The Cowboy from Christmas Past. Tina Leonard
He seemed overwhelmed. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding tired as he carefully set the baby down. “Have you ever had a dream that felt like it was real?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “I’m going to get out of this costume. Make yourself at home. There’s a powder room down the hall.”
“Powder room?”
Maybe his family called them something else. “A place to freshen up.”
He nodded, saying nothing more as he sank onto the sofa, his gaze riveted on the baby once again. She slept peacefully in her car seat carrier, oblivious to any change in her fortunes.
Auburn went to take off her stage makeup, and when she returned, the cowboy was sound asleep on her sofa, sitting up. He was truly delicious. If a woman liked her men hot, protective and dark-haired, this one had all the right stuff.
He also might be a baby thief. She ignored her sudden awareness of how wonderfully chiseled his features were, locked her bedroom door and went to bed. In the morning, she’d figure out what to do about the cowboy, and the baby.
AUBURN AWAKENED, AWARE of someone in the bedroom with her. She blinked tired eyes, coming straight awake as she realized the cowboy was beside her bed. “Eee!” she shrieked, jumping out from under the sheet and flipping on the light. “What are you doing in here?”
He seemed as startled as she was. “I just came to tell you that the baby wants something.”
Auburn clutched her nightshirt close to her. “How did you get in here?” She was positive she’d locked the door. It was locked now. She turned frightened eyes on the handsome stranger.
“I walked in.” He looked at her strangely. “I’m sorry. I should have knocked.”
“Yes, you should have!” Auburn glared at him. “And why are you telling me that the baby wants something?”
“Because I don’t know what she wants!” he snapped. “I’ve never had a baby before!”
Auburn opened the door and swept past him to pick up the child. “How long have you had her?”
“Just a few minutes before I met you. I think.”
She took the baby from the carrier, handing her to Dillinger, who seemed as surprised as the child. She quit crying for the moment. “Look,” Auburn said over her shoulder as she went to prepare a bottle, “when the baby cries, she wants to be fed, probably about every three hours or so. She’ll want her diaper changed, and you’ll be in charge of that. Then she’ll want to be cuddled and burped, and you’ll be in charge of that, too.” She handed him the bottle. “I’m not in charge of any of this. It’s not my baby.”
“Mine, either, but I like her.” He took the bottle, cradled the baby and sat down on the sofa.
Amber watched, curious. She knew something about the care of children, certainly. She’d volunteered in the church nursery; her family often had toddlers running around from different branches of the family. But this cowboy didn’t seem that well versed in holding a baby or feeding one, because it took him a few seconds to get the bottle just right so that the little one settled down enough to drink.
He wasn’t making it up, Auburn realized. This wasn’t his baby, and there were no Amber Alerts on the news last night. “Who gave her to you?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know. She was left on my porch. Which was a strange thing to do, because it had to be all of twenty degrees outside.”
It was fifty-five in Dallas. Auburn shook her head. “Where do you live?”
“Christmas River.”
“Texas?”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
She pulled her iPhone from her purse, searching the Internet for the town. A chill swept over. Nothing. It didn’t exist. “There’s no such place.”
He shook his head at her. “Of course there is. I have a ranch there.”
“Is there a nickname the town goes by?”
“It’s Christmas River,” he insisted.
She looked up the name Dillinger Kent, Christmas River. Her heart felt like it completely stopped. On a Web site of a Texas historical society there was a reprint of what looked like an old newspaper article.
Notorious gunslinger Dillinger Kent shot and killed one of the most infamous stagecoach robbers of all time, Harmon Keith, outside of Carson City today.
The date on the article was May 16, 1888. “What’s your real name?”
The baby stopped sucking on the bottle for an instant, then resumed. Dillinger looked at her. “I told you.”
“No, you gave me a name of a gunslinger from the 1880s.” There were no other Dillinger Kents listed, though she could check Facebook next. She tapped the Web address in quickly. Nothing.
“I was a gunslinger,” he said, “but I gave it up when I took a wife.”
Great. He was married. Auburn should have known. The whole story was bogus. He’d had some kind of spat with his wife, snatched the baby and took off.
Auburn backed into the bedroom doorway. This was a complication she totally didn’t need.
Chapter Two
Dillinger was worried. Something was badly wrong. Either he was having a terrible dream or…well, he didn’t know what else this could be. But something wasn’t good. One minute he’d picked a baby up off his porch, and the next thing he knew, he was in another century. And when he’d woken up to the baby’s cries and wondered how to soothe her, Auburn’s name had popped into his mind—although she didn’t seem like the type who would know a whole lot about babies—and he’d found himself inside her bedroom.
Just like that.
Right now she was staring at him with an expression of distrust and maybe even regret, for which he couldn’t blame her. No woman of decent family took a man into her home—a man with whom she wasn’t acquainted—and then was happy he’d materialized in her bedroom.
They were on bad footing here. She didn’t like him, and he needed her.
He had to convince her to help him.
“You’re married,” she said flatly. “Did you kidnap that baby from your wife? Did you have an argument?”
“No. My wife is dead.” He looked to see some sympathy in her expression, but if anything, Auburn appeared even more horrified. She had the same expression on her face that the people of Christmas River wore when they saw him, as if he were no better than a common murderer.
While he might have been known to gun down a man, he had never treated a woman with anything but respect. And he’d handled his beloved Polly as if she were a china doll. “I didn’t kill my wife,” he said dully.
“I didn’t say you did.”
“You didn’t have to,” he muttered. The baby in his arms hesitated again, searching his face for a few moments before continuing with her peaceful feeding. Something about the little one calmed him, made him feel a connection he couldn’t quite understand and yet welcomed. This baby had brought him here. “You and me,” he told the child, “we’re sticking together.”
He heard a sigh and glanced back up at the woman framed in her bedroom doorway. She was prettier without cosmetic artifice. He guessed she had to wear it for the theater production in which she performed—another bad sign, of course. Women who made their living on the stage weren’t in the same class as women who married and kept a home for a husband. But as a gunslinger, he’d lived far outside the norms of convention, too.
Still, he wished a woman