For The Twins' Sake. Melissa Senate
in his head as he’d watched him move that little stethoscope around the tiny back and chest...when the perfectly good father is standing up.
Noah Dawson, perfectly good father? He would have burst out laughing if the situation hadn’t been so incredibly lacking in humor. Thing was, after all that he’d been through, all he’d lost, after the bad day he’d had with a sick calf, Noah had appreciated the extra show of faith in himself as a human being, and Bakerton had uttered the right words at exactly the right moment. The note said the baby was his. The perfectly good—or able, he figured Bakerton had meant—father was here with the infant, doing exactly what he should be doing. That was two for two on the faith scale.
He’d driven slow as his late grandmother’s molasses back to the ranch in the pouring rain, and once inside he’d gone straight to his laptop, holding the tiny baby along his arm as he watched a YouTube video on how to mix formula, how to hold the bottle—how to hold a newborn, for that matter. Turns out he hadn’t been doing that too wrong. He’d watched each video twice. By the time he’d closed his laptop, word had come that the river had flooded and two roads into town were impassable. He’d breathed a sigh of relief at the timing; the baby was safe and had been checked out, and Noah had what he’d needed to get through the night. The universe had been looking out for Noah lately.
They’d both survived that first night. While feeding the tiny infant, he’d realized he’d have to name her, and Annabel popped into his mind and that was that. He’d refused to let himself dwell on why.
Annabel Dawson. It wasn’t official anywhere, not yet, but he’d have to deal with that too—getting Annabel a birth certificate while worrying that some bureaucrat would demand he hand his baby over.
His baby.
How Noah had gotten from where he’d been the night he’d found Annabel to his baby rolling off his tongue with ease was anyone’s guess, but it had happened, and no one was more surprised than his sister. When the roosters had announced it was officially morning, he’d called his sister, Daisy, who lived out in Cheyenne, and boy, had she been in shock. She’d driven up by early evening and helped him so much—with Annabel and the ranch—the baby making her smile when he’d catch her looking so worried so often. Daisy had been close to five months pregnant then and wouldn’t say a word about who the father was. She’d seemed relieved to have a reason to move somewhere, even to the family ranch, with its tangled roots and all.
Up until the moment he’d found Annabel, he’d spent the four months prior rebuilding the Dawson Family Guest Ranch. That had changed him, turned him around, made him a better person and had to have something to do with how immediately responsible he’d felt for the baby left on his porch—his baby. Add that to a tiny finger clutching his pinkie while feeding her. Being up all hours of the night checking on her—sometimes just to make sure she was still breathing. Googling “lullabies newborns like” and then playing them, and then singing them himself while sitting in the rocker he’d gotten from the town swap shop. Changing diapers. Playing peekaboo. Reading the pertinent pages of Your Baby’s First Year and googling all the little things Annabel did that he wasn’t sure was normal. Like burping so loud from that tiny body.
During the past seven weeks, he and Annabel had gotten even closer with all the walking around the vast property of the ranch, the baby against his chest in the Snugli and cozy footie pajamas. He’d told her all about the history of the ranch—how his grandparents had built it fifty-two years ago, how popular it had once been with tourists and locals coming to relax out in the country, to hike or ride on the vast trails in the woods and open grasslands, to learn to ride a horse, shear a sheep, spin fleece into yarn, milk cows and goats, and make butter and yogurt and his grandmother’s award-winning ice cream, which she’d sold right in their own little shop in the main barn. Bess Dawson had always handed each of her grandchildren a little spoon and sample cup of her new flavors to make sure the ice cream passed the kid test, and every flavor always had. Noah could still taste his favorites: chocolate-chocolate chip, strawberry, Bear Ridge Mix—pistachio ice cream with peanuts. Noah had also told Annabel how his widowed father had destroyed it all within three years of inheriting the place, drinking and gambling away profits, savings, their legacy, his six kids eventually scattering across the West to get away from him.
Noah was the youngest and had been trapped there for a good bunch of those low years. Daisy, two years older, watched over him the best she could until she’d been driven away by their dad’s self-destruction when she was eighteen. Noah had also left the moment he’d become a legal adult, all his pleading to his father to get his act together going in one ear...
Ten years later, the Dawson Family Guest Ranch had been a ghost ranch, rarely mentioned anymore except for someone in town to shake their head over its demise. But with the money Noah and his siblings had invested, he and a hardworking crew had gotten the place in shape—albeit on a smaller scale than the original—in just five months so they could open Memorial Day weekend. The day after tomorrow, Friday, was the grand reopening. His brothers hadn’t responded to his invitation to stop by for the big day, and Noah wouldn’t be surprised when none showed up.
“Let the place go,” the Dawson siblings had all said to Noah one way or another at their father’s funeral.
Except Noah hadn’t been able to—and then his siblings had rallied around him, making a plan to invest in rebuilding because doing so meant something to him and would mean everything to their grandparents. Noah wouldn’t ever let the ranch go. For many reasons. So many reasons he hadn’t even told Annabel all of them yet. And he’d told her just about everything. His confidante was a seven-week-old, ten-pound, nine-ounce baby with chubby cheeks. There was a first for everything.
He heard a car coming up the drive and turned around. A silver Range Rover SUV was barreling up the dirt road toward the foreman’s cabin. Did he know anyone who drove a Range Rover? The eldest Dawson sibling, Ford, maybe. But Ford had also said hell would freeze before he’d step foot on the ranch again.
Whoever it was sure was in a hell of a hurry to get to the cabin.
One hand protectively on the back of Annabel’s head in the Snugli, he watched the SUV suddenly come to a dead stop halfway up the drive. The glare from the sun made it impossible to see who was behind the wheel. Why stop there?
The Range Rover suddenly started up again and inched forward, this time at two miles an hour.
When the SUV finally got within a few feet, he could see inside.
Holy hell.
Sara.
How long had it been? Almost two years. After she’d told him she was marrying Willem Perry—he could barely even think the name in his head without wanting to vomit or hit something—he’d then heard they’d moved out to Wellington, an affluent town an hour away. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He’d been close with Sara’s only living relative, her father, but Preston Mayhew had gotten very sick a few months before she’d married Willem. He’d also heard Sara had had her dad transferred from the county hospital to the state-of-the-art one in Wellington. Noah had once called about visiting hours and was told that all visitors had to be preapproved by Willem Perry. So much for that. It was better that there was no one to talk to him about Sara or what she was up to or how great her life was with that bastard Willem; Noah wouldn’t have been able to bear it.
The car door opened and she stepped out, and his heart lurched. That wasn’t a surprise. The sight of Sara Mayhew had always had that effect. Not just because she was so pretty with her silky light brown hair and round, pale brown eyes; his attraction to her had always been about who she was, not how good she looked. Though she did look good.
She must have heard about the Dawson Family Guest Ranch reopening this weekend and decided to check the place out for herself. After all, she’d grown up here too.
“I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, Sara,” he said, surprising even himself with his honesty. But it was bursting out of him. He’d missed her so much the past couple of years that he’d done regretful things to forget her, nothing working.
She