The Rancher’s Baby Bargain Read online

  Well, she’d wanted to be taken seriously, which was how Lucy came to choose the brown leather rather than the hot pink suede she’d been eyeing in the shoe store. Her heart fluttered at the sight of him. And it fluttered with nerves.

  “Hey—I’m up here,” she said, finding her voice at the last possible moment. “It is, in fact, me, Lucy Carr.”

  Aiden dragged his blue eyes—blue like the sky reflecting into the sea—from her boots to her face, and Lucy felt that old familiar jolt. Back in high school, the pleasure she’d taken in Aiden’s gaze had all been the product of her imagination. He’d never actually looked at her.

  Not like he was looking at her now, with his eyes as hot as the mid-morning sun. Hotter, even.

  And then…he smiled.

  He smiled, a crooked grin that revealed his white, even teeth, confirming the fact that he was handsome enough to grace the covers of magazines. “Lucy Carr. From science class. You’re right. It’s been too long.”

  Too long? Too long? She hardly had time to wrap her mind around what that meant before Aiden stepped forward and wrapped her up in a hug.

  Play it cool, she thought. Play it cool. But he smelled like sunshine and hard work, and his biceps were hard—so hard. She resisted the urge to wrap her hand around one of them and test the muscles there. It had to be a mistake, anyway—hugging her like this. Men like Aiden weren’t teddy bears. She’d never had that impression of him before.

  Maybe she’d been wrong.

  Outwardly, she patted Aiden on the back and said, “It’s good to see you.” Inwardly, she was fourteen years old again and totally freaking out. It was a testament to her hard-earned maturity that she only gently extricated herself from Aiden’s hug and returned his smile as if it was nothing. “And—I’m here to see a man about a bug problem.”

  Lucy felt a little burst of pride at the joke. She could do this. She could stand in Aiden Harper’s driveway as the new and improved version of herself. The goal-oriented version of herself. The take-what-I-want-and-that’s-final version of herself. She’d do it all, and she’d get what she came for.

  Which was a separate matter entirely.

  A second man had approached from the field of hops, but next to Aiden he seemed small. He looked between the two of them, then stuck out his hand for Lucy to shake. “Jonas Mills,” he said. “We’ve talked on the phone.”

  There was a gleam in his eye that made Lucy a tiny bit suspicious of his motives, but then he went on. “I’ve been spraying these fields every other week, and the infestation is getting worse. I’d love to be able to fix the problem, if you know what I mean.”

  Ah, yes. Jonas Mills was transparently interested in being the one to take credit for saving Aiden Harper’s ranch.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  Lucy had come to make a deal.

  “I’ll give it my best shot.” She turned back to Aiden. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  He led the way through the nearest row of hops, and Lucy examined several leaves in detail. She pulled several mites from the plants and put them in a petri dish tugged from her purse.

  She did the examination, but she didn’t have to look for more than a few minutes to know that things were dire for Aiden Harper. Her heart thumped at the sight of his concerned gaze lighting on her fingers. It was going to be an equal trade between the two of them. They were both desperate for different things.

  “All right.” She stood up straight and clapped her hands, moving back down the row of hops. “The first thing we need to do is—oh!”

  Her boot had caught a stray chunk of dirt, and Lucy went down hard into Aiden’s ripped arms.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry—” She pushed away from Aiden, feeling the firmness of his body under her hands with another bolt of desire. “I swear, I know how to walk—” High School Lucy had been clumsy, too, and she didn’t relish the feeling of that girl from her past clawing her way to the surface again.

  Behind her, Jonas Mills snorted. He didn’t even bother to hide his laughter. “You…scientists. Always a little out there. Always a little bad at…simple things like walking.”

  Heat flew to her cheeks, and Lucy looked down at her outfit, a black skirt suit that had seemed totally appropriate until this very moment. Jonas’s laughter contained uncomfortable echoes of the other students who had laughed at her back in school. For liking science. For wearing out-of-date outfits because she didn’t care about anything but getting extra lab time.

  Screw those people.

  She straightened her back and looked into Aiden’s eyes. There was no way she’d let some snickering fool derail her, no matter how talented he was at dusting crops. Lucy was too strong for that. She hadn’t finished her dissertation a year early while also being in the midst of a total relationship collapse to give Jonas Mills a lick of power over her. She hadn’t redone her entire look and forged ahead despite the demise of her relationship only to wilt like a flower in front of Jonas Mills.

  Not even a little.

  She felt a strange pride, then. High School Lucy—the one who didn’t care at all about fashion and sometimes forgot to brush her hair in the morning—wouldn’t have survived a fall like that one.

  New Lucy? She’d thrive against all odds. She’d already done it.

  “Jonas, thank you so much for your input,” she said warmly. “Aiden and I will take it from here.”

  Jonas’s grin twisted into confusion halfway through the smile. “We’re done here?”

  “You’re done here for the moment.” She gave him a broad smile. “We’ll get back to you with the strategy going forward.”

  Jonas Mills opened his mouth, then shut it again. He frowned, fingers rising to touch the brim of his hat. “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Carr.” The way he said “Miz” made her feel a hundred years old, but that didn’t matter as much as getting Aiden alone.

  “Be in touch,” said Jonas into the rustling silence, and then he walked off toward the edge of the field. They both watched him go. When he’d finally disappeared behind the rows of hops, Lucy turned back to Aiden.

  He was already watching her, eyes focused in.

  “So. Have any ideas?” There was a quiet desperation in his voice, and Lucy could see exactly why. He and Jonas Mills had misread the situation.

  “I do.” She stifled the urge to reach out and run her palm over his pecs. Aiden and Lucy were standing relatively close together, hemmed in by the rows of hops, and Lucy swore the air was thinner around Aiden. She’d felt that way in high school, too. “For one thing, you’ve got it wrong.”

  “The hops?” He furrowed his brow. “Too late to course correct for this season, but—”

  “No, not the hops, the infestation.” Lucy smiled encouragingly at him. “There’s a reason the pesticides haven’t been working, and it’s because you’re going after the wrong pest.”

  Aiden crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on.”

  “You don’t have an infestation of the hop red spider mite.”

  “You’re not serious,” drawled Aiden, reaching behind him to run his fingers over the nearest leaves. “The plants are crawling with them.”

  “They’re crawling with the hop pink spider mite.”

  Aiden narrowed his eyes, and Lucy took this as an invitation to keep going.

  “It’s very easy to confuse the pink mite with the red one. For one thing, the coloring is very similar, so to the untrained eye—”

  He looked at her with a very trained eye.

  “I’ve been paying a lot of money to rid myself of this infestation hell. And you’re telling me that it could have been fixed a long time ago?” His face was a thunderstorm, the lightning ready to crack.

  “Not that long ago,” said Lucy, hitching her purse up on her shoulder and wrapping her fingers around the handle. “A few months, maybe a year.”

  Aiden shrugged. “How?”

  “The pink mite is immune to the pesticide you’ve been using.”

  Fi
sts clenched by his side, Aiden was clearly struggling to maintain his laid-back attitude. He stared at the dirt between them, taking one deep breath, then two. He closed his eyes for a long few moments and opened them again.

  “It’s not Jonas’s fault,” Lucy offered. Worry crisscrossed Aiden’s face and making him a little more comfortable was in her best interest. “He couldn’t have read my latest research paper on the subject—it hasn’t been published yet.” There it was, that pride again. She’d accomplished so much since leaving for college. So much. So much that her friends had accused her every other week of hating them all. “Don’t take it out on him.”

  “He should have known.” Aiden gritted his teeth. “He should have known before he took all my money and—”

  Lucy held both hands up in the air, and Aiden fell silent.

  “Let’s leave Jonas out of this.” His shoulders sagged a fraction of an inch. “The person you want to talk to right now is me.”

  “I am talking to you about it.”

  “No—listen. The mite is immune to the current pesticides in use, but I have an organic one that I’ve formulated myself. It’ll kill the pink mites and salvage your crops.”

  Aiden stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’m sure you charge a premium for that service.”

  “I’ll give it to you for free.”

  Her words brought his gaze snapping back to hers. “Free? Why would you do that?”

  It was now or never. Here, amongst the hops, Lucy needed to lay out her parameters. Because this was a two-way street. It had to be, from the very beginning, if she was going to be successful. “I’ll give it to you for free because there’s something I need from you.”

  Aiden shook his head. “Something from me? Tell me it’s not some high school memento. I’ve moved enough times that all those things are lost to the attic.”

  “It’s not…an object.” Lucy’s heart zigzagged into her throat. Now or never. Now or never. Now or never. “It’s a baby.”

  Aiden looked around as if she had spotted a baby in the middle of all his hops. “A baby? What baby am I supposed to give you?”

  “Yours.”

  “What?”

  “Your baby.” His mouth dropped open, and Lucy surged into the gap he left in the conversation. This was it. It was her one shot to put this deal on the table. “I’ll give the pesticide to you at no cost if you father a child for me.”

  Three

  Aiden was in some kind of vortex, a tornado that had touched down in the middle of his mind and ripped up everything he’d planted there—the plans for his brewery, his worries about the ranch, his strange excitement over seeing Lucy again.

  Maybe he’d hallucinated her words. That would make sense. It was possible that the heat had finally gotten to him. He hadn’t felt like he was cooking in his clothes while he and Jonas walked through the fields, but that had to be it. Aiden turned to the left with the thought that he should stand in the irrigation ditch and call someone over to spray him with cold water.

  “Aiden?”

  “Yeah?”

  Her voice was so familiar. He'd heard that voice everywhere in their small local high school. It had followed him out of science class and into the halls, and despite the very different trajectories of their lives, Aiden had never been able to ignore the existence of Lucy Carr.

  “You okay?” She was still looking at him expectantly.

  He brought his sleeve to his forehead and wiped it across. “I—must've misunderstood what you said.”

  She raised her chin and faced him head on, her brown eyes clear and hopeful. “I’ll give you the pesticide I’ve developed at no cost to you if you father a child for me.” Lucy gave a little shrug as if the solution had been obvious all along. “You need to save your ranch before you lose everything, and I need to have a baby.”

  Wait—what had she just said? That hadn’t sounded like a reference to one bad year of crops. “How do you know that? About the ranch?”

  Lucy turned red, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “You know how they mix up the mail at the post office sometimes?”

  It was true—Leonard Young, the postmaster, was seventy-six years old and had been known to put letters in the wrong boxes on a daily basis. “But you don’t live here anymore.”

  “No, you’re right. It must have come to my parents’ house, and then I have a service that forwards the mail—everything with their estate, you know, it has to come to me, so I can sort it out—”

  His heart ached for her. His own father’s will had been relatively cut and dried when he’d died from lung cancer when Aiden was in college, and it had still stressed his mother, Linda, while she made all the final arrangements. “I’m sorry you have to do that.”

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I mean—it’s not all right.” More color came to her cheeks. “Obviously, it’s not all right that they died, but it’s right that I should…take care of everything. There’s nobody else.”

  She was an only child. Aiden knew that from school. It was rare, to be an only child in this community, and that was probably what had made her so unique. Other kids might have called her strange. Even Aiden had fallen into that trap a time or two. But it did mean that she was different. And that drew his interest.

  “Anyway.” Lucy was slowly starting to lose that city smooth from her voice. The old Lucy—that nerdy, lab-obsessed Lucy who had only cared about experiments and results—came through in patches like a radio signal that was an acre too far from the car’s receiver. “I didn’t mean to open that letter. They come in batches, and I just—I sit down and open everything all at once. I didn’t know until it was open that it was yours, and by then I’d…already…you know, I’d already seen what kind of situation you were in.” She blushed harder.

  Aiden felt his own shame rise into his collarbone like a yoke around his neck, but he remembered where he’d come from. “I’ll find a way out of it.”

  “Well,” said Lucy briskly, “it’s a problem that can be solved. I’m sure that if your crops weren’t being decimated by the mites, it would be much easier to turn things around.” She bit her lip. “I’ve…known about them for about a year now, actually.”

  He stared at her. “For a year? How’d you find out about this a year ago?”

  She gave him a look in return. “Everybody from this town still talks. Even if you move away to Portland. It’s been torture, having to wait.”

  “What were you waiting for?” Aiden couldn’t imagine this being more torturous for anyone else. He’d been watching his business crumble for three years, and it had felt like an eternity.

  “I had to be sure the pesticide worked. I was running tests on a few farms, some sample areas, and I didn’t have the results until the end of last summer.” She raised her hands in the air. “I couldn’t offer you a solution until I was sure it would be successful. And now I’m sure. So I want to help you.”

  Aiden had never felt so exposed in his life. He’d been carrying this weight silently, stoically, hiding it from his mother and everyone else. It was true—Lucy had only found out about his financial situation because of the letter. But the whole town knew his crop was struggling, and word had gotten around to her, of all people?

  Not just word—proof. She was intimately aware of just how much trouble he was in. Lucy Carr. The girl who had captured his imagination all those years ago. He felt like his guts were on display for her.

  It was not a sensation he liked. In fact, he hated it. Anger surged in, boiling beneath the surface of his skin, and it was like a molten shield between his vulnerability and Lucy. He’d hugged her, too, like a man desperate to be saved. He was not a desperate man. He was only looking for solutions, as any other man would, and the thought of being rescued like a damsel in distress by a woman who’d clearly done well for herself while he had struggled…

  It was not a thought he wanted to entertain for a moment longer than necessary.

  “That’s not—it
’s not necessary,” he said gruffly. “I can fix this on my own. You came all the way here, and…I appreciate that, but there’s a way to the other side, and I’ll find it.”

  She looked at him, and those brown eyes seemed to see straight through him. “Aiden, without my pesticide, your ranch will collapse.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that.” Her voice was absolutely level, with none of the goofiness he’d come to expect from her in school. “Remember that you’ve been working under an incorrect assumption. They’re not red hop spider mites, they’re pink hop spider mites, and that’s made a disastrous difference when it comes to their resistance.”

  “There are other things I can try—”

  “There are not.” She said it kindly, delivering the blow so delicately that Aiden barely felt it against his disgust at this situation. That he had gotten himself into this situation. It was true. He would take responsibility for it, like he’d taken responsibility for everything else in his life, but it still turned his stomach. “The pink mites are resistant to every pesticide except mine. I rushed it into production as fast as I could for that reason, and it still took—" She pressed her lips together tightly. “It still wasn’t fast enough for some farms. Yours doesn’t have to go down that way.”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’ve already figured it out. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is—” Lucy looked away from him with such longing in her eyes that it took his breath away, despite the storm of emotions roiling in his gut. “The only thing I can’t do on my own is have a baby.” Lucy turned back to him, determined, standing up tall. “Don’t be stubborn, Aiden. We can both benefit from this relationship.”

  He gritted his teeth. “It doesn’t seem right.” It didn’t. “It seems like extortion, if you ask me. Forcing me to…do this…in order to get the pesticide? Forget it. I’ll buy it from you, but I’m not going to accept this kind of deal.”