The Rancher’s Baby Bargain Read online

  Lucy gave a sharp little sigh. “I can’t sell it to you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The testing is done on the pesticide. It’s ready to go to market, and it works. But it’s still moving through the final approval process.”

  “How long can that possibly take?”

  He saw the truth in her eyes before she said the word. “Months.”

  He didn’t have months, and he knew it.

  Aiden ran a hand over his hair and looked out over the ranch. The red barn where he stored all his farming equipment. The white farmhouse that his grandfather had built by hand. The rolling fields baking in the mid-morning sun. His family had cared for the land all these years, and never once had anyone entertained the idea that one of their own might let things go so terribly awry. It was hard, out here on the open land, with the wind whispering through the plants and the sky so big and blue, to imagine giving in to loans and banks and bad luck.

  Or giving in to Lucy Carr and her proposal.

  Aiden didn’t have another choice.

  “It has to be a gift, or I can’t give it to you,” Lucy said from behind him. “Besides, even if by some miracle it came to market early, you wouldn’t be able to afford it. This product is going to set the new standard for pesticides, and it’ll be worth its weight in gold.”

  “A gift.”

  “Think of it as a trade.” Her boots crunched on the gravel drive and then her footsteps went soft as she came to stand beside him. He heard her breath on the wind as they both looked out at all those acres together. “I have something you need. You have something I need. We could both be happy with the outcome.” There was another pause. “Here.”

  He looked down. Lucy held a petri dish toward him. There were several crawling creatures inside, and one leaf from the hops.

  “I collected some mites while we were out in the field. They’re crawling around a leaf sprayed with my pesticide.”

  He took it in his huge hand. It seemed so small and delicate, the petri dish. It seemed so incongruous that he could be holding the solution to his problems in the palm of his hand. And it seemed crazy that Lucy Carr was the one who had handed it to him.

  “Just think about it.” She looked down at the petri dish, too, but Aiden’s focus went to her eyelashes, the teeth tugging at her lip, that fighting hope still in her face. She opened her mouth, and he was sure she’d present another argument or remind him once again that his ranch was failing and he needed a miracle if he didn’t want to lose the entire thing to the bank. But she just said, “Okay? Think about it, and we can talk tomorrow.” Lucy hesitated one more time. “The only thing is, you don’t want to wait too long on this, because time is really going to be of the essence when it comes to saving the crops.”

  “All right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll think about it.” This was only a half-truth. He was probably going to throw the petri dish in the garbage the moment he got inside because it was too much. It was all too much. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten himself into this position, and the thought of having to buy his way out like this…

  Well, it was shameful. And it was shamefully exciting. But that emotion was one he wouldn’t let come to the surface.

  “I’ll be at my parents’ house,” Lucy said. She gave him an encouraging smile. “It was good to see you after all these years.”

  And then she turned on her heel and went back to the rental car.

  Aiden couldn’t help but watch her go.

  The little suit, the too-fancy boots, the way her hips swayed confidently while she walked—he could not stop watching.

  She got into the car and gave him a jaunty little wave. Aiden raised his free hand in a kind of salute, then turned his back. He didn’t have a plan—just to get out of her sightline.

  He walked quickly down the rows of hops, the dirt a familiar give beneath his feet and the sky a familiar expanse above. It didn’t matter. Aiden felt more lost than he had before.

  Four

  The house showed no sign of life.

  Lucy hadn’t been back to her parents’ house since the funeral two years ago. She’d been in the middle of her doctoral degree, and her nerves had already been fraying when they died. She’d showed up disheveled and grieving with a puffy face and broken heart. Even so, she had only been able to spare a few days. It hadn’t been enough time to take care of the house and start setting all her parents’ possessions in order.

  She unlocked the silent house with the same key she’d carried with her all through her school days and pushed the door open with her elbow, dragging her rolling suitcase in behind her.

  Oh, this was going to be hard.

  The house had been virtually untouched since her parents died, but it still smelled like…home. Lucy savored her first few breaths as she stood in the foyer. Soon, she’d be acclimated, and the scent of her past would become undetectable. That, and the cleaning. She had so much cleaning and sorting to do.

  Yes, it was going to be a punch to the gut, over and over again. By far, this was the hardest task Lucy had ever taken on. It was going to be harder than pitching her dissertation, harder than fighting her way onto the all-male research team in college, and harder than asking her parents to send her to Stanford instead of the much-cheaper state school.

  Still. She’d tackled hard things before, and she’d do it again now. They hadn’t raised her to shrink away from the things that needed doing even if they were as difficult as this.

  “Keep the faith,” she told herself out loud, just to hear something. It was still awful, walking in the front door and not having her mother thunder up from the basement. Karen Carr had been an artist, and Lucy’s father had set her up a studio in the family’s walkout basement. It was where Karen spent most of her time. Whenever Lucy came home from college, she’d rush up the stairs, her hands covered in chalk or paint or whatever it was that she’d become obsessed with that year.

  “I’m so sorry, Luce,” she’d say, pulling Lucy in for a tight hug. She never minded if her mother left one of those media behind on her clothes. “I meant to stop early and get things ready for you, but…”

  She’d kiss her mother on the cheek. “But you had art to do. Besides, it’s more fun to make cookies together.”

  It had always been true.

  She would just have to get through this. Keep pushing. Set a goal and see it through. Henry—the ex who still loomed large in Lucy’s mind, since they had spent the last five years together—had always insisted on goal-setting. He’d taught her early in the relationship to find incentives for any goal. “Once you’ve decided on your goal, the next step is to determine what’s in it for the other people you need something from in order to achieve it.”

  She’d laughed when he told her. ”Henry, stop talking about goals and come back to bed.” But he had been right, in a way.

  Lucy reached up to the clip holding her hair in that neat, lab-appropriate twist and released it, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. Ahhh. That was better. Now that she was standing in her childhood home, the skirt suit seemed all wrong, too. She needed to change.

  She carried her suitcase up to the second floor. There, on the left, was the master bedroom. A full bathroom separated it from her bedroom, and on the other side of the hall was the guest bedroom.

  Lucy chose her old room. It was too weird to sleep in her parents’ bed, and the guest room was…impersonal.

  She pushed open the door and looked in on what was essentially a time capsule.

  When she moved to college, she’d thrown away some of her junk, but the bookshelf still held her favorite novels, textbooks, and yearbooks. There were still piles of papers and books by the bed and under the desk. Above the desk hung a collage of all her pictures from high school, and—yikes. She’d been such a nerd. Weird glasses. Weird outfits. But she’d been happy, hadn’t she? The evidence was right there in her smile. The rest of the walls were a riot of colorful prints that
represented a lot of Lucy’s interests: hot boys from teen magazines, horses, and chemistry.

  She flopped the suitcase on the bed, unzipped it, and got out of her suit. Lucy tossed the skirt and the jacket, and then the shirt, to the floor, suddenly seized with a kind of teenage carelessness that felt…good, after all these years of being a professional striver, always being at her best, always containing her weird impulses.

  One pair of high-end workout pants and a tank top later, she took the stairs back down two at a time, Aiden on her mind.

  She knew two things about him. First, he was in an enormous financial hole. She didn’t feel good about how she’d obtained that knowledge, but she did know she could help. And second, she knew that her pesticide was the only thing that killed the pink mites. Aiden needed those mites to be dead in order to dig himself out of the hole he was in.

  He’d reacted badly to her proposal, that was true. But she’d found the incentives he needed to come to the table. Henry would have approved of the strategy.

  She stood in the middle of the living room. This would be one of the easiest rooms in the house. Her mother’s artwork was framed on the walls, but she wouldn’t sell that. It was mostly furniture in here, plus one desk that had some of her father’s things. A good place to start.

  Lucy sat at the desk and pulled open the drawer, then got back up and went into the kitchen. Under the sink she found a bulk roll of trash bags and brought them back into the living room.

  The desk hadn’t been very important, and Lucy’s mind wandered as she sorted the papers inside into two piles: recycle and keep. She had to keep her focus where it belonged: on all her plans. She’d taken a yearlong sabbatical from teaching, and she really couldn’t waste a moment of it. There were too many things to do. First on the list: clean, fix, and sell her childhood home. Then she needed to write a business plan for the pesticide. She hadn’t had time to finish a secondary case study on the pesticide use. Hopefully, Aiden would help her out with that, too—let her study his crops. It was a lot.

  Her parents would have liked the way she’d branched out in her work. When she had lived in California, they’d take vacations there and see her whenever she was free. They’d never wanted her to stop what she was doing to come home.

  “Don’t waste your time back here,” her father would say when she called. “Chase those dreams. Hunt them down. Do it all!”

  The desk didn’t take long at all, and Lucy was left with a slim pile of documents she thought could be useful later and a bag of papers to be shredded and recycled. It was a good start, and Lucy itched to get more out of the way.

  Well—she’d be sleeping in her bedroom, so why not spruce it up a bit?

  Back up the stairs she went.

  There was more to clean up here than she thought, actually. To be honest, it was probably good. Her mind was moving too quickly to focus on the business plan, and she couldn’t start on any of the other projects without…Aiden. The baby wasn’t going to be a thing without him, and neither would the case study.

  Lucy took a deep breath and gave her room an appraising look.

  She’d been so sure of herself back in high school. It had never seemed odd that she’d loved horses and King Arthur as much as she loved science experiments. She’d thought colorful wall coverings were the best…right along with joke science posters with funny lab warnings.

  Yes. She’d been sure of herself. But that didn’t mean it hurt any less to be on the outside. And all the pictures on the walls didn’t tell the whole story. She had struggled to fit in. It was a problem she hadn’t been able to solve.

  Lucy strode across to the closet and pulled it open—

  And jumped back when several shoe boxes that had been wedged onto the top shelf came tumbling down on top of her.

  “Oh, my god.” She laughed. So the younger version of herself hadn’t cleaned everything as well as she thought. One of the boxes had tipped over on its side, unleashing a bunch of old notes from school. She pushed it to one side. This was going to be a project.

  Lucy looked up cautiously, but nothing else seemed to be precarious. And the rest of the closet was too full of clothes, wedged in one after another, for them to move an inch.

  Like the walls of her room, the closet was an explosion of color. It was a little surprising, honestly. Lucy had been living in a world of neutrals for years. Henry had preferred neutrals—he didn’t like loud prints or colors. He hadn’t ever said explicitly that she shouldn’t wear colors, only that appropriate attire would let a person’s work speak for itself. Lucy had gone along with it. His advice had, after all, gotten her into a good position with her career. It had allowed her to fit in where it really mattered in her doctoral program. And now it gave her a certain leverage with the other faculty. Nobody could call her out for being eccentric now.

  But oh, man, she’d loved colors like this.

  Lucy flipped through her clothes, tugging them free from one another so she could get a better look. It was all here. Patterns. Neon. Splashes of brightness for even the darkest day. It had been her style. Though…perhaps Henry had been right. Perhaps the clothes had distracted people from her personality, and that was why she’d struggled so hard to find her place. They couldn’t see past the wardrobe to the person underneath.

  But…wasn’t that a problem with them, not her? It was true that the personality beneath those colors had been goofy and nerdy and a little weird, but that wasn’t a reason to dismiss her entirely.

  The next shirt she pulled out was a Spice Girls concert T-shirt that made her laugh out loud.

  So. Much. Glitter.

  Glitter everywhere, in different shades of purple and pink.

  It was ridiculous.

  It made her happy.

  She whipped the tank top over her head and replaced it with the T-shirt, which still fit. Lucy hadn’t actually gone to a Spice Girls concert, but she had bought the shirt at a secondhand shop after she had…developed. So it wasn’t too tight. It was comfortable and bright, and that was exactly what she needed.

  Besides, what had she been thinking, getting dressed in expensive workout gear? She was going to be cleaning and sorting, and she shouldn’t do that in good clothes. The pants alone had cost a hundred dollars, and she was going to put them at the mercy of bleach and other cleaning products? No way.

  The pants were the next to go. She pulled out an old pair of shorts with “SMART-ASS” on the butt. They were hilarious. She grinned at herself in the mirror. Unlike in high school, she now filled out the shorts, thanks to a dedicated workout routine and a healthy diet. It was amazing what several million squats could do for one’s butt.

  Yes. There it was. That old confidence, coming back.

  Lucy did a little dance around her bedroom. All this sorting was good, but if she was going to stay here, the place needed real cleaning first. She stripped the blankets off the bed and took them down to the basement, ignoring a pang of sadness when she glimpsed her mother’s easel out of the corner of her eye. Then she stepped back out onto the porch.

  There it was, in the corner. It had been delivered yesterday. Lucy picked up the heavy box, brought it inside, and cut through the tape with a knife from the kitchen.

  It was her own personal cleaning solution, specially formulated to clean deeply while doing the least possible damage to the environment.

  It was exactly what she needed to get the job done.

  Five

  All night, he’d been thinking of Lucy.

  Sleep had taunted him like a cruel joke. He’d start to relax, his muscles losing the tension of the day. His mind would begin to wander, and then…boom.

  Father a child for me.

  We could both be happy.

  Your ranch will collapse.

  Collapse.

  Collapse…

  The one time he’d managed to fall asleep, he’d dreamed of a tornado. In the dream, he was standing out at the tree line, his four-wheeler parked somewhere in the woods when
the sky had turned, then turned again. Aiden watched with horror as the blue sunny day darkened to thunderclouds, then a swirling storm. It happened so fast, the funnel reaching down to the earth with a vengeance. He had been powerless to do anything. He’d tried to run toward the farmhouse, but his legs had been useless. They were so heavy that he couldn’t get moving, couldn’t get his feet off the ground.

  He’d climbed out of bed in the middle of the night, pulling himself bodily out of the dream and stormed down to the kitchen where he’d tossed the petri dish haphazardly onto the counter the moment he came inside. Aiden was gripped with the urge to smash it with his fist, but a light from outside caught his attention.

  A full moon.

  The moonlight draped itself over the lines of the barn and other outbuildings and the tall rows of hops. Aiden followed those glints all the way back up to the sky, which was strewn with a million stars. It was the kind of view you could only find in the country, away from the pressures of big city life. He took a deep breath and let it out.

  Nobody ever made good decisions in the middle of the night. He was no different. So he filed away all the questions stirring in his brain.

  He went back to bed and tried not to think of her.

  In the morning, Aiden was meticulous about his breakfast. He cooked two eggs over easy, then fried a package of sausages to perfection. He did not look at the petri dish. Not when he made his toast, not when he buttered the bread, and not when he spread a thin layer of strawberry jam on the top.

  The sun had fully risen by the time he finished eating. It was time to make some decisions.

  He took his plate to the sink. He watched the petri dish out of the corner of his eye while he washed the plate and frying pan and put them in the drying rack. A sunbeam got trapped under its plastic lid.

  He couldn’t throw it away.

  He’d wanted to, in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to the moment Lucy handed it to him. But now that the time had come, he couldn’t do it.