Chapter 6

SIX

DEV

“Careful,” Tully warned before I tripped over the curb and nearly face-planted on the sidewalk. “Curb,” he added belatedly.

“Fuck,” I muttered, glancing at Lellie in the stroller to make sure I hadn’t accidentally tipped her out.

“Language,” he said for the millionth time in the last twelve hours.

“Fuck off,” I hissed, hoping it was too low for Lellie to hear. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Didn’t notice,” he lied. “I slept soundly once I put the earplugs in. Thanks, by the way, for insisting that you handle everything yourself.”

I knew he was lying because I’d caught him peering at me from under dark lashes several times throughout the night as I paced back and forth with a fussy baby in my arms. Tully had stripped down to a pair of athletic shorts and an undershirt before grabbing my spare pillow and blanket and making a nest for himself on the sofa.

Thankfully, the blanket had slipped off after the first half hour, and I’d been able to distract myself from Lellie’s fussing by studying every available inch of Tully’s exposed body.

He hadn’t changed from the man in my memories. If anything, he was more tempting, more off-limits than before. Which made me feel like I was going to jump out of my skin.

“Is the Mercantile the only place around here to get kids’ stuff?” he asked as he held the door open for me. “There’s no Target or Walmart?”

I shook my head. “Nearest one’s several hours from here. I’m hoping to avoid that. Might have to order online, though.”

As soon as I entered, Natana Whiteplume appeared. “Hey, Dev,” she began with a smile before noticing the stroller. Her forehead creased in confusion. “Who’s this?”

I should have expected to get the third degree once we set foot in town, but my sleep-deprived brain wasn’t exactly running on all cylinders at the moment. “Uh…”

“Hi!” Tully said from slightly behind me. “I’m Tully Bowman. Do you work here? I’m desperate to find a travel crib.” He smiled big and nodded toward Lellie, who was busy looking around at all the various items on display.

Natana’s confusion cleared as she seemed to reassign Lellie to someone else—an outsider—in her mind. “Oh, ah, no. I don’t work here. But I know the kid stuff is back in the left-hand corner. And Connie—the lady over there with the flower on her shirt—she can help you if you can’t find anything.”

Tully thanked her and nudged me out of the way, grabbing the stroller and taking off toward the back of the store. I blinked after him.

“Everything all set for roundup?” Natana asked.

I turned back to blink at her. “Roundup.”

She grinned. “I know it’s been a full year, Dev. But roundup is when we get all the horses ready to?—”

My brain flicked back online. “Roundup! Of course. Yeah. Uh… yeah. I guess? Way said he hired a new hand to help us out because I guess Taza went back to Jenks’ dairy.”

She rolled her eyes. “Finally. Took Jenks long enough. I’m happy for Taza. He deserves to take over the operations there. But I know you lost a good hand.”

“The best. I’m happy for him, but to leave before roundup…” I sighed. “Anyway, please tell me you’re still up for helping out? After what happened to Way last year, Silas is going to be a total pain in the ass.”

Her eyes danced as she laughed. “He definitely is. Way will be lucky to sit a horse. Yes, I’m still planning on helping, but I’m glad you guys hired someone. You’ve got your hands full since I know you probably have several mares close to foaling, too.”

While we spoke, she glanced back in the direction Tully and Lellie had gone. I could tell Natana was curious about why I’d walked into the Mercantile pushing a stroller, but she was too polite to ask outright.

We talked for another minute before I managed to extract myself from the conversation. On my way to the back of the store, I had to exchange polite greetings with Connie, Hanson Sandoval, and Clayton Spilling. All three of them glanced curiously at Tully, and though none of them asked me about him directly, either, I knew they’d be wondering and talking it over the minute I left. I had a reputation in town for valuing my privacy, but there was no such thing as privacy in Majestic, and I realized belatedly another night without a crib might have been a decent price to pay to keep everyone’s curious stares away from me.

“You want the fold-up kind or—” Tully glanced at me and abruptly stopped speaking. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Why?”

He glanced over my shoulder toward the front of the store and back to me. “You have a look on your face.”

“What look? I don’t have a look.”

He hesitated, like he was going to say something, then nodded and turned back to the shelves. “Fine. What kind of bed?—”

“What look?” I asked again, because apparently, curiosity really wanted to kill a cat.

He frowned and glanced back toward the front of the shop. “Annoyed. Or… I don’t know. Bothered? Whatever. I’m sure it’s none of my business.”

“I…” I started to agree—it really was none of his business, and I hadn’t forgotten that Tully’s questioning yesterday had an ulterior motive—but my mouth refused to follow that plan. “I don’t know what to tell people,” I admitted. “About Lellie,” I added in a lower voice.

Tully’s eyes narrowed. “I guess that depends on what your plan is. If you’re keeping her, you’re going to have to tell people. If you’re not keeping her?—”

“We’re not fucking discussing this here,” I snapped, glancing around to see if anyone might have overheard.

In fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to discuss the situation with Tully at all.

“Language,” he singsonged, turning back to the shelf.

I fought to keep my temper. Tully wasn’t wrong. In the past year, I’d mostly spent time around cowboys like Taza, who was an excellent hand but was also young and crass. Hanging out with Way and Silas was hardly better. But the last thing I needed was Tully pointing out how utterly unsuitable I was to raise a kid.

I was already well aware.

And I’d been going back and forth over what to do about that fact all night as I walked Lellie across the floor. She was a helpless baby, a motherless child, my daughter , and she needed someone to care for her. But the thought of me being that someone, of me letting her down…

“Can we just pick something?” I muttered. There weren’t many crib options—only a simple wooden crib and a foldable travel thing. Since there was no way I could keep Lellie, the foldable one was the obvious choice.

I grabbed it and set it on the ground next to the other items we’d selected. “What else do we need?”

Tully sniffed in a way that expressed disapproval of my choice… or maybe my attitude… or possibly my entire existence. “That depends on your plan, too, Dev. Are we just visiting long enough to discuss things? Or is Lellie staying with you for longer than that?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. “I don’t know yet, okay? And she’s sure as shit not going back to Dallas with you until I do.”

“Okay, then I guess we should at least get enough stuff for… a week?” Tully began ticking off items on his fingers at an alarming rate. With every additional item he mentioned, my blood pressure spiked higher.

“Enough,” I finally snapped. “Let’s start with the most important stuff. Food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep.”

He smiled. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Except you forgot breathing.”

“She seems to be handling that okay on her own.” I took a breath myself and exhaled. “Thank god,” I muttered.

“I brought two water bottles, but you might get a small plastic cup,” he suggested, moving down the shelf to the area with toddler supplies. “And you want some of these plastic spoons and plates, I think.”

We grabbed a few things. “What’s her clothes situation?”

“More than fine,” he said with a laugh. “Katie barely let the girl wear the same outfit twice. She’s good for a while until she goes through a growth spurt.”

I wondered when that kind of thing happened, but I didn’t dare ask and expose my ignorance. “Sleep stuff? Does she brush her teeth or…?” I noticed all the different offerings on the shelves and began to get overwhelmed. “Do I need gripe water? What the heck is a bath spout? Doesn’t my bathtub already have a spout? And what’s this for?” I pulled a silicone spatula off a rack and held it up.

Tully leaned in and squinted. “Uh. I admit, I don’t know, either. Is that for cooking? Like they have their own little baby spatula?”

I heard a feminine snort from somewhere behind me. Tully and I turned and saw someone shopping in the row behind us. I recognized her as one of Way’s friends, JoJo Reynolds, who seemed to always be surrounded by kids.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked.

“Diaper cream spatula. Do not waste your time or money on that crap. Use your fingers like a normal person.”

My eyes must have gotten wide because she laughed again. “Relax, Dev. Your friend’s daughter is probably too old to need diaper cream.” She leaned around me to Tully. “How old is she? Eighteen months?”

My gut tightened uncomfortably, and I felt the sudden urge to declare Lellie as my own rather than let people continue to think she was Tully’s. I opened my mouth to answer before he could.

“She’s…” I began, but then I stopped.

I didn’t know how old my own daughter was. I knew when I’d done my part, but had no clue about how long the rest of the process had taken.

Jesus . As if I needed more proof I wasn’t cut out for this shit.

I gestured at Tully to answer, but to my surprise, he seemed just as hesitant. “She’s, ah…” He glanced at me with wide eyes.

“Her birthday…?” I prompted. He’d said he’d been there when she was born, right?

“Oh.” He nodded. “February.”

“Not this February,” I argued. That was impossible. Lellie was way too big… wasn’t she?

Panic stirred in my gut. If we couldn’t come up with something, JoJo was probably going to call the cops.

“No, the February before. So she’s… yeah, fifteen months,” Tully finished lamely. “You nailed it.”

I nodded as if adding weight to his statement.

Thankfully, JoJo didn’t seem to notice our bumbling. She made a sympathetic noise. “That’s a challenging stage, isn’t it? They want to walk on their own, but they fall down at the drop of a hat, and they cry over the strangest things. I remember when JJ was that age. Total nightmare. But then you’ll look at their fat little hand and remember holding them as a newborn…” She sighed. “Next thing you know, your husband gives you a third glass of wine and talks you into another.”

I blinked at her. “That’s…”

“Probably not going to happen,” Tully finished quickly. “But thanks for the info about the spatula.”

She waved her hand. “Sure. Dev here knows if you have any questions about kid stuff, you can come to me. I’m JoJo, by the way.”

“Tully Bowman,” he said with a genuine smile. “Thanks.”

“Anytime.” She looked from me to Tully and back again, and I could tell from her delighted expression that she was adding up one and one and getting… the absolute wrong answer. But she didn’t ask for clarification any more than anyone else had. Instead, she turned around and headed to a different section of the store.

“Are we done now?” I murmured, focusing on the shelf full of brightly colored baby stuff. “Surely one small human can’t require more stuff.”

“February seventh,” he said in a soft voice. “I blanked on it when she asked, and I hadn’t done the age math in a while, but it’s February seventh.”

I glanced over at him as my brain slotted his words into place. Lellie’s birthday. “Oh.” I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s…” My brother Matt’s birthday, too. I didn’t know how that coincidence had come to be, but it felt like another layer of connection between me and the wide-eyed little girl in the stroller. “Thanks.”

He studied me for a beat before nodding and turning back to the shelves. “So, no butt spatula. But we probably need more diapers.”

We moved down to the diaper selection. There were rows and rows of packages with numbers and various descriptions on them. It reminded me of the time my grandfather had first taken me to the hardware store and asked me to get a hex bolt. I’d looked at the rows of open bins of screws and fasteners with complete overwhelm. How was I supposed to know which one was the one my grandfather had needed?

“I don’t suppose we could just close our eyes and point,” I said under my breath.

“I think… I think the ones she uses come in a blue package.”

I looked at three different brands in blue packages. “Sky blue? Navy blue? Royal blue?”

“That one,” he said, pointing. “I think?”

We moved down to the row of sky-blue packages. “What size?”

“She’s like… yea big.” He held out his hands several inches apart. “Like… her hips are this wide.”

A sudden bubble of laughter fought its way up my throat. “We’re going to get arrested,” I said in a low voice. “We cannot go up there and say we need diapers for someone with a butt about the width of a cantaloupe.”

Tully reached forward and picked a package off the shelf and rotated it until he found a size chart on the back. “Okay, says here she might be a… oh hell. This is by weight, not age. How the fuck are we supposed to know?”

We both turned to look at Lellie, who was glancing around with big eyes while still clutching the leather halter she’d wanted to hold when I’d introduced her to one of the horses earlier this morning.

Tully snorted. “When we get arrested, I’m telling them that’s your harness, not mine.”

I rubbed my face with both hands and tried to hide my smile. I was so fucking tired. “This is ridiculous.”

After reaching down to unbuckle her, I pulled her out of the stroller and hefted her up and down, trying to determine how much she weighed.

“She weighs a little less than a bag of fertilizer,” I said.

Tully blinked at me. “That’s… a strange comparison.”

“And those are twenty-five-pound bags.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled. “Fine. Then I’m getting the size three, and we’ll make it work. What else do we need?”

“I’m already worn-out,” I admitted, shifting Lellie and her leather harness to my hip.

“You good with the bed situation?”

I forced myself not to think about Tully Bowman and bed in the same sentence. It was too tempting, and I was tired enough for my defenses to be scattered all to hell.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

As we headed to the cashier to buy the supplies we’d grabbed, Lellie reached out and yanked a package of candy off a nearby display, causing several other packages to scatter on the ground. Tully and I both jumped to grab it out of her hand and clean up the mess, knocking heads in the process.

When we finally got to the cashier stand, Connie eyed the three of us as if trying to do the same relationship calculus JoJo had done. Were we brothers? Friends? Coworkers? Babysitters? Actors in a poorly executed farce?

“You need anything else? Wipes?” she asked.

I glanced at Tully, who looked unsure. “Uh…” I swallowed. “Yes?”

She nodded and moved out from behind the counter to fetch the wipes from the area where we’d found the diapers.

“Can we go home after this?” I asked in a low voice. I wasn’t sure how many more townsfolk encounters I could handle.

“Not unless you have a safe place for her to run out her energy,” Tully responded in the same low voice. “I was thinking we should take her to a playground or something first so she’ll nap afterward.” He looked over and met my eyes before adding, “And we need to have a conversation about why I’m here.”

I gritted my teeth. The last thing I wanted to do was have a conversation in which I’d have to spend more than half a second confronting the loss of Katie and the new reality of being a parent to her… our … child. But he was right. I’d been avoiding the conversation since his arrival, and I could no longer put it off. The sooner he laid out all the facts, the sooner he could leave…

And let me focus on finding a good family to raise Lellie.

“Fine,” I said just as Connie came back with a thick pack of wipes and plonked them on the counter next to the other items.

“How old is your…?” Connie asked Tully as she scanned the barcodes.

“Fifteen months,” I blurted.

Connie looked confused at my participation in the conversation. “What’s her name?”

I opened my mouth to answer her when Tully jumped in. “Eleanor,” he said.

“Lellie,” I added, feeling my face heat.

Connie glanced between the two of us before murmuring. “What a lovely name.” She told me the total of the order and waited while I pulled out my wallet. I hesitated for a moment, remembering belatedly that Silas had mentioned something about the Mercantile preferring card payments over cash for security reasons. I pulled out my credit card and handed it over.

Tully looked like he was going to say something but then clamped his mouth closed. We took our purchases outside and loaded them and the baby in the rental car before heading to the park a few blocks over.

Before I could exit the vehicle, Tully turned to face me. “You don’t have to worry about money. Katie left money to cover Lellie’s expenses.”

I blinked at him. “Worry about money?”

He looked even more uncomfortable than he was making me feel. “I saw you hesitate back there when you heard how much the total was. I was going to offer to cover it, but I didn’t want to make a big deal in front of the cashier. I know this is a small town, and people talk. But I can pay you back from Lellie’s?—”

“I got it,” I said with an incredulous laugh. The very idea of him thinking I couldn’t afford to pay for the diapers was ludicrous.

I could understand why he might think that, of course. In Tully’s eyes, I was a ranch hand living over a barn. The reality was I was a billionaire who had the kind of money that sometimes made me want to vomit. But my wealth, and that of the other guys in the brotherhood, was a closely guarded secret. And Tully Bowman was the last person I would ever tell about it.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. His cheeks had flushed deep red with discomfort. “I just wanted to let you know, since we haven’t had a chance to talk about the details yet…”

“I have a job, you know,” I said, opening the car door. “I believe I mentioned it earlier.” What I didn’t mention was the fact that Way didn’t actually pay me. It was more like we had a partnership, sharing the profits of our breeding program equally.

He sighed and opened his door. We worked together to get Lellie and her stuff out of the vehicle before making our way to a bench beside a small collection of toddler climbing structures. Several other kids were playing with attentive parents or minders nearby.

I wasn’t sure of the etiquette of this kind of situation. After glancing at the other adults and kids, I turned to Tully. “Do we just… release her into the wild?”

He bit his lip as if fighting a grin. “Yes. And then we watch to make sure she doesn’t get eaten by bears or coyotes.”

I nodded and took a seat on the edge of the bench, leaning forward to be ready for any rescue needed. A little boy with several cowlicks sticking up around his head looked particularly prone to misbehavior, so I kept an eagle eye on him as Lellie began toddling toward the structure.

“She’ll be fine,” Tully said softly as he took the bench next to me.

“Mpfh.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes while Lellie navigated her way around the large plastic turtle, patting it and testing it with one knee before finally climbing onto it next to another little girl.

“Can I speak about Katie’s will?”

His question was spoken in the same soft tone. No one was sitting close enough to be able to eavesdrop, and I was ready to get this conversation over with.

I took a breath and prepared myself. “Yes.”