Just a Cowboy and His Baby (Spikes & Spurs) (25 page)

Gemma picked up Holly’s car seat with one hand, her diaper bag with the other, and followed Trace out of the house. He turned around at the bottom step and kissed her on the forehead. The horizon split the sun on the eastern horizon, making it look like half an orange lying out there toward the Atlantic Ocean. Goodnight, Texas, was flat country with nothing but dirt, cotton, cows, and lots of summer blue sky. When they’d arrived the day before, Gemma’s soul felt as if it had come home. She loved the trees and rolling hills around Ringgold, but there was something majestic about nothing but land and sky.

“See you at noon. You sure you’re all right with watching her while I get some work done?” Trace touched Holly’s cheek.

“I’m fine with watching her, but I’m going with you,” Gemma said.

Teamer chuckled from the far end of the porch where he was sitting in a rocking chair that needed paint as bad as the house.

They both looked his way.

He threw up a palm. “Don’t mind me. Get on with the argument. Just don’t take too long. We’re wastin’ time.”

Trace jerked his eyes around to meet Gemma’s. She wouldn’t have let him win anyway, but she sure didn’t intend to lose the battle with Teamer watching.

“The hay field is no place for a baby,” he said.

“Momma raised all of us in a hay field, and darlin’, we did not have an air-conditioned tractor in those days. I can drive a tractor and get a helluva lot more done than sitting on the front porch of this house and worrying about your momma coming tonight.”

Trace started toward the pickup. “I said no!”

Teamer stood up and followed him.

Gemma stood still, but she raised her voice. “You don’t get to say jack shit, cowboy! Holly and I outvoted you. She says if she’s going to grow up on this place, then by damn, she’s going to learn how to be a ranchin’ woman. And does she need to remind you that her first days were spent in a feed box? So either we both go or you can stay home and I’ll go help Teamer cut hay. Either way, I’m goin’. Your choice as to whether you are or not.”

“You are some piece of work, Gemma O’Donnell,” Trace growled.

“You knew that before you asked me to come to your ranch for two weeks. As John Wayne said, ‘We’re burnin’ daylight.’ You stayin’ or are
we
goin’?”

Teamer chuckled.

“You are exasperating,” he said.

“That would be the pot calling the kettle black, now wouldn’t it?”

He exhaled loudly. “Okay, let’s go. You got enough diapers and bottles?”

“Right here. She’ll only need one feeding between now and noon. Should be just about break time.” She smiled.

“I wish Louis would’ve been here. We would’ve bet on which one of you would win and I would’ve made a dollar.” Teamer laughed again.

“Thank you for putting your money on me.” Gemma smiled.

“Don’t thank me. I know a good filly when I see one.” Teamer got into his old work truck and led the way to the pasture.

Gemma drove the big John Deere tractor with Holly in her car seat right beside her. The baby cooed and gooed along with the country music radio station and really made a lot of noise when the DJ played “You Look So Good in Love,” by George Strait. The cab was cool. George kept them entertained. And the tractor hummed right along, leaving mounds of alfalfa to cure in the hot sunshine.

They’d flown out of Washington still tied for the lead place in the finals. Billy Washington had come in from the bottom of the list to blow everyone out of the water at the Oregon rodeo with eighty-four points. Teamer had driven into Amarillo and picked them up at the airport the day before. She’d liked him from the minute she met him. He reminded her of her father, Cash. Slow talking, tall, lanky, and bright, twinkling eyes. The amazing thing was that thinking about her father did not make her homesick, and when she stepped foot on the ranch in Goodnight, looked at the little house and across the land to the sky on the far horizon, her soul had said that she was home.

“He’s got rocks for brains if he thinks he can boss me around just because we’re in his stomping territory, right, baby girl? Because it’s not just his territory anymore; it’s mine too. And the quicker he realizes it, the better off we’ll all be,” Gemma told Holly when they were in the tractor.

Holly smiled at Gemma’s voice.

“That’s right. He’s funny as a two-dollar bill for entertainin’ notions of leaving us in the house to stew and fret all day about his parents coming to visit. Thank God they’re staying with Teamer. I’d be crazy as a loon in a hailstorm if they were right in the house with us all weekend,” she talked to Holly. “And you’ll be meeting Granny and Grandpa for the first time, ladybug. Wonder if they’ll let you call them that or if they’ll want some kind of cutesy names.”

At six weeks Holly wasn’t interested in anything but getting her hand to her mouth and gnawing on it. She didn’t care that the second DNA had proven that she was indeed Trace’s child or that her name was formally now Holly Mary-Jo Coleman on her new amended birth certificate.

“I’m glad those new papers said that there isn’t a doubt in the world that you belong to your daddy. I wouldn’t have trusted a beer bottle DNA either,” she said as she whipped the big tractor around at the end of the hay field and started back across it, keeping the tires in the furrows.

The phone rang and she put it on speaker.

“Hello. Are you still mad at me?” she asked.

Trace’s laugh answered her. “Teamer says you remind him of his mother.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Gemma said.

“No, I’m not mad at you.”

“Good. How are you doin’ in your field? Gonna get it cut by suppertime?”

“Probably.”

“Betcha I cut more than you do today, and I’ve got a baby in the tractor,” she teased.

“Is everything a contest with you?” Trace asked.

“Of course. I’m the baby of five kids. We’d bet on who could run from the house to the barn fastest or who could swat the most flies on the back porch before dinner.”

“You are kidding me! You really counted dead flies?” Trace asked.

“Oh, yeah! I’m the queen. I got fifty-three one evening. But Raylen beat me when it came to catching fireflies and putting them in a jar.”

Trace laughed again. “I want half a dozen kids so they can do those things.”

Gemma was caught off guard and didn’t know how to answer him.

“You there?” he asked.

“I’m here. Why do I remind Teamer of his mother?”

“Grandma was headstrong, opinionated, and nobody got ahead of her. She was a pistol. Could outride and out-plow Grandpa in her youth,” Trace answered.

“That is a great compliment. I will have to thank him.”

Trace chuckled. “How’s Holly?”

“She says to tell you that her fist tastes real good and that she likes George Strait. She hasn’t fussed about riding in the tractor, so I think she’s going to be a good ranchin’ girl. We’ll have to let her decide for sure when she’s older. She might want to be a ballerina on the New York City stage and wear high-heeled shoes and business suits. And we need to start looking for a pony. She needs to start riding early on.”

“My daughter can wear high heels, but not in New York City. She’s a Texan and she’ll stay one,” Trace said.

“She’ll be whatever she wants to be,” Gemma argued. “If she decides she wants to be a woman astronaut, then by damn she can be one.”

“Like you are a bronc rider in a man’s world?” he asked.

“Don’t go there, Trace.”

“The main reason I called is to tell you that Mother and Dad are flying up in their plane instead of taking a commercial flight. They’ll be here at noon. Louis is cooking dinner for all of us in the house. We’ll be stopping for the day at about eleven so we can clean up a bit. I don’t expect you want to meet them wearing jeans with holes in the knees and with your hair in dog ears? Now, personally, I think you look like an angel in that getup, and the fact that you can drive a tractor and cut hay puts a halo above your head in Teamer’s eyes. But darlin’, Mother already gave me one dressing down for not telling her about that first dinner, so I’m not about to make that same mistake twice.”

“You better not ever do that again, Trace Coleman. I would like to stop at eleven so I can at least take a shower and get Holly all prettied up to meet them,” Gemma said.

“Another thing.” Trace paused again.

“Remember I’m bullheaded like your Granny Coleman,” she said.

“Oh, I’m finding that out the hard way. What would it take to talk you into coming back to Goodnight with me after the Washington rodeo? Your beauty shop is leased until the end of the year and it’s a helluva long way for me to go for a haircut. I could pay you,” he said.

Her heart thumped and then raced.

“You don’t have to pay me. I’ll do it,” she said. That gave him several more weeks to figure out that he couldn’t live without an opinionated woman like his grandmother had been.

“Oh, one more thing, darlin’.” His voice dropped down to a gravelly drawl.

“Trace, you’re about out of one more things,” she said.

“This is the last one. Are you wearing underpants?”

“Trace Coleman!”

“What color are they?”

“Holly is right here beside me.”

“Are they those little lacy things I took off with my teeth?”

“I told you…”

“Or are you going commando today so when we get home I can peel those clothes off you and make wild passionate love to you before we go to lunch?”

“You better curb your imagination, cowboy.”

“Can’t. It keeps thinking about you in those cute little underbritches. If Holly is taking a nap we could at least get a quickie.”

“You’d best start thinking about a dirty diaper or a shoulder full of sour milk to cool your jets down, because it’s going to take the whole hour for me and Holly to get beautiful.”

He laughed. “Darlin’, you and Holly are beautiful just like you are.”

***

Gemma unbuckled Holly, adjusted her bonnet, and handed her to Trace. “Here, you carry her inside, in your arms, not in the carrier.”

“Why?”

“Because your mother is going to want to hold her right now and you should be the one holding her the first time they see her,” Gemma explained.

Trace adjusted the baby in the crook of his left arm and laced his fingers with Gemma’s with his right hand. “Have I told you lately that you are an incredible woman?”

Gemma wore a white sundress, gold hoop earrings, and her lucky cowboy boots, the ones she usually reserved for bronc riding. Her dark hair had been washed, dried, and styled, and her makeup was flawless.

Trace had shaved, put on creased jeans and freshly shined boots, and a soft chambray shirt with pearl snaps, and Gemma had feathered his dark hair back with a handful of mousse.

Baby Holly was dolled up in a cute little white dress, a white lace bonnet with a wide brim, and white socks with lace ruffles. She smelled like baby lotion and looked like an angel with her dark hair and big eyes.

Not that it would matter anyway. Gemma and Trace could be wearing burlap feed bags tied at the waist with rope and their feet could be bare. The only thing Mary and Thomas Coleman were going to see was Holly.

“We are here,” Trace yelled at the door.

Mary got up from the rocking chair in the living area and walked toward him with her hands held out. He handed Holly over and grabbed Gemma’s hand tightly.

Thomas came from the kitchen and stood beside his wife as she looked down into the baby’s face, wide-eyed at the new person holding her. To Gemma it was a slow-motion scene, and she wondered if any one of the three would ever blink. Then tears filled Mary’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t brush them away but let them drop on her light blue sweater.

“She’s absolutely beautiful, Trace. She’s the image of you as a baby except for her eyes. I think they’re going to be dark green like your father’s and Gemma’s,” she said.

Gemma looked up at Trace.

He smiled and smacked a kiss on her forehead. “Yep, I believe they are. At first I thought they were brown, but the older she gets the greener they turn. Maybe someday she’ll be as pretty as Gemma.”

“I don’t mind being a grandpa, but it’s kind of tough thinkin’ that my trophy wife is a grandma,” Thomas said.

“If she’s lucky she’ll be as pretty as Gemma, and I’m not a trophy wife, Thomas Coleman. I wish I had a dozen of these. Come sit beside me, Gemma. You men go on and help Louis finish up the dinner,” Mary said.

Trace let go of Gemma’s hand, hugged his mother, shook hands with his father, and followed Teamer and his father into the kitchen. Gemma sat down on the sofa beside the rocking chair.

“So how do you feel about this baby?” Mary asked.

“I love her. I don’t have a child of my own, but I can’t believe it would be any closer to me than Holly is,” Gemma said honestly.

“I thought so. I could see it in your eyes. What are you going to do about it?”

Gemma was suddenly as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. “Well, to start with, Trace wants me to stay here until after the Vegas rodeo to help take care of her. I’m free to do that so I agreed. We’ll cross the next bridge after I whip his butt in that rodeo.”

“Teamer would give him this ranch or we’d buy it for him. What better place to raise my grandchild than in wide open spaces with plenty of room for her to grow?” Mary removed Holly’s bonnet and touched her hair. “We didn’t need to do that second DNA test. She looks just like Trace did when he was this age.”

Gemma pulled Holly’s socks off so Mary could count her toes. “He’s a proud man. He wants to know that he bought this ranch with his own money. And it made everyone more comfortable to have a real DNA swab and not one off a beer bottle.”

“They are all there, pretty and pink,” Mary said. “He should have told you that he was bringing you to meet us at the restaurant. Men don’t think sometimes.”

“He learned his lesson. He told me today.” Gemma smiled.

“I see that. You look lovely.”

“Thank you. Do you really want a dozen grandchildren?”

“Yes, I do. I wanted more children but had a problem after Trace was born and they had to do a hysterectomy. I’m glad you talked him into naming her after me,” Mary said.