Kissing her, his body hardened so fast it left him a little dizzy. It always seemed to be this way with her. He took a deep breath and tried to focus. If he didn’t already know what he was going to do before, he did now. But he still needed time to make some plans and the sooner he got started on them the better.
“Why don’t you bring Seth out to the arena when he wakes up and I’ll give him a real horseback ride?” he suggested.
“He’d love that,” she said, smiling.
When he looked into her crystalline blue eyes, the emotion he saw there convinced him that everything was going to work out to his satisfaction. He was not only going to pay her back taxes, but he was also going to take that leap of faith and ask her to become his wife.
* * *
When Heather paid the furnace repairman with the last of her reserves and closed the door behind him, she sighed heavily. Her and her son’s fate had just been sealed. They were going to be looking for somewhere else to live at the end of the month, but at least they would be warm until then.
“Hossy?” Seth asked, looking at the door.
“You’ve got a one-track mind, sweetie.” Scooping him up into her arms, she kissed his smooth baby-soft cheek. They had only been home a few hours and she already missed T.J. terribly. It seemed Seth did, too. “Maybe we’ll see him when he gets back from Stephenville.”
Her son looked at the door again before he shook his head. “Hossy,” he said stubbornly.
“You’re as determined to have your way as T.J. is,” she said, laughing.
When she finally got Seth distracted with the barn that mooed when the door was opened, she made a pot of coffee. Fighting tears, she took the local newspaper and started looking at what was available for rent in the area. For one reason or another, she found fault with all of the places in her price range and she was pretty sure she knew why. None of them were the Circle W or the Dusty Diamond.
Propping her elbow on the table, she rested her chin on the heel of her hand. She could understand feeling this way about her own ranch. It was home. But she really hadn’t expected to feel that way about the Dusty Diamond. Of course, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why she felt so at home there. That’s where T.J. was.
Lost in thought, it took a moment for her to realize that someone was knocking on the door. But apparently her son had heard the sound because when she started to get up from the table, he raced past her.
“Hossy! Hossy!” he shouted, turning back to give her a look that was meant to urge her to hurry up and open the door. “Hossy!”
Before she could reach for the knob, the door opened and T.J. walked in to pick up Seth. “Hey there, partner!”
As she watched, her son threw his little arms around T.J.’s neck and hugged him with all the exuberance an almost two-year-old could possess. “Mine hossy!”
Heather laughed. “I really need to work on him learning how to say T.J.”
He tickled her son’s tummy. “I’m fine with whatever he wants to call me.”
The smile T.J. gave her caused her heart to race and when he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him, Heather’s chest tightened with emotion. She realized now that she had been wrong in her assumption that no man could love another man’s child as much as he would his own. Just seeing T.J. and Seth together was all the proof she needed to dispel that misconception.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked, needing a moment to shore up her composure.
“That sounds good.” Kissing her, his gaze caught hers. “There’s something we need to talk over.”
“Oh, dear heavens,” she said, laughing as she walked over to pour him a cup of coffee. “The last time we went through this, I ended up meeting your family and they were wonderful.”
“Yeah, but you have to admit I had good reason to be nervous about that.” He grinned as he sat down at the table with Seth in his lap. “Having all of them together in one place is a lot like trying to keep up with what’s going on at a wild horse race,” he said, referring to the rodeo event where a team of three cowboys attempted to catch, saddle and ride a wild horse.
“There were times it was a bit of a free-for-all,” she admitted, setting his coffee on the table in front of him. Smiling as she sat in the chair across from him, she added, “But in a really good way.”
As she watched, he started to pick up his coffee mug, but then stopped with it halfway to his mouth. “Looking for somewhere else to live?” he asked, nodding toward the open newspaper still lying on the table.
Heather’s cheeks burned with humiliation as she stared at him. There was no sense in trying to be evasive or lying about it. He would eventually find out anyway. But that didn’t make her loss any easier to put into words.