Chapter 7
Seven
“ A re you sure you’re up for this walk?” Sam asked as he stood from his desk. Evie forced her eyes to remain on his face as he walked over to the wall and grabbed his hat. The man was lethal in his denim jeans and the tight Red River Ranch shirt he was wearing made her mouth water.
She’d been shocked, to say the least, about his apology the night before.
“Of course. I’ve been here a while now, and I haven’t even seen all the ranch has to offer. I’m excited. There’s even a little snack all packed for us in case we get hungry while we’re adventuring.”
Evie held up the container of chocolate chip cookies she baked the night before and then slid them into her backpack.
“What if I’m hungry now?” Sam laughed.
“I think I can spare a couple of cookies now if you’d like.”
Sam moved to take the backpack from Evie, but stopped short when she gasped.
“What? What’s wrong? ”
“Were you just about to take food from a pregnant woman?” A smile stretched across her face.
With his hands up by his face, he returned her smile. “No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it. But I also would never allow a woman, especially one already carrying another life, to hike with our rations. You made them, it’s only fair I tote them around.”
“Hmm. I guess I’ll agree to that, but only because Jellybean is more than enough extra weight to carry around and my back has been killing me lately.”
Their conversation slowed as they made their way out of the barn. Evie took a deep breath in, the fresh air of Bell Ridge never ceasing to amaze her. They walked past Sylvie, busy pulling weeds and old plants from her garden.
“Mom, you know I’ll be more than happy to help you with that later.”
“Nonsense. I need to get it taken care of before I start planting tomorrow. It’s good for me to get my hands dirty. You two have a nice time on your walk. Oh Sam, do you have your?—”
“Yeah, Mom. Don’t worry. I’m carrying the satellite phone too.”
“Good. Well, have fun. Don’t get into too much trouble!”
Evie waved to Sylvie.
“Your mom is great.”
“She is. She’s also pretty eccentric.”
“I love that. You know, she’s been telling me things about Jellybean. I’m excited to see if she’s right.”
A crease formed between his brows. “Things like what?”
“Oh, just what color eyes she’s going to have, or her hair color.”
“Really? Well, I mean, it’s pretty much a fifty-fifty guess, right?”
“I don’t know. I believe her. She said the baby is going to have dark brown eyes and curly hair. I love that.”
“You have curly hair.”
Evie laughed, looking down at the hair cascading over her shoulder.
“Sam. I curl my hair.”
“What?”
“In the morning, before work. I curl my hair. It’s not naturally curly.”
“Hm. I guess I can start the list now of things I learned about Evie today.”
“Is that something you’re keeping track of?” she asked.
He nodded, his dimples sneaking out as he smiled at her.
“Well, in that case here’s another for your list. I think spring might be my favorite season.”
“Really? I’m a fall guy, through and through. Something about the first crisp night in October, it just hits my soul differently than any other time of year.”
“I love seeing the land come back to life after winter,” Evie admitted. “There’s something really beautiful about watching the world around us be reborn.”
“That’s true.”
She felt her cheeks warm as Sam’s gaze lingered on her. “I wish I had been here for bluebell season. I missed it by just a few weeks, I think.”
“Bluebell?”
“Yeah, those pretty flowers you see in the fields.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Bluebonnets.”
“The butter?”
“What?”
Now it was her turn to chuckle. “Blue Bonnet is a type of butter. Or, maybe margarine? It comes in a tub. In the grocery store. My nana used to save the containers and store all her sewing odds and ends in them. ”
“No.” He smiled. “Texas bluebells are a type of wildflower, but not the ones that tourists flock here for. Bluebonnets are the flowers you are thinking of. They grow in a field and attract a bunch of annoying tourists every spring.”
“Oh.” Evie laughed. “I guess I can add that to my list of things I learned today. I was absolutely thinking about bluebonnets.”
“It’s definitely something special to see, if you can find a place that hasn’t been trampled by a million out-of-towners. Even though you missed it now, there’s always next year.”
“True.” Evie patted her stomach. “And Jellybean will be here then. I can lay her down in them and take some really cute pictures.”
Sam groaned, shaking his head back and forth as he took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his brow. Damn, that shouldn’t be stirring up wild and crazy thoughts that had her core clenching. Stupid pregnancy hormones. If she wasn’t crying lately, she was horny as hell.
Focus, Evie. Less drooling at the sexy cowboy, more chit chat. This was the most open he’d been since she got to the ranch, and she wasn’t about to lose the headway she was making with him.
“What? Why are you laughing at me?”
“You’re already planning photo shoots for your baby?”
“Well, yes. I’m a Pinterest mom, through and through.”
“Do I even want to know what that is?”
“Probably not. But I’m going to tell you anyway, Cowboy. It’s an arts and crafts mom. She finds all these elaborate party or activity ideas from the website and recreates them for her kid.”
“Pinterest is a website?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like a lot of work. ”
“Oh, I’m sure it is! But I want Jellybean to have the best childhood. I want her to have so many happy memories that even if there is a sad one sprinkled in there, she isn’t overwhelmed by it.”
“This looks like a nice place to stop for a few minutes.” Evie hoped Sam would agree. Carting Jellybean through the pastures and across the sloped landscape of the ranch had proven more difficult than she’d anticipated, and her back was aching more than it already had been over the last few weeks as her center of gravity shifted.
“This is perfect. One of my favorite places to just come out and think.” Sam set down the backpack and pulled out the blanket Evie had packed.
“It does seem really peaceful.” She grabbed two corners from him and spread the fabric out over the grass.
“Evie, if this is too personal, just tell me to mind my own business.”
She grimaced, sitting down and taking a long drink from her water bottle. “Go ahead. I try to be an open book.”
“Why did you leave your last job?”
Wow. That wasn’t the question she was expecting him to ask. Her anxious stomach rolled as she thought about how to explain everything that had happened.
“It was a really complicated situation.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t need to answer that. As your boss, I probably have no right to ask. I just remember seeing on your resume that you were with that office for years. Doesn’t seem like the right timing to just up and leave them.” He nodded towards her belly and she understood what he was saying.
“You’re not really my boss, right?” she joked .
“I guess not.” Sam slid the backpack in front of himself and rummaged through to get the container of cookies out. Evie’s eyes trailed down his legs and to the grass in front of them. How on earth was she supposed to start sharing this story?
“I didn’t leave by choice,” she blurted out. Great. Her mind just decided to go the very direct route, apparently. “My boss accused me of stealing from the company.”
“What?” Sam’s eyes snapped to her, his hands stilling in the cookie container.
“We had a great working relationship, or at least, I thought we did. He was always so nice to me. Friendly. Never anything more. He would walk me to my car at the end of the day when we were the last two in the office to make sure I was safe.”
She plucked a few blades of grass and let them blow away in the breeze as the rush of memories came flooding back. “Things changed. He was more flirty. More pushy. When I was first pregnant with Jellybean, he tried to ask me out on a date, but I turned him down. It was inappropriate, and I just wasn’t ever attracted to him. Sure, I thought we were friends, but there wasn’t ever that spark. I guess he decided he wasn’t okay with that, because he started harassing me about my performance, questioning my work ethic. And when I finally had the courage to share about the baby, he accused me the next day of stealing funds from his business. There was a really big investigation, my name was even leaked to a local news agency who thought it would be a good idea to print a story without all the facts. I was able to prove I was innocent, but they let me go. Ten years of my life, the stability for Jellybean, all gone in the blink of an eye.”
“Christ, Evie.”
“I just want you to know, Sam, I am being one hundred percent truthful with you. I never took anything from that company except for my paycheck. I would never do anything like what they accused me of.”
“Why come to Texas? Isn’t the father of your baby worried about you being so far from home?”
He’d held out much longer than she thought he would. Of course, everyone on the ranch was probably very interested in why a pregnant woman would uproot her life and do so without the father of her baby. She couldn’t fault him for wondering. It seemed like that was all people wanted to know in her old life, too. Where was the baby’s father? How would she manage doing things on her own? Did she really think that just having a mother was good for a child?
“There isn’t one.”
Sam couldn’t have heard her correctly. No father? Had something happened to her? That was the only thing he could think of. That she was somehow attacked and the father of her baby was the man who…
“Are you okay?”
Sam lifted his eyes from her belly, meeting a sea of concern. If she’d known about his heart, it would have been rightfully placed. He’d gotten so worried about what could have happened to her that his chest felt funny, in all the wrong ways.
“I’m fine,” he grumbled, pushing his hand into the muscle over his heart that was aching something fierce. “Are you?”
“Of course I am.”
“Please tell me that something didn’t… I mean, you weren’t…”
She looked confused at first, but he recognized the second she understood what he was worried about.
“God, no, Sam. Nothing bad happened.” Evie shook her head frantically and his chest loosened just a little bit. He hadn’t been very concerned with the chance of being shocked by the device in his chest since his surgery, but damn, it felt like a real possibility just then.
“I mean, I didn’t conceive this baby the normal way. There is a biological father, obviously, but I just know him as number one-sixty-seven.”
She fucking used a sperm donor. She really was all on her own.
“You decided to have a baby by yourself?”
Her shoulders squared as if she was ready to face some sort of judgment. But there wouldn’t be any from him.
“I did. I’ve always wanted to be a mom, and there just wasn’t ever a man in my life who I could see starting a family with. My career was stable at the time, I had a beautiful apartment and a group of friends I thought would support me, so when I turned thirty, I went for it.”
“Turning thirty isn’t growing old though. You had time.”
“Did I? I watched everyone I knew moving forward with their lives. My friends all dated. Got engaged. Threw big weddings where I stood by their side and smiled through my pain at being the perpetually single friend. They began having babies and I couldn’t just wait. I’d still be just waiting, Sam. I’d still be the one all alone, waiting to be chosen. I couldn’t do that to myself anymore.”
“You’re incredibly brave, Evie.”
She looked shocked that those were the words he chose to share after everything she’d said, but it was true. Evie was going to make sure her dreams came true no matter what. That was inspiring to him. If he hadn’t had to put his dreams on hold for his own family…
“I don’t know about that, Cowboy. A lot of people might call me selfish. Actually, a lot of people have.”
“Yeah, well, those people need to get a reality check. How does your family feel about you doing this on your own? Hell, they can’t be too happy about you coming all the way down to Texas.”
“My mom and dad died in a plane crash when I was seventeen.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Evie smiled before taking a drink from her water bottle while he took another bite of his cookie. “I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time when I found out about Jellybean.”
“You don’t need to apologize. Your concerns were valid.”
“You were right, though. In just the short time you’ve been here, I’ve learned how invaluable you are. Your old boss was an idiot, but his loss is my gain.”
“Thanks for saying that. I already love it here so much. Bell Ridge feels like exactly where I want to raise my sweet girl.”
He liked hearing that way too much. If Evie was starting to feel at home in Bell Ridge, then maybe she would stick around.
“So, you decided to have a baby all on your own, and badda-bing, along came Jellybean?”
“Something like that.”
He arched his eyebrow. She was trying to hide it, but he could hear the emotion bleeding into the words she said.
“Why do I feel like that’s not the case?”
“I was pregnant before Jellybean, but I lost that baby. It was a little boy.” He watched as she played with the frayed edge of the picnic blanket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get emotional. Pregnancy hormones.”
“I’m so sorry, Evie. Did you have other family to support you through that?”
“The only other family member I had after my parents died was Nana, but she passed about five years ago. It is well and truly just me and Jellybean.”
“You went through your miscarriage alone?”
The thought of Evie alone, devastated from losing the one thing she wanted the most in her life, turned Sam’s stomach sour. He prayed the next words out of her mouth would be about friends who stepped up to support her. Or even fucking coworkers. Someone. Anyone.
She nodded and he wanted to knock someone on their ass. “It was still early. I hadn’t told anyone I was trying and before I could… All within a few weeks I saw his heartbeat, found out he was a little boy, and then…” Her fingers ran through the condensation dripping down the outside of her bottle. It made him want to rip the damn thing out of her hand and lace his fingers through hers. He’d had so much support since his heart gave up, he was sick of it.
But Evie had no one. No one to hold her hand through what was clearly something so fucking heartbreaking that she couldn’t look him in the eye as she talked about it.
“It was hard, and so scary, but I got through it. And now Jellybean and I have our own little guardian angel. It feels wrong that he’ll never be here with me, and I wish he was every single day, but I know if he was, I wouldn’t have Jellybean and I don’t know, something about that feels wrong too.”
“I’m glad you and Jellybean are here.” He looked down at her belly again and felt his face turning what was surely a deep shade of red. “Did you give him a name?”
Her breath caught and for a moment, he thought she was going to let the tears gathered in her eyes spill free. But that wasn’t Evie. He’d learned that after the first day of being a fucking asshole to her. “No one has ever asked me that before.”
And that fucking pissed him off.
“God, Evie. You didn’t deserve to have no one with you through losing your son. I’d like to know his name, if you settled on one.”
“I did. I named him Bennett. It means ‘miracle’.”
“Bennett,” he repeated. “That’s a good, strong name. I’m glad you and Jellybean have Bennett to look after you.”