Chapter Two
Pitkin, Colorado
The bay mare had thrown a shoe again.
Third time this month, and Logan had to crouch in the stall with the hoof braced between his knees, running his thumb along the frog to check for bruising, while the mare did her level best to lean her full weight onto his shoulder.
Twelve hundred pounds of horse pressing down on a man had a way of focusing the mind.
He shifted under her, keeping his boots planted in the straw, and dug a pebble out of the sole with the point of his hoof pick.
“Easy, girl. Hold still, and we’ll get this over with quick.”
She flicked an ear back at him. Impatient creature. The two of them had that in common.
Behind him, somewhere near the tack wall, Mason and Thomas huddled together, whispering like a pair of schoolgirls sharing secrets behind the privy.
They’d been at it all morning. Every time Logan turned around, there they stood, heads bent together, mouths going a mile a minute.
The second he took a step in their direction, they scattered like quail.
Soon enough, he kept his promise to her and let her hoof down gently.
Then he straightened and brushed straw from the knees of his trousers.
He’d patched the left knee twice already this season, with small and even stitches, because a man ought to take pride in his mending, and the fabric was holding just fine even if the color didn’t quite match anymore.
He’d tucked his shirt in crisp that morning despite the ranch work ahead, and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
Their mother used to tease him for that.
You iron your dungarees, Logan, and the cows won’t respect you any less for a wrinkle. And maybe she’d had a point, but he’d gone right on pressing his shirts anyway, and now the habit ran so deep he’d sooner skip breakfast than walk out the door looking rumpled.
Over by the tack wall, Mason elbowed Thomas in the ribs. Thomas swatted his arm. Mason jerked his chin toward Logan and mouthed something, and Thomas shook his head so hard his dark hair whipped across his forehead.
“Y’all wanna tell me what in tarnation’s got you two actin’ like you both swallowed a hornet’s nest?”
They split apart.
At nineteen, Mason looked fifteen with that round and soft face he’d never grown out of.
He put on the kind of wide-eyed innocent expression that had never once fooled Logan in the boy’s entire life.
He had the same chestnut hair as Logan, and the same pale blue eyes, but he was packed into a stockier, shorter frame that made him look like a condensed version of his eldest brother.
“Ain’t nothin’. Just talkin’.”
“You been just talkin’ since sunup. Every time I come within ten feet, you two clam up tighter’n a miser’s coin purse.”
Logan crossed his arms and fixed them with the look—the one their father used to give when he caught them filching biscuits before supper—which Logan had inherited along with the ranch and the responsibility of keeping this family from flying apart at the seams.
“Out with it. What’re you schemin’?”
At twenty-two, Thomas still carried himself with the loose-hipped confidence of a man who’d figured out early that a square jaw and a ready smile could get him out of most anything. He leaned back against the stall post and examined his fingernails.
“Can’t two brothers have a private conversation without gettin’ the third degree?”
“Not when those two brothers are you and Mason, no, sir.”
“That’s hurtful, Logan. That cuts me deep.”
“I’ll cut you deeper if you don’t—”
The sound came from outside. Faint at first. Thin, reedy, and raw like a cat caught in a fence.
Logan held up a hand, and all three of them went still.
It came again. Louder. A warbling wail, the kind of sound that burrowed straight through a man’s chest and set his teeth on edge.
“The devil is that?” Mason took a step toward the door.
Thomas cocked his head. “Sounds like—”
Logan pushed past them both and strode out of the stable into the morning light.
The sun hit him full in the face, and he squinted against it as he scanned the yard.
The house sat up the hill to the right, and the porch his father had rebuilt last spring caught the early light.
The fenceline stretched out to the left, marking the property’s edge where the grass gave way to scrub brush, and the land started its long roll toward the tree line.
Beyond that, there was nothing but open country for miles in every direction.
Nobody came out this far. Not anymore. Not since Logan had closed the ranch to visitors two years back, and not a soul in Pitkin questioned why when they all knew full well what had happened on that porch.
The wail cut through the air again, and, this time, it carried a quality he couldn’t mistake for anything but what it impossibly turned out to be.
A baby.
He broke into a jog, following the sound down the slope toward the fenceline.
Mason and Thomas scrambled after him, and he could hear Thomas muttering something under his breath that sounded a whole lot like a prayer, which would’ve been noteworthy under any circumstance, given Thomas’s well-documented lack of religious conviction.
The basket sat just inside the fence, right where the property met the dirt road that wound down to town.
Woven wicker, about the size of a washtub, with a checked cloth draped over the top that had slipped halfway off.
And underneath, red-faced, furious, and screaming with the full power of two tiny lungs, lay a baby.
Logan stopped in place. He stared at the basket, then at the baby. Then he turned around and looked at his brothers, who skidded to a halt behind him, looking about as dumbfounded as he’d ever seen two grown men look.
“All right,” he pointed at Mason. “Which one of you done this?”
“Done what?”
“Don’t play simple with me, boy. You two been skulkin’ around all mornin’ whisperin’ and carryin’ on, and now there’s a baby in a basket sittin’ on my property line. So which one of you put it there?”
Mason’s mouth dropped open. “You think I—where in the Sam Hill would I get a baby, Logan?”
“Don’t look at me, brother.” Thomas held up both palms. “I ain’t even been to town in three weeks on account of somebody won’t let me off this ranch long enough to—”
“This ain’t about that, Thomas, and you know it.”
“I’m just statin’ facts! Hard to father a child when you’re locked up on a ranch like a prisoner of—”
The baby screamed. All three of them flinched.
Logan looked down at the basket. The baby had worked one arm free of its wrappings and waved a tiny fist at the sky. A tuft of fine, pale hair stuck up from the top of its head like dandelion fluff.
Something in his chest pulled tight.
Logan sighed. “Well, we can’t just leave it here hollerin’ like that.”
He bent and scooped the basket up with both hands, careful, the way a man handled a crate of eggs he couldn’t afford to break.
The baby weighed almost nothing. The whole contraption, baby included, couldn’t have topped fifteen pounds, and it struck him as a terribly small amount of weight for something making that much noise.
“Bring it up to the house.” Mason was already backing up the slope. “Maybe Pa will know what to do.”
“Pa ain’t gonna know what to do with a baby any better’n we do.”
“Pa raised three babies, Logan.”
“And look how that turned out.”
Thomas snickered. Logan shot him a look that could’ve curdled milk and started up the hill toward the house, holding the basket out in front of him at arm’s length like it might go off.
The baby kept right on screaming.
“Hush now.” Logan shook the basket. “Hush up. We’re goin’ inside. It’s all right.”
The baby did not hush. The baby, if anything, found a second wind and a higher register.
By the time Logan shouldered through the front door and set the basket on the kitchen table, his ears rang, and his nerves hummed like telegraph wire in a windstorm.
The house wrapped around them, with every beam and board in its proper place because Logan had made sure of it.
He’d re-chinked the walls himself last autumn.
Sanded and oiled the kitchen table until the grain shone.
Hung every pot and pan on its designated hook above the stove, arranged by size, because order made life manageable.
The baby, in its wicker basket in the middle of Logan’s perfectly ordered kitchen table, represented chaos of the highest caliber.
“You reckon it’s hungry?” Mason peered into the basket, keeping a safe distance, as if the baby might lunge.
“How should I know? Do I look like a man who knows what babies want?”
“You look like a man who’s about two ticks from losin’ his composure, is what you look like.”
Logan scrubbed his hand down his clean-shaven face and blew out a breath.
Fine. All right. A baby.
On his property. In his kitchen. Making a sound that could strip paint off a barn. He could handle this. He handled everything else around here, every broken fence and lame horse and leaking roof and stubborn brother. One baby couldn’t be that much harder.
He reached into the basket and lifted the child out.
It fit easily in his hands.
Lord, it’s so small.
The baby blinked up at him with wet and unfocused eyes.
Its mouth worked up another wail on its blotchy face, and something about the weight of it, the warm, breathing, impossible fact of it resting against his roughened palms, made the kitchen go very quiet inside his own head even though the noise hadn’t changed one bit.
“Hey there.” He rocked it gently. “Hey. What’s all this fuss about, hm?”
The baby hiccupped, screwed up its face, and let out a whimper that trailed off into a shuddering sigh.
“That’s better. That’s more like it. Ain’t nobody here gonna hurt you.”
Mason and Thomas hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching him with twin expressions he chose to ignore because if either one of them said a single word, he’d put them both to work mucking out stalls until their backs gave out.
“You two.” He looked at the baby. “Saddle up and ride out. Check the road in both directions. Ask around town if anybody’s missin’ a child, or if somebody came through last night headin’ this way. Check the homesteads out past Miller’s Creek, too.”
“Both of us?” Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You fixin’ to hold down the fort with a baby all by your lonesome?”
“I’m fixin’ to find out where this child belongs and who had the sorry notion to leave it on a fence post like a sack of mail. Now git.”
Mason grabbed his hat off the hook by the door. Thomas followed, muttering something about how Logan had a particular knack for giving orders that conveniently left him out of the saddle, and the back door banged shut behind them.
The baby squirmed in Logan’s hands.
He shifted it up against his chest, tucking its head into the crook of his neck because that seemed like what a person ought to do, and the baby pressed its face into his collar and made a snuffling sound.
The kitchen settled around them. Just the creak of the house and the tick of the mantel clock and the baby’s ragged little breaths against his throat.
“All right,” Logan said to the empty room, to the baby, to whatever almighty force had decided his Tuesday needed complicating. “All right. Let’s figure this out.”