Christine Rimmer - The M.D. She Had To Marry

Known he would come to her as soon as she did.

And that once he came, it would be harder than ever to send him away.

He smoothed a coil of hair back from her cheek. She savored the lovely, light caress.

He murmured so tenderly, “Say I can stay.”

She put off giving in. “I don’t want to hear any more talk about marriage. It’s out of the question, Logan. Do you understand?”

His eyes gleamed in satisfaction. “That’s a yes, right?”

“Not to marriage.”

“But you’ll let me stay here with you.”

“Just until the baby’s born. After that, you have to go. We can make arrangements for you to see the baby on a regular basis, and we can—”

He put a finger against her lips. “Shh. There’s no need to worry about all that now.”

She pulled her head back, away from the touch of that finger of his. It was too tempting by half, that finger. She might just get foolish and suck it right inside her mouth.

His grin seemed terribly smug.

She told him so. “I do not like the look on your face.”

“What look?” He reached for one of the grocery bags. “Come on. I’ll help you put this stuff away.”

As soon as the shopping bags were emptied, Logan went out and got his things from the car. There was only one bureau in the dark little cabin. A scarred mahogany monstrosity with a streaked mirror on top. It loomed against the wall by the rear door, sandwiched between a pair of crammed-full pine bookcases. Lacey gave him three of the eight drawers. He’d traveled light, so everything fit in the space she assigned him.

As he unpacked, Lacey sat in the old rocker in the corner, watching him, rocking slowly, her abdomen a hard mound taking up most of her lap, her head resting back, those blue eyes drooping a little.

When he finished, he shoved his empty bag and extra shoes under the daybed. Then he dropped onto the mattress, which was covered with a patchwork quilt. “That’s that.”

“Umm,” she said softly. The rocker creaked as she idly moved it back and forth.

He leaned an elbow on the ironwork bedstead and allowed himself the luxury of just looking at her.

She looked good. Her skin glowed with health and her golden hair still possessed the glossy sheen he remembered. Pregnancy seemed to agree with her. That pleased him. He wanted more children, after this one. A whole house full. It wouldn’t be the way it had been when he was a boy, just him and his father and the endless string of housekeepers who had never managed to take the place that should have been filled by a wife and mother.

His kids would have more than that. His kids would have brothers and sisters—and both of their parents. There would be noise and laughter and a feeling of belonging.

Lacey went on rocking—and she smiled.

He wanted to touch her, to put his hand on the fine, smooth skin of her cheek, to run it down over her throat and then over her breasts, which looked sweet and firm and full, even beneath the shapeless denim dress she wore. He wanted to spread both hands on her belly, test the hardness of it now, when she was so close to term, maybe even get lucky and feel his baby kick.

But he knew she wouldn’t allow such intimate explorations of her body. Not now. Not so soon after he’d forced himself back into her life.

He was going to have to wait to have his hands on her. Probably until after he had managed to convince her to marry him.

Well, fair enough. He’d waited nine months, telling himself most of the time that this physical yearning he felt for Jenna’s little sister would eventually pass.

It hadn’t. And recently he’d allowed himself to accept the fact that it was only Mother Nature playing at irony.

Lacey Bravo, of all people, was his sexual ideal.

Explain it? He couldn’t, didn’t really even care to. Human beings were primates, after all, aroused by things they didn’t consciously understand. By certain scents and secretions. Desire had nothing at all to do with logic. It was a chemical reaction, the natural attraction of one healthy specimen for another, designed to perpetuate the species.

Now that Lacey was having his baby and he meant to marry her, he found it a real bonus that he wanted her so much. They might have their problems in a lot of different areas, but he didn’t think sex was going to be one of them.

She stopped rocking and lifted her head off the backrest. “Are you tired?”

He almost said no. But then he reconsidered. He could use a nap, as a matter of fact. He’d been up well before dawn. And he hadn’t been getting much sleep in the last week anyway, not since her letter had arrived.

“A little,” he said. “I’ll lie down for a while if you will, too.” He wanted to make certain she got plenty of rest.

“It’s a deal.” She put both hands on the rocker arms and levered herself to a standing position.

He asked, in a tone as offhand as he could make it, “Is there a double bed behind that curtain?”

She gave him a lazy grin. “Nice try. You get the daybed.” She shuffled out the back door. After a few minutes, he heard the toilet flush. She came back in, only to disappear behind the curtain in the corner.

He paid a short visit to the bathroom himself, then took off his shoes and lay down. Like every other piece of furniture in the cabin, the bed appeared to be something salvaged from an earlier era. It had creaky springs and a lumpy mattress and it wasn’t long enough to fully accommodate his six-foot-three-inch frame. But he stretched out as best he could, letting his stocking feet hang over the edge and pulling one of the long sausage-shaped bolster pillows under his head.

A strange kind of peace settled over him, a deep relaxation, a sense of well-being. It was a state he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He dropped off to sleep like a rock falling down a well.

The next thing he knew, someone was knocking on the door.

Logan bolted to a sitting position, blinking and staring around him, wondering where the hell he was.

Then it all fell into place. The long trip from California. To this cabin. In Wyoming. Lacey. Pregnant with his baby. She was resting now, on the other side of that curtain over there. He glanced at his Rolex. She’d been in there for less than an hour.

And whatever idiot had dropped in for a visit would probably wake her with the next knock.

He jumped to his feet and padded swiftly to the door. When he pulled it open, he found a cowboy on the other side. Behind the cowboy, hitched to one of the poles that held up the porch, a handsome horse with a reddish-brown coat let out a low snort and flicked his shiny tail at a couple of flies.

The cowboy lifted his hat in greeting, then settled it back on his head. “I’m Zach Bravo.” His gaze shifted down, paused on Logan’s stocking feet, then quickly shifted up again. “Just thought I’d stop by and check on things out here.”

“Logan?” It was Lacey’s voice, sounding slow and sleepy, from the other end of the room. “Who is it?” She stood just beyond the curtain in the corner, her feet bare, her face soft and her hair mussed from sleep.

“It’s Zach,” said the cowboy, craning to see around Logan, who had positioned himself squarely in the open doorway.

Lacey grinned and started toward them. “Come on in. I can probably scare up a beer if you want one.”

Zach Bravo stayed where he was. “No. Got to get a move on. Never enough hours in a day around here. But Tess asked me to see if you wanted to come over to the house for dinner tonight. Around six?”

Logan stepped aside a little as Lacey came up next to him. “Zach, this is Dr. Logan Severance, a…dear friend.” Logan didn’t miss her slight hesitation over what to call him. He’d bet his license to practice medicine that Zach Bravo didn’t miss it either.

“Pleased to meet you.” The rancher held out a tough brown hand.

Logan took it, gave it a firm shake. “The pleasure is mine.”

“You’ll come for dinner then…both of you?”

Lacey lifted an eyebrow at Logan. He nodded and she smiled at her cousin. “We’ll be there. Six o’clock.”

“So I’m your dear friend,” Logan challenged the minute Zach Bravo had mounted his horse and trotted away down the dirt road that led to the cluster of ranch buildings just over the next rise.

Lacey made a noise in her throat. “What should I have said? Former lover? The father of my child?”

“How about husband?”

“But that wouldn’t be true, now, would it?”

“We could make it true.”

She looked at him for a long, cool moment, then announced defiantly, “Zach comes out to check on me two or three times a day, which is just another reason why I’m perfectly safe on my own here.”

“I’d say he came to check on me this time.”

“Right. He’s protective. More proof that I’m in no danger at all, as I’ve constantly tried to make you realize. You simply do not have to stay in this cabin with me. If you want to be here when the baby’s born, you could take a room in the motel in town and—”

“I’m not leaving, Lacey—and your cousin strikes me as a conservative man, the kind of man who would feel a lot better if you were married to the father of your child.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You are truly relentless. Now we should get married so as not to offend Zach’s conservative sensibilities?”

“I’m only pointing out that—”

“Logan. You said you would drop it.”

Lacey gave him her best unwavering stare. She was wondering, as she had more than once in the past nine months, how she could love such an obnoxious man.

He stared right back, which forced her to demand, “Are you dropping it, Logan?”

He made a growling sound. “All right, all right. I’m dropping it.”

“Good.”

His handsome face had settled into a scowl. She watched him rearrange it to something more gentle. “We’ve got another hour and a half before we have to make our appearance at your cousin’s house. Why don’t you go on back behind that curtain and lie down again?”

She blew a tangled curl out of her eye. “No, thanks. I’m wide awake now.” She marched to the sleeping nook, ducked inside and came out with her lace-up hiking boots.

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What are you doing?”

She sat in the rocker and pulled on one of the boots. It wasn’t easy, working around the bulge of her stomach, but she’d had a lot of practice in the past few weeks. Huffing and puffing, she tied the boot, pulled on the other one, tied it up, too.

“Lacey.”

She stood, turned to the bureau, picked up the brush lying on top and went to work on her hair. Their eyes met in the mirror. “I’m going out behind the cabin a ways. There’s a creek that runs by back there. Very picturesque. I’ve been doing a few sketches. Willows and cottonwoods, a few cows and their calves…” He was scowling again. She pretended not to notice. “I’ll be back in an hour or so, in plenty of time for dinner with Zach and Tess and the family.”

“Are you sure that you should—?”

She turned and pointed the brush at him. “Don’t, all right? Just…don’t. Nothing’s going to happen to me down by the creek. It’s barely a hundred yards from the back door, for heaven’s sake.”

“What if some big bull comes at you?”

“It’s not an issue.”

“This is a cattle ranch, isn’t it? If I’m not mistaken, bulls live on cattle ranches.”

She struggled to contain her building exasperation. “There’s a barbed-wire fence that runs between this particular spot on the creek and those cattle I mentioned. If there are any bulls nearby, they would most likely be on the other side of that fence.”