Page 33 of The Cowboy's Christmas Baby
Then she’d go home, pretend everything was fine—for Ford’s sake if not her own—and she’d help Maybe and Meredith decorate the damned tree.
Chapter Eleven
Miles
After a breakfastof pancakes and sausage in the ranch cookhouse alongside a few straggling guests and ranch hands, Miles’s parents followed him in their rental to his house in Grand.
Tate’s car wasn’t home, he noted on the drive past. He’d tried to call her, but it went straight to voicemail, and he didn’t dare leave her a message. What would he say?Make sure you buy extra-large?
“The tree is lovely,” his mother said after he’d given her a quick tour of his house. “And the kitchen is beautiful. But that coatrack has got to go.”
She put Iris down for a nap while he and his dad took a walk around the block. He could tell his dad had a lot left to say and the best way to get past this whole morning was to let him get it out of his system.
Miles shoved his gloved hands in his coat pockets and hunkered his chin in his collar. The frigid wind spinning off the mountains held the promise of snow, but the blue, cloudless sky called it a liar. He hadn’t gotten used to the cold, but it was on his agenda.
Miles’s three-bedroom bungalow was one of the larger homes on the street. Very few houses were more than one story, and the ones that were, tended to have only one or two bedrooms. No historic homes in this section of town, on the outskirts of Grand. The dwellings here had cropped up around the old dairy, now the taproom. He nodded to the neighbors who were also out for a stroll, also enjoying the sunshine, and took note of the babies bundled in strollers as potential playmates for Iris.
“You don’t need to bunk down with every blond piece of tail who throws herself at you, you know,” his dad started in, proving Tate wasn’t the only one who believed in the straightforward approach.
They’d had this conversation before though, and enough was enough. Miles loved his parents, but he was thirty-four, not fourteen, and no longer answered to them. They’d barged in on him unannounced. If they didn’t like what they found, that was on them for not calling ahead.
“Hold it right there,” he said. “Tate’s no piece of tail and she didn’t throw herself at me.”
His dad’s whole attitude changed. He went from antagonizing to paternal in the blink of an eye, as if he’d been handing out a life lesson that Miles was too slow to pick up on.
“No? Then what is she?” his dad probed. “Exactly how did your babysitter—which is how you described her to us—wind up in your bed?”
Suddenly, Miles saw his mistake and why Tate might be mad. He’d downplayed her importance to him. He’d given the impression she wasn’t worth introducing to his parents. It was doubly unfortunate that his dad had to point it out to him, because he should have figured it out on his own.
“I don’t know what she is yet,” he admitted. “The relationship is pretty new.” A little over a week old, in fact. He prayed his dad didn’t piece that together. “But she’s special.”
“She looks young.” His dad wasn’t being judgmental, simply stating the obvious.
“That’s part of the problem,” Miles said. “She’s twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five’s not all that young.”
“Depends on how you look at it. I’ve had my shot at a career. She’s still finding her path.” Babysitting and a brief stint as an elf… Those weren’t careers. She didn’t know what she wanted in life. And Miles didn’t want to stand in her way while she found out.
“She’s not ready for a ready-made family?” his dad guessed.
“I have no idea if she is, or she isn’t. Like I said—the relationship’s new.”
“I get it. It’s too soon to talk to her about it.” His dad draped an arm around Miles’s shoulders and rubbed his knuckles into Miles’s hair, something Miles had always hated when he was a kid but now found he liked. “If you care about her, maybe you should do some damage control. You could start off by giving her a proper introduction to your parents. You aren’t off the hook with us either, by the way—wait until your mother gets past the excitement of a new grandbaby and realizes she wasn’t the first to find out.”
One more conversation to look forward to.
“Welcome to the club,” Miles said. “I wasn’t the first to find out either.”
*
Miles
Miles deemed itsafe to leave his parents in charge of his daughter so they could bond, since right now, they were a lot happier with her than with him.
It was Tate’s mood he was more worried about. He was on his way to the ranch on the pretext that he had work to do, just so he could see if she was home and ignoring his calls, when he spotted her car at the Methodist church.
He parked next to it and got out.
