Allison Leigh – The Rancher's Christmas Promise (страница 2)

The cop’s brown eyes looked pained. “Ryder—may I call you Ryder?” She didn’t wait for his permission, but plowed right on, anyway. “I’m sorry we have to be the bearer of bad news, but we believe your wife was the baby’s mother, and—”

At the word wife, what had been Ryder’s already-thin patience went by the wayside. “My wife ran out on me a year ago. Whatever she’s done since is her prob—”

“Not anymore,” the dark-haired guy said.

“What’d you say your name was?” Ryder met the other man’s gaze head-on, knowing perfectly well he hadn’t said his name. The pretty cop’s role there was obviously official. Same with the sweaty bald guy—he had to be from social services. But the third intruder? The guy who was watching him as though he’d already formed an opinion—a bad one?

“Grant Cooper.” The man’s voice was flat. “Karen’s my sister.”

“There’s your problem,” Ryder responded just as flatly. “My so-called wife’s name was Daisy. Daisy Miranda. You’ve got the wrong guy.” He pointedly reached around them for the door to show them out. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got ice to break so my animals can get at their water.”

“This is Karen.” Only because she was a little slip of a thing, the cop succeeded in maneuvering between him and the door. She held a wallet-sized photo up in front of his face.

Ryder’s nerves tightened even more than when he’d first opened the door to find these people on his front porch.

He didn’t want to touch the photograph or examine it. He didn’t need to. He recognized his own face just fine. In the picture, he’d been kissing the wedding ring he’d just put on Daisy’s finger. The wedding had been a whirlwind sort of thing, like everything else about their relationship. Three months start to finish, from the moment they met outside the bar where she’d just quit her job until the day she’d walked out on him two weeks after their wedding. That’s how long it had taken to meet, get hitched and get unhitched.

Though the unhitching part was still a work in progress. Not that he’d been holding on to hope that she’d return. But he’d had other things more important keeping him occupied than getting a formal divorce. Namely the Diamond-L ranch, which he’d purchased only a few months before meeting her. His only regret was that he hadn’t kept his attention entirely on the ranch all along. It would have saved him some grief. “Where’d you get that?”

The cop asked her own question. “Can you confirm this is you and your wife in this picture?”

His jaw felt tight. “Yeah.” Unfortunately. The Las Vegas wedding chapel had given them a cheap set of pictures. Ryder had tossed all of them in the fireplace, save the one the cop was holding now. He’d mailed that one to Daisy in response to a stupid postcard he’d gotten from her six months after she’d left him. A postcard on which she’d written only the words I’m sorry.

He still wasn’t sure what she’d meant. Sorry for leaving him without a word or warning? Or sorry she’d ever married him in the first place?

“You wrote this?” The cop had turned the photo over, revealing his handwriting on the back. So much for vows.

Ryder was actually a little surprised that it was so legible, considering how drunk he’d been at the time he’d sent the photo. He nodded once.

The cop looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry to say that she died in a car accident over New Year’s.”

He waited as the words sank in. Expecting to feel something. Was he supposed to feel bad? Maybe he did. He wasn’t sure. He’d known Daisy was a handful from the get-go. So when she took a powder the way she had, it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it had been.

But one thing was certain. Everything that Daisy had told him had been a lie. From start to finish.

He might be an uncomplicated guy, but he understood the bottom line facing him now. “And you want to pawn off her baby on me.” He looked the dark-haired guy in the face again. “Or do you just want money?” He lifted his arm, gesturing with the worn leather gloves. “Look around. All I’ve got is what you see. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a couple strangers making claims like yours get one finger on it.”

Grant’s eyes looked like flint. “As usual, my sister’s taste in men was worse than—”

“Gentlemen.” The other man mopped his forehead again, giving both Ryder and Grant wary looks even as he took a step between them. “Let’s keep our cool. The baby is our focus.”

Ryder ignored him. He pointed at Grant. “My wife never even told me she had a brother.”

“My sister never told me she had a husband.”

“The situation is complicated enough,” the cop interrupted, “without the two of you taking potshots at each other.” Her expression was troubled, but her voice was calm. And Ryder couldn’t miss the way she’d wrapped her hand familiarly around Grant’s arm. “Ray is right. What’s important here is the baby.”

“Yes. The baby under our protection.” Ray was obviously hoping to maintain control over the discussion. “There is no local record of the baby’s birth. Our only way left to establish who the child’s parents are is through you, Mr. Wilson. We’ve expended every other option.”

“You don’t even know the baby was hers?”

Ray looked pained. Grant looked like he wanted to punch something. Hell, maybe even Ryder. The cop just looked worried.

“The assumption is that your wife was the person to have left the baby at the home her former employer, Jaxon Swift, shared with his brother, Lincoln,” she said.

“Now, that does sound like Daisy.” Ryder knew he sounded bitter. “I only knew her a few months, but it was still long enough to learn she’s good at running out on people.”

Maybe he did feel a little bad about Daisy. He hadn’t gotten around to divorcing his absent wife. Now, if what these people said were true, he wouldn’t need to. Instead of being a man with a runaway wife, he was a man with a deceased one. There was probably something wrong with him for not feeling like his world had just been rocked. “But maybe you’re wrong. She wasn’t pregnant when she left me,” he said bluntly. He couldn’t let himself believe otherwise.

“Would you agree to a paternity test?”

“The court can compel you, Mr. Wilson,” Ray added when Ryder didn’t answer right away.

It was the wrong tack for Ray to take. Ryder had been down the whole paternity-accusation path before. He hadn’t taken kindly to it then, and he wasn’t inclined to now. “Daisy was my wife, loose as that term is in this case. A baby born to her during our marriage makes me the presumed father, whether there’s a test or not. But you don’t know that the baby was actually hers. You just admitted it. Which tells me the court probably isn’t on your side as much as you’re implying. Unless I say otherwise, and without you knowing who this baby’s mother is, I’m just a guy in a picture.”

“We should have brought Greer,” Grant said impatiently to the cop. “She’s used to guys like him.”

But the cop wasn’t listening to Grant. She was looking at Ryder with an earnest expression. “You aren’t just a guy in a picture. You’re our best hope for preventing the child we believe is Grant’s niece from being adopted by strangers.”

That’s when Ryder saw that she’d reached out to clasp Grant’s hand, their fingers entwined. So, she had a dog in this race.

He thought about pointing out that he was a stranger to them, too, no matter what sort of guy Grant had deemed Ryder to be. “And if I cooperated and the test confirms I’m not this baby’s father, you still wouldn’t have proof that Daisy is—” dammit “—was the baby’s mother.”

“If the test is positive, then we know she was,” Ray said. “Without your cooperation, the proof of Karen’s maternity is circumstantial. We admit that. But you were her husband. There’s no putative father. If you even suspected she’d become pregnant during your marriage, your very existence is enough to establish legal paternity, DNA proof or not.”

The cop looked even more earnest. “And the court can’t proceed with an adoption set in motion by Layla’s abandonment.”

The name startled him. “Layla!”

The three stared at him with varying degrees of surprise and expectation.

“Layla was my mother’s name.” His voice sounded gruff, even to his own ears. Whatever it was that Daisy had done with her child, using that name was a sure way of making sure he’d get involved. After only a few months together, she’d learned enough about him to know that.

He exhaled roughly. Slapped his leather gloves together. Then he stepped out of the way so he wasn’t blocking them from the rest of his home. “You’d better come inside and sit.” He felt weary all of a sudden. As if everything he’d accomplished in his thirty-four years was for nothing. What was that song? “There Goes My Life.”

“I expect this is gonna take a while to work out.” He glanced at the disheveled room, with its leather couch and oversize, wall-mounted television. That’s what happened when a man spent more time tending cows than he did anything else. He’d even tended some of them in this very room.

Fortunately, his aunt Adelaide would never need to know.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess, though.”