Cowboy Enchantment - By Pamela Browning Page 0,25

trail ride, and I’m looking forward to a long visit with my niece,” she said, driving home the point that he’d better live up to his promise.

Erica, sensing the tension between brother and sister, stood up. “I think I’ll have a beer myself,” she said. She started toward the kitchen.

“Good idea,” Justine said. “Drink a couple of those a day and you’ll gain weight.”

As Erica disappeared down the hall, Justine shot daggers at Hank, the look in her eyes warning him not to make problems. Inwardly he cursed himself for his own stupidity. If he hadn’t brought up the idea of the trail ride, it would never have been mentioned and Erica’s riding lesson would have gone on as planned. He should have had more sense.

Suddenly he couldn’t sit still, mostly because he hated the way Justine was always trying to impose her will on him. He got up and, not knowing what he was going to do when he got there, followed Erica into the kitchen.

He surprised Erica in the process of pulling a beer out of the far reaches of the refrigerator.

“I could use another,” he said, holding up his empty bottle though he’d previously had no intention of drinking a second.

Erica moved out of the way so he could reach into the refrigerator.

“Your Kaylie is darling,” she said, surprising him. She sounded as though she meant it.

“Thanks.” Instead of going back to the living room, Erica leaned back against the kitchen counter and twisted the top off her beer bottle. “I…well, babies are so little,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I was holding her right.”

“Neither was I when I first held her. She was a lot smaller then, too.”

Erica brought the bottle up to her mouth and drank, and he couldn’t help noticing her long neck and how it swept up into her jawline, which ended at her ear, barely visible under the curtain of hair falling back from her face. He looked away, wondering how it was that he could come undone by merely looking at a portion of her anatomy, and not a portion that usually had sexual connotations, either.

“At first I thought you didn’t like Kaylie,” he blurted, thinking how stupid he was to set himself up for her denial.

She surprised him. She regarded him levelly, not denying anything. “Actually, when I started to hold her, I didn’t know if I did or not, although I thought she was beautiful. She has her own little personality, doesn’t she?”

Erica couldn’t have replied in a way that would have satisfied him more. Before he knew it, he was replying with enthusiasm. “Kaylie is unique, and it seems like they all start out that way. Before I had a baby of my own, I thought, ‘Oh, a baby,’ when I saw one and left it at that. I figured they all behaved pretty much the same.”

“Don’t they?”

“Hardly. For instance, the ranch foreman’s baby is as different from Kaylie as night is from day.”

“How so?”

He shrugged and relaxed. “The foreman and his wife invited Kaylie and me to their house for dinner, and their baby is exactly the same age. Kaylie has never met a stranger, and she flirted with Dusty, the foreman, and cooed to his wife, Tanya, and smiled at their baby, Emma. By contrast, Emma didn’t seem to enjoy having strangers around. She cried when I tried to pick her up, and they told me that she rarely sleeps through the night. Kaylie was sleeping through the night by the time she was a couple of months old.”

Justine called from the living room, sounding every bit the solicitous aunt. “Erica, Hank, bring a towel when you come back, will you? Kaylie’s drooling a lot.”

“She’s starting to cut her first tooth, I think,” Hank called back. He strode across the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer. “It’s amazing,” he said over his shoulder to Erica. “When a baby enters your life, everything starts to revolve around it. Around her.”

“So it seems,” Erica murmured.

“I’d better deliver this wiper to Justine.” He walked past her, the towel in one hand, a beer in the other.

Erica followed him, and this time, instead of sitting beside Justine and Kaylie, who had taken over most of the couch, she sat down on the piano bench. From this position she could admire the chestnut highlights in Hank’s wavy hair, the rippling abs under his tight-fitting T-shirt. He caught her looking at him, and she quickly cut her eyes to the music. To