to his home, when the two of them weren’t married. Never mind the fact that they had a little girl as proof that their relationship had ventured beyond hand-holding.
Oh, Laurie was a sneaky one, all right. She had known just what would happen when she walked through that front door. She had also known that he would indulge her whim to stop by, because he had always given her everything she’d ever wanted.
She would pay for it, though. She would pay the minute he could think of something devious enough to get the upper hand again.
A half-hour later he walked into his small house on a far corner of Adams land and slammed the door behind him. The thud gave him a moment’s satisfaction, but he wouldn’t be truly satisfied until he had his daughter and Laurie under this roof with him.
If there’d been any choice at all, he would never have left them in town where they were free to sneak off the instant his back was turned. He’d just have to trust that Mrs. Jensen would be no more anxious than he was to let them go or that Val was strong-willed enough to rat out her boss if Laurie got a notion to run. That was an awful lot of blind faith for a man who’d had some lousy lessons in broken trust lately.
He sank down on the sofa, too exhausted to even bother with taking off his boots or hauling himself up to bed. Besides, he’d had too many very erotic images the past couple of days of Laurie being back in that bed with him to want to climb into it alone.
Why did he have to want her so damned much? Life would have been a whole lot less complicated if his daughter were the only one who mattered to him. He could battle to get custody of her and forget all about her mama.
But that wasn’t possible. He might have been furious with her, but one look at Laurie up in Montana and he’d known that he was going to have to fight tooth and nail for both of them. He was as captivated by Laurie as he’d ever been. She enchanted him as much as she infuriated him, a mix that had been dangerous to a man forever.
Anger, rage, betrayal all paled beside the white-hot need to hold her in his arms again, to bury himself deep inside her and hear her cries of pleasure mounting with every thrust of his body. Images hot enough to singe burned behind his eyelids and kept him restless.
When daybreak came, he hadn’t slept a wink. He was in no mood at all for the pounding on his door that had him dragging his butt off the sofa.
“All right, all right,” he muttered as he yanked open the door to find his father on his doorstep.
“So, you are here. Your mother told me she’d seen you come flying by in the middle of the night,” Cody Adams said, scowling at him. “I told her she had to be wrong, that it must have been one of the hands coming in late. Aren’t you supposed to be in Montana with Laurie?”
“It was four o’clock in the morning,” Harlan Patrick grumbled, ignoring the reference to Laurie. He figured they’d get back to her soon enough. “What was Mom doing up?”
“She never sleeps well when one of her chicks is far from the nest. She figures Sharon Lynn has Cord looking out for her now, so she can concentrate on you.”
“Heaven help me,” Harlan Patrick said fervently.
His father grinned. “You could go a long way toward settling her down if you brought Laurie and Amy Lynn back with you. Are they here? Did you convince them to come home?”
“More or less. I’m surprised Uncle Jordan didn’t fill you in.”
“What does that mean? What does Jordan know that I don’t?”
“It means I pulled a fast one to get them back here and they wound up in town with her mother,” he admitted reluctantly.
His father’s infamous grin broadened. “Not what you had in mind, was it?”
“No. That woman’s sneakier than Grandpa Harlan.”
“I doubt that,” his father said. “You’d better hope he hasn’t gotten wind that Laurie’s back or he’ll be meddling in your life, too.”
If turning the matchmaking over to his grandfather would have worked, Harlan Patrick was just about desperate enough to try it, but he wasn’t prepared to admit that to his father.
“I haven’t spoken to Grandpa Harlan since I