The Cowboy, The Baby And The Bride-To-Be. Cara Colter
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One
It was love at first sight.
Shayla had never used that expression before in her entire twenty-four years.
But then she had never seen anything like this before.
Montana.
The land was huge and breathtaking. Some people might have found the mile upon mile of treeless rolling plain desolate, but Shayla felt something in her opening up, soaring like that red-tailed hawk above her.
The prairie was in constant motion: the wind playing in tall golden grass, creating slow and sensuous waves; herds of pronghorns appearing in the distance, suddenly disappearing again; funny black-tipped spikes poking above the grass, turning out to be the ear tips of deer.
She unrolled the window on her ancient Volkswagen and took a deep breath of air that smelled of earth and sunshine, and something she couldn’t quite define.
“Love at first sight,” she repeated, out loud this time, letting it roll off her tongue.
“Bluv burst bite,” her passenger echoed.
Shayla started. “Nicky! You’re awake.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder at her little charge, strapped securely in the brand-new car seat in the back of her car.
“Did you see them? The deer and antelope? It’s just like the song,” she realized with delight. “You know the one. ‘Home, home on the range...”’
Nicky nodded solemnly, his eyes huge and black behind a sooty fringe of lashes. Dark loops of hair curled around his fat cheeks. He was a truly beautiful child, save for a tendency to beetle his brows and frown ferociously when he wanted his own way. Which was often.
“Me free,” he said, holding up a fistful of fingers.
Free, she thought. That’s what it was. The landscape spoke to something in her about wildness and freedom.
“That’s right,” she said, glancing at him in her rearview mirror. “Three.” She noticed bright dots of color on each of his cheeks. “We’re going to be at your uncle’s soon. What do you think about that?”
“Me free.”
She laughed. “Me, too. Having my first adventure at the ripe old age of twenty-four. Me, Shayla Morrison having an adventure!”
It wasn’t really an adventure. She was doing a friend a favor. That was all. But this landscape called out to a part of her that she hadn’t known existed.
A part of her that longed for an adventure.
Tentatively she pushed her foot down a little harder. No speed limit in Montana. She had never gone fast in her whole life. The road was good, straight, paved and empty. Why not fly?
“Me six,” Nicky announced.
“No, three.”
In her rearview mirror, she watched black eyebrows drop down, and a pug nose scrunch up.
“Six!”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re three, when you’re a tree,” Shayla sang lightly, “and it doesn’t matter if you are six if you are in a fix.”
“Ohhh,” Nicky breathed with delight. “Poppy Pepperseed.”
Shayla laughed again. Her laughter felt rich within her, as glorious as this sun-filled day. For the past two years she had worked out of her home, writing the music and lyrics for the “Poppy Pepperseed Show,” a locally-produced children’s TV program in Portland, Oregon. Though she didn’t do the voice or the singing for the program, Nicky invariably recognized when she became “Poppy.”
“Sing,” he commanded.
And so she sang. Nonsense lyrics that celebrated the huge sky and the circling hawks and the bouncing pronghorns. The next time she looked in the mirror her number-one fan was sound asleep.
She frowned. Again? How often did kids sleep? The red in his cheeks seemed to be deepening. He wasn’t sick, was he?
She gave herself a little shake. She worried too much. Worrying was her specialty.
It was probably just boredom. They had been traveling now for two days.
A week ago, her neighbor Maria, a young single mom she had met about a year ago at the apartment’s pool, had dropped Nicholas—Nicky—off for an afternoon as she occasionally did.
But by late that evening, the shy, beautiful Maria hadn’t come back. Nicky had fallen asleep on the couch, his thumb in his mouth, cuddling his hand-knit purple-and-turquoise dinosaur, Ralph. It wasn’t at all like Maria, who was soft-spoken and conscientious always, and Shayla began to wonder if she should start calling the hospitals.
When the phone rang, Shayla listened to the coins falling into place before Maria had come on the line.
“Shayla, I hate to ask, but could you keep Nicky for a day or two? Something has come up.”
“Are you all right?” Shayla asked. Maria’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away.
Maria laughed, and Shayla realized she had never heard her neighbor laugh before.
Of course she couldn’t keep Nicky. He was not exactly the kind of child content to play on the floor with his Tonka toys while she plunked away at her old piano. Her next deadline was looming large.
“Please?”
A note in Maria’s voice made her say yes. Her neighbor’s voice held the smallest thread of happiness.
Maria always seemed to Shayla to be too young to look so tired and overburdened.
What was a day or two? She would have to figure out a way to work with Nicky around. Maybe even test the songs on him. A novel concept, testing a children’s song on a real child.
What was a few days if it did something to take the sad and defeated slump out of Maria’s thin shoulders?
Two days had come and gone, and then Maria had phoned again. She couldn’t come back right away. Something had come up. An emergency. She wasn’t sure when she would be back, actually, maybe weeks. Could Shayla take Nicky to his uncle in Montana?
That thread of happiness ran even stronger in Maria’s voice.
“I can’t go to Montana, Maria. When are you going to be back? What do you mean weeks?”
She knew she could not keep Nicky for weeks. He was a small tyrant, ordering her around like some tiny generalissimo dictator. No wonder Maria always looked so tired!
“Nicky eat. Now.”
“Nicky go to pool. Now.”
“Nicky not sleep. Nicky swim. Now.”
“Nicky not eat green. Nicky eat red. Lick-rish. Now.”
“Nicky playground. Now.”
Shayla was beginning to hear the word now in her sleep.
If her choice was to either keep him for weeks or take him to his uncle in Montana, she was going to Montana.
She had written down Maria’s directions carefully and phoned in to work to tell them the music would be a little late. It was the first time in two years she had missed a deadline, but she was writing the Halloween episode, so she was nearly a month in advance of production, anyway.
As soon as she had started packing, she’d realized she felt happy.
“I think I wanted to get away,” she murmured to herself, pressing down the accelerator just a little bit more. Seventy-two miles an hour. It was absolutely heady stuff.
Away from what?
Her job? It was true that after two years of writing the music for Poppy, her career was something less than challenging now. There