Suddenly a Father
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Melissa Senate
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18.1K
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37
Prologue
Was that a baby crying?
Nah.
Noah Dawson turned over in bed and tried to go back to sleep, but he heard the sound again. A crying baby. Impossible on this isolated ranch in the Wyoming wilderness, but unmistakable. Yesterday, Noah had gone to Bear Ridge Groceries to stock up for the impending rainstorm that threatened flash flooding, and a woman in front of him on the long checkout line had had a baby in her shopping cart, wailing just like he was hearing now. A round of peekaboo had helped quiet the screecher. But, man, did he know a crying baby when he heard one.
Still, right now? He glanced at his phone on the bedside table—at 1:52 a.m.? He had to be hearing things. Dreaming. Imagining it.
“Waaaah!”
Noah sat up. The crying was getting louder—and coming through the window on the early April breeze.
Did he have a middle-of-the-night visitor and he’d missed the doorbell ringing or something? Did he even know anyone with a baby?
“Waaah-waaah!”
Noah bolted out of bed. That was a baby crying. And it was coming from just outside the window of his cabin, below which was the front porch. He grabbed his jeans from where he’d slung them over his desk chair, pulled them on and hurried downstairs.
The crying got louder. He pulled the front door open.
Then he looked down—and gasped.
A baby—a girl, guessing from the pink blanket covering most of her in an infant car seat, a white cotton cap on her head—was crying up a storm. A small black tote bag was beside the carrier.
What the hell? Who would leave a baby here? He glanced around for a car, for someone, anyone, but all he saw were the distant evergreens in the moonlight. The ranch was silent otherwise.
“Hello?” he called out, looking in every direction. No one. “Hello?” he shouted.
No response. No person. Nothing but the breeze through the trees.
How long has she been out here? he wondered as he snatched up the carrier and bag and brought them inside, his heart starting to pound, his brain trying to make some sort of sense of this. A baby. Left on his porch at two in the morning.
He set the carrier on the big wood coffee table in the living room. He carefully moved aside the blanket.
Whoa. Noah didn’t know much about babies, but this tiny creature had to be a newborn. He wouldn’t be surprised if the baby had been born today. That’s how small she was. Her pink footie pajamas were way too big for her little body.
Call the police. Call an ambulance. Call social services. So many thoughts ran through his head at once that he had to just stop, stand still and breathe.
He glanced out the window, the rain starting. Just drizzling now, but within ten to fifteen minutes the skies would open up. That was a problem. The ranch was forty minutes from town down some winding rural roads, and the storm was forecasted to quickly create flood conditions, which would come before anyone could safely reach the place. Doc Bakerton, who ran the clinic in Bear Ridge, had emergency hours, and his home was only a ten-minute drive from here. Noah could get the baby over to Bakerton’s faster and safer than an ambulance or the sheriff could get here, and he knew these country roads and where the river would rise the worst. He could get back.
Decision made: he’d take her over to Doc Bakerton’s place.
But right now, the baby was crying her head off. Should he comfort her for a few seconds? Noah had no idea what the hell to do. She let out another wail, and he shifted the blanket aside, not surprised she wasn’t even buckled in.
Hand under the neck, he told himself, lifting her out as carefully as he could. He held her alongside his arm, bracketed by his chest, not sure he was doing this right.
He touched a finger to her little cheek. She wasn’t cold or hot, and her color seemed okay.
A hot burst of anger swelled in his gut over whoever had left a newborn to the elements in the middle of the night. What if he hadn’t heard her crying at all? What if she’d been out there all night? In the middle of the Wyoming wilderness, a rainstorm about to pour down. Granted, the large front porch of his foreman’s cabin was covered on three sides as a point of refuge for future guests of the ranch to wait out any bad weather, but still.
He swayed his arms a bit, and the crying stopped. When the baby’s strangely colored eyes—a grayish blueish—closed, his anger dissipated some. The little face looked content, relaxed, the tiny chest rising and falling, rising and falling, the impossibly tiny bow lips giving a quirk.
Whose are you? he wondered. Why would anyone leave you here? The Dawson Family Guest Ranch wasn’t due to open for seven more weeks, on Memorial Day weekend, so the guest cabins were empty. And none of the small staff he’d hired lived on the property.
He glanced at the carrier and tote bag on the coffee table. Maybe there was a note. Or a birth certificate. Something.
He couldn’t reach the bag easily without putting the baby down, and he thought he should hold her a bit—why, exactly, he wasn’t entirely sure. To keep her warm? To comfort her? Make her feel connected to someone and something? His gaze caught on something small and white poking up from underneath the blanket in the car seat. He shoved the blanket aside.
So there was a note. Half a page. Scrawled, crudely, in black pen.
She’s your baby, Noah Dawson. Your responsibility. You won’t hear from me again.
Every cell in his body froze.
What?
My baby? he thought, the idea not penetrating.
Forget the police. Or social services. Until he could think, figure out who the mother was.
His baby? Seriously?
He grabbed the tote bag and rooted around inside it for a birth certificate or envelope or any kind of paperwork. Nothing but a baby bottle, a small container of formula and two tiny diapers.
The infant’s eyes opened just then, then drooped, opened, drooped, then closed again. There was something familiar about the little face, something in the expression, the eyes, that he couldn’t pin down. He knew that face. The baby’s mother, a woman he probably was with one night... Or maybe the little girl looked a bit like him?
Just get her to the doc, he told himself. Now.
He very gently laid her back down in the carrier, one little fist moving, the lips quirking again. He buckled the five-point harness and settled the blanket around her.
From the looks of her, all scrawny and tiny, tinier than your average baby, he was pretty sure she couldn’t be more than a few hours old. So her mother didn’t want to keep her and dropped her off right after giving birth? That hardly made sense. Mothers who’d just delivered a baby didn’t jump in cars and drop off their babies in the middle of the night. Unless they were desperate, maybe.
All he knew was that someone had left a baby on his doorstep. No knock, no explanation. No concern for the infant’s well-being.
No idea who that person could possibly be.
His baby? His brain wasn’t fully firing right now from the shock, but as he lifted the carrier he managed to think back nine months. It was the second week of April now. Who had he been involved with last July?
There were a few possibilities. One of whom he’d seen in passing just last week as he’d parked in front of the coffee shop in town. She certainly hadn’t been nine months pregnant.
Two or three others back then, one-night stands when his life had still been about drinking too much at bars and trying to forget his troubles with women whose last names he didn’t know.
He wasn’t proud of that time in his life.
He’d been a hot mess. Two years ago, the small ranch he’d managed to buy had gone under—like father, like son, he supposed. The woman he’d loved his entire life had told him she’d had enough and was moving on, unless he changed most things about himself. He hadn’t known how, and she’d gotten tired of trying to help when all her advice fell on deaf ears. And so he’d driven her away and she’d married the biggest jerk he’d ever known. The downward spiral had continued.
And then five months ago he’d inherited the Dawson Family Guest Ranch with his five siblings, most of whom wanted nothing to do with the place. Suddenly, the man on the edge of the cliff had inched back to solid ground. Purpose. Determination. Heritage.
Before his father passed, before Noah had come back home to the formerly dilapidated guest ranch he’d grown up on, he’d had no idea heritage meant anything to him. But it clearly did. Because here he was. Not that he had anywhere else to go, but still. He wanted to be here.
And if this baby was his, she belonged here too. With him on the Dawson ranch. Until he figured out whose she was—aside from his—he’d keep his siblings out of it. Maybe he’d call his sister, Daisy, in Cheyenne. Maybe she’d come visit for a few days and help him out.
The tiny eyes opened, and her face scrunched.
“I’m taking you to the doc, little buddy.”
It struck him that little girls probably weren’t called “little buddy” the way boys were. He recalled how Sara—the one he’d driven away—hated that her father had called her princess. I’m no princess, she’d say. Furthest thing from it.
“You’re no princess either,” he told the infant. “You certainly did not get the royal treatment on your first day on earth.”
Carrier in hand, he headed toward the door, setting it on the floor to put on his leather jacket. Then he picked her back up and headed out to the truck.
“I’m not gonna let anything happen to you,” he said, latching the carrier rear-facing on the back seat, like the little diagram on the side of the carrier wisely showed. “You can count on that.”
