The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch Read online

  The Cowboy's Baby

  Devlin Brothers Ranch Book 1

  Joanna Bell

  © 2020 Joanna Bell

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Jackson

  Chapter 2: Hailey

  Chapter 3: Jackson

  Chapter 4: Hailey

  Chapter 5: Jackson

  Chapter 6: Hailey

  Chapter 7: Jackson

  Chapter 8: Hailey

  Chapter 9: Jackson

  Chapter 10: Hailey

  Chapter 11: Jackson

  Chapter 12: Hailey

  Chapter 13: Jackson

  Chapter 14: Hailey

  Chapter 15: Jackson

  Chapter 16: Hailey

  Chapter 17: Jackson

  Chapter 18: Hailey

  Chapter 19: Jackson

  Chapter 20: Hailey

  Chapter 21: Jackson

  Chapter 22: Jackson

  Chapter 23: Hailey

  Chapter 24: Jackson

  Chapter 25: Hailey

  Chapter 26: Hailey

  Chapter 27: Jackson

  Chapter 28: Jackson

  Chapter 29: Hailey

  Chapter 30: Hailey

  Chapter 31: Jackson

  Chapter 32: Hailey

  Chapter 33: Jackson

  Chapter 34: Hailey

  Chapter 35: Jackson

  Chapter 36: Hailey

  Chapter 37: Jackson

  Chapter 38: Hailey

  Chapter 39: Jackson

  Chapter 40: Hailey

  Chapter 41: Jackson

  Chapter 42: Hailey

  Chapter 43: Hailey

  Chapter 44: Jackson

  Chapter 45: Hailey

  Chapter 46: Jackson

  Chapter 47: Hailey

  Chapter 48: Jackson

  Chapter 49: Hailey

  Chapter 50: Jackson

  Chapter 51: Hailey

  Chapter 52: Jackson

  Chapter 53: Hailey

  Epilogue: Jackson

  About The Author

  Devlin Brothers Ranch Series

  Other Books By Joanna Bell

  Chapter 1: Jackson

  The first time I met Hailey Nickerson she was 8 years old, sprawled out in the middle of the main hallway at Sweetgrass Ridge Junior School and surrounded by the remains of about a dozen cupcakes.

  She was also, I noticed, covered in pink frosting and angrier than a wasp trapped in a jelly jar.

  I remember her reddened cheeks and furious, flashing eyes cutting off a burst of laughter before it could leave my throat. Come on, it's funny when people fall over. It's even funnier when they're carrying baked goods.

  "Oh," I said as I approached, instinctively reaching down to help her up. "Looks like you had an accident. Do you –"

  But before I could finish my sentence she'd slapped my hand away, stood up, and begun an entirely useless attempt to brush the crumbs and frosting out of her long, dark hair.

  "You're making it worse," I offered, trying to be helpful. "Why don't I go get the janitor and we can –"

  "We won't be doing anything," she snapped, refusing to meet my eyes. "I'm fine. I don't need your help. Go away!"

  I was 13 years old, captain of the junior varsity football team, firstborn son of the most prominent rancher in Montana and all-around king-in-waiting of Sweetgrass Ridge. So to say I wasn't used to being spoken to like that – especially by fire-breathing little girls covered in frosting – would be something of an understatement.

  "You're obviously not fine," I laughed after a brief pause. "Come on, don't be silly. Wait here and I'll get –"

  But she haughtily flipped a few sticky tendrils of hair over her shoulder, turned on her heel and marched purposefully off down the hallway before I could finish, as if she had an important meeting to get to and couldn't possibly spare the time to make small talk with the likes of me.

  I stood rooted to the spot, watching as she left a trail of little pink frosting-footprints on the shiny floor and wondering if she might be the single rudest person I ever met.

  I wasn't even sure if I was angry or amused – or both. I only had brothers. Big, loud brothers who never met a problem that couldn't be solved by either yelling or fighting. So I truly had no idea what to make of the tiny, furious little girl who had somehow managed to make me feel like I was the one who screwed up, even as she was the one covered in crumbs.

  "Just trying to help!" I called down the hallway after her. She showed no sign of having heard me.

  ***

  Later on that day, I stood watching insects twirl dizzily through the last sunbeams of the day and thinking about that girl. She was so angry when I tried to help. People were almost never angry at me.

  The cattle, gathered tightly in the northwest corner of the pasture, were bellowing indignantly at their lack of supper.

  "I'm comin'!" I called out as the sun sank down behind the inky blue ridgeline of the Rocky Mountains in the west. "Hold your horses, I'm comin'."

  ***

  There was a time when I used to look back on that day a lot, the way a prospector goes back over an old map again and again, searching for clues he may have missed the previous thousand times. Sometimes I wondered if something about that first interaction set us on a certain course. What if I'd handled it differently, insisted on making her wait for the janitor? What if I hadn't laughed at her? She hated being laughed at. What if, after that day, I'd never seen her again?

  Other times, I think everything that happened between me and Hailey Nickerson was as inevitable as the hand of a clock falling into the next minute. That a crack could have opened between us in that hallway that grew and grew until it split the whole world in half and we still would have found our way back to each other.

  Chapter 2: Hailey

  I don't know how I managed to trip up on a perfectly flat floor – but I did. And it was just my luck that Jackson Devlin – I knew who he was because everyone knew who he was – caught me covered in the remnants of the cupcakes I'd been tasked with carrying to the gym for a fundraising bake sale.

  I cried in the bathroom for an hour afterwards.

  That's not true. I only cried for a minute. Tears of humiliation, hot and angry and copious until I forced myself to stop. But I stayed in the bathroom for an hour afterwards, trying to get frosting out of my hair and my nostrils and the cuffs of the sweatshirt with the gray kitten on the front, which I would have worn every day if my mom let me.

  Of all the people to see me like that, why did it have to be him? Why couldn't it have been someone else? Someone who wasn't going to spend the rest of the time before he graduated to Senior High making fun of me with all his popular friends?

  ***

  But Jackson Devlin didn't make fun of me. The times I passed him in the hallway or saw him on the school grounds after the cupcake incident, he didn't seem to remember me at all.

  That's what I thought, anyway, until the day about 3 years later when I looked up from the kitchen table at my aunt's house to find him standing right there in front of me, a little half-smile playing at the corner of his mouth and a football tucked under his arm.

&
nbsp; He was with my cousin Tiago. Both of them slung their backpacks onto the table.

  "Hey!" My cousin – and best friend – Liliana immediately protested. "What the frick, Tiago? We're trying to do our homework here! Put your backpack somewhere else!"

  "Lili!" My aunt's voice floated in from the back porch where she was shelling beans from the little garden plot in the backyard. "Language!"

  "I said 'frick,' Mom! I didn't say the eff –"

  Before she could finish, though, and before the kitchen could descend into sibling chaos, Jackson Devlin spoke up. He looked me right in the eye, smiled widely and said the following:

  "Hey, cupcake girl."

  Tiago and Lili looked on, fascinated by whatever drama they could sense between me and Jackson.

  "Shut up," I mumbled, hoping he would just let it go.

  But Jackson wouldn't let it go. When I bent my head back down to my homework he reached out and snatched the paper off the table in front of me.

  "What's this?" He asked, still grinning good-naturedly. "Math?"

  "Give it back!" I pleaded, getting to my feet even as I knew I was powerless to make him do any such thing – even at 16 he towered over everyone.

  As he held the paper just out of my reach I spotted the sketch I'd made of my classroom and my math teacher – Ms. Furness – on the back of it. My sketches were private. I was so self-conscious about them I usually didn't even show them to Lili. And now Bigmouth Devlin was holding one in his hands.

  Of course, he flipped the paper over immediately – because whenever you don't want a person like Jackson Devlin to do something, they always do it right away – and began to study my drawing.

  "Please," I begged, hating the helplessness in my own voice. "Please give it back. It's mine."

  But he refused. I jumped up to try to grab it back but he kept it out of reach.

  "Did you draw this?" He asked, still smiling that smug smile. "What are you, cupcake girl? Some kind of artist?"

  I can still remember the hot, prickling sensation that is acute embarrassment rising up my neck and spreading out over my cheeks. And the deep desire to punch Jackson Devlin in his stupid, grinning mouth. Which I may well have done if I could have reached above his shoulders.

  As it was, I wasn't going to stick around to be tormented. Nor was I going to keep jumping up like a dog for my math homework. I grabbed my bag off the floor and began to shove the rest of my things into it as Lili and Tiago stared at me, confused.

  "Hailey?" Lili asked carefully, because she could see that I was upset – more upset than I should have been. "Are you leaving? You don't have to go. Supper's almost ready."

  She then turned to Jackson as I finished packing up my stuff and threw my backpack over my shoulder. "Come on. Give it back to her, Jackson. Stop being a jerk."

  Before anyone could say anything else I stomped out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out the front door as Lili called after me to come back.

  I didn't come back. I kept going all the way to the sidewalk and then to the other side of the street before I heard heavy, fast footsteps approaching and turned to see Jackson.

  "What the hell are you doing, you crazy little thing?" He asked, jogging easily beside me as I briefly broke into a run. He was still holding my math homework – and my sketch – in his hand.

  I didn't answer. I kept going. Eventually, he slowed and let me walk ahead of him. And I would have kept going if he hadn't decided to throw one more jab my way.

  "Jesus Christ, cupcake. I never met a little kid as stuck up as you."

  That did it. The emotion I'd been suppressing in my aunt's kitchen came boiling to the surface and I came to a dead stop, spinning around to face him.

  "Don't – don't swear at me!" I stammer-screeched, the tips of my ears hot with fury. "And don't – AND DON'T CALL ME A LITTLE KID!"

  Great. Well, that was Jackson Devlin told. If I could have rolled my eyes at myself without giving myself away, I would have. 'Don't call me a little kid.' Yep. Wonderful. Surely he would never dare to make fun of me again.

  He peered at me for a moment, as if something about me made him intensely curious. "Don't swear at you?" He laughed, shaking his head. "Who are you – my grandma? Kid, you need to calm down. I just came out here to give this back, OK? Did you do this yourself? It's really good."

  I was already drawing in the breath with which I was going to tell him to get lost when it struck me that he'd just said something nice.

  And that wasn't the only thing that struck me, to my burning shame. The other thing that struck me – along with the fact that he'd just paid me a compliment – was how good it felt. I swear I had to force myself not to break into a big, dumb, happy smile right there on the sidewalk.

  "Oh," I said, suddenly abashed and awkward. "Oh. Uh..."

  "Don't know what to say now that you can't yell at me again, do you?" He teased. "Come on, cupcake girl. Come back inside. Lili wants you to stay."

  "Stop calling me cupcake girl," I responded tartly, not yet ready to give in.

  "Why?"

  Jackson was 16 by then, and much bigger than he'd been at 13. I had to literally lean my head back to look at him. He had a big mop of sandy blond hair and pale blue Irish eyes like all the other Devlins. I was still a girl, then. Still totally innocent. I didn't know why I liked it so much when Jackson complimented my sketch – I just knew that I did.

  "Because it's mean," I told him, regaining a measure of composure. "And I don't like mean people."

  "Ah," he replied, nodding sagely. "That's weird."

  I looked down at my feet, at the raggedy white sneakers that wouldn't survive the summer and my own skinny ankles. And then I took the bait.

  "Why?"

  Jackson chuckled, enjoying the fact that he was holding my attention – probably the one person in Sweetgrass Ridge who had so far managed to resist his charm. Before he could finish being amused, I turned around and began to walk away again, determined not to give him the satisfaction of thinking he'd won me over. Even though he kind of had.

  "Because all I tried to do that day was help!" He called after me. "Have you been holding a grudge all this time? For what? You're the one who was rude that day. Not me."

  Once again, I stopped. I didn't turn around, I just stopped. "I was rude?"

  "Yeah, you. What, you think I deliberately arranged for you to drop all your cupcakes and then secretly spent the rest of the day laughing at what an idiot you were? I was just trying to help and you didn't even thank me. I mean, it was just a few cupcakes. Are you seriously still salty about it?"

  When he said that, I did turn around. I wanted to look at his face, to see if I could gauge whether he was being sincere or not. He looked like he was.

  "I'm not salty," I replied, but I think he could hear that my heart was no longer in it.

  "Yes you are. What was that, just now? Pure salt."

  "I don't even know what that means!"

  "What – salty? It's what you are, cupcake girl, stomping out of the house over nothing."

  "It wasn't nothing. You were making fun of me! And now you're trying to act like you weren't! And you took my homework! And stop calling me cupcake girl!"

  Jackson Devlin and I stood eying each other warily on the sidewalk as the warm breeze blew fluffy cottonwood seeds around us. If we had known what the future held for us, would we have gone back into the house together? Would he have cracked first, put an arm around my narrow shoulders and agreed that maybe he had been making a little fun of me?

  For a long time, I didn't know the answers to those questions.

  What I do know is that I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for Jackson Devlin.

  More importantly, I wouldn't be mother to a beautiful little boy with the same crooked smile and ice-blue eyes as the father who, for so many years, didn't even know he existed.

  Chapter 3: Jackson

  I saw Hailey Nickerson quite a lot between the end of eleventh grade and the beginning of s
enior year. It was the last summer of my childhood, and even as I was too young to fully understand what that meant my father and stepmother had made it more than clear over the years that barring a job as starting quarterback for an NFL franchise, my role as eldest son was to dedicate myself to and eventually take on the family business.

  So to say I was determined to enjoy that last true summer of freedom before the responsibilities of helping to run Devlin Ranch – and adulthood in general – took over, would be a classic understatement.

  Hailey was a funny, canny little thing even back then. If we were both at the Gomez house at the same time she would wait until I was momentarily alone before appearing in front of me, furtively pulling a folded piece of paper out of a pocket or an overstuffed backpack and silently handing it to me for appraisal.

  And I, temporary art critic that I was that summer, never had to lie to her about any of her work. It was good. Really good. She drew better than anyone I'd ever met – although admittedly that's not saying much because what the hell does a rancher's son know about art? Not a lot.

  "What do you think?" She would ask, hanging back shyly, tucking locks of dark hair behind her ears and then pulling them out and re-tucking them over and over.