High Country Baby Read online

  All Taylor Brand wanted was a baby of her own

  But at nearly forty and recently divorced, embarking on a “solo” trek on the Continental Divide Trail, her time was tight and her options slim. Maybe the curt cowboy who’d been charged with watching out for her was her best shot. After all, Clint McAllister was shadowing her on a high-country horseback trip for the money. Would he be up for being hired for something else?

  Classy ladies like Taylor didn’t normally give a rough rodeo-rider like him a second glance...much less ask him to father a baby. And while Clint didn’t need an excuse to take Taylor to bed, he did wonder if this plan was perhaps the wisest. Who knew what would happen once he got to taste the forbidden?

  “Would you want to do this the natural way?”

  The look on his face when he asked that question was comical. Taylor started to laugh, even though Clint didn’t join her. They both had something the other needed, so it truly could be a win-win if they played their hands correctly.

  “I’d prefer...” She couldn’t believe she was about to say this. “Natural.”

  She was tired of shots and doctors and scheduling and waiting rooms. She just wanted a man to knock her up the old-fashioned way. Was that too much to ask for?

  “Would you have any...objection to that?”

  “No.” Clint’s response was direct. “I wanted to take you to bed the first time I saw you.”

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for choosing High Country Baby, the third book in The Brands of Montana Special Edition series. This is my sixth book published with Harlequin Special Edition, and it is the sixth book featuring the Brand clan. My love affair with Montana began when I was twelve; my family took a vacation to a working cattle ranch outside of Helena, Montana, and I have yet to visit any place in the world that I find more beautiful or compelling. When you read books in The Brands of Montana series, the images of the ranch—the farmhouse, mountains, barns, the bright cerulean-blue sky—are drawn directly from the memories of my own magical Montana experiences.

  Right around the time I fell in love with Montana, I also fell in love with Harlequin books. I enjoy many different types of romance, but what I always enjoyed about reading a romance from a Harlequin series was that I could take a quick break to fall in love. Now that I have the privilege of writing for Special Edition, I am dedicated to writing stories that will allow readers to take a little holiday from their own busy lives. I hope you curl up with High Country Baby in your favorite chair, with your favorite beverage, and join in Taylor and Clint’s journey to happily-ever-after! And, as always, I welcome you to write me via my website, joannasimsromance.com.

  Welcome to the family!

  Joanna Sims

  High Country Baby

  Joanna Sims

  Joanna Sims lives in Florida with her wonderful husband, Cory, and their three fabulous felines, Sebastian, Chester (aka Tubby) and Ranger. By day, Joanna works as a speech-language pathologist and a clinical educator for a large university. But her nights and weekends are reserved for writing contemporary romance for Harlequin. Joanna loves to hear from Harlequin readers and invites you to stop by her website for a visit, joannasimsromance.com.

  Books by Joanna Sims

  Harlequin Special Edition

  The Brands of Montana

  High Country Christmas

  A Match Made in Montana

  Marry Me, Mackenzie!

  The One He’s Been Looking For

  A Baby for Christmas

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  Dedicated to my mentor and dear friend Libby I love you.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Excerpt from Lucy & the Lieutenant by Helen Lacey

  Chapter One

  Clint McAllister heard the familiar click of a bullet being chambered. He’d slept just like a baby once he’d polished off a fifth of tequila, and he’d awakened with a well-deserved hangover. Groggy, irritated, with a massive headache, he’d stumbled over to the edge of the wooded area just beyond his campsite to relieve himself. The last thing he’d expected was to get caught with his pants unzipped, barefoot and without his revolver. Damn rotten luck.

  “Put your hands up and turn around nice and slow.” Taylor Brand stood confident in the “ready” stance she had learned during concealed-weapon training. Like everything in her life, she had worked hard to be first in her class.

  “Just calm down...” The cowboy lifted his left hand up but moved his right hand down to his zipper.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them!” Taylor ordered, her voice clear, firm and calm. “Turn around...do it now!”

  The stranger quickly lifted his right hand back up. “Look...unless you want a show, I’ve gotta zip it up before I face you. All right?”

  “Do it quick.” Taylor told him. “Then turn around.”

  The man tucked himself in and zipped up quickly, per the lady’s orders. His belt buckle still undone, his button-down shirt still completely unbuttoned, the cowboy raised his hands above his head and turned around slowly.

  “Why are you following me?” Taylor demanded with her revolver aimed at the man’s chest.

  “Boss’s orders.” The man told her, keeping his eye on the flat black barrel of her gun. “Your uncle told me to follow you, make sure you’re safe, and that’s what I’m doin’.”

  Taylor stared hard at the unkempt cowboy with her hands steady on the gun. She was only one full day into her trek up to the Continental Divide. It was true that she had forgotten a lot about being in the wilderness over the years, but she had traveled all over the world for business and she had developed a heightened sense of awareness.

  Once she was certain she was being followed, she had waited until the first light of morning, made a wide circle back and was able to sneak up on the cowboy much more easily than she had anticipated. The empty liquor bottle she had spotted near the cowboy’s gear most likely explained how simple it had been to ambush him—he was a drinker.

  “You work at Bent Tree?” she asked him.

  The cowboy gave a slight nod of his head. Now that she was getting a better look at him, he did look familiar. She remembered a cowboy who had tipped his hat to her the first day she had arrived at her uncle’s ranch. He’d been wearing a sweat-soaked chambray shirt, a black cowboy hat and boots caked with mud and manure. But just because she could place him at Bent Tree didn’t mean that he was following her on her uncle’s orders. Uncle Hank hadn’t mentioned one word of this to her before she had headed out.

  “I’m lowerin’ my arms, lady. You got that?” the cowboy asked. For a man staring down the barrel of a gun, he seemed to have the mistaken impression that he
was in charge of this encounter.

  The man’s collar-length dark hair was unruly from the night; his face had been unshaven for several days. She wasn’t overly impressed with his height or the jailhouse tattoos on his exposed skin, but he was surprisingly fit from the look of his defined chest and shredded abs. His eyes were squinty and bloodshot, and he was obviously hungover. If he had been her employee, she would have fired him on the spot.

  “And if you don’t plan on shootin’ me, you’d best holster that weapon,” the cowboy told her.

  “I haven’t decided not to shoot you.” The man’s arrogance wasn’t unexpected—he was a cowboy.

  Clint watched her through sore, narrowed eyes while he buttoned up his shirt. Getting caught with his pants down by Hank’s niece had sobered him up quick enough. And he didn’t like having that gun pointed at him.

  “Lady—do you even know how to shoot that gun?” Clint unzipped his jeans a little so he could tuck his shirt in.

  “I’m a crack shot.” she answered him. “Now, get your hands back where I can see them!”

  Clint heard the slightest squeak in Taylor’s voice when she issued the command. She didn’t want him to know it, but she was rattled. And a rattled woman with a gun aimed at his chest didn’t sound like a good time.

  “Look...” Clint tucked in his shirt. “You need to get on the horn to your uncle. Convince him that you don’t need me and you’ll be seein’ the hind end of my horse before you can say Gucci.”

  Clint finished tucking in his shirt, zipped up his pants, buckled his belt buckle, and then pointed to the campsite.

  “Now—I’m going over there...if you shoot me, you’d better do a good job. If you just graze me, you’re gonna regret it...”

  “What’s your name?” she asked tersely. Clearly she had lost control over this situation. A phone call to her uncle was the next logical step.

  “Clint.” The cowboy settled his hat on his head and adjusted the brim. “Clint McAllister.”

  There was a bite in his tone and rigidness in his body she didn’t like at all. He was an ill-mannered man, too jagged around the edges for her taste.

  “Just stay put until I talk to my uncle,” Taylor ordered when Clint started to walk over to where his horse was tethered, his saddle hoisted onto his narrow hip.

  “Take it easy.” He shook his head in frustration.

  This was a rotten beginning to an already lousy day.

  “You take it easy.” Taylor snapped, but she holstered her weapon.

  “Uncle Hank!” The connection was bad on her end. “It’s Taylor...can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you...”

  “I can barely hear you...but, listen... I’ve got some guy named Clint following me and he says he’s under orders from you...is that true, or should I shoot him?”

  “I’d rather you not shoot him, Taylor.” Hank told her. “He’d be a hard one to replace.”

  Taylor glanced quickly at Clint’s back—he wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he was listening to every word.

  “Uncle Hank—I told you that I needed to make this trip on my own.”

  She had taken a leave of absence from her job so she could ride the Continental Divide. Her plan was to ride a section of the divide alone; she’d never imagined it any other way.

  “Negative,” Hank said in a brusque tone that she had heard many times in her life. Her uncle was a big man, physically as well as in the world of ranching, and he wasn’t fond of explaining his decisions.

  Clint turned around and they locked eyes for the briefest moment before they both broke the connection.

  Taylor lowered her voice. “Uncle Hank—I don’t want this. This wasn’t part of my plan.”

  “Plans change.” Hank told her in a no-nonsense manner. “Take Clint with you or make a U-turn and come on back to the ranch.”

  Taylor moved farther away from her cowboy bodyguard. “Did Dad call you? Is that it? Because if he did, let me assure you...”

  “Your dad didn’t call me—my brother hasn’t bothered to call me in years, so I don’t expect him to start now.”

  Hank was her father’s older brother. When their father, her grandfather, died, a disagreement about the validity of the will sparked a family feud that had lasted for most of her adult life.

  “Uncle Hank.” She sounded like a child beseeching a parent. “Please. This is really important to me.”

  “You are really important to me, Taylor. I was wrong to go along with your cockamamie idea in the first place. I’ve come to my senses now, and I’m not changing my mind. So, what’s it gonna be?”

  “I have to do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t turn back now.”

  “Come again?”

  More loudly, she repeated. “I can’t turn back now.”

  Not after she had come this far—farther than anyone in her life, including her, thought that she would go.

  “It’s better this way,” her uncle reassured her.

  It was pointless to disagree, so she didn’t bother to put her energy into a lost cause.

  “And Taylor?”

  “Yes?” She didn’t try to hide the disappointment.

  “Clint knows the divide like the back of his hand—and I trust him.”

  Clint didn’t have to hear the conversation to know that it wasn’t swinging in Taylor’s favor. Her body language—hunched, tense shoulders and lowered head—said it all. Which meant that he was still on the hook to babysit a woman who looked as if she’d be more comfortable getting pampered in a ritzy spa than riding the divide on horseback. She didn’t make sense to him, and he wasn’t keen on things that didn’t make sense.

  “Everything squared away?” Clint asked as he swung his saddle onto the back of his sturdily built buckskin quarter horse.

  “Looks like we’re stuck with each other.” Taylor swatted a fly away from her face. “I don’t know what possessed my uncle to change his mind at the eleventh hour—I don’t need a babysitter.”

  Clint reached beneath his horse’s belly to grab the girth. “I ain’t no babysitter.”

  Taylor cringed at the way in which Clint colorfully put a sentence together. She was an English major in college. Syntax was always her first love and double negatives made her nuts. Even though he’d managed to butcher the English language with a four-word sentence, she couldn’t deny one thing: the cowboy didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted him. They were both in the same rotten boat. And by the looks of him, there was a chance he could be persuaded...

  “You could wait here for me. No one has to know,” she suggested casually. Then, when she had his attention, she sweetened the pot. “I could pay you.”

  The cowboy fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his front pocket and knocked one out of the pack with his hand. “That’s not gonna happen, lady.”

  He needed this job. He was trying to dig himself out of a mighty deep financial hole and he wasn’t about to bite the Hank Brand hand that was currently feeding him. If he took Taylor’s money, it would no doubt be short-term gain with long-term negative consequences.

  Before he put the cigarette in his mouth to light it, he offered Taylor a suggestion of his own. “You could head on back to Bent Tree and save us the hassle.”

  “I’m not going back.” Taylor was firm in her response. It was easy for her uncle and this cowboy-for-hire to toss this suggestion around as if it was nothing. To them it was nothing. They had no idea what she had gone through or how much she’d given up to get to this leg of her journey. And, to her, this trek to the Continental Divide had become everything.

  Clint took a drag off of his cigarette. He shook his head and when he spoke, curls of white smoke streamed out of his nose and mouth.

  “Well, then...it looks like we’re stuck with ea
ch other.”

  She felt tears of frustration and anger well up behind her eyes. She didn’t typically cry when she was sad—she cried when she was mad as hell. She hated Clint for not being corruptible. She pushed the tears down; they were useless to her and she needed every ounce of her energy reserve to spend another day in the saddle.

  “I’ll hang back.” Clint put his cigarette out on the tip of the bottom of his boot before he tossed it into the cold fire pit. “That’s the best I can do.”

  Taylor stared at the wrangler for a moment longer. She had already burned too much daylight dealing with an issue that simply wasn’t going to resolve in her favor.

  “I’m afraid that you’re best isn’t good enough, Mr. McAllister.”

  She had been a vice president at a large bank for many years and knew when a negotiation was over. She didn’t have anything left to say to the cowboy, so she headed back up the hill to where she had stayed for the night and broke camp as quickly as she could.

  Her uncle had provided her with a small, sure-footed mare named Honey and an experienced pack mule named Easy Does It. It didn’t take her long to break camp, pack up her belongings and get ready for the day’s ride.

  Prior to leaving Chicago for Montana, she had moved all of the furniture in her formal living room out of the way so she could set up a practice campsite. She read, and then reread, all of the manuals that came with her new camping gear, and she had even slept inside of the tent for several weeks to get used to sleeping on the ground.

  All of her practice and preparation had paid off—she could set up and break camp with relative ease. Her uncle had personally shown her how to pack Easy’s load properly and refreshed her memory on the correct way to tack a horse. All in all, she was pretty proud of her ability.

  But there was one giant fly in her ointment: mounting her horse.

  She was short, she had stubby legs and she certainly wasn’t as limber as she’d been in her teens. It was a major chore to get her foot into the stirrup, but once that was accomplished she didn’t have enough strength to get her bottom-heavy body into the saddle. The only way she could mount up was to find a log or a stump to stand on and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. She knew that this was a weakness that needed to be overcome, because if she couldn’t find a makeshift mounting block one day, she would be stuck on the ground. Not good.