Rodeo Bride by Myrna Mackenzie

you go putting words in my baby’s mouth.”
    And just like that, the atmosphere changed.
    “I meant your baby, of course,” Colleen said.
    “Don’t be sad, Colleen,” Millie said. “I’m sure that when he takes Toby back to Chicago he’ll call. He’ll make sure that Toby stays in touch over the years, won’t you, Dillon?”
    Before he had a time to open his mouth, to breathe, to think, Colleen held up her hand. “Do not answer that,” she said. Which was good because he didn’t know how to answer. He knew that maintaining contact with a woman who drove him insane with desire but to who he could never make love or marry would be a kind of hell.
    “And don’t any of you make Dillon feel guilty about Toby,” she said to her friends.
    “Of course we wouldn’t, Colleen,” Julie said. “It isn’t Dillon’s fault that you can’t have a baby of your own.”
    And that was when the chandelier fell on their heads. Metaphorically, anyway, Dillon thought later.
    For a long moment time seemed to stop. No one breathed. No one spoke. Even the clock on the wall seemed to stop ticking.
    “You didn’t know,” Millie said to Dillon.
    “Why should he? It isn’t exactly the kind of thing I was just going to drop into a conversation over lunch. And besides, there was no reason for Dillon to know. It was an accident I had years ago. It’s not his fault I can’t have a child, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
    She turned to Dillon and pasted on a smile. It was totally phony. He knew it. She knew he knew it. But what she was telling him was that she didn’t want to talk about it. How could he not honor that when the topic was one that was so painful for her?
    And Toby was starting to fret, to twist in Millie’s arms and whimper, as if he was absorbing the charged atmosphere and was frightened.
    Automatically, as if she’d done it a thousand times and probably had, Colleen turned to the baby, a look of love and concern on her face. Quickly she moved toward him, but then she stopped suddenly just two feet from Toby, who was waving his little hands in distress.
    Colleen looked suddenly smaller, her shoulders more rounded, her head dropped slightly.
    She turned away from Toby and looked at Dillon.
    “You need to hold your son,” she said. “Now, I’d better get some work done.” She smiled sadly. Then she quietly left the room.
    As Dillon cuddled his child he realized that something elemental had happened here. Colleen had decided that it was time to start letting go. She would begin to transfer the care of Toby to him in earnest.
    And she would begin to back out of the picture.
    This should have been a moment of pride for Dillon, the fact that she trusted him enough to turn control of Toby over to him.
    Instead, when he heard the front door open and close a few seconds later, he simply wanted to go after her, stop her, wherever she was going.
    In fact, he must have made a move toward the door, because he felt a hand on his sleeve. Millie was shaking her head.
    “She’ll probably be working all night in her shop.”
    When he frowned in confusion, Millie smiled. “I guess shedidn’t tell you. Colleen’s an artist.” She gestured toward the beautiful decorated glass vases that were in every room in the house. “The wind chimes, the sculpture…that, more than anything, has kept this ranch going when times got rough. Colleen can’t create a child, but she creates beautiful things nonetheless.”
    “I didn’t know,” he said. It occurred to him that there were lots of things he didn’t know about Colleen.
    Things he wanted to know but never would. As he left the room and headed toward the nursery with Toby, he reached up and touched one of the chimes that hung in the doorway. Its soft sounds were like music. Sad but very sweet and very beautiful.
    Just like the woman responsible for them.
     
    Colleen didn’t spend all night in her workshop. In fact, she had done very little work when she put her