The Convenient Cowboy by Heidi Hormel Read Free Book Online

the wall. What the hell? She hadn’t let him into the spare room she’d taken when he moved in. It was so tiny. Why had she insisted he take the master bedroom and its big bed? “Come on. Get in. I’ll finish the draft and leave it for you to read on your own. It’s about protecting you, too.” He worried when she dropped onto the bed, letting her head hang forward.
    “If you say so,” she whispered.
    “I say so.” He knelt in front of her and pulled off her sneakers. He liked the boots better. He’d like to see her in nothing but those boots.
Whoa.
That was not what he wanted and definitely not what they needed. What was wrong with him? She was sick. She wasn’t really his wife. More important, she didn’t even like him.
    When her shoes were off, she curled into a ball on the bed. “Go away. I want to die on my own.”
    “You won’t die,” he said softly. “It’s morning sickness. It’ll go away.”
    “Is it morning?”
    “Just a turn of phrase. The nausea can happen at any time of day. Researchers believe that it’s a warning system. That usually the illness is triggered by foods that could cause the baby harm.”
    “Toast? Toast is harmful?”
    “It’s not a perfect system.” He smiled at her tousled hair. He wanted to smooth the strands to comfort her, except the other feelings that had him shifting on his feet had nothing to do with tenderness.
Stop it, you perv.
“It’ll get better. It always does.”
    “I’m holding you to that.”
    He stood for another moment, imagining their baby...his baby. Good Lord, he was going to be a father again. He hurried out of the room, so he didn’t do something stupid like cry or give her a hug.
    * * *
    T HE SOUND OF Olympia being sick on the other side of the door ratcheted up Spence’s worry. They’d been at the ranch for three weeks, and Olympia had been sick nearly 24/7...although that hadn’t stopped her from going out to the barn or looking for more horses to board and train.
    Fear sweat gathered in his armpits. Could a woman die from morning sickness? He’d looked it up on Google. He pulled out his phone. Hey, he had a doctor in the family. He dialed Payson. Where was his brother, Arizona or Philadelphia?
    “What?” Payson asked, sounding harried and annoyed.
    “Olympia is pregnant and has been throwing up constantly,” Spence spewed out, the fear choking his voice a little as Olympia moaned in distress. “Do I need to take her to the emergency room?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Do I need to take Olympia to the ER?”
    “I can’t get past
pregnant
. Your phony wife is pregnant?”
    “Yes,” Spence said, realizing this had been a huge mistake. He’d called on instinct, not with the thinking part of his brain. “I’ll just take her to one of those clinics. Never mind.”
    “Don’t hang up,” Payson said. “Olympia is having a baby. I thought you said this wasn’t a real marriage?”
    “Pregnancy and marriage are not correlated.”
    “I know that, but—”
    “It’s your fault. Well, yours and Jessie’s.”
    “I don’t see how. You might be a lawyer, but even you’ve got to understand basic anatomy—”
    “Ha-ha. Very funny. She’s sick constantly. I swear she’s lost twenty pounds.”
    “I doubt she’s lost that much weight. I want to understand how she got pregnant when you’ve been married for less than a month.”
    “We met at your wedding.”
    “You hooked up at our wedding? Were you so drunk that you didn’t—”
    “The condom broke.”
    “You’re sure it’s your baby? It seems awfully convenient that you offer her a marriage proposal with money... I assume you offered her money, since you told me you might have to sell that damned truck, which you love better than any man should.”
    “The baby is mine.” Spence made himself loosen his grip on the phone. Olympia wasn’t that kind of woman, which he’d known even before she’d punched him. She lived by a cowgirl code like his sister-in-law’s. No