Coming Home by Leslie Kelly

want to show you how different it looks."
    Wyatt saw her bite at the corner of her lip in indecision. He didn't give her a chance to argue. Turning on his heel, he walked to his truck and waited for her to get into her father's SUV. She followed him up the driveway.
    As he drove, Wyatt wondered if he was crazy to ask her to come up to the house. The afternoon hadn't exactly gone as he'd expected. She'd surprised him. Wyatt had to admit that one reason he'd let her come to the ranch to help out was so he could see what kind of animal doctor she'd turned out to be. She was good. Better than good. He'd somehow expected that the Nicole he'd met at the airport, self-possessed and assured, would remain cool and aloof, not wanting to get her hands dirty.
    He was wrong. Some of his horses, bred for racing, were skittish and temperamental. There hadn't been one she couldn't conquer. She charmed animals the way some women charmed men, flirting, cajoling, touching and flattering. Wyatt found himself as susceptible to her as his horses were.
    He parked in front of the house, watching the look of amazement on Nicole's face as she pulled the car up next to him. He grinned as she stepped out.
    "Looks different, hmm?"
    "That's an understatement," Nicole said.
    She remembered a squat, sprawling building, painted a hideous shade of pink with a Spanish style red tile roof. Someone had made major changes, adding a second floor to the center, lending the structure some proportion, and painting the entire home a more pleasing shade of cream.
    "It’s really nice," she commented as she got out of the car and joined Wyatt next to the truck.
    "It was an ugly old place, wasn't it? I couldn't stand it. My grandmother apparently chose the original shade of pink before I was born, and after she died my grandfather never had the heart to re-paint it. Plus, whenever he felt like spreading out a little, he'd add a few rooms, but always out, never up."
    They walked up the front steps to the long porch stretching across the width of the house. A few rockers sat totally still without even a hint of breeze to set them in motion.
    "And, of course, there was no other 'feminine' touch for the place. My Uncle Clay and his wife split up years ago, and who knows where she is. My mother, well, you know about her."
    "How is she?"
    "Fine. Happy. Still living like royalty with her English lord. Her life turned out all right, in spite of...everything."
    Nicole listened closely for the hint of bitterness Wyatt had always felt toward his mother, but couldn't hear it. She wondered if he'd come to terms with her abandonment, but didn't have the nerve to ask him.
    She had wondered many times over the years why his own rough childhood, his issues with his parents—never experiencing love, never feeling important—hadn’t made him more interested in claiming his role as a father. Of course, on the flip side of the coin, maybe that’s why he had backed away the minute he’d found out she was pregnant. Fear, feeling incapable of real love, unworthy of commitment…all of those things might have been enough to send him into a state of panic when his grandfather had contacted him and let him know Nicole was pregnant that long-ago summer. That explanation was somehow easier to accept than the idea that he’d just been a rotten, horny bastard who’d gotten what his cousin Brady hadn’t been able to, then walked away forever.
    Of course, there was always the third possibility: that he really believed what he’d said when his grandfather had reached him. He’d claimed Nicole was a tramp who couldn’t possibly know for sure who the father of her baby was.
    She had thought she’d die with the pain of hearing that. Hadn’t wanted to believe it, had screamed and raged at her parents that he would never have said such a thing.
    But he didn’t come. He never came.
    So maybe he had believed it. Maybe to this day he had never truly accepted the fact that he’d been the one who got