Enchanted Heart by Brianna Lee McKenzie

before she nuzzled his little nose and said, “He certainly is a Hirsch.”
    Caid looked at the child and then at her, wondering what she had meant. Marty, remembering that she had only told him her married name, explained, “My father’s name was Hirsch. Elsa’s mother was Papa’s sister, but Baby Jake has Hirsch blood in him.”
“He does look like his mother,” Caid said offhandedly.
“In English, Hirsch means deer,” Marty said.
Caid tilted his head and smiled, quipping, “Which one?”
    Marty narrowed her eyes at him, with a questioning look, so he clarified, “I mean, does it mean ‘deer’ the animal or ‘dear’ the endearment?”
She had to giggle at his question and then she said, “The animal.”
“Do they have deer in Germany?” Caid asked while he moved the blankets away from Baby Jake’s little rosebud mouth.
“Yes,” Marty said quickly. “They are strong and resilient and not afraid of anything, even men.”
The way in which she had said this made Caid chuckle and wrap his arm around her before he said, “You are certainly a dear.”
    Of course, since they were talking about the animal, Marty concluded that he was referring to it. And, because he had said earlier that she was more resilient than her twin, Marty thought that he believed that she had more Hirsch blood in her than her sister Greta. Oblivious to his jest, she looked up at him and smiled, then kissed the cool cheek of her little cousin and buried her nose in his clean-baby smell. Then, a fleeting thought that he might have meant the other version of the word made her suddenly embarrassed at her naivety and she blushed into the warm blanket.
    Caid removed his arm from her waist and took the reins into his hands and puckered his lips and kissed the air toward the oxen. Marty raised her head quickly, thinking that he was making a lewd gesture toward her and fully intended to admonish him for it, but she saw that he was trying to get the lead bull to pick up his pace, for their wagon had lagged behind quite a bit during their conversation.
She stared at the head of that horned creature while she said, “You really do like animals, don’t you?”
Caid tilted his head toward her while still watching the oxen trudge ahead of him and answered, “Yep.”
“Did you have animals when you were a child?” she asked, trying to glean information from him about his past.
    “Mother did not want pets but Grammy let me have them,” he said with a smirk that indicated that he must have owned a menagerie at Grammy’s house. “We had horses, goats, ducks, cats, dogs and an occasional broken-winged bird.”
    “You have a kind heart,” she said without thinking.
    “I learned it from my Grammy,” he said as he stared ahead of him. “I wish you two could have known each other. She would have liked you. You have a kind heart, too.”
    Marty smiled. It was a sweet compliment and she enjoyed hearing it. But she knew that sometimes she did not have such a kind heart. Life had seen to that. Life and all the tragedies and having to grow up too soon had made her heart hard, but when it came to the man sitting next to her and the baby nestled in her arms, she found it softening quite a bit. She pulled the child up to her face and kissed him one last time while Caid pulled the wagon to a stop so that Marty could hand the bundle down to Elsa, who had come to take her baby back.
    “Feeling better?” Caid asked with genuine concern.
    “Yes, thank you!” Elsa said as she wrapped the baby into the quilt that she had draped around her shoulders.
    The weather was turning colder and everyone had to wrap themselves in blankets and quilts to keep warm. Marty eased closer to Caid’s warmth and pulled the quilt around her shoulders in an unconscious yet feeble attempt to maintain space between them. The memory of his arms around her, his kiss upon the skin on her forehead, the tender expression on his face and the concern in his deep blue eyes made her want