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The Ranch She Left Behind
Kathleen O'Brien
For one year, Penny Wright is doing whatever she wants. She’s returned to her hometown in Colorado – but not the family ranch – to cross items off her Risk-It List. To her surprise, she’s braver than she thinks, because when she spies a hot newcomer doing something sweet for his daughter, Penny can’t resist kissing him on the spot.Unfortunately, he turns out to be Max Thorpe. Her new tenant!Luckily, they both agree to be just friends. But with the sizzling attraction between them “just friends” is hard.Maybe it’s time Penny add a new item to her list – a family with Max!


Who knows where a kiss will lead!
For one year, Penny Wright is doing whatever she wants. She’s returned to her hometown in Colorado—but not the family ranch—to cross items off her risk-it list. To her surprise, she’s braver than she thinks, because when she spies a hot newcomer doing something sweet for his daughter, Penny can’t resist kissing him on the spot. Unfortunately, he turns out to be Max Thorpe. Her new tenant!
Luckily, they both agree to be just friends. But with the sizzling attraction between them, “just friends” is hard. Maybe it’s time for Penny to add a new item to her list—a family with Max.
“You specifically wanted to kiss a stranger?”
Max tilted his head as he asked the question. The moonlight touched the mellow honey of his eyes and glistened against the white teeth as he smiled again.
He sounded curious, not shocked. Penny had been turning over various half-truths, wondering how she could explain her eccentric behavior without revealing too much. But to her surprise it suddenly seemed oddly easy to just tell the truth.
“Actually, yes.” She sighed. “It was on my list.”
His smile broadened. “Really.”
“Yes. I have a list. Not a bucket list, exactly. But a—” She couldn’t bring herself to say risk-it list, which suddenly sounded too cute and sophomoric. “Just a list of all the things I have always wanted to do but never got the chance.”
But that wasn’t really true. Any female who could walk on her own two feet could have done the absurd thing she did this morning. It wasn’t as if she’d asked for his permission or cooperation.
Still, when she caught the interested gleam in his eye, she couldn’t stop the feeling of pride in herself, in her boldness.
I could kiss him again!
Dear Reader,
Are you a risk taker? Do you dance on the cliff edge, laugh at the rain?
If so, you’re lucky! Some people—like me—were born more timid. We’re peacemakers, rule followers, boat steadiers. We have to work to be brave.
So when it came time to create Penny Wright’s story, I could easily empathize with her struggle to live a bolder life. At least Penny has a good excuse! The youngest of the three Wright sisters of Bell River Ranch, she was only eleven when her father killed her mother. It’s taken her sixteen years to emerge from that shadow.
For inspiration, Penny creates a risk-it list—a catalogue of little things she’s always wanted to try, but never had the nerve. She starts small, hoping to gather courage as she goes along.
But funny thing about life…it has a way of setting its own pace. Right at the stumbling start, she meets dynamic Max Thorpe and his motherless ten-year-old daughter. The two may hide it better, but underneath they are every bit as wounded as Penny herself. Suddenly she’s facing the biggest risk of all: the risk of losing her heart.
I hope you enjoy watching Penny find the courage, love and freedom she deserves. I hope, too, that your own risk-it list is full of exciting adventures. May every one make you stronger!
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
P.S.—Visit me at my website www.kathleenobrien.com (http://www.kathleenobrien.com), or come by and say hi on Facebook or Twitter!
The Ranch She Left Behind
Kathleen O’Brien


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathleen O’Brien was a feature writer and TV critic before marrying a fellow journalist. Motherhood, which followed soon after, was so marvelous she turned to writing novels, which could be done at home. A rule follower who still hears the terrifying voice of Sister Alice in her head whenever she contemplates stepping over the line, she’s so glad she discovered romance writing. On the page, she can indulge her secret love of grand drama, goofy escapades and emotional whirlwinds without even getting her knuckles rapped.
To Nancy Robards Thompson and Lori L. Harris, who always find a way to make the story come right—and keep me laughing even when I don’t sleep or eat.
And, of course, to Ann Evans, whose wisdom guides every word, just as it always did.
Contents
Chapter One (#ue0a404f2-5044-5a4a-83d5-f59be6970ac1)
Chapter Two (#u684f3fa6-e8bf-5466-8fc9-1d257202fa23)
Chapter Three (#ub1d69f47-d5d0-5395-911a-d788fb47b5ae)
Chapter Four (#ua546c9d0-5cbb-5a3d-ac9c-0274ba13969f)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
PENNY WRIGHT JERKED awake, her heart pounding so hard it seemed to beat against her eardrums. What had happened? What was wrong? There’d been a sound...something big....
Oh, no... She sat up, tossing aside the covers, and swung her bare legs toward the floor. “Coming, Ruth!” She fumbled for the lamp switch. Had her aunt fallen again? “Don’t move, Ruth. I’ll be right th—”
But the act of sitting up was enough to start clearing the cobwebs out of her mind, and she knew there was no point in finishing the sentence. Ruth hadn’t fallen. Ruth couldn’t hear her.
Ruth had died two months ago.
The town house was silent around her. So silent she could hear the gears of the banjo clock move, preparing to sound the hour in the downstairs parlor...
So what noise had she heard just now?
It must have been something major, to wake her up like that, to make her heart hammer so hard. Or had it been just a dream noise? She dreamed a lot these days—dreams of flying, of dancing, of climbing mountains and riding wild palominos. Freedom dreams. It was as if her subconscious was trying to tell her to get out of this town house and do something.
But she just kept on staying. She was comfortable here. She was used to the quiet, the shadows, the isolation. Even if she sometimes felt like Sleeping Beauty inside her castle tower, at least she always felt safe.
The clock began to bong. One. Two. Three. Four. Then it fell silent again, leaving nothing but the eerie after-vibrations that pulsed invisibly up the stairs and made the air in Penny’s bedroom hum.
Instinctively, she glanced at her cell phone. More like four-thirty, really. The clock had kept perfect time while Ruth had been alive, but ever since her death it had fallen further and further behind, as if time had begun to slow and stretch, like warm molasses. Just a minute here, a minute there... But it added up.
Soon, the clock would perpetually be living in yesterday.
Oh, well. Too tired to worry, Penny fell back against her pillow. The larger noise she had imagined, it must have been a dream.
But then, with a cold shiver, she registered the sound of another noise—registered it more with her nerve endings than her eardrums.
A much smaller noise this time. A sneaky sound, a muffled creak... She gasped softly, recognizing it. The fifth stair from the top, the one that couldn’t be fixed. She’d always had to step over it on her way to bed at night, so she wouldn’t wake Ruth.
Someone who didn’t know about that little creak was, even now, tiptoeing up the stairs.
Her heart began to pound again. Someone was in the house.
Without hesitation, she slid open the nightstand drawer. Ruth, a practical woman to the core, had insisted that Penny keep protection beside her at all times, especially once the neighborhood began to deteriorate. A gun would have been out of the question—neither Ruth nor Penny liked weapons, or had any confidence that they could prevent a bad guy from getting hold of it.
Therefore, Penny kept a can of wasp spray beside her. Effective from a safe distance, nonlethal, and carrying the added benefit of surprise. Penny had found the idea almost funny and had bought it more for Ruth’s peace of mind than her own.
But now, as she saw the shadowy figure appear in her doorway, she sent a fervent thank-you to her practical aunt, who apparently was going to save her one more time—even from the grave.
Ben Hackney, their next door neighbor and a retired policeman, had warned them that, if they ever had to use the can, they shouldn’t holler out a warning, but should spray first and ask questions later. So Penny inhaled quickly, put her finger on the trigger, aimed and shot.
A man’s voice cried out. “What the fu—?”
She could see the figure a little better now—a man, definitely, dressed in black, his face covered. Her breath hitched. Covered! His eyes, too? If his eyes were covered, would the wasp spray have any effect?
But then the man’s hands shot to his face. A guttural growl burst out of him, a sound of both pain and rage. With every fraction of a second, the growl grew louder.
“Goddamn it—”
The voice was deep, middle-aged, furious. She didn’t recognize it.
Absurdly, even as she shot the spray again, she felt a shimmer of relief. What if it had been someone she knew? Someone like...
It could have been poor Ben. The man was eighty and had spent a quarter of a century nursing an unrequited love for Aunt Ruth. He’d been good to Penny, too, through the years.
Thank God she hadn’t attacked some well-meaning friend like that.
But the relief was brief. The calculations flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and then she was left with one awful truth—this was a real intruder. She was left with a stranger, who had, without question, come to harm her.
And a can of wasp spray that wasn’t bottomless.
For one horrible second, the man lurched forward, and Penny backed up instinctively, though she had nowhere to go. Her spine hit the headboard with an electric bang that exploded every nerve ending in her brain. Somehow, she kept her finger on the trigger and held her numb arm steady enough to keep the spray aimed toward his face.
“You bitch!” He dropped to his knees, shaking his head violently. With a cold determination she hadn’t known she possessed, she lowered her aim and found him where he had hit the floor.
The spray connected again. Crying out, he roiled backward, a crablike monster, and the sight of his confusion gave her courage. She stood. She was about to follow him, still spraying, when she realized he was trying to reach the stairs.
“No! Wait!” she called out, though warning him made no sense. As long as he was leaving, what did she care what happened to him? But...the staircase!
An irrational panic seized her, freezing all logical thought. He might be a thief, or a rapist, or a murderer. And yet, she couldn’t let him just fall backward, helplessly, down that steep, uncarpeted walnut spiral of stairs.
A picture of her mother’s body flashed into her mind. The green eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. The black hair glistening as a red pool spread on the floor around her...
“No!” Penny cried out again, louder. She dropped the wasp spray onto the bed and moved toward the door. “No...the stairs!”
But either the intruder didn’t hear her or he couldn’t think straight over the pain. He kept scrambling backward, kept bumping and lurching, his shadowy body hurtling toward the point of no return.
And then, just as she reached the hall, he fell.
“No!” The word was a whisper that came out on an exhale of horror. “No...no...”
The sound of his body hitting the steps, one after another, cracked like gunfire. It ricocheted through the house, through the empty rooms and the high ceilings, and, it seemed, through every muscle in Penny’s body.
Oh, God. Frozen, she peered over the banister. She wondered if she was going to be sick. If his body lay there, arms and legs at crazed angles like an abandoned rag doll...
If his head rested hideously on a red satin pillow of blood...
She squeezed the wooden rail, squinting. But it was too dark to be sure of anything. He could have been a pile of black laundry at the foot of the stairs. An inanimate object.
No, no, no... Her mind was like one of her father’s unbroken horses, running away faster than she could follow. “Please, not again.”
But then, as if in answer to a prayer, the shadows seemed to shift, then jerk, then fall still again. Another groan.
Not dead, then. Not dead. As relief swept through her, she heard the jagged gasps of her own lungs, as if she’d been unable to breathe until she was sure he lived.
He lived.
The crumpled shadow shifted. The man stood, moving oddly, but moving. Then he ran to the front door, dragging one leg behind him, and, in a sudden rectangle of moonlight, disappeared into the night.
The minute she couldn’t see him anymore, she sank to her knees, right there on the upper landing. It was a complete collapse, as if the batteries that had locked her legs into the upright position had been abruptly switched off.
As she went down, she grabbed for the phone on the marble table. It clattered to the floor. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but she found the lighted numbers somehow and punched them in.
9...1...1...
* * *
LATER, AS A PINK DAWN light began to seep into the edges of the black clouds, Penny started to shiver. She grabbed her upper arms with her hands and rubbed vigorously.
And only then did she finally realize why, as they interviewed her and took her statement, the police officers kept giving her such strange looks and asking whether she might like to finish the interview inside.
She’d said no because she couldn’t bear the thought. She couldn’t go in there. Not yet. Not until she stopped reliving the moment the man fell down the stairs. Even then, she wondered if she’d be able to enter by the front door. At Bell River, where her mother had died, Penny hadn’t entered by the front in seventeen years.
But these officers didn’t know any of that. All they knew was how inappropriately dressed she was for a cold June San Francisco dawn. She was wearing only a thin cotton T-shirt. Dingy, shapeless, with sparkly multicolored letters across the chest that read Keep Calm and Paint Something.
It was too big—she’d lost weight since Ruth’s death—so it hit her midthigh, thank goodness. The letters were peeling because she’d washed it so often. But it had been a gift from Ruth, and Penny had worn it almost every night since her aunt’s death.
The officer taking her statement was young. Though Penny was only twenty-seven, she felt aeons older than Officer McGregor. Even the name seemed too big for someone who looked more boy than man, not old enough to be out of high school.
He frowned as she rubbed her arms, and he made a small, worried sound. Then, with a jerky motion, he darted up the steps and into the town house. When he emerged seconds later, he held her running shoes, which she kept by the door, and one of Ruth’s sweaters, which had hung on the coat tree for years.
He extended them awkwardly. “I just thought, if you really don’t want to go inside...”
“Yes. Thank you.” Smiling, she took the shoes gratefully, and wobbled on first one foot, then the other, to tug them on without even unlacing them. His arm twitched, as if he wanted to help steady her, but that was one impulse he did resist.
He held out the sweater so that she could insert her arms, but even that made him blush.
“Thank you,” she said again, warmly enough, she hoped, to make him feel more at ease about whether his gesture had been too personal. “I guess I was numb at first, but the chill started to get to me. I feel much better now.”
He nodded, obviously tongue-tied, pretending to read over his notes from their interview. She closed the sweater over her chest, wrapped her arms there to hold it shut, and watched him without speaking.
She was sorry he felt embarrassed. But it was soothing, somehow, to witness this gallant innocence. It was like...a chaser. Something sweet to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the shadowy, hulking threat, who had, in such a surreal way, appeared at her bedroom door.
“Pea! Are you mad, girl? It’s freezing out here!”
She turned at the sound of Ben Hackney’s voice. Oh, no. The first police vehicle had arrived with blue lights flashing, and they must have woken him. He probably had been alarmed, wondering what had happened next door.
“I’m fine, Ben,” she said. As he drew closer, she saw that he carried one of his big wool overcoats, which he draped over her shoulders without preamble.
“You will be fine—when you get inside. Which you’re going to do right now.” He glared at McGregor. “If you have more questions, you’ll have to ask them another time. I just spoke to your boss over there, and he agreed that I should take Miss Wright in and get her warm.”
McGregor lifted his square chin—a Dudley Do Right movement. “Miss Wright has indicated that she doesn’t want to go into the house, sir.”
“Not that house, you foolish pup. My house.”
McGregor turned to Penny. “Is this what you’d prefer, Miss Wright? Is this gentleman a friend?”
Penny put her hand on Ben’s arm. “Yes, a good friend,” she began, but Ben had started to laugh.
“I’m going to take care of her, son. Not serve her up in a pie.” His voice was oddly sympathetic. “I know how you’re feeling. You want to slay dragons, shoot bad guys, swim oceans in her name.”
McGregor’s eyebrows drew together, and he started to protest, but he was already blushing again.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Ben assured him, slapping him on the shoulder. “She has that effect on everyone. Give her your card. That way, if she ever decides she wants to, she can call you.”
“Ben, for heaven’s sake.” He had been trying to match her up with a boyfriend for the past ten years. She had to credit him with good instincts, though—he’d never liked Curt.
She turned to McGregor. “He’s teasing,” she said. “He thinks it’ll make me feel better, after—”
To her surprise, the officer was holding out his business card. “Oh.” She accepted it, looked at it—which was stupid, because what did she expect it to say, other than what it did? James McGregor, SFPD, and a telephone number. She wished she had pockets.
For one thing, having pockets would mean she had pants.
“Thank you.”
Then Ben shepherded her away, across the dewy grass, up his stairs—the mirror image of the ones on Ruth’s town house—and hustled her to the kitchen, where she could smell coffee brewing.
The kitchen was toasty warm, but she kept on the overcoat, realizing that the shivering wasn’t entirely a result of temperature. He scraped out a chair at the breakfast nook, then began to bustle about, pouring coffee and scrambling eggs with a quiet calm as she recounted what had happened.
When the facts had been exchanged, and the immediate questions answered, he seemed to realize she needed to stop talking. He kept bustling, while she sat, staring out at the brightening emerald of the grass and the gorgeous tulips he grew with his magical green thumbs.
She liked the small sounds of him working. The clink of a spoon against a cup, the quick swish of water dampening a dishcloth, the squeak of his tennis shoes.
The simple sounds of another human being. Suddenly she realized how completely alone she’d been the past two months.
Finally, the internal shivering ceased. With a small sigh of relief, she shrugged off his coat. Glancing at the clock over the stove, she realized it was almost seven.
She must have been here an hour or more. She should go home and let him get on with his day.
“Thank you, Ben,” she began, standing. “I should go ho—” All of a sudden she felt tears pushing at her throat, behind her eyes, and she sat back down, frowning hard at her cup. “I—I should...”
“You should move,” Ben said matter-of-factly. He had his cup in one hand and a dish towel in the other, drying the china in methodical circular motions, as if he were polishing silver.
“Move?” She glanced up, wondering if she’d misheard. “Move out of the town house?”
He nodded.
“Just because of what happened this morning?”
“No. Not just that. You should move because you shouldn’t be living there in the first place. For Ruth, maybe it was right. She liked quiet. For you...”
He shook his head slowly, but with utter conviction. “I always knew it was wrong of her to keep you there. Like a prison. You’re too young. You’re too alive.”
“That’s not fair,” she interjected quickly. Criticism of Ruth always made her uncomfortable. Where would she have been if Ruth hadn’t agreed to take her in? “Ruth knew I needed—a safe harbor.”
“At first, yes.” Ben sighed, and his gaze shifted to the bay window overlooking the gardens. His deep-set blue eyes softened, as if he could see them as they’d been fifteen years ago, an old man and a little girl, with twin easels set up, twin paint palettes smudged with blue and red and yellow, each trying to capture the beauty of the flowers.
“At first, you did need a quiet home. Like a hospital. You were a broken little thing.”
He transferred his troubled gaze to her. Then he cleared his throat and turned to the sink.
Ben knew about the tragedy that had exiled Penny from Bell River, of course. Everyone knew, but Ruth hadn’t allowed anyone to speak of it to Penny. She thought it would be too traumatic. Having a mother die tragically was bad enough for any child. But having your mother killed by your father...and your father hauled away to prison...
And then being ripped from the only home you’d ever known, split from your sisters and asked to live in another state, with a woman you barely knew...
Traumatic was an understatement. But, though Ruth had meant well, never being allowed to talk about what had happened—that might have been the hardest of all. Never to be given the chance to sort her emotions into words, to put the events into some larger perspective. Never to let them lose power through familiarity.
Sometimes Penny thought it was a miracle she hadn’t suffered a psychotic break.
“Sweet pea, I’m sorry. But I need to say this.” Ben still held the cup and dishrag, and was still rubbing the surface in circles, as if it were a worry stone.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s okay, Ben. Whatever it is.”
“Good.” He put down the cup and rag, then cleared his throat. “Ruth did mean well. I know that. You needed to heal, and at first it was probably better to heal quietly, in private. But you’ve been ready to move on for a long time.”
“How could I? Ruth was so sick, and—”
“I know. It was loyal of you to stay, to take care of her when she needed you. But she doesn’t need you anymore, honey. It’s time to move on.”
At first Penny didn’t answer. She recognized a disturbing truth in his words. That truth made her so uncomfortable she wanted to run away. But she respected him too much to brush him off. They’d been friends a long time. He was as close to a father as she’d ever had.
“I know,” she admitted finally. “But moving on...it’s not that easy, Ben.”
“Of course it is!” With a grin, he stomped to the refrigerator and yanked down the piece of paper that always hung there, attached by a magnet shaped like Betty Boop. “Just do it! Walk out the door! Grab your bucket list and start checking things off!”
She laughed. “I don’t have a bucket list.”
“You don’t?” Ben looked shocked. He stared at his own. “Not even in your head? In your heart of hearts? You don’t have a list of things you want to do before you die?”
She shook her head.
“Why? You think bucket lists are just for geezers like me?”
“Of course not. I’ve never had any reason to—”
“Well, you do now. You can’t hide forever, Pea. For better or worse, you aren’t like the nun in Ruth’s parlor. You were never meant for that.”
Ruth’s parlor overflowed with lace doilies and antimacassars, Edwardian furniture and Meissen shepherdesses. Ruth had covered every inch of wall space with framed, elaborate cross-stitch samplers offering snippets of poetry, advice and warnings—so many it was hard to tell where one maxim ended and the next one began.
Penny had loved them all, but her favorite had been a picture of a woman putting on a white veil. When Penny moved in, at eleven, she’d assumed the woman was getting married, but Ruth had explained that the poem was really about a woman preparing to become a nun.
The line of poetry beneath the veil read, “And I have asked to be where no storms come.” Penny had adored the quote—especially the way it began with and, as if it picked up the story in the middle. As if the woman had already explained the troubles that had driven her to seek safety in a convent.
“My father murdered my mother,” Penny always imagined the poem might have begun. “And so I have asked to be where no storms come.”
She’d mentioned it to Ben only one time. He gave her a camera for her twelfth birthday, and she took a picture of the sampler, among her other favorite things. When she showed it to him, he had frowned, as if it displeased him to see how much she liked it.
He was frowning now, too. “I hope you’re not still toying with the idea of taking the veil.”
Penny chuckled. “Of course not.” She remembered what Ruth had said when Penny had asked if she was too young to become a nun.
“Far too young,” Ruth had responded with a grim smile, “and far too Methodist.”
“Good.” Ben waved his hand, chasing the idea away like a gnat. “You’d make a horrible nun. You were made for marriage, and children, and love.”
“No.” She shook her head instinctively. No, she definitely wasn’t.
“Of course you are. How could you not know it? The men know it. Every male who sees you falls in love with you on the spot. You make them want to be heroes. Think of poor Officer McGregor out there.”
It was her turn to blush. Penny knew she wasn’t glamorous. She had two beautiful sisters, one as dark and dramatic as a stormy midnight, the other as pale and cool as a snow queen. Penny was the boring one. And if she hadn’t been boring to begin with, these years with Ruth, who didn’t believe in wearing bright clothing or making loud noises, had certainly washed her out to a faded, sepia watercolor of a woman.
The only beauty she had any claim to showed up in her art.
Ben’s affection made him partial. As if to offset Ruth’s crisp, undemonstrative manner, he had always handed out extravagant compliments like candy.
“Don’t be silly, Ben.”
“I’m not. You are. You’ve got that quiet, innocent kind of beauty, which, believe me, is the most dangerous. Plus, you’re talented, and you’re smart, and you’re far too gutsy to spend the rest of your life hiding in that town house.”
She had to smile. She was the typical youngest child—meek, a pleaser, bossed around by everyone, always trying to broker peace. “Come on. Gutsy?”
“Absolutely. You’ve conquered more demons at your young age than most people face in a lifetime. Starting with your devil of a father, and going up through tonight.”
“I haven’t been brave. I’ve simply endured. I’ve done whatever I had to do.”
“Well, what do you think courage is?” He smiled. “It’s surviving, kiddo. It’s doing what you must. It’s grabbing a can of wasp spray and aiming it at the monster’s ugly face.”
She laughed, and shook her head. “And then shaking like a leaf for four hours straight?”
“Sure. For a while you’ll shake. But trust me, by tomorrow, you’ll realize tonight taught you two very important things. One, you can’t hide from trouble—not in a nunnery, and certainly not in a San Francisco town house.”
The truth of that sizzled in the pit of her stomach. She might want to be where no storms come—but was there any such place?
She nodded slowly. “And two?”
“And two...” He took her hand in his and squeezed. “Two...so trouble finds you. So what? You’re a warrior, Penelope Wright. There’s no trouble out there that you can’t handle.”
* * *
MAX THORPE HADN’T been on a date in ten months, not since his wife died. Apparently, ten months wasn’t long enough. Everything about the woman he’d taken to dinner annoyed him, from her perfume to her conversation.
Even the way she ate salad irritated him. So odd, this intensely negative reaction. She’d seemed pretty good on paper—just-turned-thirty to his thirty-four, a widow herself. A professional, some kind of charity arts work on the weekends. His friends, who had been aware that divorce had been in the air long before Lydia’s aneurysm, had started trying to set him up with their single friends about six months after her death, but this was the first time he’d said yes.
Obviously he’d surrendered too soon—which actually surprised him. Given the state of his marriage, he wouldn’t have thought he’d have this much trouble getting over Lydia.
But the attempt to reenter the dating world had gone so staggeringly wrong from the get-go that he’d almost been glad to see his daughter’s cell phone number pop up on his caller ID.
Until he realized she was calling from the security guard’s station at the outlet mall.
Ellen and her friends, who had supposedly been safe at a friend’s sleepover, had been caught shoplifting. The store would release her with only a warning, but he had to talk to them in person.
Shoplifting? He almost couldn’t believe his ears. But he arranged a cab for his date, with apologies, then hightailed it to the mall, listened to the guard’s lecture, and now was driving his stony-faced eleven-year-old daughter home in total silence.
A lipstick. Good God. The surprisingly understanding guard had said it all—how wrong it was morally, how stupid it was intellectually, how much damage it could do to her life, long-term. But Max could tell Ellen wasn’t listening.
And he had no idea how he would get through to her, either.
Ellen had turned eleven a couple of weeks ago. She wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick. But even if she was going to defy him about that, why steal it? She always had enough money to buy whatever she wanted, and he didn’t make her account for every penny.
In fact, he almost never said no to her—never had. At first, he’d been overindulgent because he felt guilty for traveling so much, and for even thinking the D word. Then, after Lydia’s death, he’d indulged his daughter because she’d seemed so broken and lost.
Great. He hadn’t just flunked Marriage 101, he’d flunked Parenting, too.
“Ellen, I need to understand what happened tonight. First of all, what were you and Stephanie doing at the mall without Stephanie’s parents?”
Ellen gave him a look that stopped just shy of being rude. She knew he didn’t allow overt disrespect, but she’d found a hundred and one ways to get the same message across, covertly.
“They let her go to the mall with friends all the time. I guess her parents trust her.”
He made a sound that might have been a chuckle if he hadn’t been so angry. “Guess that’s a mistake.”
Ellen folded her arms across her chest and faced the window.
The traffic was terrible—Friday night in downtown Chicago. It would be forty minutes before they got home. Forty very long minutes. He realized, with a sudden chagrin, that he’d really rather let it go, and make the drive in angry silence. Though he’d adored Ellen as a baby and a toddler, something had changed through the years. He didn’t speak her language anymore.
He didn’t know how to couch things so that she’d listen, so that she’d care. He didn’t know what metaphors she thought in, or what incentives she valued.
The awkward, one-sided sessions of family therapy, which they’d endured together for six months to help her deal with her grief, hadn’t exactly prepared him for real-life conversations.
Even before that, everything had come together in a perfect storm of bad parenting. His job had started sending him on longer and longer trips. Mexico had happened. When he returned from that, he was different—and not in a good way. His wife didn’t like the new, less-patient Max, and he didn’t like her much, either. She seemed, after his ordeal, to be shockingly superficial, oblivious to anything that really mattered in life.
And she had taken their daughter with her to that world of jewelry, supermodels, clothes, diets. When they chattered together, Max tuned out. If he hadn’t, he would have walked out.
He hadn’t blamed Lydia. He knew she clung to her daughter because she needed an ally, and because she needed an unconditional admiration he couldn’t give her. But as the gulf widened between Max and Lydia, it had widened between Max and Ellen, too.
He might not travel that much anymore, but he’d been absent nonetheless.
“Ellen.” He resisted the urge to give up. “You’re going to have to talk to me. Stealing is serious. I have no idea why you’d even consider doing something you know is wrong. You have enough money for whatever you need, don’t you?”
She made a tsking sound through her teeth. “You don’t understand. It’s not always about money.”
“Well, then, help me to understand. What is it about?”
“Why do you even care? I’m sorry I caused you trouble. I’m sorry I interrupted you on your date.”
He frowned. Could his dating already be what had prompted this? He’d talked to her about the dinner ahead of time, and she’d professed herself completely indifferent to when, or whom, he chose to date.
But he should have known. Ellen rarely admitted she cared about anything. Especially anything to do with Max.
“I don’t care about the date,” he said. “It wasn’t going well, anyhow. Right now, all I want is to be here. I want to sort this out with you.”
She laughed, a short bark that wasn’t openly rude, but again, barely. “Right.”
“If you want me to understand, you have to explain. If it’s not about money, what is it about? Are you angry that I went on a date?”
“No. Why should I be? It’s not like Mom will mind.”
He flinched. “Okay, then, what is it?” He took a breath. “Ellen, I’m not letting this go, so you might as well tell me. Why would you do such a thing?”
She unwound her arms so that she could fiddle with her seat belt, as if it were too tight. “You won’t understand.”
“I already don’t understand.”
“It’s like an initiation.”
He had to make a conscious effort not to do a double take. But what the hell? What kind of initiation did eleven-year-olds have to go through?
“Initiation into what?”
“The group. Stephanie’s group.”
“Why on earth would you want to be part of any group that would ask you to commit a crime?”
“Are you kidding?” Finally, Ellen turned, and her face was slack with shock. “Stephanie’s the prettiest girl in school, and the coolest. If you’re not part of her group, you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says Loser.”
A flare of anger went through him like something shot from a rocket. How could this be his daughter? He’d been brought up on a North Carolina farm, by grandparents who taught him that nothing seen by the naked eye mattered. The worth of land wasn’t in its beauty, but in what lay beneath, in the soil. The sweetest-looking land sometimes was so starved for nutrients that it wouldn’t grow a single stick of celery, or was so riddled with stones that it would break your hoe on the first pass.
People, they told him, were the same as the land. Only what they had inside mattered, and finding that out took time and care. Money just confused things, allowing an empty shell to deck out like a king.
For a moment, he wanted to blame Lydia. But wasn’t that the kind of lie that his grandfather would have hated? All lies, according to his grandfather, were ugly. But what he called “chicken lies” were the worst. Those were the ones you told to yourself, to keep from having to look an ugly truth in the eye.
So, no. He couldn’t blame Lydia. First of all, where did Lydia come from? From Max’s own foolish, lusty youth. From his inability to tell the empty shell from the decked-out facade.
And, even more important, why should Lydia’s influence have prevailed over his?
Because he’d abdicated, that’s why. He’d opted out. He’d failed.
But not anymore. He looked at his little girl, at her brown hair that used to feel like angel silk beneath his hands. He remembered the dreams he’d built in his head, as he walked the floor with her at night. He remembered the love, that knee-weakening, heart-humbling rush of pure adoration....
“We’re going to have to make some serious changes,” he said. His tone was somber—so somber it seemed to startle her, her eyes wide and alarmed.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But you should brace yourself, because they’re going to be big changes. We’ve gotten off track somewhere. Not just you. Me, too. We have to find our way back.”
She swallowed, as if the look on his face made her nervous. But she didn’t ask any further questions.
Which was good, because he didn’t have many answers. Only one thing he knew, instinctively. He couldn’t do it here, in Chicago, with the traffic and the malls and the Stephanies. And the memories of Lydia around every corner.
He had no idea how, but he was going to fix this. He was going to stop giving her money, stop assuaging his guilt with presents and indulgence. He was going spend time with her, get to know her and teach her those hard but wonderful life lessons his grandparents had taught him.
And maybe, along the way, he’d relearn some of those lessons himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Two months later
SILVERDELL, COLORADO, HADN’T changed much in seventeen years. Penny had noticed that last year, when she came back as the dude ranch idea was first being considered, and then again when her sister Rowena got married.
But on this visit, she was particularly struck by the snow-globe effect—perhaps because her own world had changed so dramatically. She drove slowly down Elk Avenue, noting how many stores remained from her childhood, and how many of the replacement shops had maintained the feel of their predecessors.
August. Early fall in Silverdell. She remembered it so well. And here it all was. Same big tubs of orange and gold chrysanthemums on the sidewalk, same colorful awnings over shovel-and ski-jacket-filled windows that warned of the winter to come.
Same park square, roiling with what might easily have been the same laughing children.
She slowed now, watching them kick piles of leaves into tiny yellow storms and chase each other, squealing, until someone fell, then got up, giggling, with grass stains on elbows and chin.
She and her sisters, Rowena and Bree, had rarely been part of all that. In fact, she used to watch those mischievous kids and wonder where they got the courage to be so naughty. Didn’t their fathers have tempers, too?
Their fathers...
She knew she ought to go to the ranch. Or at least by her new duplex.
But she knew she wasn’t ready. It didn’t make any sense, but she needed more time to come to terms with being in Silverdell again—and with the big changes that were coming.
It didn’t help to remind herself that they were changes she’d wanted. Changes she’d chosen. Suddenly the changes seemed more than “big.” They seemed crazy. Risky. Terrifying.
Annoyed with herself, but unable to break through the emotional paralysis, she found a parking space and headed into the ice-cream shop. She was hungry and nervous. Even before she had grown a full set of teeth she’d learned that a banana split could make everything better.
Her father and Ruth would both have been horrified—ice cream before lunch? Instead of lunch? But they weren’t here. And she wasn’t a child. Surely this one tiny act of independent thinking wasn’t too much for her, even today.
Baby steps.
“Hey!” The string-bean-shaped young man behind the counter tossed down his magazine and stood at attention, apparently delighted to see her. The shop was empty, so maybe he really was. “What can I get you?”
She glanced at the calligraphy on the menu over his head. “I’d love a banana split. Double whipped cream.”
“Awesome!” He grinned as if she’d said the magic words and began pulling out ingredients. “It’s getting nippy out, and we don’t get much business once it turns cold. We sell hot chocolate, but it takes a lot of hot chocolates to pay the rent, you know?”
She smiled, thinking how close her calculations had been when she decided how much rent she’d need to ask for the other side of her new duplex.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“About a hundred million,” the young man said, inserting his knife into a banana as carefully as if he were performing surgery. “Plus, there’s no art to making a cup of cocoa. Not like a good banana split.” He arranged the slices into the curved boat, tossing away a couple of bruised bits. “Now this is something you can get creative with.”
A warmhearted ice-cream artist who worried about making the rent but couldn’t force himself to serve a bruised banana. She made a mental note to come in as often as she could. Her sweet tooth didn’t know seasons.
She smiled. See? She hadn’t taken a single bite, and she was already feeling better.
“Go ahead and grab a seat,” he said. “I’m Danny. This is my shop. I’ll make you something special, and bring it to you.”
She arranged herself by the window, dropped her purse on the other side of the table and pulled out her legal pad and pen. Maybe if she worked on her list, she would retrieve her courage, and she could head to Bell River.
She flipped over a couple of pages, filled to the margins with practical information about who to call if the water wasn’t hooked up, or the electricity went wonky. All that was important, but not right now.
The third page... That’s the one that mattered. She tapped her pen against her lips and read what she’d written so far.
The Risk-it List.
The very words looked good, in her favorite turquoise ink, against the yellow lined paper. Last night, when she’d stopped—not wanting to arrive in Silverdell after dark—she had worked on the list. Right before she fell asleep, she’d doodled a small bluebird in the upper right corner of her paper.
The bluebird of happiness. That’s what Ro used to call it. Ro and Bree used to take Penny “hunting” in the woods, with butterfly nets that supposedly were magical, nets that could catch the bluebird that would make everything at Bell River right.
Obviously, they’d never captured one. But Penny had drawn birds, photographed them, been fascinated by them, ever since. This one was fat and contented, and smiled at the list below him.
The Risk-it List. She’d decided it should be twelve items long. She had six entries so far, and two check marks.
Sell town house. Check.
Buy place in Silverdell— Don’t let Bree and Ro overrule. Don’t tell Bree and Ro until purchase complete! Check.
Host a party...wearing a costume.
Learn to juggle.
Learn to dance.
Cut hair.
Seven...Seven...
Penny chewed on the end of her pen—a habit she’d never been able to break—and tried to make up her mind what number seven should be.
Ben had been right, of course. When the shock of the wasp spray incident had worn off, a strange pride took its place. She felt empowered. Why shouldn’t she? She’d prevailed over a big, hulking intruder. She might have been terrified, but she hadn’t panicked. She’d kept her head, and she’d driven him away—without anyone getting seriously hurt.
She’d decided that very day to start the list. And before any doubt could set in, she’d accomplished numbers one and two. Sell the town house—almost frighteningly easy. And buy a small house in Silverdell—much scarier, as she didn’t have time to see it for herself but had to trust Jenny Gladiola, Silverdell’s longtime real estate agent.
But she’d accomplished both, and now here she was, less than three miles from Bell River Ranch. Here to stay. Here to call Silverdell home again, after all these years.
A shiver passed through her. Thanks to Jenny’s discretion, no one in the family yet knew she was in town. Jenny had been a Dellian real estate agent forever, and she’d kept her career flourishing, through good markets and bad, by knowing how to keep her mouth shut.
For now Penny was safe. However, telling Bree and Rowena absolutely had to be next.
Her sisters had been begging her for months to come live at the dude ranch with them. They could use the help, they said. They needed an art teacher, they said. But she knew the truth—they were worried about her. They wanted to slip her into their nest, straight from the nest Ruth had kept her in.
No one wanted her to learn to fly.
But, by golly, she was going to learn anyhow.
So...back to the Risk-it List. What should number seven be? She had to pick very carefully. After the two big jolts of selling the town house and buying the duplex, she wanted the rest of the list to be relatively easy. She’d tackle a few of her phobias—but she wouldn’t set herself up for failure. No wrestling pythons in the rain forest or taking a commercial shuttle to the space station.
Just juggling, costumes, kissing...
Ben would laugh. He was much more the space station type. She’d decided not to call hers a bucket list. It sounded too ambitious. That might come later, after she’d accomplished everything on this one. After she’d learned a little bit about who Penny Wright really was.
Instead, she’d called it the Risk-it List. A list of things she’d never had the nerve to do—though she’d always envied others who did. Things that looked daring, or exciting, or just plain fun. Things that might be mistakes. Things that might make her look silly. Things she had phobias about...
Aha! Phobias!
So seven would be: Ride in a hot air balloon. (fear of heights)
Take a picture of someone famous. (shyness)
Get a beautiful tattoo. (fear of disapproval)
Kiss a total stranger. (fear of...everything)
Go white-water rafting (fear of dying J)
Make love in a sailboat.
Number Eleven, the white-water rafting, would probably be the scariest. She really, really found the rapids terrifying. So obviously she’d left that till toward the end of the list.
But where had that crazy Number Twelve come from? Was it from some movie she’d seen? Some couple she’d spotted setting off into San Francisco Bay...with her imagination supplying the rest?
“What’s so funny?”
Danny, the ice-cream artist, was at her table, holding a bowl so laden with beautifully arranged sweets that she knew she’d never be able to finish it.
He looked for a safe place to set it down. Flushing, she tilted her legal pad toward her chest to hide it, then felt ridiculous. Why did she care whether he saw it?
“Nothing, really,” she said awkwardly. “I just wrote the wrong thing... You know... I mean I spelled it all wrong.”
Argh. Why did she always feel nervous if she did anything remotely unconventional? She was unconventional, darn it. She was an artist at heart, not a banker. She wanted to dress in flamboyant colors and patterns, and laugh loudly, and lie down on the sidewalk to get the best angle on a snail. She wanted to sing and dance and go to parties—and make love in a sailboat.
Ruth wasn’t here to reproach her. Her father wasn’t here to mock. No one cared. No one.
She could simply have laughed and said, “I wrote ‘sex on a sailboat’ on my wish list, though until this very minute I had no idea it was a fantasy of mine.”
Danny was probably no more than twenty-three, fresh out of college—he’d probably be a lot more embarrassed than she was.
New Number One: Stop Being Such a Doormat.
Oh, well. Baby steps, remember? She gave him a warm smile to offset any insult he might have taken from the snatched-away list. She complimented his gorgeous creation, stuck a finger—sorry, Ruth—into the whipped cream, then stuck the finger into her mouth and sighed. Real whipped cream. Sinfully delicious.
“It’s fantastic,” she said. “I’ve moved back to town, and you can be sure I’ll be a regular customer!”
But it was too late. Obviously offended, he’d dialed his friendliness down about three notches. He wandered toward the ice-cream cases and began stacking and restacking prepackaged tubs—though they’d been perfectly aligned already.
Darn it. She sighed, annoyed with herself all over again. That was three strikes. Afraid to pull into Bell River. Afraid to pull into her own new duplex. Afraid to let this nice man see that she was making a list of dreams.
She’d better stiffen up, and fast, or the ego boost of banishing her intruder would disappear into a cloud of self-doubt. Her life might slide right back into the gray, conformist soup of the past seventeen years.
No. Darn it. No.
She couldn’t stand that. She wouldn’t let it happen. One way or another, she’d find the courage to—
The bell rang out as the door opened. She kept her legal pad against her chest as two people walked in. A little girl, maybe ten? Sulky, angry about something.
As she did with everyone she saw, Penny mentally began to sketch the child. A duckling still, but with definite traces of swan showing up around the edges. Her chubby cheeks were out of proportion to her longish, narrow chin. Someday, in the next year or two, her contours would lengthen, and she’d have the sweetest heart-shaped face....
Her hair was a glorious mess—shining, thick, brown, glossy curls that she had no idea what to do with now. And her figure obviously was hard to fit. A thick waist over too-long, too-skinny legs that made her look a little like a candy apple on toothpicks today. But when she got her teenage growth spurt, and that torso stretched out to match the limbs....well, watch out, Dad.
Ohhhh. When Penny’s gaze finally shifted to Dad, she felt a small kick beneath her ribs. What a wonderful face...and the rest of him wasn’t bad, either.
His coloring wasn’t dramatic—the daughter must have inherited that from Mom. He was brown-haired, with hints of honey in the strands, and a similar honeyed stubble on his cheeks and chin. His eyes, too, were brown—they caught the light through the window, and glowed amber, rich, a lot like the caramel sliding down her ice cream right now.
But he didn’t need to be painted with bold colors to be memorable. He oozed power—it was in the jut of his cheekbones, the knife-edge of his jaw, the full sensuality of his lips. And in that body. If he didn’t work outdoors, he must work out indoors...about twenty hours a day.
Something else made her lower her legal pad, uncap her pen and start to sketch, though. Not the power. She wasn’t impressed by power—in fact, it repelled her. No, what her pen flew across the page trying to capture was something less easily defined. Something in the curve of his neck, or maybe it was the elegant slide of light across his cheek, twinkling like a hint of magic in those tiny, unshaven shadows.
She bit her lower lip, frustrated. The pen wasn’t subtle enough; she needed charcoals, or watercolor. Or was watercolor too insipid? Pen and ink, maybe, would find the tightrope balance between sweetness and strength.
Suddenly, the sweetness took the upper hand. Oh, he was smiling, and that changed everything! A hint of rascal in the slight overbite, but a rush of kindness and harmony in the open lips, a torrent of sensuality in the wide expanse of...
Her pen froze. He wasn’t just smiling. He was smiling at her.
He was watching her watch him.
Which, she realized as she stared at her pad, she must have been doing for quite a while. The drawing was taking shape, filling in with detail. It wouldn’t be mistaken for anyone or anything but him.
Her cheeks burned as she realized his daughter was watching her, too. How long had she been in her trance, drawing while the rest of the world disappeared? Father and daughter had already ordered, and the little girl was even now sucking absently on the straw of an ice-cream float while she stared at Penny.
Nervously, Penny set down the pad and pulled the top pages over to cover her sketch. She tried to make the movement look natural, but she knew it was hopeless.
“Why were you drawing my dad?” The girl frowned, pointing her float toward the notebook, as if to prevent Penny from denying it.
“Ellen. Don’t be rude,” the man said, still smiling. He reached out to pull back his daughter’s outthrust glass, but she made a petulant sound and lurched clear of him in one willful, rebellious motion.
Her father’s grip had obviously been gentle, so the force was twice what she needed to break free. The results were disastrous. Ice cream and root beer and whipped cream flew everywhere.
Everywhere. Across the girl’s hand, onto the floor, onto her shoes—and even onto her dad’s crisp white shirt and golden suede jacket.
Her cheeks flamed red. “Now look what you did,” the girl said, obviously covering her embarrassment with aggression.
Oh, no, don’t make him look a fool—especially not with strangers to witness the disrespect! Penny’s chest tightened, and her stomach did a dizzy swooping thing. She didn’t dare look at the father. Though the girl was bratty, Penny’s heart ached for her, and she wished she could prevent what must be coming.
But several seconds passed, and she heard nothing. No yelling, no curses, not even a cold, scathing reprimand. Penny glanced up. To her surprise the child was disappearing into the ladies’ room, and the father calmly tugged napkins out of the dispenser.
“Ah, man, I’m sorry,” Danny said, running a dishrag under some water. “I’ll make her another one. No charge.”
Yeah, right. Penny tightened again, thinking how unlikely it was that the father would reward such rudeness with a second chance at ice cream.
“Don’t be silly,” the man said in a pleasant tone, surprising Penny so completely she felt her lower jaw sag. “Of course we’ll pay for it. But make it a double, okay? And what the heck. I’ll have one, too.”
And just like that, Penny’s tension drained away, as if someone had pulled the stopper out. She felt a wave of irrational happiness wash in after it. The happiness was irrational because logically, just one nice man, one patient father—that didn’t change anything, not for her. She had grown up with a terrifying father, and she still had the emotional scars to prove it.
This man was no one to her—she didn’t even know his name. But he was...well, right now he felt like hope personified. He was the rainbow after the storm, the unicorn emerging from the forest, the olive branch that proved land still existed, land that an exhausted sailor might someday reach.
Right now, she absolutely loved this beautiful, beautiful man.
Impulsively, she stood. He’d run out of napkins, and he still had whipped cream flecked across his neck and under his chin. He probably didn’t even realize it. She extracted a dozen napkins from the dispenser on her table and moved toward him.
Danny was absorbed in making the new floats.
“Here,” she said as she reached the counter. “Let me help with that. You’ve still got a spot, here—” She stood on tiptoe. He was tall. “And here.”
She leaned in.
Number Ten. Kiss a total stranger.
This was perfect. Not an artificial check mark on an arbitrary list. She wanted to kiss him. For daughters everywhere, including the angry kid in the bathroom, and the terrified little girl she herself once had been, Penny wanted to give him a heartfelt thank-you kiss.
On the cheek, of course. She shut her eyes. Her lips tingled, anticipating the soft bristles of his stubble. He smelled sweet, as if he’d been traveling in a perfume-filled car. But not a grown woman’s perfume. A pink-cotton-candy perfume—the kind a ten-year-old would wear.
Cotton candy and honey bristles... Something fluttered in her belly. How could such a combination be sensual?
But as she moved in, he must have shifted his face toward her, because her impetuous kiss landed not on soft bristles, but on the warm, ridged flesh of his lips.
She inhaled sharply, opening her eyes—and found herself staring into the deep pools of his. She had connected with the edge of his mouth, not the center, where the sharply drawn bow formed. But still...she felt the warmth of the stiff rim around the velvet flesh. She felt the minty heat of his surprised breath.
For a minute, she couldn’t pull away.
He didn’t, either. For a second, a few seconds—it was hard to tell, because time seemed as sticky and easily stretched as the caramel on her sundae—they stood there, joined by shocked eyes and warm, half-open mouths.
He made a low sound, a primitive sound that could be identified in any country, on any planet, as pleasure. But he didn’t dive in, snatching the opportunity lewdly, as some men might have done. Instead, he slowly, almost imperceptibly, tilted his head to the right...then delicately drew it back again to the left.
The subtle movement caused his lips to brush hers with an excruciating tingle. All through her body, nerve endings reacted, as if he’d put a match to her mouth. Her cheeks flamed. Her chest radiated heat like a sunburst. Her heart couldn’t remember exactly what to do, and thumped around in her chest, confused.
Surely the whole thing didn’t last more than two or three seconds. Danny hadn’t even finished churning ice cream into the floats. Two or three seconds, and then—it might have been prearranged—they both pulled back at the same moment. She had to work hard to steady her breathing, as if she’d been jogging, and she felt the strangest urge to adjust her untouched clothes and smooth her unruffled hair.
In contrast, he looked surprised but utterly calm. His caramel eyes were smiling. The outside corners tilted up, managing to look quizzical and delighted at the same time.
“I’m not sure what I did to deserve that,” he said in low, pleasant tones. “But I hope you’ll tell me...so that I can do it again.”
“It isn’t what you did,” she said awkwardly, backing up a step. “It’s what you didn’t do.”
“What I didn’t do?”
She tried to laugh, tried to match his composure, though she suddenly felt utterly ridiculous. He’d never understand. He probably had no idea what some fathers were capable of doing to a daughter who got mouthy and rude.
She let her gaze drift to the hallway where his daughter had disappeared only two or three minutes before. “I guess I wanted to thank you, on behalf of all the clumsy, fussy little girls out there, for not losing your temper.”
For a minute he looked truly confused. His brows drew together a fraction of an inch, and he tilted his head one degree. “Over ice cream?”
“Partly ice cream.” She raised her eyebrows. “But mostly...attitude.”
“Ah. The attitude.” He sobered slightly. “Well, we’ve got kind of a special case, because—”
“Dad, let’s go.”
The little girl had emerged, still scowling, clearly not happy to see her father talking to Penny. At the same moment Danny came around the counter, big silver containers in both hands, whipped cream oozing in snowy rivers down the sides.
“Here you go!” He beamed. “Extra whipped cream, extra cherries, I even threw in some jimmies.”
He tilted one of the floats, eager to show off the happy face he’d made with cherries and sprinkles—and he almost lost his grip on the slippery vessel. For a few laughing, chaotic seconds, both father and daughter were absorbed in trying to make the transfer without upsetting another drink.
Penny took advantage of that moment to slip out, her legal pad tucked safely under her arm.
Yes, she was running away. But it didn’t feel like the same kind of cowardice she’d hated in herself earlier. It was more...preservation of something inexplicably special.
She simply couldn’t bear to let the girl start quizzing her again about why she’d been drawing Dad. And, for whatever reason, she didn’t want the frozen-time beauty of their accidental kiss to become...ordinary.
She moved quickly, let the door fall shut on the chimes behind her, and then turned left, making her way toward her car.
Time to go to Bell River. She could handle it now. She felt, in fact, as if she could handle anything.
Still hugging her legal pad, she took a deep breath of the crisp August afternoon air. She felt so buoyant she had to make a conscious effort not to skip, or break into song.
She might have made a fool of herself in there, but looking foolish hadn’t killed her.
In fact, it had made her sizzle and pop inside. As if Danny had put her under the soda water spigot and injected her with fizzy carbonation. She felt free.
The idea of freedom was so new, and at the same time so old, that she laughed out loud. A saleslady who had been arranging flowers in front of a store looked up with a cautious smile.
“May I help you?”
“No, thanks,” Penny said, smiling. “I’m fine. I know exactly what I want.”
And, for the first time in years, that was true. She did know what she wanted.
She wanted to be herself.
* * *
MAX TWIRLED THE rusted pressure relief valve at the top of the cottage’s water heater carefully. Ellen had tried to grab a quick shower earlier, but turning the spigot had triggered a series of banging, popping noises. Sounded like sediment buildup to Max.
Since they’d arrived in town almost a week early, he couldn’t blame their landlady for the problem. And since it was Saturday, he couldn’t expect a plumber to come out on a moment’s notice—not without charging a fortune in overtime.
“Dad, call the plumber. It’s not like we’re poor,” Ellen had whined, disgusted. She took after Lydia that way. She didn’t mind how long he sat at the drafting table sketching blueprints for his newest office complex or luxury resort. In fact, at those times, she’d brag to her friends about her father, the Important Architect.
But work that left him dirty, or smelly, or disheveled? That was embarrassing. Just one of the things they were in Silverdell to unlearn.
“We would get poor in a hurry if we never did anything for ourselves,” he had responded calmly, though he’d known it would make her roll her eyes.
It had. But he couldn’t continue catering to her quirks simply to avoid an eye roll. Nor could he keep indulging her whims, as he wanted to, just because she was angry, lonely and motherless.
He’d finally accepted that his job was harder than that. Nothing let him off the hook when it came to responsible parenting.
Responsible parenting. Even his grandfather wouldn’t ever have used such a stupid expression. It sounded like the stuffiest, most judgmental jackassery....
He groaned. No wonder Ellen thought he was boring. In her estimation, thirty-four was already ancient, and his endless talk of work ethic and responsibility and self-control clearly made her want to puke.
For a moment, his thoughts returned to the woman at the ice-cream store. Wonder what Ellen would have thought, if she’d seen the woman come right up and kiss boring old dad, right out of nowhere?
She probably would have puked.
But Max’s reaction had been very different—and a little unnerving. This eccentric young woman wasn’t really his type. She was the “little girl lost” type—and he’d been around long enough to be fairly cynical about that particular female style. In his experience, it was usually either a sign of dysfunction, or pure sham.
She was clearly in her early twenties, and she had a shy but stunning beauty, as if she were something magical that was accustomed to living in the forest. A swinging, colorful dress over playful cowgirl boots. Long, brown hair pulled back by a simple tortoiseshell headband, falling down her slim back, as glossy and healthy as a child’s.
No, Flower Child doll wasn’t his type. He was thirty-four, not fourteen.
And yet, when she kissed him, every atom in his body had leaped to attention, as turned on as if he actually were that breathless fourteen-year-old. For about three incredible seconds, time had stood still in a glittering pool of sexual awareness.
And then she was gone. Just as well. Ellen hadn’t seen the kiss, but she was an eagle-eyed little thing, and she was always spoiling for a fight, always looking for proof that she wasn’t important to Max. If the kiss had gone on much longer...
He couldn’t help wondering whether he’d see the woman again. Silverdell was a small town, so unless she’d been passing through, another meeting seemed inevitable. And awkward.
It might be better if she was merely a tourist stopping for a respite from driving. It would be oddly disappointing to meet her and discover she was a fake, or a fool, or a mother of four.
He’d far rather remember their encounter as a rare, mystical moment when his cynicism had evaporated, his “responsibility” had dropped away, and he’d kissed a fairy forest creature.
“Are you done yet?”
Ellen’s voice, impatient, wafted into the basement. He snapped back to reality.
“Not yet. A couple more minutes.”
He refocused, though he hated to mentally return to this shadowy, dirty basement where the water heater stood, its silver cylinder winking oddly, picking up whatever light broke through. He hated basements. He always had, even before Mexico. But responsible parenting meant he couldn’t succumb to his aversion.
And, in the end, the basement was just a big, dusty rectangle of concrete. He could leave anytime he wanted. Funny how often he reminded himself of that when he entered tight spaces or underground rooms. The doors were open. His hands and legs were free.
He could leave anytime he wanted.
He double-checked the garden hose connection on the drain valve one more time before letting the hot water through. He hoped to heaven Ellen continued to obey him, staying inside the house while he worked. The water probably wasn’t hot enough to hurt anyone—the timer had been set to off when they arrived an hour ago—but he refused to take any chances. If she stood downhill from the draining water...
She could be burned. Not likely, but it could happen. And these days he didn’t take the slightest of chances. Ever since Lydia’s death... No, even before that. Ever since Mexico, really.
No wonder he drove Ellen crazy. He didn’t understand anything that mattered to her. He didn’t watch reality TV, where people voted away those who annoyed them, instead of learning to coexist. He could listen only so long to whether stripes or prints were “in” this year, or which of her friends would have to buy a bra first.
And that boy singer she idolized... The girlie little princess made Max want to laugh, frankly. As did Ellen’s fixation with getting her ears pierced and wearing eyeliner. At eleven? Hell, no.
But Lydia would have let her wear it. Buy it. Watch it. Listen to it.
So not only was he stuffy and dense about why “people like them” didn’t fix their own water heaters, he was a traitor to Lydia’s memory.
“Mom said I could.” “Mom promised, as soon as I turned eleven.” Mom said. Mom said. Mom said...
But Mom was gone. And that, of course, was Max’s real sin. He wasn’t Lydia. He never would be. And he couldn’t bring Lydia back. Just as he hadn’t been able to save her.
He gave the valve a final twist, watching the hose hiccup as the water surged through it. A few drops glistened around the fitting, where the metal didn’t quite meet, and pooled in the dust.
The basement hadn’t been used, obviously, in months. It smelled of dead bugs, and grime, and something oily—a leaking lawn mower, an unwashed chain saw, a toppled can of WD-40....
A tremor shimmered down his arm, and he slammed a mental door on the memory. All basements smelled the same. Mexican basements, Colorado basements, probably even Parisian basements.
Out of nowhere, the banging started again, the firecracker pops echoing around him like gunshots. It was just the heater, complaining, but it was too late to tell himself that. His body was already reacting, before his mind could catch up.
Pop. Bang.
The tremor flared to life, and his arm began to shake. Then his legs softened. His knee joints grew soupy. The sounds reverberated hollowly, as if they’d been caught inside his skull, and bounced off every cranial wall.
His heart knocked frantically, demanding his ribs to open and let it free. He fell to his knees, his elbows over his ears, his hands locked behind his head. It was dark. He smelled the oil-gas mixture of dirty power tools....
Oh, God...
Then, suddenly, a rectangle of silver light tilted across the floor.
“Dad?”
He squeezed his elbows together, somehow silencing the tremors. He took a deep breath.
“Yes. I’ll be right up. What is it?”
His voice sounded almost normal. She would probably assume that the edge of thin tension was merely annoyance.
“I wanted to tell you I’m going out back. There is, like, a little orchard, over by the school. Just beyond the fence.”
“Okay.” He took another deep breath. Her voice, even crabby and unfriendly as it always was these days, pulled him to shore, as surely as if it were a bowline tied to a dock.
And the light helped, too. There had never been light, before....
One muscle at a time, the trembling subsided. His heart calmed, accepting that it must stay in his body.
“Okay,” he repeated. “Be careful, though. Stay away from the water I just drained. And don’t go so far that you can’t hear me if I call.”
“I have my cell,” she observed sourly, as though he were being deliberately dense. But when he didn’t respond to that, she surrendered. “Okay, I’ll stay nearby. Remember, though, if you get distracted later by work or something, I did tell you where I was going.”
“Yeah.” He stood, though he felt the need to touch the wall for balance. His head finally began to clear. “Thank you for that, Ellie. I’m really glad you did.”
CHAPTER THREE
BELL RIVER RANCH was only two miles out of downtown Silverdell proper—which luckily didn’t leave enough driving time for doubt or insecurity to set in. Penny rolled down the windows of the rental car and let the cool early-fall breeze blow through her hair. The air smelled sweet, like Russian sage, rose and cosmos, all of which had been planted along the fringes of the Bell River property years ago. It was, to Penny, the defining scent of Home.
And, as always, it triggered a dozen contradictory emotions inside her. Excitement. Fear. Loss. Hope.
Home.
When she spotted the big, two-story timber-and-brick main house rising up around the bend, she slowed the car to a crawl. She needed to let her emotions move through her, giving the intensity time to subside.
The place looked wonderful, new roof gleaming in the morning sun, grass as green as finger paint rolling out in all directions. The trees burned gold and orange and red, but were still full and leafy—the best of both summer and fall, as if the seasons had decided to share this one overlapping month of August.
But...oh, look at all those cars. So many people! Penny had received regular updates from her sisters, so she knew that business was good, but she hadn’t quite absorbed what that meant. There would be guests everywhere. No real privacy, for explaining. And Bree’s new guy—Grayson Harper—he’d be there, too, and Penny would meet him for the first time.
Worst of all, once Bree and Ro heard that Penny intended to stay in Silverdell, but not with them...that she’d bought her own house...
Explaining why without hurting anyone’s feelings could take hours.
Was she ready for all that? She glanced into the rearview mirror, into her own wide, expectant eyes, which looked abnormally bright and alive. Partly it was the reflected color from the vivid turquoise-navy-and-pink-flowered pattern of her dress. This dress had been her only new purchase since Ruth’s death.
The “Russian doll” dress was so unlike anything she’d worn—at least since she was a child. The people at the ice-cream store didn’t know her, so they didn’t know how out of character it was. But Bree and Ro hadn’t seen her look like this in years.
Was it too much? Too conspicuous? She remembered Ruth’s voice, pronouncing flatly that “flamboyant” clothes made her look cheap, or foolish.
Ruth had insisted on neutrals—white shirts, gray slacks, khaki skirts and brown or black shoes. For someone who loved color and pattern as much as Penny did—and had ever since she was a little girl gathering flowers to make garlands for her ponies—such a drab palette was torture.
She smiled at her reflection, and the flicker of doubt soon disappeared. She loved Ruth—but the old lady had been wrong. This brightly colored dress, with its long, belled sleeves and gathered empire waist, might not look like a nun’s habit, but it suited Penny. It put pink in her cheeks and blue in her eyes.
Or had that impulsive ice-cream kiss done those things?
It didn’t matter. She was happy, and she was comfortable in her own skin, her own clothes, for the first time in a long time. She didn’t even care that she had worn no makeup—she rarely did—or that her ponytail had been torn to shreds by the wind through the windows.
She was ready.
She pulled into Bell River and drove around back, to the little parking lot. But that was full, so she rounded the house on the other side, till she reached the front. She parked near the new fountain, and then, without thinking much about it, walked all the way to the back again, so that she could enter by the kitchen door.
Her aversion to the front foyer hadn’t ever subsided, and she wasn’t going to add that to today’s list of hurdles she needed to clear.
“Penny?”
She had climbed halfway up toward the back porch steps when she heard Rowena’s voice, equal parts shock and delight. “Pea, is it really you?”
Penny smiled as Ro came rushing through the door, her arms still full of linens she’d obviously been folding. Rowena had always been an uncorked bottle of raw emotion. The difference, now that she’d found true love here in Bell River, was that the emotion bubbling out of her was happiness, not anger.
“What on earth are you doing here? Why didn’t you call?” She draped an unfolded sheet across her shoulder like a toga, freeing her arms for hugging. The sheet was warm, straight from the dryer, and smelled sweet and clean.
“I’m sorry,” Penny said. “I wanted to surprise you, so—”
“I’m surprised, all right!” Rowena laughed. “Look at you! You look fantastic!” She smoothed the sleeve of Penny’s dress affectionately, with that big-sister pride, and Penny grinned as if she’d just gotten an A on something important. “But darn it. We’ve got every single room rented out through September. If I’d known you were coming...”
Rowena frowned, her green eyes fiercely focused on solving the problem immediately. “Let’s see—”
“It’s okay, Ro.” Penny took a breath. “You see, I’m not—”
“Naw, don’t worry.” Rowena grinned, tucked her hand under Penny’s elbow and led her toward the house. “We’ll think of something. We’ll kick Alec out of his room if we have to. He’s in the doghouse anyhow, for sneaking out last night, and—”
“I did not sneak out! I left a note!” As if out of nowhere, Alec suddenly bounded up the stairs behind them. “Hi, Penny! You can have my room if you want, but I did not sneak out!”
Penny turned, hardly recognizing the mud ball she saw rushing toward her. Rowena’s new stepson, ten-year-old Alec Garwood, was ordinarily a twinkling, ridiculously handsome four-foot-three hunk of pure mischief. Today, though...
Today Alec’s clothes and cowboy boots were black, his hands were silver, and his face and hair were gray. At first glance he looked like a statue, but Penny realized quickly that he was covered in mud from head to toe—his thick blond thatch sticking out like a witch’s broom, and his white teeth and blue eyes gleaming from his gray face like jewels embedded in a cave wall.
He hugged Penny as if everything were perfectly normal, though, and seemed shocked when Rowena cried out in a mixture of laughter and horror. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to ruin Pea’s pretty dress!”
“Why?” Alec reared back, insulted. Then he glanced down at his hands. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Trouble was chasing a duck. I had to stop him. He’s even dirtier than I am.”
“Great.” Rowena rolled her eyes—but there was no real anger in her voice. From the start, Rowena had doted on this rascally little boy. “That dog’s not coming in the house until he’s clean. And neither are you.” She poked the tip of her index finger onto the center of Alec’s head, and twirled it to signal that he should turn around. “Barn hose. Now.”
Alec smiled, showing those diamond teeth and cracking the drying mud around his lips. He never minded being scolded, which was a good thing, since he seemed chronically to be in trouble.
“See you later, Penny,” he said, waving a filthy hand, dislodging gobbets of mud, which then rained onto the porch. “If you use my room, be careful. Definitely don’t open the jar under the bed, okay?”
“Oh, my dear Lord.” Rowena laughed out loud. “Scat, you disgusting creature!”
They both watched the boy trot away, whistling merrily and calling for his dog. He passed Barton James, the general manager Ro had hired last year, and the two high-fived each other. Barton never so much as blinked at the mud that caked the boy.
“Penny!” Barton bounded up the stairs, apparently as delighted to see Penny as if they were best buddies, when actually she’d met him only a couple of times.
But everyone loved Barton, and Barton loved everyone. She accepted his hug without reservation—laughing when he had to slip his guitar around to his back to make room. How he managed to get so much accomplished, and yet always be strumming some tune on that old thing, no one could ever understand.
“Good thing you’re here,” he said merrily. “I’ve just about got the older two Wright gals married off, and I was wondering who I’d matchmake next.”
Penny laughed. “Not me,” she assured him. “I’ve sworn off men for an entire year.”
He frowned, as if she’d said she ate little green Martians for lunch. “Poppycock,” he said. “A year? At your age? Can’t be done.”
“Barton, not everyone is as romantic as you are.” Rowena shook her head. “Hey, see if you can find Bree, okay? Let her know Penny’s come home!”
“Done,” he said. He kissed Penny one more time, then held her at arm’s length, appraising her. “I’m thinking an older man. Not old like me. I wish. But a few years older than you, maybe. Seen the world. Would know how to treat a lady.”
“Barton.” Rowena gave him The Look.
“Okay, okay,” he said, grinning, and then he sauntered off, swinging his guitar back to the front.
Rowena turned to Penny with a smile. “Sorry about that. He really is such a darling old man. But he can be a bit much sometimes.”
“I love him,” Penny said honestly. Barton was obviously a treasure—the perfect general manager for the ranch. Not only was he a charmer who immediately won over every female guest, he was also a former dude ranch owner himself and knew everything. More than once, he’d kept the neophyte Wright women from making terrible mistakes.
As he told it, he’d tried retirement for a couple of years and hated it. He was born to work, and the harder he worked the happier he was. There wasn’t a chore too lowly, or a responsibility too heavy for him to take on with a smile. He sawed and painted, cooked and cleaned, ran financial programs and mocked up publicity flyers. He sang and danced, played the guitar and chess and horseshoes and generally made sure no man, woman or child left Bell River Dude Ranch feeling disappointed.
“Sorry about Alec, too,” Rowena said. “We’ve got a lot of crazy males around here, apparently. I’ll move the jar, whatever it is.” She shuddered dramatically.
“Ro, it’s okay. You don’t need to kick Alec out. I’m not staying at the ranch.”
Rowena stopped abruptly at the threshold and turned. “You’re not?”
“No.”
“Aw, Penny. You don’t have to go back to San Francisco tonight, surely? Dallas would be so disappointed. You haven’t even met Gray yet. You can’t go back tonight!”
“No, but—”
“Penny!” Bree appeared in the great room suddenly, balancing a tray of coffee cups and flatware. Obviously Barton hadn’t found her, because her face lit up with delighted surprise, and she instantly began searching for a clear space on which to deposit the tray.
Once free, Bree enveloped Penny in a hug so tight she temporarily had to give up all thought of breathing.
“Why didn’t you call?” Bree frowned at Rowena. “You didn’t forget to tell me, did you, Ro? You’re so caught up in planning the winter schedule—”
“I didn’t forget. She just showed up out of nowhere. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on.” Ro turned back to Penny. “So, if you’re not going back tonight, of course you’ll stay here. We wouldn’t hear of your staying anywhere else.”
“Ro, I—”
“No foolishness about imposing. It’s your house. Rats—I shouldn’t ever have rented the sister suite. But we’ll think of something. Where are your things?”
Ro moved to the window to scan the yard. “I’ll get Barton back. Or somebody. Who’s not leading a class right now, Bree? We’ve got tons of strapping college kids. One of them will bring your suitcases in.”
But Bree was staring at Penny thoughtfully. Her cool, observant control had always spotted things Rowena’s passionate fire either overlooked or tried to will away.
“Hang on a minute, Ro.” Bree’s blue eyes had darkened slightly, and her cameo-pale forehead furrowed. “Everything’s okay, isn’t it, Pea?”
“Everything’s fine.” Eventually, Penny would have to tell them about the intruder. But one thing at a time.
“Good.” Rowena scraped her black hair away from her face impatiently. She was an old hand at rejecting any little reality that annoyed her. “Then of course you won’t go back to San Francisco tonight, so let’s find one of the kids to—”
“Ro, let Penny talk.” Bree put her hand on their older sister’s arm.
Penny smiled, grateful. Rowena was a steamroller when she got going, and Penny would find herself ensconced in one of the cottages by nightfall, with a pet parakeet and a Silverdell voter’s ID, if she didn’t slow things down.
Bree’s voice was gentle. “Tell us what’s going on, Penny. Did you really come all this way just for one day? Are you really going back tonight?”
Penny took a breath. “No. In fact, I’m not going back to San Francisco at all. I sold the town house.”
“You what?” Both her sisters spoke at once.
“I sold the town house. You know Ruth left it to me, for a nest egg. She expected me to sell, and luckily it moved very quickly. So I’ve come back to Silverdell.”
“Then...but that’s fantastic!” Rowena frowned, tugging the sheet from her shoulder and glancing around the porch, her gaze again calculating, sorting. “Okay, so we’ll have to free up something more permanent. They’re almost finished with the four new cottages, but they won’t be move-in ready until—”
“Rowena!” Penny squared her shoulders. “Bree. I know this is going to be a shock, and that’s why I didn’t call ahead. Or write. I wanted to tell you in person, face-to-face. The thing is...I’m not going to be living at the ranch.”
“Don’t be silly,” Rowena repeated, almost absently. “It’s no imposition. It’s what we’ve all been hoping for. You know we’ve been begging you to come ever since Ruth died. Since before Ruth died. Of course you’ll live here.”
“No. I won’t.” Penny took Ro’s right hand and Bree’s left into her own. “I love you for wanting to take care of me. But I won’t be moving into the ranch.”
Rowena opened her mouth, obviously prepared to protest reflexively, but a glare from Bree made her shut it again.
“Damn it, Ro. Let her explain.”
But could she? Could she ever make them understand how, up until today, she’d always been a stranger to herself, a guest in her own life? Their love, Ruth’s love, the exile to San Francisco, the quiet, hermit life with her great-aunt...where no storms came...
No storms. And nothing else, either.
Everyone had tried to shield her from the ugliness of the Wright family history. Maybe they thought that, since she’d been only eleven at the time of the tragedy, she had a chance of growing up unscarred if they wrapped her in cotton and tucked her away.
But in the end, they’d only managed to create a ghost of a girl, who had no idea who she was or what she wanted out of life.
“I’ve bought a house. A duplex. I’m renting one side out for now, but eventually I hope to open a studio. Give lessons, maybe. Definitely paint and take pictures, and anything else that will help me earn a living.”
The news wounded them. She could see it in the speechless shock that wiped their eyes and smiles clear of emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though she’d vowed to herself that she wouldn’t apologize. She had nothing to apologize for. She had a right to make her own decisions, to live wherever she pleased. And yet she hated to hurt them.
“Rowena, Bree...please try to understand. I love you both more than I can say. But it’s time I created a life of my own.”
* * *
THE DUPLEX MAX had rented was newly refurnished, which was one of the reasons he’d chosen it. He’d come out twice to look at various possible rentals. He’d seen plenty of houses much grander than this little cottage, but grand didn’t suit his agenda. Simple suited him. Simple and clean, with structural integrity and enough charm to please the soul.
Even Ellen hadn’t been able to say the duplex was ugly. Small, yes. But delightful in a quaint, historic-cottage way. A pale butter-yellow with blue trim around the windows and doors, the one-story wooden structure looked neat and friendly, glowing under autumn sunshine filtered through half a dozen gorgeous aspens.
And furnished made it even better. For the next nine months, he could leave all the big pieces in Chicago, which was a relief. Back home, every stick of furniture seemed saturated with memories of Lydia. That was her chair at the dinner table. That was where she sat while they watched TV. Even the pencil marks on the woodwork measuring Ellen’s growth had been made by Lydia.
Which was probably more proof that Max had been a hopelessly absentee father. But he couldn’t change the past. All he could do was rededicate himself to his daughter from now on. No do-overs in this life—but luckily you did occasionally get to start over.
And it would be easier to start over without Lydia’s ghost everywhere they turned.
He had put away his clothes and books and set up his drafting table. Later, he’d have to go buy supplies, but for now the landlady had been thoughtful, providing everything from magazines on the coffee table to knives and forks in the pantry.
Maybe he’d wait for Ellen to come back from exploring, and then they’d make a grocery run. He wasn’t very good at cooking yet, but he’d mastered the red rice with tuna horror she seemed to love best. She’d probably had it twice a week in the months since Lydia died.
He walked out to the car one more time, clearing out the last of the loose items—Ellen’s paper cup from the fast-food lunch they’d grabbed as they neared Silverdell, her tangled earbuds and the cherry-flavored lip balm she’d bought at a gas station. He dug out a paperback book about a vampire high school, which had gotten wedged between the seats. He was finally extricating himself from the SUV when he heard another car drive up beside his.
He straightened, smiling, wondering if it might be his landlady, who would also be his next-door neighbor. The agent had explained that the owner, someone named Penelope Wright, would live on the other side, though so far he’d seen no signs of her. For some reason, he’d assumed she was a retiree—maybe the old-fashioned name did that. But perhaps she wasn’t retired, and had merely been at work all day.
Reflections of aspen leaves dappled her car’s windshield, so he couldn’t see anything except the hint of a bright blue coat or dress.
He waited, still smiling a welcome, ready to start off on the right foot. But, oddly, the person in the car didn’t open the door. Maybe she was on the phone, tying up some final details before she hung up.
He turned back to the SUV, checking under the seats one last time, not wanting to look impatient. He had just collected a stray French fry when he heard the woman get out of her car and clear her throat.
“I...I...” She started over. “You...”
Poor thing. She sounded as if she might struggle with a stammer.
“Hi,” he began, turning with a smile. The rest of his greeting died on his lips. Standing in front of him was the woman from the ice-cream store.
It couldn’t be. But...
It also couldn’t be anyone else. Even without the same cute dress, silly boots, shining hair...he would never forget that face.
For a split second, the shock left him mildly uncomfortable. The encounter earlier had been so random, so strange. It had been over in less than a minute, and she’d disappeared suddenly, without a word, as if embarrassed by her boldness.
So how had she found him again? She didn’t know his name—he didn’t know hers. He hadn’t told the soda jerk anything about his plans. And yet, out of nowhere, this same woman pulled up in his driveway a few hours later?
How was it possible? Silverdell wasn’t that small.
Was there any chance this sweet-faced young woman was...
Stalking him?
“Wow. This is so awkward I honestly don’t know what to say.” The woman shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, as if she hoped that when she opened them, he wouldn’t be standing there.
But of course he was.
“Okay. So I guess you have to be Mr. Thorpe. You’re here early. I mean, that’s fine. It’s just that...I wasn’t even considering the possibility that my tenant might already be in Silverdell. Before, I mean. Earlier, I mean. When I...”
She took a deep breath, held out her hand and managed a smile. “I guess I should properly introduce myself, even if it’s a little late. I’m Penny Wright. I’m your...your....”
He took her hand. “My landlady?”
She nodded. “I cannot tell you what an idiot I feel. If I had considered, even for a second, that you...that we...”
She flushed, starting at the neck, which wasn’t very helpful, because it caused Max to focus on the graceful column of her throat. His gaze followed the pink stain up, as it spread across the delicate jawline, and then her cheeks.
And, just like that, there it was again—the hot, helpless, fourteen-year-old feeling. He wanted to kiss that pulsing spot where her throat met her chin—and at the same time he wanted to be the white knight who knew exactly what to say to make her feel better.
But he couldn’t do either one, because he was too busy hoping she couldn’t tell what she did to him...physically. He realized he still held her hand, and he let it go as nonchalantly as he could.
He fought down the sensation. This was ridiculous. The both of them, grown adults, standing here temporarily reduced to blithering idiots—all over a casual kiss. A quick, closed-mouth kiss between total strangers that had meant absolutely nothing.
Get a grip, Thorpe.
“You shouldn’t feel foolish,” he said, smiling. “It was very sweet, and I didn’t mind a bit. But if you’d rather, we could agree that it never happened.”
She nodded eagerly. “If we could, if you would...I mean, that would be terrific. I’d appreciate it. So much. That’s not really me. I mean, I don’t do things like that, ordinarily. It was just—just this silly thing I did because...you see, I was making this crazy list, and—”
He was loving the stumbling explanation, and wondering whether he might have grown too cynical, through the years. This innocent honesty didn’t look like a sham. This looked like the real thing. An adorable, awkward naïveté.
But her cascade of half sentences was cut off by the arrival of more vehicles, which pulled up in a caravan and jockeyed one at a time for parking space in the street just outside the duplex. Max looked first at the newcomers—a late-model pickup truck, a hybrid SUV and a wildly expensive sports car. Then he looked at Penny, whose expressive face was registering both surprise and annoyance.
“Oh, my goodness, they are impossible! I should never have told them the address!” She glanced at Max apologetically. “My family. I told them not to come, but they’re...well, they hover. They mean well, but—”
“Hey! Penny!” A tall blond man in a suit hopped out of the truck, strode over and scooped Penny into his embrace. “What a surprise, kiddo! Ro called and she said we needed to get over here ASAP to help.”
“Dallas!” Penny’s annoyance seemed to fade as she accepted his hug. Max watched curiously, trying to sort out the relationships. Whoever this was, she liked him. Brother, maybe? But there wasn’t much resemblance.
“I’m sorry you had to come,” she said. “I’m perfectly fine on my own. There’s really nothing to be done. My furniture won’t arrive until tomorrow.”
“Ah, but that seems to be the problem. They can’t stand the idea of you camping out on a sleeping bag. Ro and Bree are mobilizing a small army to make this place homey. The SUV is loaded with food, supplies, blow-up mattress, books, shampoos, and there may even be a lawn mower back there. You’ll be lucky if they don’t start hanging wallpaper before it gets dark.”
Penny groaned. But then she seemed to remember her manners. She stepped back from the hug, and, putting her hand on the man’s arm, included Max in her smile.
“Dallas, this is my tenant, Max Thorpe. We’ve just met, this very minute. Max, this is my brother-in-law, Dallas Garwood.”
Max shook Dallas’s hand, noting the sharp scrutiny the blue-eyed man gave him and meeting it with a bland smile and a slightly raised brow. Dallas Garwood was the distrustful type? But what about Max made him suspicious in the first place?
“Nice to meet you, Dallas,” he said politely.
Another man had stepped out of the jazzy sports car and was making his way over. His greeting was warm, but a bit more restrained, as if he weren’t quite as close to Penny as Dallas was.
“Hey, Penny. I’m Gray, and—”
“Gray!” Dallas thumped the newcomer on the shoulder. “Penny, it’s hard to believe you haven’t met Gray. He’s been underfoot for months now. He’s been dying to meet you, because somehow he’s decided you’re the only one who can persuade Bree to set a wedding date.”
Penny accepted a hug from the second man, and then rather stiltedly attempted to introduce him to Max, too.
“Grayson Harper, this is Max Thorpe, my tenant. Max, Gray is my sister Bree’s—”
“Fiancé,” Gray said, stepping forward to help smooth over Penny’s uncertainty about the label. He shook Max’s hand, and again Max was aware of getting a steely-eyed, mildly threatening appraisal.
You’d better be a good guy, the stare said. You’d better not mess with our Penny.
Damn. Max wondered whether he had picked up some kind of scary stain that looked like blood while he was in the basement. Surely he didn’t give off a serial killer vibe, did he? He was just a road-weary dad in jeans and a suede jacket, holding his daughter’s Vampire High pulp novel, and a bubblegum-blue Slurpee cup. How dangerous could he possibly look?
“Nice to meet you, Gray,” he said with a deliberately cool tone. He met the aggressive gaze without blinking.
Commotion over by the cars drew their gazes. Two women were emerging from the hybrid SUV—one blonde, one black-haired, both stunning. They laughed as they stumbled over each other and tried to extricate large casserole dishes. Their hands were covered in large blue oven mitts that said the dishes were still hot.
The sisters, no doubt. Though where the family resemblance was, Max had no idea. Obviously they were bringing dinner—and everything else under the sun. The SUV was packed to the gills with random paraphernalia. In addition to the unwieldy casserole dish she carried, the brunette sister had a potted flower tucked under one elbow. The blonde had wedged a framed picture under each arm. They were so encumbered they could hardly walk.
For a second, Max understood why Penny had looked annoyed. Hover might be an understatement.
He needed to get out of the way and let her deal with this. “I’d better go find Ellen,” he said. “We’ve had a long day.”
She frowned. “But we...” She met his gaze with an apologetic smile, as if to say she knew they needed to talk more. But then her glance angled toward the approaching women, and she shut her eyes in something that looked like exhaustion.
“We’ll talk tomorrow?” She made it a question. “About...about the lease and everything. If there’s anything the agent didn’t provide—”
“Everything seems perfect,” he assured her. It was strange—especially given that she clearly already had an army poised to protect her—but he still had the urge to put her at ease. “We’re going to turn in early, I’m sure.”
He lifted one eyebrow playfully. “Most of it is already a bit of a blur. For instance, I can hardly remember this morning.”
She gave him a grateful smile. But the sisters had reached the driveway, so she launched one more time into a rote introduction. Max said the polite phrases, shaking hands with the two beauties who stared at him as if he were Jack the Ripper. They talked about having plenty of food to share, but he insisted on heading back into his own side of the duplex.
He almost got away. Just as he reached his own door, he saw a shadow fall behind him. He turned, and wasn’t surprised to see Gray Harper standing on the front porch.
Max had figured out, finally, what must have happened. Small-town grapevines being what they were—someone must have reported the kiss.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what’s bugging you guys. I’m here to do a construction project, a resort just outside town called Silverdell Hills. You can look me up, if you’d like. I’m a paying tenant. I have no intention of annoying your sister-in-law in any way.”
Gray tilted his head. “Well, apparently there’s a story going around—”
“I’m sure there is. I’m not sure exactly what the story said by the time it reached you, but she kissed me, not vice versa.”
The other man grinned. Though he was irritated, Max had to admire that Gray didn’t try to deny it, or to pretend that Max had imagined the unanimous, wordless antagonism.
“Fair enough,” Gray said. “That is what we heard, actually. That she kissed you. But Ro and Bree couldn’t believe it—and it does sound a bit out of character.”
“I wouldn’t have a clue.” Max shrugged. “I hadn’t ever met her—I mean, met her by name—until ten minutes ago. When I was told I had a landlady named Penelope Wright, I pictured some blue-haired grandmother who would grow delphiniums and make cookies for my daughter.”
“She does make a mean cookie, I hear.” Gray smiled. “Look, I don’t blame you for being ticked off. But you know how sisters can be. Or you will, if you live here long. These sisters, in particular. They worry about Penny as if it were their full-time job.”
Max raised his eyebrows. “Gray. I don’t know what Penny’s problems are. But I know what mine are. I came here for some quiet time to focus on my daughter, who lost her mother last year. I’m not a con man or a pervert. But I am tired, and I need to get my daughter home, fed and put to bed.”
“Okay.” Gray nodded. “But there’s just one last thing. No offense intended, honestly. But Bree won’t sleep if I don’t tell you. See, Penny’s the baby of the family, and she’s been through a lot. When they heard the story about this morning, they about flipped.”
“Just say it, Harper,” Max said, trying not to sound as impatient as he felt. “Whatever it is, no offense taken, I guarantee.”
“Well.” Gray shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “They want you to know that Penny...well, her brother-in-law, Dallas... The thing is...he’s the sheriff.”
The sheriff? So?
Then Max understood, and, finally, he started to laugh. This was about as unsubtle a warning as he could possibly imagine. He began to wonder whether Penny might be more than merely charmingly naive. Maybe she was a little barmy. Why else would her whole family feel so frantic to caution him that she was protected?
Or...on second thought...maybe the whole family was nuts. Maybe, by renting this duplex in a hurry, he’d just stepped into the biggest nest of crazy in all of Colorado.
“Fantastic.” He let his laugh die off to a dark chuckle. “The sheriff of Silverdell. Got it. You can report that I am sufficiently intimidated by the badge. But listen. I’m going to say this one more time, and then I really think you should let it go. Your sister-in-law may have problems. In fact, I’m starting to be pretty sure she does. But I am not one of them.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ELLEN WAS SO mad at everybody she wondered if she might explode. For the past half hour, she’d been sitting under the biggest tree in the orchard behind their new place, with her back against the trunk. She was uncomfortable, but she’d rather be miserable here than cozy back at the duplex.
To let off steam, she was tearing off blades of grass and throwing them as far as she could—which wasn’t far, because it was windy and the grass kept boomeranging back in her face.
She didn’t want to be in this stupid town—if you could even call it a town when it had only one street with stores, and nothing at all to do. She wanted to be back in Chicago, with her friends.
Or at least the girls who used to be her friends.
She frowned as hard as she could, because she had a stinging in her eyes and a hot feeling in her throat that made her afraid she might cry. She picked up her cell phone for the tenth time in the past minute and checked for incoming texts. Nothing.
She had sent a group text to all her friends at least fifteen minutes ago. She wasn’t supposed to use the data package—her dad didn’t want her on the internet. The phone was only for emergencies. But she didn’t care. She needed to talk to somebody from home.
So she’d taken a picture of herself with the built-in camera, making sure you could see the mountains in the background, and she’d sent it to everyone. She was smiling like she was having the time of her life, and the text said, <3 CO! Epic sky, adorbs cottage. Miss u!
It had taken her a while to think of the perfect words. She couldn’t say duplex, of course. Cottage admitted that it was small, but it sounded quaint and fun instead of pathetic and trashy.
The picture of her was good, too. She’d held the camera high, which made her face look skinnier. Plus, she was wearing the gold earrings her mom had left her, which were very sophisticated. And real, which was important. Stephanie said only losers wore jewelry that wasn’t real.
But no one had texted back. Not even Becky, who had always been on the fringes of their group because Stephanie didn’t like her. Stephanie said Becky was greasy from eating too much fast food. Probably, though, Becky would be allowed on the inside now.
Now that Ellen was gone, and a place had opened up.
The wind rose, tickling her hair into her face, and her eyes stung even worse. She swallowed three times, trying to loosen that tight feeling in her throat, and then clicked on her Facebook app. Maybe she should just post the picture there, so everyone could see.
But Facebook made her feel worse. Her news feed was full of pictures Stephanie and the gang had just taken at the mall, where they’d gone to see a movie. “Less than a minute ago” they’d been horsing around at the Organic Highway counter at the food court. Laughing, throwing stuff at each other, making funny faces.
And, look at that shot! Becky stood so close to Gregory Parr the whole world could see she had a crush on him.
Well, Gregory Parr was the cutest guy in school. Ellen had a graph in her diary tracking how long it would take her to lose fifteen pounds, and what she’d do then to make Greg notice her.
Except for Stephanie, who had been held back in first grade and was older than the rest of them, no one in their group had a boyfriend. Not outright. But everyone knew who liked who, and everybody knew you didn’t go after the boys your friends had chosen.
But here was Becky, clearly trying to call dibs on Gregory. Ellen’s fury rose. If greasy Becky Fife thought she could just move in and take over every single part of Ellen’s life...her guy, her friends...
Ellen could imagine her dad’s reaction. “Could they really have been friends if they have forgotten about you in a week?”
Could Dad really be that clueless?
Of course they were going to forget her. They hung out together every day, and when you were gone, you were gone. You could hardly expect them to sit around for nine months waiting for you to come back.
Her tears had begun to fall. She reached up and ripped off her left earring angrily. They were only hooked over the edge of her ear, anyhow, because her ears weren’t pierced.
Thanks for that, too, Dad.
She yanked the second one, and the filigreed hoop went flying out of her hand into the tall grass around her.
“Oh, my God. No!” She got on all fours and tried to comb the grass, praying to see the winking gold. “No!”
A sudden rustling in the tree overhead startled her. She felt a spasm of fear and froze in place. No bird could possibly be that big. Not even an eagle. Well, maybe an eagle. What did she know about eagles?
She sniffed, trying to keep her nose from running. She hated hick places like this. It could be anything up there. A snake, or a cougar, or...
“What’s the matter? What are you looking for?”
And abruptly, there he was. A boy, draped over the lowest big branch like the Cheshire cat, his skinny blue jeans and sneakers dangling, his grin and upturned eyes laughing at her.
Suddenly, she was madder than ever. He must have been in the tree the whole time. He’d probably been watching her when she took the picture of herself. Pictures. She’d taken fifteen different shots, trying for one that looked perfect.
She blushed furiously, thinking how she’d smirked at herself in the camera, trying to look happy and cute.
“Who are you?” She lifted onto her knees, fists on her hips. “That’s pretty rude, to spy on people.”
“Hey, now.” The boy swung himself down like a monkey and plopped onto the grass a couple of feet away. “I wasn’t spying. I was sleeping, and when I woke up, you were there, acting weird. I didn’t say anything because I was waiting for you to go away. It’s my tree, after all.”
“It can’t be your tree. This is a school playground. Playgrounds belong to the city, not to people.” But then her curiosity got the better of her. “How can you have been sleeping in a tree? Isn’t that dangerous?”
The boy dusted off his hands. “Not if you know how.” His grin broadened, his sunburned face busting out in white teeth, practically from ear to ear. “I know how.”
For a minute, when he smiled, he looked kind of cute. He was a few inches taller than she was, and wiry, like boys were when they had too much energy and never stood still. His hair was blond and thick, and his eyes were a sparkly blue—just about the same color as the sky, now that it was almost evening.
Ellen still thought Greg was cuter, because this guy looked like he might be a hick, with his dirty blue jeans and cowboy boots and flannel shirt with the cuffs rolled back. But he was pretty cute, anyhow. Stephanie would definitely think so. Stephanie had a thing for cowboys.
“So.” The boy took a Tootsie Roll out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and stuffed it into his mouth. As he started to chew, he paused. He let his hand hover over his pocket, looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Want one?”
She did. Though she hadn’t noticed it before, she was starving. But she thought about the diet chart in her diary. And she thought about how she’d look like a cow, chewing away at the sticky candy. He certainly did, although he obviously didn’t care what she thought. “No, thanks.”
“’K.” He chewed a little more. “So what are you looking for?”
The sudden recollection of her awful mistake shot through her like a hot poker. How could she have been thinking about cute guys, or even her diet, when she’d lost her mother’s earring?
“My earring. It fell off.”
“You yanked it off, you mean.” But the kid didn’t sound judgmental, just factual. He chewed thoughtfully, his gaze scanning the overgrown grass. “What does it look like?”
She held out her hand, opening the palm to show him the match. He walked closer, put his hands on his knees, bent down and studied it without touching, the way he might look at a specimen in science class.
“Is that really yours? It looks kind of grown-up for you.” He tilted his head. “How old are you?”
“I’m eleven,” she said, lifting her chin to look older, and, she hoped, skinnier. “I’m plenty old enough to wear earrings. Why? How old are you?”
He chewed on his lower lip briefly. “I’m ten,” he said.
“What grade?”
“Fourth.”
Oh, man. He was a whole grade below her. She felt stupid for having thought he was cute. No wonder he carried Tootsie Roll candy around in his pocket and didn’t care if he looked ugly chewing a wad of caramel in front of a girl.
“Well, I’m going into fifth,” she said. “And these earrings are definitely mine. My mother gave them to me. It can’t have gone far, but the grass is so high....”
She got back on her knees and started ruffling her palm over the grass, inch by inch. “It’s important.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “It’s real,” she said. Then, in case a cowboy kid wouldn’t know what that meant, she added, “like, I mean...real gold.”
He nodded, dropped to his knees and started combing the grass, too. He was working an area much closer to where she’d been sitting, and she suddenly realized that was smarter. The earring wouldn’t have flown this far.
She subtly worked her way back toward him, but her hopes were fading. This was like the old cliché—finding a needle in a haystack. The thatch of golden-brown dead grass below the new growth was almost exactly the same color as the earring.
And it would be dark soon.
“So will your mom be super mad? Will you get in trouble if we don’t find it?”
She glanced over at the boy. It was nice, him saying we like that, as if they were partners in the hunt. He didn’t have to help. He could have walked away and gone home.
“Not trouble from my mom.” She bent her head again. “My mom died. Almost a year ago.”
“Aw. Dang.” The boy paused and looked at her. “I’m sorry about that.”
She didn’t respond. If her eyes got blurry with tears, she wouldn’t have any chance at all of spotting the circle of gold in the grass.
“Got it!” The boy suddenly jumped to his feet, his fist in the air triumphantly.
Relief washed through her. She stood, too, holding out her hand.
He deposited the earring in her palm with a flourish. “There you go!”
It felt cold, from lying on the ground. She closed her fingers, as if to chafe warmth back into it. She looked up at him, so grateful she forgot to play cool.
“Thank you. Thank you so much....”
“Alec.” The boy grinned. “Alec Garwood, rancher, wrangler and part-time treasure hunter.”
She grinned back. She couldn’t help it. She was so happy that she hadn’t lost the only thing her mother had given her directly, with her own hands. And his smile was that kind of smile. The kind you could catch, like a cold.
“I’m Ellen Thorpe. We moved in today. We’re renting the yellow cottage over there.”
“No kidding!” Alec glanced at the cottage. “That’s a cool place. So you’ve just moved here? Where from?”
“We haven’t exactly moved. We’re taking a year off while my dad works on a resort he’s building.” She didn’t feel the need to mention the shoplifting, the bad grades, the arguments with her dad. “It’s more like a long vacation. But I still live in Chicago.”
He frowned, as if he might quarrel with that way of seeing things, but then he shrugged. “Whatever. Anyhow, those are pierced earrings. No wonder you lost them. Why don’t you get your ears pierced, so they won’t fall off?”
She straightened. “Maybe I don’t want to get my ears pierced.”
He looked skeptical about that, too. “All girls want their ears pierced,” he said reasonably. “Oh. I see. You’re scared to?”
“Of course not. It’s just that my dad won’t let me.”
Alec looked confused. “So?”
She stared at him. “What do you mean, so?”
“I mean...so what? How can he stop you?” Alec grinned. “My theory is I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “You didn’t make that line up. That’s famous.”
“I didn’t say I made it up. I said that’s what I do. Grown-ups don’t ever want you to do anything fun. They’re afraid you’ll get hurt.” He sighed. “But you gotta do what you gotta do, you know? If you get in trouble for it, well, whatever. They can’t eat you, right?”
“Um.” She wasn’t sure what the correct answer was to that. Even Stephanie wasn’t this honest about being bad. Stephanie generally pretended she’d misunderstood the rules, or someone else made her do it. For a fraction of a second, Ellen could see that Alec’s honest civil disobedience had a certain nobility to it. “I guess not.”
He pulled out another candy. “Well, anyhow, maybe you’re really just scared. That’s okay. Everybody’s scared of something. But if you wanted me to, I could pierce them for you sometime.”
Again, she was speechless. Again, even Stephanie...
It suddenly struck Ellen as kind of ironic that her dad had brought her here to get her away from Stephanie’s “bad influence,” and the first person she met was this troublemaker who casually assumed all rules were made to be broken.
“I—” She squeezed the earrings. This was ridiculous. She wasn’t used to being tongue-tied. She always had a comeback. That was why Stephanie had invited her into the group. Stephanie admired people who were chill and sarcastic. “I—”
But then, luckily, she spotted her dad walking toward them across the playground.
“That’s my father,” she said. “I gotta go.”
She moved quickly, hoping she’d meet her dad halfway. She didn’t want him to see Alec. He would be impossible about it. He’d probably say a hundred times, “Isn’t it great that you’ve made a friend already?”
He wouldn’t see that Alec’s being in fourth grade made it impossible for them to be friends.
But after a few yards, she realized it sort of stunk to ditch Alec that way, after he’d been so nice about helping.
She turned. “Thanks ag—”
Alec had already disappeared. She glanced up into the tree, but not a single branch was swaying.
He was just plain gone. She wondered how he did it. He might be only ten, but he was...interesting. Kind of cool. Though not in any way her Chicago friends would understand.
She repeated his name in her head, so she’d remember it. Alec Garwood. Cowboy, wrangler, treasure hunter...and, apparently, ninja.
* * *
BY TEN O’CLOCK, Penny had done everything she could—at least until the furniture arrived in the morning. It had taken her a couple of hours to shoo away the family, and then she’d emptied the car, hung up her clothes, washed the dishes and investigated every closet, cabinet and cupboard the tiny space had to offer.
After that, as darkness settled over Silverdell like indigo watercolor applied with a thick brush, she grew restless.
It had been seventeen years since she’d moved to a new house—and all of a sudden, though she was exhausted, she couldn’t imagine settling down.
The blow-up mattress was ready on the floor, but even with all the extra pillows and blankets Bree and Ro had scattered around, it looked completely uninviting. She’d have to be a lot more tired before she crawled in there.

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