Renegade Father

“He’s a concerned teacher who cares enough about you and your grade to call me and inform me you’re still not turning in your assignments.”

“So what?”

“So you lied to me, for starters. You told me you’ve been finishing all your work in study hall.”

“Algebra’s stupid.”

“I like math,” C.J. piped in.

“That’s because you’re stupid, too.”

“Leah, that’s enough,” Annie snapped again, feeling whatever shreds of patience she had been clinging to disappear as the headache began to writhe down her spine. “Apologize to your brother.”

“I’m sorry you’re stupid.” Leah smirked.

With his innate sense of self-preservation, C.J. stuck his tongue out at his sister, grabbed a chocolate-chip cookie out of the boot-shaped jar on the counter, and headed for the family room.

Annie refrained from pointing out they would be eating in just a few minutes—she wasn’t up to another battle, especially when his exit left her alone with the twelve-year-old daughter she barely knew anymore.

She hated this. Absolutely hated it. Leah used to be so sweet and good-natured, always eager to please, with a kind word for everyone. In the months since Charlie left she’d turned into this moody little monster with an attitude to match. She closed herself off in her room every day after school and shunned all of her mother’s attempts to get to the root of the behavioral changes.

This guilt didn’t help matters. Annie pinched at the bridge of her nose again.

She’d like to think this constant defiance was just a natural part of growing up, just Leah testing her boundaries as she prepared for teenagedom in a few months. But she couldn’t help wondering if her daughter was reacting out of latent rage and hurt at her, if somehow she had completely warped her daughter’s psyche by putting up with Charlie for so long.

She couldn’t think that way. Or at least she couldn’t let her guilt over her own weakness affect her treatment of her daughter.

“You’re grounded.” She tried not to grind her teeth at the pain in her head or at the pain in her heart. “For lying to me and for not taking care of your responsibilities. You won’t be able to go to Brittany’s birthday party this weekend or to any other activities with your friends until you’re completely caught up in school—not just in algebra but in language arts and social studies as well.

“And,” she went on, knowing this was a much worse punishment to her daughter than curtailing her social activities, “you’ve lost your riding privileges starting right now. Stardust is now off-limits until you manage to bring your grades up.”

Leah’s mouth dropped open and her eyes narrowed into a killing glare, though her lips quivered like she wanted to cry. “That completely reeks! Stardust is my horse. I raised her. You can’t keep me from riding her!”

“Watch me.” Annie turned back to add spaghetti to the now-boiling water on the stove and to hide the quiver in her own lips.

“This is so not fair! I hate you!” Leah cried, then stomped up the stairs to her bedroom. A few seconds later, her door slammed shut with a resounding crack that echoed through the house, making Annie flinch.

“Uh-oh. Rough day?”

She glanced toward the mudroom to find Joe’s broad shoulders filling the doorway, his hands rubbing the woven band on his Stetson. She had a fierce, powerful urge to fall into his arms, to bury her face in the folds of that soft chamois shirt and weep for the daughter she didn’t know how to reach anymore.

But her days of leaning were done. Joe was leaving and she would have to stand on her own two feet.

“How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to hear you ban her from that horse of hers.”

“You think it’s too harsh?”

He was silent for several seconds. The only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of the clock above the refrigerator and the burbling coming from the pots on the stove. “I think it’s probably the only punishment that would mean a thing to her,” he finally said. “She loves that horse more than just about anything.”

“I had to do something. She’s going to have to repeat the seventh grade if I don’t.”

“She doesn’t really hate you. You know that, don’t you?”

If she did, it would be no less than Annie deserved. For most of her daughter’s life, their home hadn’t been the safe haven every child deserves but a place of prolonged tension and then sharp, sudden outbursts of temper. Why shouldn’t Leah hate her for the choices she’d made?

The hell of it was, if she had it all to do over again, she would probably make the same choices.

She glanced up to find Joe studying her, expecting an answer. Since she couldn’t very well tell him her thoughts, she just nodded. “I know she doesn’t hate me,” she said, without conviction.

He looked like he wanted to pursue it, but to her relief, he changed the subject. “Have you told the kids about my new job?”

The new job. The reminder sent fresh pain slithering to the base of her skull.

She shook her head, wincing a little at the movement, while she pulled out a fragrant loaf of garlic bread from the oven. “You’re the one leaving. You’re the one who can break the news.”

He frowned at her shortness. “Annie—”

“This is almost ready. Where’s the rest of the crew?” She cut him off, not wanting to hear more apologies or explanations.

A muscle flexed in his jaw but he let the matter rest. “Patch was just about finished in the barn and I think Ruben and Manny are right behind me.”

“What about Luke?”

“I think he went back to the trailer to get gussied up for you. Said something about putting on a clean shirt.”

She looked up from stirring the spaghetti sauce, just in time to catch his rare grin. She gazed at it, at him.

The smile softened the harsh lines of his features, etching lines along the edges of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. He was beautiful, in a raw, elemental way with those glittering black eyes fringed by long, thick eyelashes, that sensual mouth and that coppery skin from his Shoshone heritage stretched over high cheekbones.

She blinked, suddenly breathless. “Don’t tease him, Joe. He gets enough from the rest of the men.”

“He wouldn’t if the kid didn’t make it so easy for us. He follows you around like he’s a puppy dog and you’re a big ol’ juicy bone he wants to sink his teeth into.”

“He does not.” She felt her face flush from more than just the heat rising off the pans on the stove.

She was very much afraid Joe was right, that their newest ranch hand made it painfully obvious to everyone he had a crush on her. She had done her best to discourage him but he seemed oblivious to all her gentle hints. If it was causing problems between him and the rest of the help, she was going to have to be more stern.

“Does so.” Joe flashed another of those rare grins. “We practically have to lift the boy’s tongue off the floor every time he looks at you.”

She managed—barely—to lift her own tongue off the floor and yanked her gaze away from that smile she suddenly realized she would miss so desperately.

She stirred the spaghetti sauce with vigorous motions. “He’s just a little overenthusiastic. He’ll get over it. Besides, don’t you remember what it was like to be twenty-two?”

As soon as the words escaped her mouth, she wanted to grab them and stuff them back. The year he had turned twenty-two, she had been eighteen, and she had given him her love and her innocence on a sun-warmed stretch of meadow grass on the shores of Butterfly Lake.

Now, after her hastily spoken words, he was silent for one beat too long and she finally risked a look at him over the steam curling up from the bubbling pasta. That muscle worked in his jaw again and his dark eyes held a distant, unreadable expression.

“I do,” he said softly. “Every minute of it.”

Her breath caught and held, but before she could think of a reply, the outside door opened, bringing a gust of icy air, and the Santiago brothers tromped through the mudroom. The kitchen was soon filled with the sound of scraping chairs and melodious Spanish.

“That storm’s gonna be a real bi…er, beast,” Patch McNeil entered the kitchen behind them, his leathery cheeks red and wind-chapped above the white of the handlebar mustache he was so proud of. “I’m afraid we’re gonna lose some stock tonight.”

She barely heard the old cowboy, still flustered from the intense exchange with Joe. What could he have meant by those low words? Was she reading too much into it? Could he simply have been referring to being twenty-two or was he also haunted by the memory of those hours spent in each other’s arms? After his release from prison, he had never given her any indication he even remembered the encounter that had forever changed the course of her life.

They had never talked about it, about the day of her father’s funeral when he had come in search of her and found her lost and grief-stricken at the lake they’d spent so many hours fishing when they were younger.

While he was alive, her father had been stiff and un-affectionate, impossible to please, but she loved him desperately. He was the only parent she ever knew and his death had left her a frightened eighteen-year-old girl responsible for a six-hundred-head cattle ranch.

Joe had started out comforting her but she had wanted more from him. She had always wanted more from him.

She knew he regretted what they had done. He couldn’t have made it more clear when he left Madison Valley that night for a new job on a ranch near Great Falls, taking her heart with him.

In the years since, that hazy afternoon had become like the proverbial elephant sitting in the parlor that both of them could clearly see but neither wanted to be the first to mention.

Her mind racing, she drained the pasta with mechanical movements and spooned the sauce into a serving dish. She finally turned to set the food on the big pine table that ran the length of the kitchen and was startled to find all the men watching her, wearing odd expressions.

“What’s the matter?”

“I asked twice if you wanted me to round up C.J. and Leah.” Joe sent her a long, searching look and she hoped like crazy he couldn’t read her thoughts on her face.

“Um, yes. Thank you.”

Luke came in from outside just as Joe returned to the kitchen with C.J. riding piggyback and Leah trudging behind, resentment at her mother still simmering in her eyes.

As they began to eat, Annie thought about how much she had come to enjoy these evening meals with her makeshift family. It hadn’t always been like this. During her marriage, meals had been tense, uneasy affairs that she usually couldn’t wait to escape.

The first thing she had done after Charlie left was give notice to the crew he surrounded himself with, men whose insolence was matched only by their incompetence.

The second thing had been to steal Patch back from the ranch he’d gone to after she married Charlie so she could split kitchen duty with him.

In her father’s day, Patch had been the camp cook. In those days, the Double C had fixed one meal a day for its hands, usually supper. The ranch provided the food for the other meals but left it up to the men to prepare their own in the bunkhouse.

Charlie, though, had insisted Annie cook a full breakfast, dinner and supper for the men. It was just another of his many ways of keeping her in her place, of reminding her who was boss.

She had never minded spending time in the kitchen when it was voluntary. But because he was forcing her to do it, she had grown to hate it. Her cooking responsibilities had become symbolic of the mess she had created for herself.

Freeing herself from the kitchen had been almost as liberating as freeing herself from her sham of a marriage. Maybe it was a true sign of how far she had come that she had started to once more enjoy cooking on the nights when it was her turn.

Most of the time she enjoyed these evening meals, she corrected her earlier thought. This one wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of suppers. Leah said nothing, just glowered at everyone and picked at her food. None of the other men seemed in the mood for conversation and if not for C.J.’s constant chatter to Joe about his day, they all would have eaten in silence.

Finally Luke Mitchell wiped his mouth with his napkin and cleared his throat. “Tastes delicious, Miz Redhawk. As usual.” He must have finally worked up the nerve to speak, and he punctuated the compliment with a shy, eager smile across the table.

Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw Ruben and Manny exchange grins and she felt a flush of embarrassment begin at the nape of her neck and spread up. She was really going to have to do something about him, and soon.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“I mean it,” he persisted. “You make a real good spaghetti sauce.”

The fact that it was her night to cook had completely slipped her mind until she had returned from the barn after delivering the calf. She hadn’t had time to do much more than open a jar of store-bought sauce and mix it with ground beef, but she didn’t want to embarrass the eager ranch hand by pointing out the obvious so she just smiled politely.

“With that wind chill, we’re supposed to dip down to minus twenty tonight,” Joe interjected before Luke could say anything else. “That means we’re going to have to drop another load of hay after dinner. Mitchell, you and I can take the cows and calves up on the winter range. Manny, Ruben, you can take care of the bulls and yearlings down by the creek. Patch, can you handle the animals in the barns by yourself?”

The grizzled old cowboy nodded. For the next several moments, Annie listened with only half an ear to them discuss ranch business and the constant struggle to keep the livestock warm for the night. The rest of her waited, nerves twitching like a calf on locoweed, for Joe to tell everyone he was leaving.

He seemed to want to drag it out, though, while they discussed vaccinations and the yearly race to be the first ranch in the area to have the calving over with and how many of last year’s steers they would take to auction in a few weeks.

She waited all through dinner but it was only after the men cleared their plates and she had dished up leftover apple pie for dessert that Joe set his fork down with a clatter and pushed back his chair.

“I have an announcement,” he began. Damn. This was harder than he expected it to be. As he studied the faces around the table, his gut clenched and he scrambled for words.

“I’m, uh…I’m leaving the Double C,” he finally just said bluntly. “I’ll be taking a new job in Wyoming come April.”

Everyone was silent for several moments. He saw varying degrees of shock on everyone’s expression except Annie’s—from profound surprise in Patch’s good eye to what he could only describe as an odd kind of glee on Luke Mitchell’s smooth-cheeked features.

To his surprise, Leah was the first to react—Leah, who acted like she couldn’t stand him most of the time. She slid her chair back from the table so abruptly it tipped backward as she stood. She didn’t bother to right it again, just looked at him out of dark eyes wounded with an expression of complete betrayal, like he’d suddenly up and slapped her for no reason, then she rushed out of the kitchen.

The sound of her pounding up the stairs seemed to break the spell for all of them and everyone began talking at once.

“You’re gonna run out right in the middle of planting season?” Patch exclaimed.

“Where in Wyoming are you going?” Ruben asked.

“I guess that means Miz Redhawk’s gonna need to find herself a new foreman,” Luke said.

It was C.J.’s plaintive cry that pierced through the buzz of questions, and brought the men’s conversation to a grinding halt. “You can’t leave, too, Uncle Joe! You can’t!”

Awkward silence echoed through the kitchen while he scrambled for something to say to make things right. Before he could figure out a way to achieve the impossible, Patch cleared his throat, discomfort plain on his face. “Uh, boys, we’ve got some feed to put out if we want to spend the worst of that storm out there where it’s warm and dry. There’ll be time to talk about this later.”

Eager to avoid the scene they all must have known was inevitable, the men murmured their thanks to Annie for the meal then trooped out of the kitchen, leaving him alone with her and her son.

The boy was trying valiantly not to cry but a tear trickled from the corner of his eye anyway, leaving a watery path down the side of his nose. His fingers trembled as he swiped at it, damn near breaking Joe’s heart.

“C.J.—”

Whatever he was going to say was lost as C.J. cut him off. “You promised you’d take me campin’ and fishin’ on the Ruby this summer. You promised!”

He flashed a look toward Annie and found her watching her son out of green eyes filled with compassion and pain.

“We can still go.” His voice sounded hoarse. “I’ll try to get away for a weekend and come up and take you.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

More tears followed the pathway of that lone trail-blazer and Joe felt small and mean for putting them there. He wanted to gather his nephew close, to try to absorb his pain into him if he could, but he sensed the boy would only jerk away.

“Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean I’ll stop being your uncle,” he said quietly. “That’ll never change. We can still talk on the phone and write letters. I promise, I’ll take you on that fishing trip this summer and maybe you can even come stay with me for a while once I get settled.”

“It won’t be the same,” C.J. cried again. His whole face crumpled. “Why do you have to go?”

How could he explain to a seven-year-old how a man sometimes ached for more than he had, more than he would ever have? And how sometimes the lack of it, this constant, aching emptiness, was like a living thing chewing away at him until he couldn’t breathe?

C.J. didn’t wait for an answer, which was probably a good thing since he didn’t have one to offer. The boy stared up at him, and there was a world of disillusionment in his eyes. “You’re no different than him. I thought you were, but you’re not.”

The impassioned words—and all the heartbreak behind it—sliced into him like a just-sharpened blade. No different than him. Than Charlie. The man who had spent every one of C.J.’s seven years destroying his faith in everything.

It was his greatest fear—that he and his half brother were more alike than he wanted to believe. That somehow the genetic makeup they had in common was stronger than his own self-control.

They weren’t, he reminded himself. He had done his damnedest throughout his life to make sure of that. Charlie was a drunk and a bully who delighted in terrorizing anybody smaller than he was. He wasn’t anything like him.

Oh no, he thought with sudden bitterness. Nothing at all. He was just an ex-con who served four years in Deer Lodge for killing his father.

He thrust the thought away and tried to concentrate on the crisis at hand. “C.J.—” he began, but the boy turned away.

“If you leave, I don’t want you to come back. I don’t want to go to the Ruby with you. I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” And for the second time in just a few minutes, the room echoed with the sound of feet pounding up the stairs and the slam of a bedroom door.

At the sound, Annie froze for just an instant, then she stood abruptly and started clearing away dishes with quick, jerky movements, as if she was suddenly desperate to keep her hands busy.

He scratched his cheek. “That went well, don’t you think?”

She fumbled with a plate, catching it just in time to keep it from smashing to the floor, and sent him a baleful look. “Great. Just great. With all these slamming doors, I’m surprised none of the windows are broken.”

His laugh sounded raw and strained. “I’m sorry, Annie. I didn’t think they’d take it this hard.”

“They love you,” she said simply. “You’ve always been decent and kind to them. Lord knows, they got little enough of that from their…from Charlie.”

“I hate like hell that I’m putting them through this.”

“They’ll live. People get over all kinds of things.”

Have you? He wanted to ask, but didn’t. He carried a pile of plates to the sink, wishing things were different. That he didn’t have to leave. That these were his dishes, that this was his kitchen.

That she was his woman.

Chapter 3

What a mess.

With her hands curled around a mug of lemon tea, Annie sighed and looked out the kitchen window at the snow whirled around by the shrieking wind. Hours after Joe’s announcement at dinner, her head still ached, her nerves still in an uproar, and nothing seemed to help.

C.J. was finally asleep after crying most of the evening. She had a feeling if she checked his pillowcase, it would be damp with more tears.

He couldn’t understand why the man who had been more of a father to him in the last eighteen months than his own father had been for his whole life could just walk away. All her efforts to console him only seemed to sound hollow and trite.

She had knocked on Leah’s door a few minutes earlier to tell her to turn the lights out and had received just a grunt in return. Her daughter was no longer speaking to her, but she didn’t know if it was due to Joe’s impending departure or because of their earlier battle over homework and riding privileges.

Had she been this difficult when she was twelve? She didn’t think so. She had been a handful, certainly, always tumbling into trouble with Joe and Colt, but she’d always tried hard not to disappoint her father, anxious for the love he had such a hard time demonstrating.

Of course, by the time she was twelve, Joe and Colt had been in high school and too busy with sports and school and girls to pay much attention to the wild-haired tomboy from the ranch next door who used to follow them everywhere.

She sighed again. If she didn’t stop woolgathering, she was going to be up all night trying to finish this blasted help-wanted ad. She wanted to be able to call it into the newspaper and some of the ranch periodicals in the morning.

She read what she’d written so far: “Wanted: Experienced foreman to oversee six-hundred-head Hereford operation. Prefer long-term commitment and extensive ranching background. Salary based on experience. Must be loyal and hard-working.”

She winced. Was she advertising for a foreman or a dog? She scribbled the last part out and was trying to come up with something better when she heard a soft knock at the back door.

A quick glance at the clock over the stove showed it was nearly ten—a little late for company.

Maybe Joe had some unfinished ranch business he needed to discuss. It wasn’t unusual for him to stop by after the evening chores were done to talk about what needed to be done the next day—a gesture she appreciated but which she’d tried to tell him repeatedly wasn’t necessary. She trusted his instincts completely.

It would take a long time to build up that kind of trust with whomever she finally hired to replace him. She set the pencil down so hard the lead snapped off, and went to answer the door.

To her surprise, it wasn’t Joe she found in the light of the back porch at all but Luke Mitchell, looking nervous and edgy and, if possible, even younger than normal.

“Luke! Is something wrong?”

“No. I just…” the ranch hand shifted his weight, “I wanted to talk to you tonight. Are you busy?”

“No. Just trying to write an ad for a new foreman. Come in.”

She helped brush snow off his black slicker in the mudroom, then led the way into the kitchen. “Can I get you something? I was having a cup of tea and there’s plenty more hot water.”

He shook his head. The movement seemed to remind him of his manners because he abruptly yanked the cowboy hat from his head, leaving a flat line haloing his blond hair.