The Ranch She Left Behind

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.