A Cowboy In The Kitchen

Doc McTufts had assured him that Lucy was fine, no broken bones, and that the doc herself had fallen out of plenty of trees as a kid and lived to tell the tale to worried parents all over town. But of course, as they were settling up at the reception desk, who was giving him the stink eye but the Dunkins’ next-door neighbor, sitting with pursed lips next to her daughter and grandbaby. As West drove home, Lucy in her car seat in the back with her superhero coloring book, he figured the woman had already called Raina to let her know her poor granddaughter had almost been injured and had left the doc’s office with a big bandage over a nasty scrape.

Lucy was all right. That was what mattered. But he would keep a better eye on her when she was climbing.

“Daddy, can we have ice cream for dinner?” Lucy asked.

“How about your second favorite for dinner and ice cream for dessert?” he asked, smiling at her in the rearview mirror.

“French toast with strawberries for the mouth and blueberries for the eyes?”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, feeling pretty confident about his French toast after yesterday’s cooking lesson. Plus, hadn’t Annabel said that she’d often eaten breakfast for dinner in Dallas when she was feeling low or missed her family? Comfort food. The very reason he ate at Hurley’s so often.

He’d lain awake for hours last night, thinking about the cooking lesson. Annabel was so beautiful with that silky dark red hair caught in the ponytail, her pale, porcelainlike skin free of makeup, her long, lush body in low-slung jeans rolled up at the ankles and a loose white button down shirt tucked in. Her uniform, she’d called it. He called it sexy. She was like summertime, like sunshine, and her nearness, the scent of her, the sight of the swell of her breasts against the cotton shirt, the curve of her hip...it had been all he could do not to grab her against the wall and kiss her, memories of their time in the barn hitting him hard, as he’d shaken confectioners’ sugar on French toast, slid peppers around in the pan.

And then she’d touched him, her soft hand, her skin electrifying his with the most casual of gestures, moving his hand over on the knife. Her touch had sent a shock through him and brought him back to the barn to forty-five minutes when he thought he’d found his future, when he thought everything made sense.

Until it didn’t.

Back then West had been going nowhere fast. Annabel would have joined him there if he’d let something happen between them. After he and Annabel had almost gone too far in the barn, he forced himself to stop for her sake and said he’d better get back to the house. She’d gotten a funny look on her face, and he’d wanted to ask her if she was okay, to get a handle on why she seemed upset, but she seemed in a hurry to get away. From him. Maybe she’d just meant to pay her condolences, nice enough to bring him his favorite chili con carne that he always ordered to go after school, and he’d practically ripped her clothes off. Jerk. Maybe she was just being nice and he’d taken things too far, like always.

So then they’d gone back to the house so she could say goodbye to his parents, but his parents were standing outside, his mother crying, his father’s arm over her shoulder, and they’d seen West and Annabel come out of the barn. He held back a bit and it was too late to tell Annabel she had a bit of hay in her hair. He saw his mother stare at the hay, then glance at him, disapproval turning her grief-stricken eyes cold. West doing the wrong thing again—fooling around with a girl in the barn while friends and neighbors came to pay their respects. That wasn’t how it was, but it was how it had looked to his parents. West was sure of it.

Annabel had told his parents how sorry she was for their loss, glanced at West with such sorrow, then she’d gotten on her bike and raced away. Later that night, after the last of the relatives had left, West had come downstairs for a cold drink when he overheard his mother crying again and his father comforting her. The sound of his mother crying was like a slam in his gut, and West had stood there, frozen, his head hung, wishing he could go in and say the right thing, but he’d known, he’d always known, that he wasn’t “living up to their expectations” and he’d be no comfort, that the wrong Montgomery brother was gone. Then he’d heard his mother say Annabel’s name and he strained to hear.

Did you see West and Annabel come out of the barn together? his mother was saying. She had hay in her hair. Hopefully her grandmother will have the sense to tell Annabel to stay away from West. I hear she has a scholarship to culinary school in Dallas. I’d hate for her to give up her future.

West had gone rigid. He’d waited for his father’s response, for some kind of defense, but his dad had said, She won’t give that up to stay in Blue Gulch.

Plenty of girls give up their dreams for handsome boys they’re in love with, his mother had said. Annabel has her whole life ahead of her, and West will be here, doing what? Odd jobs. New girlfriend every weekend. I love West, but he’s...who he is.

Who he is... His heart in his throat, he’d crept back upstairs, lying awake for a long, long time, tears streaming down his face. He’d lost his brother. His parents thought he was nothing. And now he had to lose Annabel—to save her...from himself. His mother was right. Annabel was a good girl, straight A’s, helped out her grandmother by working in the family restaurant every day after school as a cook’s assistant and sometimes as a waitress when someone called in sick. And West was the troublemaker in the black leather jacket, calls to his parents from the principal about fights he got into with jerk jocks who thought they could say anything they wanted about anyone. And yeah, since barely graduating, he worked for room and board at a big spread on the outskirts of town, thinking he might want to be a rancher, breed cattle, raise horses. His dad was a mechanic who’d tried his hand at starting a small ranch on their property and hadn’t done well, so his father had figured West would fail at that life too. But West wasn’t like Garrett, who’d joined the military and planned to become a police officer, a trajectory his parents could be proud of.

Back then he’d lain awake for hours, vowing to avoid Annabel Hurley so that he wouldn’t screw up her life. In the barn, she’d taken off her sweater, let him touch her breasts in the lacy white bra, and kissed him deeper and deeper, driving him wild until he’d stopped things, afraid to go too far and take advantage of the situation.

So yeah, she liked him. That had been clear. Liked him enough to give up her scholarship and Dallas? Maybe. So he’d made the decision to avoid her from that moment on, let her go have her great life with a better guy than him.

And when Lorna Dunkin had told him the next day that she knew exactly how to make him forget his grief for a little while, looking him up and down and whispering in his ear, he took her to the flat-topped boulder where he often saw Annabel picking herbs for her grandmother, and he let Lorna help him forget everything—losing his brother, his parents’ disappointment in him, his disappointment in himself and giving up Annabel for her own damned good. At some point, he’d heard the crack of a twig and he knew it was her, knew that she saw, and the footsteps running away let him know he’d achieved his goal.

Some damned victory.

Except about six weeks later, Lorna had shown him a white stick that looked like a thermometer with a pink plus sign in a tiny window and said she wanted a big wedding.

Lucy had made everything he’d given up worth it. But those times when he’d be stacking hay or training a horse, he’d think of Annabel’s beautiful face, those round dark brown eyes, full of trust, of feeling, and he’d feel like the scum of the earth. He’d hurt her, no doubt. But hadn’t she gone off to Dallas to the fancy cooking school? Hadn’t he stepped out of her way? He’d heard she had a condo in a swanky apartment building near Reunion Tower. That she was a chef at a Michelin-starred American fusion restaurant, whatever that meant. She probably had a serious boyfriend in a fancy suit.

With Lucy lying on her stomach on the living room rug with her coloring book, Daisy half snoozing nearby, West opened the folder of recipes Annabel had given him. Breakfast was written in red marker on the tab in her neat script. He found the one for French toast, and set to work, cracking eggs, melting butter in the pan, getting out the bread. Soon enough he had four slices of French toast cooking, eyeholes cut out for blueberries and a mouth cut out for strawberry slices for Lucy’s portion. Smelled pretty darned good too.

He thought about all those women coming by, in the first couple of months after Lorna died, with casseroles and offers to cook for him. There’d been innuendo and flat-out invitations. More than a few times he’d taken up those invitations, needing to forget, to be taken out of himself. And more than a few times he’d failed Lucy. One time he’d been in a woman’s bed when he was supposed to pick up Lucy early from school for a dentist appointment, but the woman had made him forget himself so well he forgot his own daughter. Another time Lucy had been calling him over and over on the phone from Lorna’s parents’ house, where she was sleeping over, to tell him she lost a tooth, her first, but he’d shut the ringer so no one could interrupt him while a stranger with big breasts was naked beside him.

The next morning, the look of absolute disdain and disappointment on Raina Dunkin’s face had said it all. A father, especially a widowed father, needs to be reachable at all times, West, she’d practically spit at him. But it was the look on Lucy’s face, with one of her bottom front teeth gone, the where were you, Daddy? I tried to call you like one million times that had made him vow that was it. No more women. No more whiskey. No more hiding from his life. He’d focus on his daughter.

So beautiful women with long red hair and dark brown eyes, who made him want to rip off their loose jeans and white button-down shirts, women like Annabel Hurley, just couldn’t go around casually touching his hand while slicing mushrooms.

“Daddy, I think Daisy ate my silver crayon,” Lucy called from the living room. “She’s choking!”

West rushed into the living room, where Daisy was sputtering a bit, trying to get something out of her mouth and pushing on her teeth with her paw.

“Daddy, is Daisy okay?” Lucy asked, hazel eyes worried.

“Well, let’s see if we can help her,” he said, kneeling beside Daisy and opening the beagle’s mouth, where half a crayon was wedged in her back teeth. “Daisy, that couldn’t possibly have tasted good,” he said, shaking his head and trying to pop up the flattened, bitten crayon. Finally out it came. As the smell of something burning wafted into the living room, Daisy stood up and spit out the other half of the crayon.

Damn it, the French toast! It would be burned to a crisp by now.

The doorbell rang just as West was rushing back into the kitchen, so he quickly shut off the burner, then noticed he’d left the bag of bread too close to the burner; part of it started to cinder. He threw that in the sink and stood there for a moment, hands braced on the counter, wishing his headache away.

“Daddy, the doorbell rang again,” Lucy called out just as the smoke alarm started blaring.

“Lucy, it’s Nana and Pop-Pop,” he heard Raina’s shrill voice call out. “Come open the door, sweetheart.”

Oh, hell.

He quickly tried to fan the smoke from the alarm with a magazine, then hurried into the living room, where Raina and Landon glared at him.

“What is that burning smell?” Raina said, barreling in and heading for the kitchen. West could hear her shoving up the kitchen window, and in a few moments, the alarm stopped its beeping. Raina was back in the living room in seconds, holding the charred bag of bread. “Blackened bread is in a pan on the stove. This burned bag was in the sink, and the kitchen is all smoky, which can seriously hurt developing lungs. God, West.”

“We had a mergency with Daisy because she ate my crayon,” Lucy said, holding up the flattened sliver for her nana.

“Even the dog isn’t safe in this house,” Landon said, shaking his silver-gray head at West as he took the crayon from Lucy. “I’ll make sure this ends up in the garbage so there isn’t another ‘mergency.’”

“I heard Lucy was at the doctor today,” Raina said as she went over to Lucy to examine her leg. She peeled back the bandage and added her own head shake at the nasty cut. He watched Raina’s gaze take in Lucy’s torn purple leggings, the scrape on her arm, the knot clumping together a cluster of ringlets on the left side of her head, the dirt smudge on her cheek.

“I fell out of the tree today,” Lucy said proudly, sticking out her injured leg.

“Oh, I can see that,” Raina said, shooting a death stare at West. “Lucy, can you go play in your room?” she added through gritted teeth. “Grandpa and I need to talk to your father.”

When Lucy left, Raina lowered her voice. “You leave me no choice, West. We’ve given you a year to get your act together. But you’re unfit to parent Lucy alone. Landon and I will be filing for custody. This was the final straw.” She held up a hand. “Don’t bother to defend yourself,” she said, and then they swept out.

West dropped down on the sofa, his head in his hands. No one was taking his daughter away from him. But how would he fight the Dunkins when a lot of circumstantial evidence said he wasn’t exactly father of the year?

“Daddy, is the French toast ready? I’m starving,” Lucy said as she burst out of her room. “Hey, where’s Nana and Pop-Pop?” she asked, looking around.

Keep it together for Lucy, he ordered himself. The Dunkins aren’t taking your girl away. They can’t. He’d figure it out, he’d fight them, he’d...do whatever he had to do.

He sucked in a breath and let it out. “They had to get home. You know what, Lucy? Even Daisy wouldn’t eat the burned French toast. How about dinner at Hurley’s, just the two of us? Go wash your hands, sweetcakes.”

As Lucy grinned and ran to wash up, West felt a slow snake of cold fear slither up his spine. Could the Dunkins prove he was unfit? He was a better father now than he was in the terrible first month after Lorna’s death, when Lucy didn’t quite understand where her mother was, but had two sets of doting grandparents. He’d let them do what he should have done—been there for his daughter. Then his parents moved away...and he’d lost them too—permanently. Instead of focusing on being a good dad to Lucy, he’d drank too much and spent too many nights with women, trying to make himself forget who and what he was. A man very much alone who had no idea how to be a good father.

He would not lose his daughter. No matter what he had to do.

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