by Merry Farmer
“Yeah, of course.” Hero winked at her.
“But I could give her so much stuff,” Wes rambled on.
“I have a good job waiting for me in Haskell,” Hero countered. “Which isn’t half as important as the fact that Denise loves her and I love Denise. Love is better than stuff any day.”
“Wait, you love me?” Denise asked beside him.
Hero turned to her, smiling like the fool in love that he was. “Yeah, I do. How could I not?”
She giggled. “I could give you a million reasons.”
“None of them would count.” Hero shrugged. “I love you, and that’s that.”
“But we’ve barely known each other a week,” she argued.
His brow went up. “Would you prefer that I didn’t love you?”
“No!” she nearly shouted. “I’m just surprised. Because I…I love you too.”
Hero’s grin spread across his face and into his heart, and all the way down to his toes. “Cool. I would absolutely kiss you right now, but I have to deal with a little something first.”
Denise continued to giggle, her eyes shining bright in the light of the floodlights in back of the gym. The crowd that had gathered looked on expectantly, shifting their attention to Wes. It was his move.
“Yeah, well, I hope you enjoy all that love stuff, because not only am I going to sue you for custody of Destiny, I’m going to sue you for everything you’ve got just because I can.”
“Uh, can you?” Doc O’Donnell asked from the crowd, his tone clearly implying that there was no way he could.
“I’ve got a rock-solid case,” Wes went on, voice raised. “At least, I’ve got a case to sue for Destiny.”
“What case?” Hero asked.
“I’m about to be a public official,” Wes said. “Voters want to see a family man in office.”
“How is that a case?” Denise shook her head.
“It is because…because…” Wes glanced around desperately. He grabbed one of his friends and pulled him into the center of the fight. “Tell them why, Shaughnessy.”
“Um.” Shaughnessy tugged at his collar, glancing nervously to the people watching the confrontation. He winced as he turned back to Wes. “Those conversations we had weren’t actual legal advice, Wes. I’m a personal injury lawyer. I don’t actually know anything about family law.”
Shock took over Wes’s expression. “But you said no court out there would deny my claim.”
Shaughnessy shrugged. “I’d had a few beers. And that was before Denise got married. This guy seems pretty cool.”
“He does not.” Wes grabbed Shaughnessy and shoved him back with the others. The rough treatment of one of his friends didn’t help his cause. All of the former high school jocks who had banded around Wes began to step back and fade into the rest of the crowd. “Destiny is my daughter, I need her to live with me, end of story.”
“Oh, it’s the end of the story, all right,” someone muttered in the crowd. A few more people murmured in agreement.
Things seemed to be coming to an end, so Hero laid the last of his argument out. “Look. I get that you want to win your election. I can see that you think presenting the image of a happy family is important to that goal. But you can’t just walk back into Denise and Destiny’s lives after being absent for fifteen years and expect everything to be the same way it was in high school. You were the captain of the football team then and Denise was the disgraced girl, but let me tell you, from where I’m standing, those roles are reversed now.”
“Except Mom’s not the captain of the football team now,” Destiny added. She wore a bemused grin and stood with her arms crossed in a cocky pose. That in itself was proof Hero was on the right path. She was back to being a teenager and not a wild harpy.
Hero turned back to Wes. “You left Denise to fend for herself all those years ago. Well, she fended quite nicely. Without you. You have forfeited all rights to walk back in here and disrupt the life she’s built for herself. If your concern for Destiny were genuine, I might feel differently. But where were you all those years when Denise might actually have needed you?”
“I wasn’t about to ruin my chances by shackling myself to a dumb bimbo, if that’s what you mean,” Wes sulked.
Hero shook his head. “See, now you’re just making me angry. I think you’d better pack it up and leave before it’s too late.”
Wes took that as a challenge. “Are you chicken?” He raised his fists and sunk into a fighter’s stance. “Don’t think you have what it takes, in spite of those porn-star muscles, to fight a real man?”
“The whole point here is that there is no fight,” Hero sighed. “The point is that you’ve already lost, and everything you do now is just embarrassing.”
“Oh yeah? How embarrassing is this?” He lunged toward Hero, throwing a punch.
Hero shifted easily into everything he’d learned in his years of martial arts training. He inched out of Wes’s way, grabbing his wrist and forearm and using the force and momentum of Wes’s attack against him. One tiny twist, and Wes dropped like a sack of bricks. One of the cows just on the other side of the fence lowed at just that moment. It was the perfect thing to break the shocked tension of Wes going down. Someone laughed. A few more people joined in. Seconds later, the entire crowd was laughing.
Wes stayed on the ground, moaning and cradling his arm. Mona wedged her way out of the crowd and crouched beside her, but he swatted her away. “Get off of me! Stop laughing, stop laughing!”
Hero didn’t exactly feel bad for the man, didn’t quite think he deserved his dignity in that moment, but for Destiny’s sake, he made eye-contact with a few key people in the crowd, gesturing for them to stop laughing. Then he turned away and walked over to Denise and Destiny.
“My girls okay?” he asked. Denise handed him his shirt, and he shrugged into it.
“Yeah, we are,” Destiny answered, all smiles. “I’m not even mad that you did that to my dad. He’s just a sperm donor. He’s never been a father to me.”
“I’m sorry you have to feel that way,” Hero said. He finished with the buttons of his shirt, tucked it in, then slid his arm around Denise’s shoulders. They started back into the gym. “No girl should have to go through life without a father.”
Destiny nodded, more serious. “I’m not going to get all reality-show special and say that you can be my father now, but I think I like you.”
“I’m glad.” Hero smiled at Destiny and kissed Denise’s forehead.
“And…” Destiny hesitated, blinking as their eyes got used to the light inside the gym. “And if you think I should move to Haskell with you next week, I won’t put up a fight.”
“Oh, thank you, honey.” Denise hugged her.
“The move to Haskell might be able to wait,” Hero said. “I mean, I need to get over there for orientation and to get the new house that’s part of the job, but we could probably move slowly.”
“I don’t know,” Denise said, making a face. “I’m kind of ready to get out of this town and move on.”
“Then I won’t hold you back from doing whatever you need to do. But maybe Destiny could stay in the old house here with your mom for a while, and at the end of the term or the end of the school year, whichever you’d like, both of them can move with us to Haskell.”
“Really?” Destiny blinked. “You’d let me live alone in the house with Grandma?”
“Only temporarily,” Denise told her, sounding more like a mother than ever. “And remember, Haskell is just a thirty-minute drive away. And I’d come back and stay overnight on days when I’m not working. And I’d call you every day to make sure things are under control. And if there is ever a problem, we’ll change the arrangement right away.”
“I’m okay with that.” Destiny smiled. “I’d miss you if you were gone, like, all the time. I love you, Mom.”
“And I will always love you with all my heart, baby.” Denise threw her arms around her daughter and hugged her so hard Hero tho
ught Destiny’s spine might break. But Destiny didn’t mind. She hugged her mom back just as hard. “We really are a family now,” Denise said.
“I’ve always wanted a family of my own,” Hero laughed, joining the hug.
“Me too,” Destiny added. “And now I have one.”
Are you ready for more? Christmas is coming, after all, and there’s one more O’Donnell brother left single. Will Dr. Tabby Ross change that, or will the rivalry between Culpepper’s foremost pediatrician and its premier architect cause both to end up with coal in their stocking? Find out this Christmas with Architect’s Angel!
And if you’re at all curious about Paradise Space Flight and the hijinks that could result from a bunch of engineers, mathematicians, and astrophysicists mixing it up with Haskell, Wyoming’s cowboys, cowgirls, and ranchers—not to mention the descendants of some of Haskell’s oldest and most prominent families, look for the Nerds of Paradise contemporary romance series, starting in January with Opposites Attract!
Click here for a complete list of other works by Merry Farmer.
About the Author
I hope you have enjoyed Hairdresser’s Honey. If you’d like to be the first to learn about when new books in the series come out and more, please sign up for my newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/RQ-KX And remember, Read it, Review it, Share it! For a complete list of works by Merry Farmer with links, please visit http://wp.me/P5ttjb-14F.
Merry Farmer is an award-winning novelist who lives in suburban Philadelphia with her two cats, Butterfly and Torpedo. She has been writing since she was ten years old and realized one day that she didn't have to wait for the teacher to assign a creative writing project to write something. It was the best day of her life. She then went on to earn not one but two degrees in History so that she would always have something to write about. Her books have topped the Amazon and iBooks charts and have been named finalists in the prestigious RONE and Rom Com Reader’s Crown awards.
Click here for a complete list of other works by Merry Farmer.
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Acknowledgments
Writing a series in tandem with another writer can be a huge challenge, but Kirsten Osbourne and I were born for it. The two of us get up to all sorts of shenanigans on paper and on those rare occasions when we can get together in real life. But I owe a huge debt of gratitude to her for coming up with this crazy idea. We’ve had so much fun checking in with each other and giggling over the hijinks these characters have gotten into! Thanks also to my excellent beta-readers Julie Tague, and Jolene Stewart. And a big, big thanks to my editors, Cissie Patterson and Carly Cole, for doing an outstanding job, as always, and for leaving hilarious comments throughout the manuscript. Also, a big round of applause for my marketing and promo mistress, Sara Benedict.
And a special thank you to the Pioneer Hearts group! Do you love Western Historical Romance? Wanna come play with us? Become a member at https://www.facebook.com/groups/pioneerhearts/
Click here for a complete list of other works by Merry Farmer.