by Beth Andrews
Well, Penny understood that, too. It was something she struggled with, herself. Only in Penny’s case, the person she’d never learned to trust was herself.
So she just held out her hand, as if it would be perfectly normal for Ellen to take it. After a brief hesitation, the girl did. Then, together, they moved through the swinging door and entered the living room.
Rowena stood near the front door, grasping Alec by both shoulders, fixing him directly in front of her. She was clearly not going to let go until he’d made an apology that suited her.
He seemed to be winding down from a long speech. “And so that’s it, Mr. Thorpe. I really mean it. I’m really, really sorry.”
Alec twisted his head up at Rowena, as if checking to see if he’d satisfied all requirements. Her face seemed expressionless, but its very blankness must have told him something, because he sighed and turned around again to face Max.
“And...let’s see...oh, yeah, I’m also sorry that I came into your house without your permission, because I know that probably feels creepy to you, doesn’t it?”
Max’s mouth twitched. Penny had to force herself to stop looking at it, because the motion of repressed laughter was so attractive.
So oddly sexy, given the situation.
“I honestly didn’t think of coming off like a creeper,” Alec explained. “I was just thinking it would be fun, and that Ellen would be happy to have pierced ears so that she could wear her earrings. And...oh, and I’m also sorry I fainted on your carpet, and I guess I could pay to get it cleaned or something, but to tell you the truth I don’t even remember any of that, so if I slobbered or puked on it or anything—”
“That’ll do.” Rowena made a choking sound. “I think Mr. Thorpe gets the idea.”
Rowena suddenly seemed to notice Penny and Ellen. She wiggled Alec’s shoulders. “There’s Ellen,” she said meaningfully.
He screwed up his mouth, but he obviously knew the drill. He walked over to Ellen, and he gave her a serious look. She stared back, equally solemn, still holding Penny’s hand. She didn’t relent an inch. Though her fingers tightened around Penny’s, her gaze at Alec was poker-straight.
“I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” he said in his best manly voice. “I’m sorry I sucked at ear piercing. I thought it was a lot easier than that. And I had no idea I’d be so dumb about blood.”
He grinned up at Penny—it wasn’t in Alec to be somber for long. “I used to think maybe I’d be a doctor, but now I know that won’t work. So that’s actually a good thing, right?”
“That’s a very good thing,” Ellen answered, though the question hadn’t been directed at her. When Alec glanced her way, she smiled—just a fraction of an inch, but he obviously knew he’d eventually be forgiven.
“Want to come meet my second mom?” He gestured toward Rowena. “I call her Rowena, but she’s really my second mom. My first mom moved to Paris and had these two twin babies that are like, wow, disgusting. You wouldn’t believe how awful. So Dad married Rowena, and everyone thought I would be mad, but I wasn’t, because she’s actually pretty awesome.”
Ellen glanced over at Rowena, covering her shyness with a frown. She squeezed Penny’s hand, as if trying to send her an SOS.
Penny watched Ro figure Ellen out in a heartbeat. At that age, Ro, too, would have hated the idea of a formal introduction to a stranger, especially a stranger who might be very mad at her.
So Ro just smiled and gave Ellen a friendly “that’s okay” wave.
“Ellen probably doesn’t want to have much to do with anyone connected to you, Alec,” Rowena said. “Anyhow, right now I have to take you to get your head examined. Literally. Maybe later, if she decides to forgive you, Ellen can come over to the ranch for lunch or something. You can show her Trouble.”
“Trouble’s my dog,” Alec put in, as if afraid Max and Ellen would misunderstand. “It’s just a silly name. She never bites or anything.”
“Anyhow, we’ll get out of your way,” Rowena said, glancing toward Max. “Remember, though—this probably really was all Alec’s doing. The boy could talk a rabbit into a steel-jawed trap.”
“So I’m gathering,” Max said blandly. He walked over and held out his hand to Alec. “Thank you for the apology. Your mom brought you up right.” He smiled at Rowena. “Both of them.”
Rowena smiled back at him. Then she cast a quick, sparkling glance at Penny, as if to say wow.
“Ro, I’ll head out with you,” Penny said quickly, before her sister could start saying embarrassing things. Rowena’s matchmaking wasn’t terribly subtle, she’d discovered at lunch the other day.
Besides, Max and Ellen would need privacy now, to sort things out. “I’ll walk you to the car, and then I’ve got a ton of unpacking left to do.”
She felt a small twitch from Ellen, as if her instinct was to beg Penny to stay. But when she looked down, Ellen’s face had gone stoic, any weakness covered with a layer of bravado. She let go of Penny’s hand.
Penny’s heart tightened again, recognizing the acceptance that she was all alone in this. So heartbreaking—and so unnecessary. If only the little girl could see how staunch an ally her dad would be, if only she’d let him...
“Maybe I’ll see you in the next few days?” Penny smiled. “Maybe you could help me decide where to put the gazing balls?”
“Maybe.” Ellen swallowed hard. “If I’m not grounded.”
Penny glanced at Max—and beneath the impassive mask she saw the truth. He was so darn relieved both kids were unharmed. Any punishment he doled out would be purely a token.
Which, unfortunately, just made her want to kiss him all over again. She flushed, then glanced at Ro, wondering if her sister had noticed.
The twinkle in Rowena’s green eyes was answer enough.
She’d noticed, all right. In fact, the tips of her cheeks looked a little pink, too, as if she might be willing to kiss him herself.
“You won’t ground her, will you, Mr. Thorpe?” Alec sounded worried. “It’s like Rowena said. It was my fault, even if she is a bleeder—”
Laughing, Rowena clapped one hand over her stepson’s mouth.
“Come on, Pea,” she said. With her free hand, she grabbed Penny’s fingers and tugged her toward the door. “I think Alec better quit while he’s ahead.”
* * *
ELLEN DIDN’T FALL asleep until nearly midnight. Max wondered whether that might be too late to knock on Penny’s door, but her lights were still blazing, so he took a chance.
He went to the back, leaving his kitchen door ajar so he could hear Ellen if she woke up. She slept hard, and ordinarily nothing disturbed her, not even his bad dreams, during which he sometimes cried out so loudly he woke himself. But he didn’t want to take any chances.
Penny answered almost immediately, and it was clear she’d still been up and wide-awake. She wore the same loose, lacy shirt and formfitting blue jeans that had driven him crazy earlier today. She might have the face of a china doll, too sweet and perfect to be real under that fall of honey-brown hair. But her body was 100 percent real-flesh woman.
And, given that he’d sworn that for the next nine months he’d be 100 percent pure father—with nothing set aside for personal things, like sex and dating—that was a lot more woman than he needed right now.
But he had to thank her for today. She’d been unbelievably competent and compassionate.
In fact, she’d been the kind of mother Ellen should have had. How different might things have been, he thought, if he’d waited for a woman like this one?
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so late. I just wanted to thank you for all your help today. You were terrific.”
“It was nothing.” She smiled. “And I didn’t even realize it was late. I was still up. Still unpacking. It’s such a mess, moving in,
isn’t it?”
He nodded with feeling. But, judging from what he could see over her shoulder, her place didn’t look half as chaotic as his. He still had boxes everywhere, and he hadn’t even brought any furniture or large items. She’d had only a few days to start from scratch, and everything he could see looked fully finished.
Simple and spare, lots of blues and browns and clean, creamy white. Elegant and welcoming. Flowers on the kitchen table, and beyond that, lamps and armchairs and a colorful braided rug in the living room.
And, on every wall, framed paintings—beautiful landscapes that looked like original artwork. Wildflowers and mountains that could easily have been Silverdell itself.
She glanced toward his side of the duplex. “How’s Ellen?”
“She’s all right, thanks to your TLC. I don’t know how you got her to come out and face Rowena. She usually gets stubborn and defensive.”
She smiled. “Appealed to her sense of pride, mostly. It’s a technique I learned with Rowena, when we were kids. When she felt bullied or threatened, she covered up by being haughty, or lashing out preemptively. So we all learned to come at her sideways.”
He shook his head, thinking how sad it was that Penny, at ten or eleven, had been defter with a difficult personality than he was at thirty-four.
“I wish you’d been around to help me navigate the rest of the night. The minute you guys were gone, Ellen started in on how the whole disaster was my fault, because I reneged on her mother’s promise to let her pierce her ears when she turned eleven.”
“Oh, dear.” Penny still smiled, but her gaze was sympathetic. “Don’t tell me. You tried to be logical. And things went south from there?”
“In a big hurry. I ended up having to ground her after all. She got so unpleasant, and I’m so bad at knowing how to stop it. Once, I would have walked away and let her mother handle it. Then, for a while, I just let her get away with whatever, because she’d lost her mom. Now I’m trying to hold her accountable. It’s no fun, but I’m trying to stick to it, even when it hurts.”
“I’m so sorry.” Penny reached up to shove a strand of shining hair from her face. “I feel as if I’m to blame, actually. If only I’d realized they were in the house already.”
“That’s absolutely not your fault. You couldn’t have known she’d be devious enough to hide and refuse to answer the door. Besides, the driver shouldn’t have left her when no one was—”
He broke off, suddenly glimpsing what looked like an angry, purple bruise on the upper rim of Penny’s cheekbone.
It wasn’t large, but the back porch motion-sensitive lights all had switched on when he came through, so the porch was bright as if it were daylight. It was definitely a bruise. She looked as if someone had socked her.
“Oh...” He touched his index finger to the mark before he even thought about it. “What happened?”
She put her own hand to the spot and made a sheepish sound. “Honestly, it’s so ridiculous I almost hate to admit it.” She smiled. “I’m twenty-seven years old, and I don’t know how to juggle. I was trying to learn.”
Juggling? Had he heard her right? “With what? Your bowling balls?”
She backed away from the door slightly, so that he could see into the kitchen’s breakfast nook. There, just beside the centerpiece of daisies, were three stones she’d probably found on the creek bed. Mostly rounded, mostly smooth, but too big and heavy for juggling—at least twice the size of golf balls.
“With rocks?”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I don’t have anything sensible, like beanbags, so I thought those might work.” She raised her eyebrows. “I was wrong.”
“Who would have guessed?” He tried not to laugh, but at the moment he felt every day of the seven years between them. How could anyone be so naive? “Did you put something on it?”
She nodded. “I’ve been defrosting peas on my face for the past half hour, so I should be okay. Do you want to come in? I don’t have anything adult to offer you, but I’ve got hot milk on the stove.” She smiled. “And peas.”
Hot milk for a nightcap. He thought back to the first day, when he’d seen her pull into the driveway and assumed she was a stalker, maybe nuts. He almost laughed out loud, thinking how wrong he’d gotten that one.
“I’d love a glass of milk,” he said, though he knew the offer had probably been perfunctory, and she fully expected him to decline. “I should stay out here, though, so I can hear Ellen.”
“Of course.” Maybe it hadn’t been perfunctory, after all. She looked pleased, and he wondered whether she’d been lonely—in there with only her determination to stand on her own two feet for company.
She glanced up at the silvery-gray sky. “The weather’s perfect for it, as long as we don’t get any rain.”
She was right. The temperatures, which had reached the high seventies in the afternoon, had dipped, but not enough to be uncomfortable. A low blanket of clouds had kept the warmth from dissipating. It also held the resin scent of the pines near the earth, thick and sweet. Overall, a fair trade for the loss of starlight.
She went to the stove, poured out two glasses and brought them out onto the porch in a matter of seconds. She led him to the new wooden table she’d put next to the railing overlooking the creek.
This could become a habit, he thought—meeting his adorable, milk-guzzling landlady each night under the pines, with the babbling water for background music. Max was accustomed to city life, where even the deepest midnight hummed with traffic, television sets set too loud, and the occasional ambulance crying in the distance. The absence of mechanized noises made you intensely aware of yourself, he realized...and the people around you.
She leaned back in her chair, put her feet up on the seat, and nursed her warm milk in both palms. “You’re very polite, not even asking me why I was juggling rocks in the middle of the night.”
He took a sip of his milk, which was very sweet, and reminded him forcefully—and pleasantly—of his childhood, back when everything was simple and everyone was a friend.
“I know why,” he said. “It’s on your list. I’m just glad you weren’t in there giving yourself a tattoo. I’ve seen enough damage from needles for one day.”
“Oh, that’s right. I already mentioned the tattoo, didn’t I? The bluebird of happiness. But I must have neglected to mention I plan to put the tattoo on my right hip. I couldn’t possibly reach that by myself.”
He laughed. “The bluebird of happiness?”
“Yeah. Sounds crazy, right? It’s just...a thing from when I was a kid.” She smiled. “And I mentioned the juggling, too, didn’t I? That one may be my undoing. It’s not the scariest thing on my list, but it may be the hardest—for me, anyhow. I’m the most horrible physical klutz.”
He found that hard to believe. If he’d ever seen a body put together right...
“What is the scariest thing on the list?”
Her eyes widened. “White-water rafting.” She laughed. “It looks like so much fun, but at the same time I’m deathly terrified of the very thought. If I ever get a check mark next to that one, I’ll feel like a superhero.”
Her sparkling eyes looked so alive. He had a sudden, intense desire to see her master all of it—the juggling, the rafting—every darn thing on her list.
She deserved to feel like a superhero. He’d seen her with her family, with their elderly neighbors, with Alec. It was beautiful, how she offered gentle understanding to everyone around her—even to his unpleasant daughter.
But she had more than handmaiden sweetness inside her. She had fire and grit, and he would love to be there when she finally believed in herself.
“Why juggling, of all things? You planning to join the circus?”
“I’m not sure, really. We used to have a wrangler who could juggle anything. Anything. Horsesho
es, spurs, boots, bottles.”
“Rocks?”
“No.” She laughed softly. “Even he never tried rocks. But I could watch him for hours. He said he’d teach me, and we’d just begun lessons when my dad fired him for goofing off too much. It broke my heart.”
Max imagined her guileless, sweet-featured face, taken back fifteen or twenty years. She would have looked like an illustration in an old-fashioned children’s book, all wide, oversize Bambi eyes, and bowed, pink-cherub lips.
He pictured how earnestly she would have listened to the old wrangler’s instructions, and how openly she would have sobbed as he departed.
Max raised his glass with a smile. “So now you’d like to learn to juggle, in his honor.”
She grinned, raising hers, too, and clinking them together in a lighthearted toast. “Exactly. But I’m afraid I’m hopeless. If he could see me today, he’d be ashamed of his pupil.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” He set his milk down and stood, thinking about their options. Many of the trees around the cottage were aspens, but taller pines dotted the landscape, too, so there undoubtedly would be cones. He walked the three steps down from the deck, and sure enough within a minute he’d found two that were perfect. Small, more round than oblong, and closed fairly tightly, as if they knew there would be rain before the night was over.
“Here. Let’s try these.” He tested the weight of the cones by bouncing them in his palm. Good—they were light enough that, even if she missed a catch, no one would be bruised. And the bristles weren’t too sharp. His more-callused palm hardly registered a sting, so surely even her softer one would survive.
She looked embarrassed as he climbed back up to her. “Max, I don’t think you understand. I’m not just bad at this. I’m horrible.”
“Maybe. But it must be on your list for a reason,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Reluctantly, she stood and placed herself a foot or so in front of him. She looked at his hands. “You only have two pinecones,” she said dubiously. “We need three, right?”