Harlequin Superromance December 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2: Caught Up in YouThe Ranch She Left BehindA Valley Ridge Christmas

by Beth Andrews

  “I was shocked to see how obvious it was, in the pictures, that we weren’t in love. I was so determined to make it work, I think I had convinced myself that I did love her. I figured I must. What kind of man doesn’t love the mother of his child?”

  Penny could have answered that. All kinds. A million million men around the world faced this same dilemma. People couldn’t summon love the way they’d summon a waiter, merely because it was time to pay the bill.

  At least, she could have said, he didn’t kill his unloved, unsatisfactory wife.

  But what Max needed right now was someone who would listen to him while he asked himself these questions—not someone who would try to provide facile, simplistic answers.

  “We limped along for several years. For Ellen’s sake. But then—” his face changed suddenly “—some things happened, and I grew a lot less patient. I guess I just stopped trying. So Lydia found someone who would try. A couple of someones, actually. She was a very beautiful woman.”

  Of course she was. And Ellen would someday look just like her, no doubt. Penny wondered whether that affected Max’s feelings toward his daughter. But then she remembered the misery on his face when Ellen had been crying over her impaled ear, and she was certain that it didn’t.

  She knew what it looked like when a man did not love his daughters. And she also knew what it looked like when a man did, if only the way she might recognize a positive by having seen its negative.

  “When I discovered she was cheating, I wasn’t even angry.” He took a deep breath. “I thought she wanted out, and I was more relieved than anything else.”

  He paused. But Penny didn’t speak, so he went on, as she’d hoped he would.

  “She didn’t want out, though. She’d only taken lovers because she thought that, if I got jealous enough, if I feared losing her, I might wake up and appreciate what I had.”

  Penny wanted to touch him, to offer just a simple gesture of understanding, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to risk closing off the flow of words.

  He put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think Lydia ever accepted the truth. Right up to the very end, I think she clung to the hope that I’d change my mind.”

  He stared at the fairy lights and flower garlands in front of them. He was silent a long time. Then he turned to Penny, a half smile on his lips. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this.”

  She raised her shoulders. “Maybe because I didn’t know her. It’s easier to confess things to strangers.”

  His brow furrowed slightly. “Strangers?”

  “Well, you know what I mean. People who aren’t...aren’t part of your normal life. You don’t have to live with the consequences of what you tell them, because they’re temporary—they’re just...”

  She flushed, remembering what he’d said the other night. He knew he would end up merely a memory for Penny, and his only concern was that he didn’t want to be a bad memory. “They’re just passing through. Or, in this case, you are.”

  He seemed to be studying her face, squinting, as if the shadows made reading it difficult.

  “Maybe,” he said finally. “Or maybe it’s because you’re easy to talk to. Because you listen without judging. Because you have a good moral compass and a kind heart.”

  She had to look away. The intensity of his gaze on her skin was almost like a physical burn. “I don’t think very many people would judge you harshly, Max. It’s a sad story, but it is also sadly common.”

  As she stared toward the dance floor, she caught another glimpse of Ellen. She and Alec were working hard at their beginner’s version of the electric slide, but they kept bumping into each other and then collapsing into laughter.

  “Does Ellen know? That you and her mom were probably going to split up?”

  He shook his head. He had followed her gaze and was watching his daughter, too. “We decided it would be better not to tell her, and then, after Lydia died, there didn’t seem to be any point.”

  Penny still knew it was probably best if she didn’t volunteer anything. She didn’t know Lydia—and what she knew of Max was too isolated, too separate from his normal life, to be considered a true picture.

  But she did know something about children who were frightened and hopelessly confused.

  “I think you ought to consider telling her,” she said. “Kids always know when something is wrong. They know if something, or someone, in the family is on the verge of collapse. But if no one will tell them exactly what the problem is, then they fear everything. There’s no safe harbor. No load-bearing wall can be trusted to protect you from the disaster you know is coming.”

  She realized that, halfway through that speech, she had switched from they to you. If she’d gone on another sentence or two, she would have been saying I and me.

  But she didn’t really care. At the very least, he already knew the basic facts of her family’s history, because she, herself, had told him. At worst, he’d get an earful from awful Esther Fillmore.

  Heck, even Millicent Starling could have provided some of the juicier details.

  The gossips especially loved the bit about how Penny had attended her mother’s funeral in her blue party dress that was still stained with her mother’s blood.

  “And you have no idea what other people might have said to her already.” Penny wished she could make him see how likely this scenario actually was. One of Ellen’s friends had probably spotted her mom with another man, or heard gossip that Max always took the long way home.

  “One day, at school,” she said, “a friend of mine called me an ‘accident’ baby, because I was so much younger than Rowena and Bree. So I came home and asked our housekeeper if that was true.”

  He was watching her carefully. “What did she say?”

  “She laughed so hard she almost dropped the cake batter she was stirring. She told me I wasn’t an accident baby at all. Instead, I was what she liked to call a ‘padlock baby.’ I was the padlock on the stable door that made sure the frisky filly didn’t get away.”

  “Good God.” He frowned, hard. “I hope your parents fired her.”

  “They didn’t know.” She put her hand on his arm gently. “That’s my point, Max. You won’t know, because she won’t tell you. If you want to make sure she understands, you’ll have to tell her yourself.”

  * * *

  ELLEN WAS HAVING so much fun she felt like crying when Dad said it was time to go home. She loved it here. She loved the creek in the moonlight, the old guys playing cowboy music, all the people line dancing and laughing and acting like idiots.

  She only calmed down when Alec reminded her that she would be coming back for camp next week, and then for the “camp-in,” a sleepover for all the Bell River day camp kids that they held in the big barn. Her dad had actually agreed to it—without any fuss at all.

  That was probably because Rowena had asked him. He liked Rowena, she could tell. Rowena had explained that there would be story time and art and games and the Geezers were coming to do a talent contest.

  It was going to be awesome, and with that ahead of her, she was willing to leave without complaining.

  She had thought about taking some pictures of the wedding and putting them on Facebook so that Stephanie and Becky and everybody back in Chicago could see how cool it was in Colorado.

  But she never got around to it. People had always been coming up, asking her for something, as if she were part of the family, as if they really needed her. They asked her to dance with old Mr. Harper, who shocked her by being awesome, in spite of the cane. They asked her to get some coffee from the tent for the lady who had started crying because the flowers were so beautiful. They asked her to talk Alec into singing “Red River Valley” with the Geezers. Dallas, Gray, old Mr. Harper and at least two of the boys from day camp had all asked her to dance slow da
nces.

  Even Dad danced with her. He was a pretty good dancer, too. And of course, she and Alec got up for every single line dance, but that wasn’t like a couples thing, so it didn’t mean anything. He was too young to dance with, like that, and besides he kind of felt like a brother.

  “Penny is a really good dancer, isn’t she?”

  She and her dad were driving home. They were about halfway there, and she’d started to get sleepy. She had her eyes shut, and her head was resting against the window. She almost felt as if she were talking to herself.

  But her dad clearly heard her.

  “Yeah.” He sounded surprised, almost as surprised as Ellen had been. She’d never seen Penny dance even once, and yet their landlady was clearly the best dancer in the room.

  “I could hardly stop watching her,” Ellen admitted. She probably wouldn’t have said it, except that she was tired and so strangely happy. “Her bridesmaid’s dress was pretty. And she doesn’t really look exactly like anybody else, does she?”

  Her dad hesitated a minute. “No,” he said, finally. “She doesn’t.”

  “But it’s more than that.” Ellen tried to think it through. “She’s not show-offy when she dances, but it’s like...it is like she dances the way she paints.”

  Though her eyes were still closed, she heard Dad turn toward her. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Ellen wondered if this would make sense to anyone who didn’t paint. He just drew blueprints, which were different, all hard lines and no color or swooshing. “It’s like...like she’s really paying attention to what’s beautiful about music, and what’s beautiful about people dancing.”

  Her father was quite a minute.

  “Yes,” he said, then. “That’s a good way to put it.”

  Penny’s dancing had been so special, in fact, that Ellen had secretly begun trying to imitate it.

  But she didn’t want to tell her dad that part.

  Penny’s dancing had been really feminine, but not in a fake or trashy way. Her mom had been feminine; Ellen had always known that. When Lydia Thorpe walked down the street, men turned around to stare at her, and they didn’t even try to hide it. But there was something about their stares... They always made Ellen uncomfortable, as if they were thinking things they shouldn’t be thinking about somebody’s mom. Behind their eyes, their thoughts looked hot and dirty.

  Men looked at Penny, too. But they didn’t look hot or dirty when they did it. They looked the way puppies looked when they watched their owners drive up, and they sat at attention, tails thumping on the ground in excitement. Or else they looked kind of happy-stunned, like maybe they’d just seen a fairy, or a ghost, or something else they’d only read about in books.

  Only a few of the men who watched Penny didn’t look happy. They just looked quietly sad, as if she made them homesick. As if she made them think about something that was gone forever, but they were still glad for the chance to think about it.

  She felt herself drifting toward sleep. She couldn’t remember quite how she’d gotten on to this subject...

  Oh, yeah. The Facebook pictures. The ones still locked in her camera. With one thing and another, she’d never gotten around to posting any pictures.

  And suddenly she realized that was probably a very good thing.

  Stephanie wouldn’t think a bunch of old cowboys line dancing outside under a string of lights and a garland of wildflowers looked like fun at all.

  “Oh, well,” Ellen said, yawning as she opened her eyes heavily, and briefly glimpsed the moonlight pouring by in creamy white streams. “That just shows how stupid Stephanie is.”

  “What?” Her dad glanced over toward her side of the car.

  She smiled and shut her eyes again. “Nothing.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE THURSDAY AFTER the wedding, Barton James pulled up in front of a tattoo parlor. He scowled at the storefront, then transferred his scowl to Penny. Though it was only three in the afternoon, on a beautiful fall day in a safe little city like Silverdell, he obviously didn’t approve.

  “You sure you don’t want me to wait for you?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Penny said. “I could walk home, if I had to. It isn’t two miles back to the duplex.”

  The tattoo studio was on the far side of Elk Avenue, but in a town the size of Silverdell nothing was very far from anything else. She was telling the literal truth. If her car wasn’t out of the mechanic’s by the time she needed to leave, she really could walk home.

  It wasn’t as if getting a tattoo left you laid up, like getting your appendix removed.

  She patted his shoulder and opened her car door.

  “Well, I think I should wait,” he grumbled. “You know what kind of people hang out in places like that.”

  Penny laughed. “People like me?”

  “No.” He lowered his tangled white eyebrows over his sharp blue eyes. “You don’t hang out in places like that. You may go in there, this one time, but that’s not the same thing. No sir. Whatever bumblebee has itself stuck under your saddle, I have no idea. But I’d be willing to bet you haven’t talked to Rowena about this. Or Bree, for that matter.”

  There wasn’t much he could have said that would have been as irritating as that particular comment. She got out, shut the door behind her, then leaned in through his open window, giving him a scowl that was every bit the match of the one he’d given her.

  “I don’t need my sisters’ permission to get a tattoo. I’m twenty-seven. I can get drunk, join the Blue Angels and have ‘Johnny Depp’ tattooed on my rear end if I want to, and neither Ro nor Bree has anything to say in the matter.”

  He grinned, though he tried to bite it back by chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Nobody said anything about getting permission, Spitfire. You go to your family to talk things over because nobody’s head is right every single time. Now and then, you’ve got mud in your eyes, and you need somebody else to help you see what’s what.”

  Yeah, Barton James was the best. She knew he had called her Spitfire the way people called a shy girl Chatty or a giant man Tiny, but she liked the sound of it anyhow. Maybe that’s what she’d ask the guy to give her—a tattoo that said Spitfire.

  “I know what’s what.” She touched her purse with a smile. “I’ve got a numbered list of what’s what.”

  “Whatever that means.” Though he rolled his eyes, he moved the gearshift to Drive. “But I’ve said my piece. My momma always told me, say what you’ve gotta say, but then let it be. Cornering ain’t the same as convincing.”

  “Smart lady, your mom.” Penny extended her arm a little farther and wiggled her fingers, indicating that she wanted a goodbye hug.

  He took her hand. “Oh, well. At least get a good one. No Johnny Depp. I’m begging you, Spitfire. No Johnny Depp.”

  She shook her head, gave him one last squeeze, then pulled her hand back. “Bye, Barton.”

  As he drove away, she turned toward the tattoo studio. It definitely wasn’t trying to blend in. Its signage was all yellow letters on red background, big letters in some font she subliminally associated with the circus. Needles ’N’ Pins, it said, and under that, in the same font, only slightly smaller, Art Tattoos and Body Piercing.

  You couldn’t see into the shop. Every inch of the plate-glass windows was covered with examples of the artist’s work. Mermaids, guns, barbells, hearts, American flags, dragons, Celtic knots, fairies, about fifty different scripts of the word Mom. She moved to the window to the right of the door.

  She wondered how they managed to make the tattoo look exactly like these samples. Did it matter whether the artist was...well, an artist? Did tattoos ever go horribly wrong? She was pretty sure she’d heard of misspelled words. And then, of course, there was the dreaded “I thought I’d love you forever,
but it’s only been six months, and already I hate you” problem.

  Her stomach fluttered, and she realized that she probably should have done some more research. She hadn’t, because every time she did an internet search on the word tattoo the pictures scared her to death. People lying on their stomachs while being drawn on with needles by men who appeared to be wearing elbow gloves made of starbursts and skulls with rainbows and roses growing out of the eyeholes.

  But she probably should at least have looked into which of the employees here was the best. And when he would be on duty.

  She walked on beyond the studio, trying to get her stomach to settle down before she went in. This stupid fear—this was why she had to go through with it. If she was ever going to master her fears, she had to start somewhere.

  Easier to start here, than, for instance, on the white-water rafting trip, where every minute would feel like imminent death by drowning.

  Or in the front foyer of her childhood home. Or at her father’s graveside.

  She had almost reached the ice-cream shop when she squared her shoulders and turned around.

  She retraced her steps. Bookstore, diner, drug store, ski shop. Tattoo studio. But she kept going, down the other end, the less chi-chi end. Payday loan, dollar store, thrift store, do-it-yourself pest control. U-turn, and back again.

  Maybe she should just quickly stop in at the bookstore and see if there were any books about tattoos. There might be a checklist, things to watch out for.

  She probably would run into someone she knew. At least Fanny Bronson, who had taken over for her father some years ago. Penny liked the woman, who was Rowena’s age, just a few years older than Penny herself. Fanny was a little odd, but smart. She had to be, in this new world of digital book-buying, to continue to defy the odds and make a profit.

  But she also had discretion. She probably had guessed a thousand Dellian secrets, based on who ordered a copy of Bankruptcy Law and who spent hours in the self-help section, then purchased Winning Back Your Wife. But she’d never been known as a gossip.