She sighed. Well, okay, that probably wasn’t the most brilliant idea she had ever come up with. As much as she adored her lime-green VW bug, she was afraid it didn’t have the necessary gumption to break through a couple of eight-foot-high iron gates.
Failure was not an option, though. She and the jerk in question had been heading for this shoot-out for three weeks. Whether he knew it or not—or whether he even cared—she had given Justin Hartford an ultimatum in her mind. His time for avoiding her had just run out.
She eyed the gates, all eight menacing feet of them. She hadn’t grown up on a horse ranch with four older brothers without learning a thing or two about hurdling fences, shinnying up trees and swinging out of barn lofts on old, fraying ropes. Climbing the man’s gate wouldn’t exactly be easy, but he wasn’t giving her a lot to work with here.
She sighed, grateful at least that she was wearing jeans. She had to jump three times before she could reach the crossbar on the fence. From there, it was easy enough to hoist herself up. She perched along the top bar for just a moment—only long enough to catch a terrifying glimpse of a horse and rider heading toward her at a neck-or-nothing pace.
Rats. It was too far to jump unless she wanted to risk a broken ankle, so she had to slither down like one of her kindergarten children on the monkey bars. She hit the ground and turned around just as a gorgeous Arabian raced up in a swirling cloud of dust.
Ashley caught a quick glimpse of the horse’s rider and her pulse rate kicked up a notch. Her mouth suddenly felt as dry as a Cold Creek tributary after a three-year drought. It was the jerk himself. She couldn’t mistake those chiseled features and that strong jaw for anyone else.
She had a quick mental picture of him in Last Chance, when he had played a wounded outlaw with a tragic secret. She loved that movie. She loved all his movies.
Too bad they were all Hollywood make-believe.
Chapter 2
STORY:
Justin reined the horse in and tipped his hat back. Ashley took an instinctive step back at the menace on his features. Had she ever really been so young and so stupid to think she was hopelessly in love with him?
“You’ve got two choices here, lady,” he growled. “You either climb back the way you came or we wait here until the sheriff shows up to arrest you for trespassing. Which one do you prefer?”
A chorus line of nerves started tap-dancing in her stomach, and she couldn’t seem to think straight with those midnight-blue eyes boring into her.
“Go ahead and call the sheriff, Mr. Hartford. In fact,” she added brightly, “I can do it for you if you’d like, since I’ve got him on speed dial on my cell phone. I have all my brothers on speed dial. Luke is number two, right after Mom and Dad. It’s only fair, since he’s the oldest and that seemed the easiest way to keep the numbers straight. I should probably put Evan at number two since I call him most often. He’s the brother just older than me. We’re only two years apart so we are probably the closest. Still, he’s at number three. I don’t call the twins very often since they live on the coast, so they’re at five and six. But like I said, Luke is number two, so it would be easy to get him here fast if that’s what you want to do—”
By the time she had the sense to realize she was rambling and could manage to clamp her teeth together to stem the gushing flow of stupidity, Justin Hartford’s famously gorgeous eyes had started to cross.
This was all his own fault, she thought, crabby all over again. He didn’t need to sit there on his horse and glower at her as if she was the treasonous spy in one of his movies.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “You don’t care about any of that. When I’m nervous I ramble.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he muttered, with such condescension she wanted to smack him. “Enlightening family history aside, you’re still trespassing—an eight-foot-high locked iron gate is usually a big tip-off there.”
She drew in a cleansing breath and let it out again. This wasn’t going well. She needed to put aside her instinctive nervous reaction to her silly teenage heartthrob and focus on the crisis at hand—the reason she was there.
“It’s your own fault. If you weren’t such a...a darn hermit maybe I wouldn’t have to resort to such drastic measures.”
He blinked. “A hermit?”
“Yes! How am I supposed to talk to you if you hardly leave the Blue Sage?”
“I happen to like my privacy, Ms....”
She drew herself up to her full five-foot-three inches tall and glared at him with all the frustration that had been burning through her for three weeks. “Ashley Barnes. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. Whether you want to be bothered or not, it is imperative I talk to you about your daughter.”
Chapter 3
JUSTIN LOOKED DOWN AT THE soft little blonde peach in the dusty-pink sweater who had just scaled his gate like some kind of Olympic gymnast. Ruby’s kindergarten teacher. He winced, embarrassed he had mistaken her for an obsessed fan.
Though he had walked away from Hollywood six years ago and moved to eastern Idaho without a backward glance, away from the attention he had never wanted, sometimes it followed him. He wasn’t obsessive about security. But what else was he supposed to think when he spied a woman climbing over his gate?
“Kind of drastic measures to take for a parent-teacher conference, don’t you think?” he asked as he slid down from his horse.
Her hazel eyes narrowed at him and he had to admit, up close she was seriously cute. Small and feminine, with short blond curls held back in a headband and dimples that appeared even when she was glaring at him.
She looked like a cream puff. Like a delicious, sugary, melt-in-your-mouth confection. He had sworn off sweets a long time ago, but that didn’t make the sudden intense craving any easier to ignore.
“I wouldn’t have had to resort to such drastic measures as climbing your stupid gate if you could be bothered just once to answer one of my dozens of pleas to set up a meeting.”
She didn’t let him answer—not that he had the first idea what she was talking about.
“I realize you’re a very busy, very important man,” she snapped, her hands fisted on her hips.
How did the curl of those luscious lips make the words sound like an epithet? he wondered.
“I’m sure you must have scores of people to see and all that,” she went on. “But you’re an actor—or you used to be, anyway. Couldn’t you at least pretend you care about your child?”
He jerked his attention from her lips as her words filtered through. “Excuse me?”
“You probably pay more attention to that horse of yours than you do to your own daughter!”
Justin was usually pretty good at keeping his temper under wraps. But he wasn’t about to let some sanctimonious schoolteacher question how he raised his daughter. Ruby was the most important thing in his life. The only thing that mattered. Everything he did was for her and he didn’t take kindly to anyone insinuating otherwise.
“You don’t know anything about me or about my daughter if you can say that.”
The cream puff didn’t exactly deflate in the face of his anger, but she did back down a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “But for three weeks I have been trying every method under the sun, except carrier pigeons, to get your attention, and you have ignored every single one of my attempts to contact you. If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you have the same impression, of an uninvolved parent who doesn’t care a hill of beans about his daughter’s education? I finally decided I would talk to you today, even if I had to climb your gate to do it.”
Chapter 4
HE TIPPED HIS HAT BACK farther, completely baffled by the obvious concern in her voice. “I’m sure this is some kind of a mistake. I haven’t heard anything about any problems Ruby might be havi
ng in school. Did you talk to her great-aunt about it?”
She moved forward, so close he could smell her, like vanilla and almonds. His mouth instantly watered but he pushed it aside.
“Several times,” she answered, oblivious—he hoped—to his sudden hunger.
“Lydia has promised me that she and Ruby talked about it and Ruby promised her things would change. But nothing has.”
The school term had been underway for a month now and he had been under the impression everything was fine. Pine Gulch, Idaho, wasn’t exactly overflowing with educational opportunities and the local public school was the only option for his five-year-old daughter. He could have hired tutors for Ruby when she reached school-age, but he wanted her to have the most normal life possible. To him, that meant school lunch and recess and spelling bees.
All the things he never had.
It was tough enough on a kid having a dad who had once been a celebrity. He hadn’t wanted to make things harder on Ruby by showing up at her school all the time and reminding everyone of it, so he and his aunt had agreed she would be his go-between with the school.
Lydia served as his housekeeper, nanny and confidante. She had raised him, after all, and had been the logical person to turn to for help raising Ruby the day she had been dumped on him when she was only two months old.
He loved Lydia dearly, but she did have a bad habit of trying to solve all his problems for him.
“Lydia and Ruby never said a word about any trouble at school. In fact, all I hear from Ruby is how much she loves it. She talks about it all the time. About her friends and how much she’s learning and how much she loves her teacher. I guess that would be you.”
Miss Barnes had been the major topic of conversation since school started a month ago, he reflected. Ruby had jabbered endlessly about how pretty and nice and smart her teacher was, until he had begun to dislike the woman before he’d even met her.
Just now the nice, pretty teacher was staring at him as if he were the alien space creature from the single sci-fi picture he’d made.
“She said she loved her teacher? Are we talking about the same child here? Mr. Hartford, your daughter hates school! And me! Or at least she manages to give a very convincing impression of a child who does.”
“Hates it? You’ve got to be kidding! She doesn’t talk about anything else!”
“The first week of the school year, things seemed fine. Ruby was making friends, she was enthusiastic about learning, she was attentive in class and participated in discussions. Then three weeks ago, everything changed.”
“Three weeks ago?”
“Right. I’ve seen a dramatic turnaround. Ruby has gone from being a sweet little girl to one who seems absolutely miserable, from the moment she arrives at lunchtime to when she leaves at the end of the day. She is sullen and uncooperative. If I call on her in class, she clamps her lips together, and she turns every assignment over on her desk without even putting her name on it.”
Chapter 5
HE STARED, HIS MIND CHURNING to make sense of this. “That’s not like Ruby at all. This can’t be right.”
“Look, Mr. Hartford, I’m only trying to get to the bottom of the rapid change in Ruby’s behavior. Have you noticed a similar change at home?”
“No. She’s been the same as always—energetic, curious, a little on the mischievous side, maybe. But overall, she’s a great kid.”
Her prickly attitude seemed to soften a little at his words. “I’ll admit, I’m stumped. Did anything happen about three weeks ago that might have contributed to her acting out?”
He racked his brain, trying to think back. They had made a quick weekend trip to L.A. to visit a friend who was having an engagement party to celebrate her second marriage. That was the only thing that came to mind. “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything specific.”
“I must tell you, I’m wondering if perhaps Ruby is not quite ready for kindergarten. Some children take longer to mature than others, especially if there is some...upheaval in their lives.”
She said the last part with such subtle contempt that he simmered. She didn’t know anything about him—except maybe what she read in the tabloids.
“You’re wrong, Miss Barnes. Ruby has been ready for kindergarten since she was three years old. She is smart and precocious and curious and loves learning. I can’t imagine what’s happened since she started in your classroom to change that.”
Her gaze narrowed and he realized how his words could be misconstrued. “You can bet I intend to find out,” he said quickly. “I’m sure once we sit down together we can figure out what’s going on. Ruby and Lydia have gone to Jackson, shopping for the day, or I would go grab her right now and have this out. Any chance you can come back later?”
“I have plans tonight,” she said stiffly, a hint of color in her cheeks. A hot date? he wondered, and was stunned at his disappointment.
“We can make an appointment to meet one day this week after school,” she offered.
“I’m leaving Monday to go to Denver on a horse-buying trip until Friday. What about tomorrow night? We’ll even throw in dinner for your trouble.”
A host of emotions flashed through those expressive eyes—reluctance at the forefront among them, something that suddenly annoyed him. “I... Yes. I suppose that would be all right.”
“Does seven sound okay?”
She nodded those soft curls. “Yes.”
“This has got to be a big misunderstanding. Ruby is a great kid. You’ll see. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“I hope so. Ruby’s negative attitude is becoming disruptive to the entire afternoon class.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, then. Oh, and Miss Barnes,” he said with a smile as he pushed the button to open the gate, “perhaps it would be better if you rang the buzzer when you arrive for dinner tomorrow. I wouldn’t want you to fall from the top of the gate next time and miss the appetizer.”
He laughed at the hot glare she sliced at him. As he watched her march back through the gates and climb into her fluorescent car, he was aware of the unwilling attraction settling low in his gut.
Chapter 6
HE WAS CHARMED BY HER, Justin thought as he watched Ruby’s teacher drive away. He had to admire any woman passionate enough about her job to climb a fence, just to get her point across. Not to mention those delectable lips....
Nothing could come of it. He knew that. Miss Ashley Barnes had commitment written all over her cute little face and he had a terrible track record in that department.
He had decided after Ruby came into his life that he just had to close the door on anything long-term. He had been burned too many times. He picked the wrong kind of women to tangle with and then ended up paying for it.
Ruby’s mother had been the final straw. Tamara Drake had been an aspiring actress he met at a party and dated a few times, unaware that underneath her fun, sexy act was a predatory woman who thought trapping him by becoming pregnant with his child would seal her celebrity status. Tamara’s pregnancy and her increasingly strident demands on him had been Justin’s wake-up call that his life was not traveling a course he wanted. He had fathered a child with a woman he barely knew and one he had come to despise, and the grim reality of it all forced him to take a good, hard look at himself.
He hadn’t been very crazy about what he saw. He was just like Tamara, he had realized. He had become selfish, materialistic, shallow. He went after what he wanted at the moment without thought of the consequences, and he knew he couldn’t continue on that road.
He started looking for a quiet western town to settle in, told Tamara he was leaving Hollywood and offered a financial settlement and annuity in return for her signing over parental rights to Ruby to him. Though she had been livid at him for walking away, she certainly hadn’t wanted to
be saddled with a baby. She agreed with alacrity and died a year later of a drug overdose.
It was an ugly story, one that still made him ashamed of the man he had been six years ago.
He had changed. Ruby had seen to that, but he still didn’t trust his own judgment about women. Tamara had just been the last in a long line of mistakes, and with a child’s fragile emotions to consider, he couldn’t afford the high price anymore.
He avoided the spotlight now as much as he could, but to his jaded eye, it seemed as if every woman he met since Tamara was mostly interested in him for his ex-celebrity status, enthralled, for some crazy reason, to be seen with a man who had once been moderately famous.
It turned his stomach. He wanted them to see beyond the image that had appeared on far too much movie-related merchandise. To see the man whose favorite things now were mowing the lawn on a warm summer afternoon, playing outside in the sunshine with his daughter, training a good horse.
He didn’t trust many women and he certainly didn’t trust his own judgment. This way was better. Just him and Ruby and Lydia. They made a good team and there just wasn’t room for any more players.
Not even cute-as-pie schoolteachers with dimples and hazel eyes and blond, starlit curls.
Chapter 7
“ALL A BIG MISUNDERSTANDING. RIGHT. Can you believe that man? Does he think I don’t know what’s going on in my own classroom?”
“The nerve!” Josie Roundy exclaimed.
“He should be horsewhipped,” Marcy Weller agreed.
Her two best friends looked at each other and grinned, and Ashley fought the urge to bean them both with the wok she was setting up on the stove top.
She should be grateful they were there, she told herself. They had both agreed to her last-minute invitation so she wouldn’t be consumed with guilt for lying to Jason Hartford.
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