Outlaw Hartes: The Valentine Two-Step / Cassidy Harte And The Comeback Kid

Chapter 5

As soon as he walked into the big, warm kitchen, he regretted it.

He felt like the big, bad wolf walking in on a coop full of chickens. All four of them—Ellie, Cass and both of the girls—looked up, their cutoff laughter hanging in the air along with the sweet, intoxicating smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he muttered. “I, uh, just needed a drink of water and then I’ll get out of your way.”

“You didn’t interrupt,” Cassie said. “Sit down. The cookies will be done in a minute, and I know how much you love eating them right out of the oven.”

Information his baby sister didn’t need to be sharing with the whole damn world, thank you very much. Made him sound like a seven-year-old boy snitching goodies after school. “I’ve got things to do,” he muttered.

“They can wait five minutes, can’t they?”

His jaw worked as he tried to come up with a decent-sounding excuse to escape without seeming rude. How was a man supposed to think straight when he had four females watching him so expectantly?

Finally, he muttered a curse under his breath and pulled out a chair. “Just five minutes, though.”

Like a tractor with a couple bad cylinders, the conversation limped along for a moment, and he squirmed on the hard chair, wishing he were absolutely anywhere but here. He was just about to jump up and rush back to the relative safety of his office—excuse or none—when Lucy ambushed him.

She touched his arm with green-painted fingernails—now where did she get those? he wondered—and gazed at him out of those big gray eyes. “Daddy, Dylan and her mom aren’t going anywhere for Thanksgiving dinner since they don’t have any family around here. Isn’t that sad?”

Keeping his gaze firmly averted from Ellie’s, he made a noncommittal sound.

“Do you think they might be able to come here and share our family’s dinner?”

Despite his best efforts, his gaze slid toward Ellie just in time to catch her mouth drop and her eyes go wide—with what, he couldn’t say for sure, but it sure looked like she was as horrified as he was by the very idea.

“I don’t know, honey—” he began.

“That’s a great idea,” Cassie said at the same time. “There’s always room at the table for a few more, and plenty of food.”

“Oh, no. That’s okay,” Ellie said quickly. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Dylan?”

Dylan put on a pleading expression. “Come on, Mom. It would be so cool. Lucy’s aunt Cassie is a great cook. I bet she never burns the stuffing like you do.”

Ellie made a face at her daughter, and Matt had to fight a chuckle. And he thought Cass and Lucy were bad at spilling family secrets.

“Be that as it may,” Ellie said, her cheeks tinged slightly pink, “I’m sure the Hartes have a lovely family dinner planned. They don’t need to be saddled with two more.”

“It’s no problem,” Cassie said. “We’d love to have you come. Wouldn’t we, Matt?”

He cleared his throat. Again, he couldn’t seem to make his brain work fast enough to come up with an excuse. “Uh, sure.”

* * *

Ellie raised an eyebrow at his less-than-enthusiastic response. He obviously didn’t want to invite her for Thanksgiving any more than she wanted to accept.

“Good. It’s settled,” Cassie said, oblivious to their objections. “It’s usually really casual. Just family—Matt, Lucy, our brother Jess and whichever of the ranch hands stick around for the holidays. We eat around two but you’re welcome to come out any time before then, especially if you’re into watching football with the guys.”

What she knew about football would fit into a saltshaker. Ellie sighed heavily. And what she knew about big rowdy Thanksgiving family dinners wouldn’t even fit on a grain of salt.

It looked like she was going to be stuck with both things. So much for her good intentions about having as little as possible to do with the man who somehow managed to jumble up her insides every time she was around him.

What choice did she have, though? She didn’t want to hurt his daughter or sister’s feelings by refusing the invitation. Lucy was a dear, sweet and quiet and polite. Exactly Dylan’s opposite! It was a wonder they were friends, but somehow the two of them meshed perfectly. They brought out the best in each other.

To her surprise, she and Cassie had also immediately hit it off. Unlike Matt, his sister was bubbly and friendly and went out of her way to make her feel welcomed.

She would sound churlish and rude if she refused to share their holiday simply because the alpha male in the family made her as edgy as a hen on a hot griddle and sent her hormones whirling around like a Texas dust storm.

“Can I bring something?” she finally asked, trying to accept the invitation as gracefully as she could manage.

“Do you have a specialty?” Cassie asked.

Did macaroni and cheese count as a specialty? She doubted it. “No. I’m afraid not.”

“Sure you do, Mom.” Dylan spoke up. “What about that pie you make sometimes?”

She made pecan pie exactly twice, but Dylan had never forgotten it. Hope apparently springs eternal in a nine-year-old’s heart that someday she would bake it again. “I don’t know if I’d call that a specialty.”

“Why don’t you bring it anyway?” Cassie suggested. “Or if you’d rather make something else, that would be fine.”

I’d rather just stay home and have our usual quiet dinner for two, she thought. But one look at Dylan revealed her daughter was ecstatic about the invitation. Her eyes shone, and her funny little face had the same kind of expectancy it usually wore just before walking downstairs on Christmas morning.

She looked so excited that Ellie instantly was awash in guilt for all the years they had done just that—stayed home alone with their precooked turkey and instant mashed potatoes instead of accepting other invitations from friends and colleagues.

Why had she never realized her daughter had been missing a big, noisy celebration? Dylan was usually so vocal about what she wanted and thought she needed. Why had she never said anything about this?

“Whatever you want to bring is fine,” Cassie assured her. “Really, though, you don’t have to bring anything but yourselves. Like I said, there’s always plenty of food.”

“I’ll bring the pecan pie,” she said, hoping her reluctance didn’t filter into her voice.

“Great. I usually make a pumpkin and maybe an apple so we’ll have several to choose from. Knowing my brothers, I doubt any of them will last long.”

She looked at Matt out of the corner of her eyes and found him watching her. What was he thinking? That she was an interloper who had suddenly barged her way in to yet another facet of his life when he had plainly made it clear she wasn’t welcome? She couldn’t tell by the unreadable expression in those startling blue eyes.

The timer suddenly went off on the oven.

“That would be the cookies.” Cassie jumped up and opened the oven door, releasing even more of the heavenly aroma.

A smell so evocative of hearth and home that Ellie’s heart broke a little for all the homemade cookies she never had time to bake for her daughter. She had shed her last tear a long time ago for all the missing cookies in her own childhood.

Cassie quickly transferred at least half a dozen of the warm, gooey treats onto a plate for Matt, then poured him a glass of milk from the industrial-size refrigerator.

She set both in front of him, and he quickly grabbed them and stood up. Ellie smiled a little at the blatant relief evident in every line of his big, rangy body.

“Thanks,” he mumbled to his sister. “I’ll let you ladies get back to whatever you were talking about before I interrupted you.”

The girls’ giggles at being called ladies trailed after him as Matt made his escape from the kitchen.