Willowleaf Lane

He would have to see how things went first with the job before he made a decision about that.

He heard noises coming from the kitchen and headed in that direction. When he walked in, he found Pey seated at the breakfast bar, a huge bowl of cereal in front of her, looking at something on her phone.

“Good morning. Did you sleep well?” he asked, then cursed the stiff politeness in his tone. This was his daughter. He shouldn’t sound like he was on a business trip, bumping into an associate in the hotel’s free buffet line.

She shrugged, a spoonful of cereal almost to her mouth. “Okay, I guess. I need a fan or something. It was too quiet.”

“We can probably find you something. Was the bed comfortable?”

“I don’t know. I guess. It was a bed. I slept.”

She took another bite of cereal and he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a water bottle and a yogurt, grateful he had taken a moment to order groceries the night before. It took him a few tries to find the silverware drawer for a spoon before he leaned back against the counter adjacent to her.

“We can change anything you don’t like in your room.”

“Can you transport it back to Portland?”

He bit down his frustration at her continual refrain. This was why he walked on eggshells around her, because she was prickly and moody all the damn time.

“Nope. Can’t do that. How’s your cereal?”

“Fine.” She poured a little Cinnamon Toast Crunch into her milk. Where did she put all the food she ate sometimes? he had to wonder. She was skinny as can be, like her mother had been.

Once he had found that attractive. He must have. Hadn’t he been enamored with Jade at first and thought her the most perfect creature on earth?

Of course, he had been only nineteen and in his rookie year with the Pioneers, starry-eyed and heady with the success that had come far more quickly than a dirt-poor kid who had spent his life watching over a drunk of a mother could either comprehend or cope with.

When a gorgeous supermodel like Jade Howell, three years older and infinitely exciting, wanted to date him, what teenage boy would have refused?

Not him, even though he was pretty sure now she had been more drawn to all those new zeros in his portfolio from his record-breaking contract than she had been to a naive nineteen-year-old kid.

At the time he had been too caught up in the high life of instant fame—fast cars, magazine covers, avid fans—to see that she was a troubled, damaged soul constantly in need of reassurance. Or maybe subconsciously, he had seen it and had in some twisted way thought that, if he could make things work with Jade, in some way he might be able to scab over all those open sores from his childhood.

A therapist would probably tell him he had a pretty severe case of knight-in-shining-armor complex from all those years he had tried to look out for his mother. Even so, after six months, he had grown tired of Jade’s moods and her petty piques and probably would have ended things if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Peyton.

He didn’t like thinking about Jade or the way their hasty marriage had disintegrated before Peyton was even in preschool. Though his wife had certainly loved the creature comforts his income provided, she had hated everything about his career—the traveling, the fame, the fans—and had constantly accused him of cheating.

He took a spoonful of yogurt. It had been a miserable marriage. If not for his daughter, he would have walked away but Jade had threatened to tie him up in court so he would never see Peyton again. He had known she wouldn’t have been able to win but the energy in fighting her would only have hurt their daughter.

As poor a father as he had been, he had been raised the only child of a bitter, lost, addicted soul, and he couldn’t condemn his child to that same fate.

Eventually, he and Jade had worked out an arrangement of sorts. They lived virtually separate lives in the same house, joined only by their shared love for their daughter. Jade did her thing, he did his and they tried to stay out of each other’s way—until she made that impossible by dragging him into the complicated mess her life had become.

Jade had been all sharp edges and angles. Charlotte Caine, on the other hand, had those soft curves that a man wanted to spend days, weeks, months exploring....

“So why were you carrying the fudge lady?” Peyton asked.

He flushed, remembering that surge of unexpected heat when she was in his arms. “You saw that, did you?”

She pointed to the window over the sink, which he realized provided a fine view out into the street.

“I guess I startled her this morning when I said hello as she was jogging past. She lost her balance and ended up twisting her ankle.”

“Oh, way to go, Dad.”

At her caustic tone, he jumped immediately to the defensive. “Yeah. It was totally on purpose. I like to lie in wait, then jump out of the bushes when unsuspecting joggers appear. Makes a fun ending to my own workout.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

He would like to wring the neck of whatever idiot invented that word that was wielded so freely by his daughter.

“It was totally accidental, I promise. I was just being friendly when I saw her go past. I figured she would have seen me. Turns out, she lives up the street in that little white cottage with the blue shutters and the ivy.”

“And you had to carry her home.”

“Didn’t have to, no. But I didn’t want her putting weight on her ankle.”

Peyton raised a skeptical eyebrow, always looking for the worst in him, and he waited for the dreaded w-word. To his surprise, she must have decided to demur.

“You knew her when you lived here before, didn’t you?” she asked instead, in almost a civil tone. Charlotte must have made quite an impression with her kindness. Peyton had seemed genuinely touched at her welcome gift.

“Yes,” he answered, weighing how much to tell her. He had been fairly closemouthed about his life here in Hope’s Crossing, figuring his childhood wasn’t exactly much to brag about. She hadn’t showed much interest but when she did ask, he evaded and dissembled.

He had spent most of his adult life trying to forget his beginnings here. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t remember ever having a conversation with Pey about those hardscrabble times, the weekends when he would eat ramen noodles for three meals each day because that’s all they had in the house and about all he knew how to fix.

Another reason he had loved the café, because Dermot would always make sure he went home with something in his stomach and usually a doggie bag of food he could heat the next day.

That was one of his worries about being home, actually. Peyton already thought the worst of him. What would she think once she discovered how much everybody likely hated him here?

On the other hand, he wouldn’t exactly win any popularity contests in Portland, especially since the Pioneers had struggled the past few years without him. He knew things had been rough for Peyton at school, enduring taunts and ridicule about her drug-dealing asshole of a father, but at least she also had a core of loyal friends there.

He wondered again if he was doing the right thing, dragging her away from what little she had left. He had to cling to the idea that, if he could make things work here in Hope’s Crossing, he might be able to open other options for them both in the future.

“Charlotte’s family was always kind to me,” he finally said, which was a bit of an understatement. “I was good friends with her older brothers. My mom was a waitress and I washed dishes at her dad’s diner in town. The Center of Hope Café.”

“You washed dishes? Seriously?”

“Yeah. And I swept the floor at the hardware store after school. And delivered papers at 5:00 a.m. every day from the time I was twelve.”

He had figured out early that if he and his mother were going to be able to afford to keep the utilities turned on in the house she had inherited from her mother, one of them was going to have to work to make it happen.

“Newspaper delivery boy. Really?”

He had no regrets, at least about the paper delivery job. As miserable as it might have been riding his secondhand bike around the hilly streets of Hope’s Crossing, especially on bitter January mornings, he gave that job a lot of the credit for his throwing arm that Sports Illustrated once called supersonic.

“Yeah. Really. It taught me a lot, that job. Maybe you ought to think about picking up a route.”

She snorted. “Right.”