The Valentine Two-Step

It wasn’t a new thought. He’d had plenty of chances in the last ten years to wish things could be different, to regret that he had become so blasted dependent on everything Cassie did for them after Melanie ran off.

She ought to go to college—or at least to cooking school somewhere, since she loved it so much. But every time they talked about it, about her plans for the future, she insisted she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to be doing.

How could he convince her otherwise when he still wasn’t completely sure he could handle things on his own? He didn’t know how he could do a proper job of raising Lucy by himself and handle the demands of the ranch at the same time.

Maybe if Jesse was around more, things might be different. He could have given his younger brother some of the responsibilities of the ranch, leaving more time to take care of things on the home front. But Jess had never been content on the Diamond Harte. He had other dreams, of catching the bad guys and saving the world, and Matt couldn’t begrudge him those.

“Where’s Lucy?” he asked.

“Up in her room fretting, I imagine. She’s been a basket case waiting for you to get back from the school. She broke two glasses while she was setting the table, and spent more time looking out the window for your truck than she did on her math homework.”

“She ought to be nervous,” he growled, grateful for the renewed aggravation that was strong enough to push the guilt aside.

Cassie glanced up at his tone. “Uh-oh. That bad? What did she do?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he muttered and headed toward the stairs. “Give me five minutes to talk to her, and then we’ll be down.”

He knocked swiftly on her door and heard a muffled, “Come in.” Inside, he found his daughter sitting on her bed, gnawing her bottom lip so hard it looked like she had chewed away every last drop of blood.

Through that curtain of long, dark hair, he saw that her eyes were wide and nervous. As they damn well ought to be after the little stunt she pulled. He let her stew in it for a minute.

“Hey, squirt.”

“Hi,” she whispered. With hands that trembled just a little, she picked up Sigmund, the chubby calico cat she’d raised from a kitten, and plopped him in her lap.

“So I just got back from talking with Miz McKenzie.”

Lucy peered at him between the cat’s ears. She cleared her throat. “Um, what did she say?”

“I think you know exactly what she said, don’t you?”

She nodded, the big gray eyes she’d inherited from her mother wide with apprehension. As usual, he hoped to heaven that was the only thing Melanie had passed on to their daughter.

“You want to tell me what this is all about?”

She appeared to think it over, then shook her head swiftly. He bit his cheek to keep a rueful grin from creeping out at that particular piece of honesty. “Tough. Tell me anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Luce. What were you thinking, to sign me up for this Valentine’s carnival without at least talking to me first?”

“It was Dylan’s idea,” Lucy mumbled.

Big surprise there. Dylan Webster was a miniature version of her wacky mother. “Why?”

“She thought you’d be good at it, since you’re so important around here and can get people to do whatever you want. At least that’s what her mom says.”

He could picture Ellie Webster saying exactly that, with her pert little nose turned up in the air.

“And,” Lucy added, the tension easing from her shoulders a little as she stroked the purring cat, “we both thought it would be fun. You know, planning the carnival and stuff. You and me and Dylan and her mom, doing it all together. A bonding thing.”

A bonding thing? The last thing he needed to do was bond with Ellie Webster, under any circumstances.

“What do you know about bonding? Don’t tell me that’s something they teach you in school.”

Lucy shrugged. “Dylan says we’re in our formative preteen years and need positive parental influence now more than ever. She thought this would be a good opportunity for us to develop some leadership skills.”

Great. Now Ellie Webster’s kid had his daughter spouting psychobabble. He blew out a breath. “What about you?”

She blinked at him. “Me?”

“You’re pretty knowledgeable about Dylan’s views, but what about your own? Why did you go along with it?”

Lucy suddenly seemed extremely interested in a little spot on the cat’s fur. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Come on. You can do better than that.”

She chewed her lip again, then looked at the cat. “We never do anything together.”

He rocked back on his heels, baffled by her. “What are you talking about? We do plenty of things together. Just last Saturday you spent the whole day with me in Idaho Falls.”

She rolled her eyes. “Shopping for a new truck. Big whoop. I thought it would be fun to do something completely different together. Something that doesn’t have to do with the ranch or with cattle or horses.” She paused, then added in a quiet voice, “Something just for me.”

Ah, more guilt. Just what he needed. The kid wasn’t even ten years old and she was already an expert at it. He sighed. Did females come out of the box with some built-in guilt mechanism they could turn off and on at will?

The hell of it was, she was absolutely right, and he knew it. He didn’t spend nearly enough time with her. He tried, he really did, but between the horses and the cattle, his time seemed to be in as short supply as sunshine in January.

His baby girl was growing up. He could see it every day. Used to be a day spent with him would be enough for her no matter what they did together. Even if it was only shopping for a new truck. Now she wanted more, and he wasn’t sure he knew how to provide it.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell me all this before you signed me up? Then we could have at least talked it over without me getting such a shock like this.”

She fidgeted with Sigmund, who finally must have grown tired of being messed with. He let out an offended mewl of protest and rolled away from her, then leaped from the bed gracefully and stalked out the door.

Lucy watched until his tail disappeared down the end of the hall before she answered him in that same low, ashamed voice. “Dylan said you’d both say no if we asked. We thought it might be harder for you to back out if Ms. McKenzie thought you’d already agreed to it.”

“That wasn’t very fair, to me or to Dr. Webster, was it?” He tried to come up with an analogy that might make sense to her. “How would you like it if I signed you up to show one of the horses in the 4-H competition without talking to you first?”

She shuddered, as he knew she would. Her shyness made her uncomfortable being the center of attention, so she had always avoided the limelight, even when she was little. In that respect, Miz McKenzie was right—Dylan Webster had been good for her and had brought her out of her shell, at least a little.

“I wouldn’t like it at all.”

“And I don’t like what you did any better. I ought to just back out of this whole crazy thing right now.”

“Oh, Dad, you can’t!” she wailed. “You’ll ruin everything.”

He studied her distress for several seconds, then sighed. He loved his daughter fiercely. She was the biggest joy in his life, more important than a hundred ranches. If she felt like she came in second to the Diamond Harte, he obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.

Lucy finally broke the silence. “Are you really, really, really mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.