Down Home Cowboy
It struck him then that he didn’t know this version of his daughter at all.
“Wow,” he said, not sure what else to say.
Violet obviously recognized his voice, because she stopped and looked up. Her expression went flat for a moment, and then came a smile that he could tell was forced. “Oh, hi, Dad. I didn’t realize you were going to come by.”
“Lane was busy. So I figured I would come and get you.”
Violet frowned. “Is it time already?”
“Yeah, but if you want to finish, that’s fine. I can wait.”
“Yeah,” Violet said, “I’m going to finish.” She turned her focus back to the cookies. And Cain turned his focus back to Alison.
“Nice place you have.”
There were other women—it was all women—bustling around the kitchen, barely acknowledging him as they took cakes out of the oven and moved mixing bowls around, and colored bowls of frosting.
“Thank you. We’re working toward doing more than just selling things here at the bakery. We make desserts for special events. And supply cakes for parties, weddings. And we’re working on packaging some of our baked goods and getting them in stores. And in various showrooms. So what you see up front is only a small sampling of what happens here.”
He gestured back toward the dining area, because he wanted a chance to speak to her without Violet in earshot. She caught his meaning, and led the way back out of the kitchen. He showed himself back into the main room, grateful to get the counter between them. “You seem really busy. I really appreciate you taking the time to train Violet. It doesn’t seem like you would have a lot to spare.”
“I don’t. But, even though there were a few people back there, I’m actually short-staffed right now. And anyway, I’m kind of in the business of training women for the workforce.”
“Really?”
She nodded definitively. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s what I do. I mean, in addition to baking kick-ass pies.”
“I’ll take two,” he said.
“Two?”
“Pies. Kick-ass pies.”
“Which kind?”
He lifted a shoulder. “The kind that kicks the most ass?”
“That seems subjective.”
He really was out of practice with the flirting thing. Of course, he didn’t want to flirt with her. No, what he wanted to do was throw her down on the nearest flat surface and deal with all of the pent-up sexual energy that was roaring through his body. And he shouldn’t want to do any of that.
“Well, in your opinion.”
“Okay,” she said, making her way over to the pastry case and frowning. The concentration she was putting into selecting the right pie was a little too fascinating for him. He liked the way her eyebrows pleated together, that little crease it made in her forehead. The way her full lips pulled down at the corners.
She had been wearing makeup last night. A bright tint over the natural skin tone on her mouth. But he liked it better now. A soft wash of pale pink. He wanted to taste it. Wanted to bite it.
“I’m ready to go.”
He looked up, in the middle of thinking about how he wanted to bite Alison’s lip, to see his daughter coming out of the kitchen. Well, that was a great underscore to the first specific sexual fantasy he’d had in about a million years.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m just getting pie.”
“That’s all I’ve eaten for three days,” Violet said.
“If you’re whining about pie now, then you really can’t be helped.”
Violet treated him to a shrug that he had a feeling looked like the gesture he’d just made. “Maybe I don’t want to be.”
“Fine. Eat a salad and be sad. I’m going to eat pie.”
Alison walked over to the register and punched in the code. “Employee discount,” she said.
Violet frowned. “You don’t have to do that. Especially since I ruined that last cake.”
“I’m the one paying for this,” Cain said, “maybe consider that before you reject my discount.”
“I already told you, Violet,” Alison said, “the cake isn’t a big deal. It’s part of learning.”
Surprisingly, Violet smiled. An expression that looked both genuine and not sullen. “Thanks,” his daughter said, modulating her tone into something much softer than he’d heard in at least a year.
“Lemon meringue and blackberry,” Alison said, looking at him.
“Lemon meringue is my favorite.”
Her cheeks turned pink, and he had to admit he enjoyed that. Enjoyed the idea that she wasn’t any more immune to him than he was to her. Even if it was futile, it was a nice feeling. “Good. That’s... Good.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Ready?” He directed that question at Violet.
Violet already had her phone out and was texting someone. She looked up just for a moment, just long enough to give him a dry look. “I said I was.”
“Okay, then.” He took the plastic bag that contained two pie boxes and waved at Alison, then headed out the door with Violet. “You could be a little bit friendlier,” he commented when they were back out on the street.
“I was friendly.”
“You were standing there texting.”
“I already said what I needed to say.”
He let out a long, slow breath. These kinds of conversations with Violet were futile. She had decided that he was being ridiculous, and she was going to hold on to that no matter what he said. Just like he always did, he wrestled with how to handle it. He could ground her, but then, the only thing he could ground her from was her phone.
Which was reasonable enough, except summer in a new town meant that it was her only source of social life. There was no school to go to, she had no friends around here. Anyway, she was mad enough. He didn’t want to make it worse. He didn’t want to cut her off from everyone.
That phone represented her entire life right now. And if she was a different kid in a different situation he might handle it differently. But Violet hadn’t been the same since her mother had left.
It had taken a couple of years for Violet to stop looking at him like she thought he might disappear. Like she was surprised that he’d come home. For all of that time she’d been almost supernaturally well-behaved. Quiet. And now, it was like she was making up for lost time. Like she had spent the first two years terrified that he might leave her too, and the second two realizing that he wouldn’t. Or maybe now she was testing his staying power; he didn’t really know.
All he knew was that being a parent was hard. And doing it by yourself when you knew jack shit about kids—about teenagers—was even harder.
Sometimes he looked at his daughter, at this girl who was closer to being a woman than a kid, and wondered where all the years had gone. Wondered how the hell he was standing on a street in a small Oregon town with a sixteen-year-old. Sometimes he didn’t know at all how he’d gotten here. He would have thought that sixteen years into parenthood he would feel like he knew something. Would feel like he understood the gig.
No, if anything, he seemed to be worse at it now. When she was three it hadn’t taken any work at all to get her to smile at him. Now it took an act of God.
“Do you want to go out to eat tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I’m ready to go home.”
It was somewhat encouraging to hear her refer to the ranch as home. Usually, she said something about going back to Uncle Finn’s house. This new terminology made him wonder if maybe they were making progress.
“Sure. I bet there’s a bunch of food in the freezer that Lane made.”
Violet shrugged. “I’m not hungry.”
“You will be later.”
“You don’t know that.”
He gritted his teeth. This actually did remind him of when she was a toddler. All kinds of screaming about not being hungry anytime food was placed in front of her. And of course, she would whine about not having anything to eat the minute it was taken away.
“You’re right,” he said, not doing a great job of keeping his tone even. “I don’t know that. I don’t know a damn thing.” He jerked the driver’s side door of the truck open and got in. Violet climbed into the passenger side, slamming the door hard enough that he was afraid she might have broken something in the old rig.
She didn’t say anything in response to that. Rather, she just gave him a standard eye roll and long-suffering sigh. He was tempted to tell her she didn’t know anything about long-suffering. He was pretty sure he had the monopoly on that at this point.
They drove the rest of the way back to the homestead in silence, and he was grateful. He didn’t know how to talk to her. At least, not in ways that didn’t do more damage.
When he parked, Violet got out of the car wordlessly and headed toward the house, her eyes fixed on her phone. He looked at the front door, which she slammed behind her, not waiting for him. He decided he was going to avoid the house for a while. He looked back up toward the barn that he was preparing for the two of them, a place where—he hoped—they might find a little more peace between them. Where she might see what the point of all of this was.
That he was doing it for her. For them. So that they could finally move on from everything that had happened in Texas.
He was building a life, dammit. Literally. Building them a place to live, a place to call home. One that wasn’t completely overrun with the memory of Kathleen and her abandonment.
She would see. When the barn house was finished, when she settled in here, got going at school, made some friends... Everything would be fine. He would make it fine. The lone alternative was failing the only other person on Earth who had ever depended on him. And as far as he was concerned, that just wasn’t an option.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALISON WAS HAVING a hard time concentrating on the chatter at their official monthly girls’ night—different from their occasional random get-togethers for dinner simply because it was on the calendar. Which was really crappy of her since Lane had arrived with a shiny new ring on her finger, bursting to tell them about Finn proposing, and she was still thinking about her encounter with Cain Donnelly earlier.
The proposal had been beautiful, romantic and utterly spontaneous. At the lake by Lane’s house, and they’d been naked apparently. Alison wasn’t surprised. Well, the nudity was kind of surprising—she had follow-up questions about where Finn had been keeping the ring—but the proposal had been inevitable as far as she was concerned.
She’d never seen two people who loved each other more. And that had been true long before they’d gone from Just Friends to more. They were meant to be. Even a curmudgeon like Alison could see that.
And the fact it had been such a certainty in her mind was the excuse she was using for zoning out now. And feeling...well, not left out. But something.
Lane and Rebecca were excitedly talking wedding plans, the diamond rings on their fingers casting showers of sparks across the room as they waved their hands in increasingly broad gestures. Cassie was smiling, sitting there with a dreamy expression on her face, clearly caught up in the romance of it all and no doubt remembering her own wedding.
Bah humbug.
Alison wasn’t caught up in any romance. And, she didn’t want to be. And somehow, she was the last remaining single girl in her group of friends when just a year ago Rebecca and Lane had been staunchly anti-love right alongside her.
It was a conspiracy.
Her mind wandered back to earlier that day, when she had met Violet’s father. She hadn’t caught his first name. She knew that Lane would know, but expressing any kind of interest would probably seem suspicious. Then again, maybe not. Seeing as Violet was her employee. And Finn was Lane’s fiancé.
It might, in fact, be germane to the conversation. It could be. It was always possible.
“What are Finn’s brothers’ names again?” she asked, realizing as the words tumbled out of her mouth that it had been a bit of a rough transition.
“Cain, Liam and Alex. Why?” Lane frowned. She tented her fingers, and that diamond ring sparkled all the brighter.
Finn and Lane had been together for only a little over a month. But they had been best friends for more than a decade, and when the two of them had tumbled headfirst into a physical relationship, true love had followed quickly. Though, actually, Alison believed that they’d probably always loved each other, they’d just been hesitant to get involved in romantic relationships for some very compelling reasons.
Alison was glad the two of them had worked it out. She really was.
And she wasn’t jealous. Not of the love.
But they all glowed. All of her friends. Every last one of them. And Alison believed firmly, that it was not with love, but with recently had orgasms. And that, she was a bit jealous of.
“Oh, I met Violet’s father today,” she said, keeping her voice perfectly neutral. “But I forgot to catch his name.”
“Yeah,” Lane said, “that’s Cain.”
“And he’s divorced, right?” she asked, doing her best to sound not the least bit personally interested. Academic. She was aiming to sound academic.
Lane nodded. “Kind of horrifically, if I’ve interpreted the comments he’s made correctly. And I think I have. But as far as I know his wife just kind of disappeared and left both him and Violet.”
Well, that explained a lot about Violet’s attitude. Alison had known that she was coming from something of a difficult home situation, but she hadn’t exactly known the details.
“That’s good to know. I mean, good to know so that I can make sure to relate to Violet in the appropriate way. I’ve helped a lot of women start their lives over, a teenager should be similar. And it sounds to me like she’ll have some of the same issues. Confidence, self-esteem.” Typically, Alison worked with women like herself. Women who had lost themselves somewhere inside an abusive relationship and were working on resurfacing.
But, abandonment, feeling lonely, being afraid that you always would be... That was part of it. Alison was intimately acquainted with some of those fears. And she had come out the other side of them. She had gotten to a place where she actually enjoyed her own company, which she considered something of a triumph. She felt very strongly about wanting to help other people reach that same place. Where they knew that the people who hurt them were the ones who were at fault. Where they knew that it wasn’t something broken in them.
“I think you’re the perfect mentor,” Rebecca said, “because you’re sensitive, but also pretty firm when you have to be.”
“My firmness was hard-won,” Alison responded.
“I know,” Rebecca said, smiling. But not in that way people did when they looked at her and thought only of how broken she was.
That was just one of the many things she appreciated about her friends. They didn’t baby her. They didn’t treat her like a sad little fledgling that needed special care.
“Though I have to say, being a good mentor is kind of a depressing thought since it clearly means I don’t misbehave enough.”
“Are you suggesting we go toilet paper some houses?” Rebecca asked. “Because if so, I’m in.”
“No time for that,” Lane said, “I have to figure out what color bridesmaids dresses to put all of you in.”
Cassie groaned. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?” The question was asked in chorus.
“Yes, pregnant. I was waiting for a chance to bring it up. I didn’t want to run over the wedding stuff. But baby number three is officially on the way and that means I’m going to be wearing taffeta for two at your wedding, Lane.”
“Absolutely not. There will be no taffeta at my wedding. I am a classy lady,” Lane said, reaching into the bowl that contained chip remnants and gathering as much as she could into her hand.
“Good Lord,” Rebecca snorted, “can’t Jake keep it in his pants?”
“I can’t keep it in Jake’s pants,” Cassie said. “My husband is a wicked hot bastard, and I was led into temptation and convinced that it would be okay to do it just once without protection.”
Lane and Rebecca looked somewhat wistful and abashed by that. As if they could relate to wanting to take the risk, or perhaps had. Alison could scarcely remember feeling passion like that. Most certainly not for the man she’d been married to for eight long years. Again, she struggled with a bit of envy. Not so much over the babies. Although, sometimes she wished there were babies. But she was thirty-two, and had absolutely no relationship prospects on the horizon. Maybe she would adopt someday. But she certainly wasn’t going to be having the traditional husband and white picket fence scenario. At least, not in the next five years.
“I’m going to make sure that Gage keeps it wrapped,” Rebecca commented.
Rebecca was the youngest of their group, and was of course not quite as biologically predisposed to having full-blown ovarian explosions when people announced pregnancy as Alison and Lane were.
“I’m on the pill,” Lane said, “to avoid just that sort of thing. Because Lord knows lapses in judgment happen. Especially with Finn.”
“Stop it,” Alison said. “You are talking to an extremely celibate woman. And it just feels mean.”
“What about that hot guy that was checking you out at the bar the other night?” Rebecca asked. “Do it with him.”
“What hot guy?” Lane asked, looking between Alison and Rebecca. “There was a hot guy?”
“Some sexy cowboy checking her out when we went out the other night.”
Suddenly, everyone was looking at her. “I said it then, and I’ll say it again. I’m not going to get involved with anyone.”
“Clearly, you have needs that have to be met,” Lane said.
“Well, they’re not going to be met with him.”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked.
“There’s no reason for it to be him. Nothing happened. He... He was looking at me. That’s it. For all we know he could’ve been staring because my makeup looked funky and I had lipstick on my teeth.” She really didn’t want to get into the fact that it was Cain Donnelly who had been looking at her. There was too much small-town weirdness happening without her letting her friends in on it.
And Lane would enjoy it too much. And try to matchmake or something. No thank you.
“He wanted to get into your pants. Literally the only reason men stare at women.”
“Thank you for that, Lane,” Alison said.
“You’re welcome. And, now that I’ve pointed out the very helpful piece of information, maybe you can admit that you actually had a guy who wanted to get with you and you passed it up for no good reason.”
Alison sputtered. “I have good reason.”
“Tell me your reasons. I want a list of them,” Lane said, crossing her arms and staring her down.
Alison held up a finger. “I don’t want a relationship.”
“Who said anything about a relationship? I was talking about hooking up.”
“Well, I’m not in a place in my life where I feel comfortable doing that.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t believe that.” This was when she wished her friends would treat her a little more like a fragile fledgling.
Alison threw up her hands, exasperated, then leaned in and took a piece of pie off the tray that was sitting on the table between them. “It doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is the truth. And the truth is that I... I don’t feel... Like I should sleep with a guy just to sleep with him.”
“You don’t have to sleep with him,” Rebecca said, her tone sly. “Just have sex with him and leave.”
Alison looked at her younger friend. “Rebecca. I’m shocked. This coming from you, who has literally only ever been intimate with the man you’re in love with.”
Rebecca made a dismissive sound. “I was not in love with him the first time I was intimate with him.” She put air quotes around that phrase. “In fact, I was decidedly not in love with him the first time.”
“Settle down, you horrendous bitches,” Cassie said. “If Alison wants to stay celibate, Alison can stay celibate.”
“Thank you,” Alison said, her tone arch.
“And,” Cassie continued, “if she wants to become a nun, she can become a nun.”
“Okay,” Alison said, shooting her friend a deadly glare. “I’m not even Catholic.”
“If you’re not devoting your life to the church, Alison, I feel like you might devote some of it to having a little bit of fun, but that’s just me,” Cassie said.
“Wow, your support waned quickly.”
Cassie grabbed a second piece of pie for herself. “I’m supportive. I’m very supportive. But in this instance my support includes giving the opinion that if a hot guy—correction, a hot cowboy—is checking you out...”
“It was Cain Donnelly,” Alison exploded, forgetting why she hadn’t wanted to share the information in the first place. “Okay? Are you satisfied? I discovered today that the man who checked me out at the bar was Cain Donnelly.”
Cassie and Rebecca just blinked in silence.
But Lane exploded with laughter. “Oh, my goodness. That is funny.”
“Why is that funny? I finally found a man who made me consider the benefits of a little bit of medicinal penis and he happens to be the father of one of my employees.”
“And a man less likely to show a woman a good time I cannot think of,” Lane said, wiping a tear from beneath her eye as she continued to hoot like a deranged burrowing owl.
Alison thought back to that strong, muscular frame, those large, very capable-looking hands, that angular jaw...
“He looks perfectly able to show a woman a good time to me,” she said.
“Oh, sure, physically. He’s hot. They all are,” Lane said. “All the Donnelly men, I mean. Did you not notice that there’s a family resemblance?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, later when I realized, yes. But I don’t think of Finn that way and it just...didn’t occur to me.”
She’d been caught up in more than just looks. It had been about the connection. The electricity.
“Every Donnelly is hot,” Lane said. “But Cain has extenuating circumstances, and he’s not the most charming individual at the best of times. Though for him I’m not really sure what constitutes the best of times.”
For some reason, Alison felt instantly defensive of him. Which was crazy, because tall, dark and not-getting-in-her-pants did not need her defense. “He was really nice when I talked to him.”
“Well, this sucks.” Cassie looked deflated. “She finally meets a decent guy and he’s complicated.”
“All men are complicated,” Lane said. “Some are just worth it.”
“Why does it have to suck?” Rebecca asked. “You could still hook up with him.”
“No,” Alison said definitively. “That’s too many connections. When I thought he was just a guy passing through town I was almost kind of open to the idea. Of course, then he left the bar and I figured I would never see him again. But when he walked into the shop today... I thought maybe. I thought maybe it was fate. But then it turned out he was Violet’s father. And no. First of all, I have so much of my own baggage that I am required to pay oversize luggage fees. So I don’t want a guy who’s carrying that much of his own. Second of all, Violet needs... Something. Stability. Someone she can talk to. And I feel like she’s really getting somewhere at the bakery. I want to help her. Like I’ve helped other people. I can’t do that if I have my hand in her father’s pants.”
“I don’t know,” Lane said, her expression taking on a dipped-in-honey sweetness that spoke of nothing but trouble. “You do like to help the needy. Cain is awfully needy.”
That brought to mind some very choice images. Hot, sweaty ones. Of how she might help Cain’s needs. Wrap her fingers right around that need. Test its strength. Lean in and...
“Dammit,” Alison said, sliding her fingers through her hair and cradling her forehead on her palms. “Don’t tell me things like that.”
“I can tell you a few things about the Donnellys,” Lane continued. “I mean, assuming certain anatomical traits are hereditary...”
“Stop it.” She let out a heavy sigh. “Lane, you of all people should understand why I don’t want an entanglement. And, until recently, you didn’t want one either. Don’t betray me just because Finn liked it and put a ring on it.”