Читать книгу A Cowboy In The Kitchen - Meg Maxwell - Страница 9
ОглавлениеYesterday, when Gram was reminding Annabel of how the restaurant worked, Essie Hurley had made clear that Mondays were a real day off—no prep, no cleaning, no ordering supplies. In fact, family who lived in the Victorian were only allowed in the kitchen on Mondays to cook simple meals for themselves. So at five-thirty, Annabel was surprised to come down the back stairs into the kitchen and find her younger sister, Clementine, kneeling in front of the sink and meticulously cleaning the little red rooster cabinet knobs. Twenty-four-year-old Clementine wore gray yoga pants and a long pale pink T-shirt, her feet in orange flip-flops and her long dark hair in a high ponytail.
“Clem?” Annabel said, watching her sister dip a rag into a small bucket of cleaning solution and go over the rooster’s tiny tail.
Clementine turned around and shot Annabel a tight smile. “I forgot to clean these last night,” she said, moving on to the next cabinet knob. “Aren’t they cute? Georgia sent them from Houston a few months ago.” She smiled again and returned to work, scrubbing at the rooster’s crown.
Something was wrong. Annabel had been gone for seven years, and she and Clementine had never been as close as Annabel had hoped, even when they’d lived under one roof, but she knew when Clementine was holding back. Maybe Clem was angry at her for staying away so long. For leaving the restaurant and Gram on her shoulders all these years. It was hard to tell with Clem. Clem was a “fine, everything’s fine” kind of person, the sort who’d tell you “no worries!” with a bright smile and then go off alone to cry over something dreadful that had just happened to her, like when her birth mother had stood her up for their twice-a-year reunions, only to text an hour later to say something had come up. Annabel’s parents had adopted Clementine when she was eight from a bad foster-care situation, and though Clem’s birth mother was cagey and distant, Clementine had worked hard, often fruitlessly, to keep up some kind of relationship with the woman.
If Clem was cleaning cabinet pulls—and on a Monday—something had happened.
“Is everything okay with you?” Annabel asked.
“I’m fine. Just worried about Gram.” She glanced back at Annabel. “I’m fine, really.”
Annabel wished her sister would open to her. But Annabel knew she couldn’t rush things. This morning she and Clementine had taken Gram to an appointment at the county hospital; three hours later, after testing and poking, they were sent home, Gram told to rest as much as possible until the test results came in. Clementine had been quiet on the ride to the hospital, quiet there, quiet on the way back.
Now she glanced at the big yellow clock on the wall above the stove. “I promised Mae Tucker I’d babysit the triplets tonight. See you around midnight.” With that, Clementine bolted up, dumped out the bucket and stored it away, then dashed up the back stairs.
It’ll take time to rebuild your relationship with Clem, Gram had said during lunch earlier. Don’t give up on her.
Annabel wouldn’t. Ever. She’d never give up on family.
And she’d never give up on Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen either. Since the restaurant wasn’t doing well, it was up to Annabel to keep the kitchen going. Folks counted on Hurley’s to be open Tuesday through Sundays for lunch and dinner, and Annabel didn’t want to let her Gram down.
West Montgomery wants to learn how to cook, does he? Gram had said that afternoon, taking a nibble of the potato chowder Annabel had made her. Teach him everything I taught you, Essie had added. The tips and secrets. The things you can’t learn by a recipe alone. I know he hurt you, Annabel. But I’ve seen him around town with that little girl of his and it would melt the heart of Constance Brichard. Constance Brichard was the grumpiest person in town, an elderly widow who was always threatening to sic her mean little Chihuahua on kids for making too much noise at the bus stop across the street from her house.
Which made things worse for Annabel. If West could get Constance Brichard to crack a smile, what would he do to her?
Annabel put on her favorite yellow apron and glanced at the clock—ten minutes till West walked through the door, daughter-sized handprint apron on.
She pulled the list she’d made from her jeans pocket. Breakfasts: cheese omelet, scrambled eggs, quiche Lorraine, French toast. Bacon. Biscuits with apple butter. Tonight’s cooking lesson would be about breakfast. Annabel was about to open the walk-in refrigerator for the eggs and milk and butter, then realized if West was paying her a thousand dollars to learn how to make an omelet and biscuits, he could probably use a tutorial about the ingredients themselves, what to buy, how to store them.
A rap sounded at the back door and Annabel glanced out the window. There he was, right on time. She held up a hand and went to the door, taking a deep breath before she opened it.
“Got my apron,” he said, clutching it in one hand.
She smiled and held the door open for him, willing herself not to stare at him, not to look too closely at his handsome face or the way his broad shoulders filled the doorway. He wore a navy blue T-shirt and low-slung jeans, a brown belt with a bronc buckle. He’d filled out from the nineteen-year-old boy she’d known. He was tall then, but now he was muscular from years of ranch work. “Come on in.”
He hung his hat on a peg by the door, then stood at the huge center island.
Speak, Annabel. She cleared her throat. “Since you said you want to learn the basics, I thought we’d start with breakfast—scrambled eggs, omelets, French toast, bacon.”
“Lucy loves scrambled eggs and French toast, and I love bacon, so all that sounds great.”
“So Lucy is six?” she asked. Six. It just occurred to her that in all this time, all these years, of course he hadn’t given Annabel two thoughts. She’d been so focused on how he’d dropped her like a hot biscuit for sexy Lorna when she should have realized it had been fatherhood that wiped his memory of all that had come before. One hour in the hayloft in his parents’ barn where they’d groped and kissed? How could that even register amid the birth of a baby, the first cold, the first steps, the first day of school? How could it register against daily life with sweet miracles in the form of a toothless smile or a child’s pride at learning to read?
She’d been a dope to wonder these past seven years if he’d thought about her. Of course he hadn’t.
But that hadn’t stopped her from tossing and turning for hours last night, remembering how it had felt to be in his arms, to be kissed so passionately by him. At around three in the morning, she’d made herself promise she wouldn’t be sucked back in by his face, by his incredible body, by his...story. He had a story seven years ago. She’d responded and had her heart broken and her life set on a path she hadn’t expected. She’d left her home, left her gram and her younger sister and had lived in a kind of emptiness, of going through the motions.
He had a story now. She might not be able to stop herself from responding; he was standing in her kitchen, after all, awaiting her help. But she would respond only so much, only so far. She wouldn’t let him get to her, wouldn’t let him affect her, wouldn’t let him in.
West nodded and slipped on his apron. “I can’t believe it, but yeah, she’s six. She’s in first grade and something of a math whiz.”
“That’s something I’ll never be,” Annabel said. “Although I know my way around a measuring cup and my ounces and quarts and gallons.” She eyed the clock. One minute after six. For a thousand dollars, he was expecting results, not chitchat. “So, I also thought I’d walk you through the ingredients. We’re going to start with scrambled eggs.” She went over to the counter and picked up a stack of papers she’d inserted into a folder. “I made you a folder of recipes,” she said, handing it to him. “Find the one for scrambled eggs and bacon and tell me what we need.”
He opened the folder and scanned it. “Got it.” He held out a sheet and put the folder back on the counter. “Eggs, milk, butter, bacon.”
She explained how the bacon would take longer to fry than the eggs needed to cook, so they should start with the bacon. She went over the different kinds of bacon to buy, how folks at Hurley’s liked thick-cut the best, how long to keep it, how to store it, and he jotted down notes on the recipe, listening intently to everything she said. She showed him different kinds of pans, from sauté to cast iron. A few minutes later he had single-file bacon beginning to sizzle in the pan, tongs at the ready.
“While that’s cooking, let’s get the eggs ready.” She told him how many eggs to use for him and his daughter, how to crack them so the shells wouldn’t land in the bowl, how to beat the eggs and for how long, how some people like to add a little milk and he could try it both ways, with or without, but she liked it with. A little salt and pepper and he was ready to pour the beaten eggs in the fry pan on the next burner.
The smell of frying bacon made her mouth water and she realized she hadn’t eaten much today. By the time he was slowly stirring the eggs in the pan, she was ravenous. She had him turn the heat off the eggs and drain the bacon on paper towels, then transfer everything to two plates. After instructing him to grab a small handful of cherries from the basket on the counter and add it to the plate, they sat down at the round table by the window.
“Depending on how hungry you are, you can add toast or biscuits too,” she said. “Well, dig in.”
He glanced at his plate, then forked a bite of eggs into his mouth. “I made this? It’s pretty good.” He leaned back as though relieved. She wanted to ask again why he was paying a thousand dollars to learn to make a few basics, but as she stole a glance at him while he popped a cherry into his mouth, that mouth she’d fantasized about for at least three years of high school before he’d ever kissed her, she could see the hard set of his jaw, something inscrutable in his eyes. He didn’t want questions, didn’t want to talk. He wanted to learn to cook and was paying good money for it.
Okay, then.
She dragged her gaze off him and took a bite of eggs, then tasted a piece of bacon. “It’s better than good. It’s absolutely delicious.” Nerves made her ramble on about how he could get the best tasting eggs from the farm stands in town, rather than from the supermarket. He did a lot of nodding in response and said maybe he’d get some chickens of his own, that his daughter would love that.
Aware that their knees were awfully close and had brushed together more than once, Annabel couldn’t take it and got up with the excuse that she could use some coffee.
“Ditto,” he said. “Guess we were both hungry,” he added, glancing at their empty plates. “I imagine you have your hands full, cooking for the restaurant and caring for your grandmother. I appreciate you taking me on.”
As a student only.
“Well, we really need the money,” she said pointedly, and he glanced at her. Don’t follow up that comment, don’t qualify, just move on to French toast. He doesn’t need to know your business, that he hurt you so badly you wouldn’t help him if you didn’t have to. Which would be a lie. Of course she’d help him. But he didn’t need to know Gram’s business, how much trouble the restaurant was in. If only Georgia would call back. Talk about a math whiz. Georgia Hurley ran a company in Houston. She’d know how to get Hurley’s back in the black.
A half hour later, on their second cup of coffee, they sat at the same spot, trying the French toast they’d made, the first bite with a sprinkle of cinnamon.
“Delicious,” he said. “I wish I wasn’t so full from all that bacon I ate.”
She laughed. “Me too. But try a piece with cinnamon and a sprinkle of confectioners’ sugar.”
“Lucy will love this,” he said, swiping a bite in some maple syrup—which she quickly explained was the real thing and worth every penny.
They moved on to a western omelet, with West slicing and dicing vegetables—mushroom, green and red peppers and onions. He stood beside her at the island, slicing the mushrooms a bit too thick.
“Thinner,” she said, moving his hand on the knife a bit to the left. “The mushrooms will sauté quicker and won’t be too chunky in the omelet.”
He glanced at her hand on his, and pulled away slightly. “Got it,” he said.
Annabel, you fool, she chastised herself, feeling like a total idiot. Hadn’t Gram told her he had women throwing themselves at him since his wife had died? A gorgeous widower with a sweet little girl and a prosperous ranch brought out all kinds, Gram had said. Now he probably thought she was flirting. Grrr. Her cheeks flamed with embarrassment. Seven years in Dallas might have changed Annabel from that scrawny, frizzy-haired girl into a woman who knew her way around a little makeup and a blow dryer, but she was a jeans and T-shirt kind of gal and always would be and wore her long auburn hair in a low ponytail, tool of the trade. West wasn’t really attracted to her seven years ago, and with a glamorous wife like Lorna, who’d worn push-up bras and high heels to the supermarket at ten in the morning, he wouldn’t be attracted to her now. Especially now, when she smelled like bacon grease and cinnamon. Real sexy.
She just had a “duh” moment. His sudden interest in cooking was likely tied to his wife’s recent passing. For the past year, he’d probably been responsible for feeding his daughter and maybe he’d burned a few breakfasts or bungled some dinners.
She moved to the other side of the counter. “You can slide those mushrooms and the onions in the pan,” she said, showing him how to gently sauté them with a wooden spoon.
He nodded and glanced out the window as if all he really wanted to do was get out of here.
Unnerved and unsure what to do, what to say, Annabel thought about launching into a discussion of how to properly store vegetables, but she could see something was wrong, that she’d crossed a line. For touching him? Maybe she should remind him that he’d crossed a line, that he’d touched her—ran his hands over her bra, kissed a line down her stomach to the waistband of her jeans. And then dumped her without a damned word the next day.
It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself, a hollow feeling opening in her stomach. It was a long time ago. A lifetime ago for him. You’re his cooking teacher, Annabel. That’s it.
“The Dunkins were in for dinner last night,” she said to change the subject—the one in her head anyway.
He stirred the mushrooms, peppers and onions. And didn’t respond. Interesting.
Raina and Landon Dunkin, Lucy’s maternal grandparents, had left Clementine a huge tip too. Raina, a former Miss Texas contestant, had special ordered a mixed green salad, dressing on the side, with grilled chicken breast and just a bit of Hurley’s famed Creole sauce. Landon, a nice enough but reserved man who’d done very well for himself in real estate, had the barbecue crawfish po’boy special, with its side of slaw and sweet potato fries. When Annabel had peered through the little round window on the kitchen door to see how busy the dining room was, she saw the Dunkins lingering over cappuccino, deep in quiet conversation.
“The restaurant sign could use some fresh paint,” West suddenly said, gesturing out the window where the Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen sign, hanging from a post by the white picket fence, clearly needed some sprucing up. Hmm. Guess West wasn’t interested in chatting about the Dunkins. Just bored by the small talk? She wasn’t sure. “And the walkway needs work. There are a couple of loose stones. It’s okay now, but in a few weeks they’ll come loose enough that someone could trip and sue you for everything.”
Annabel closed her eyes, a swirl of panic shooting up her spine. There was no money. Gram admitted yesterday that the restaurant was losing money every day. There was little in the account for repairs. With everyone knowing Essie was out of commission, Hurley’s just wasn’t the same. Clementine had suggested holding a fundraiser; after all, didn’t everyone love Hurley’s? The place was a community treasure. But Gram had shot down that idea and had called it charity. You’re just as good a cook as I am, better probably, Gram had said this afternoon as she finished her potato chowder. There’s something special in your cooking. Folks just have to have the chance to know that. Give it time.
“I’ll take care of it,” Annabel said to West, then instructed him to turn the heat off the vegetables. “We have some paint in the basement, I think. And I can probably watch a YouTube video on re-whatevering the stones on the path.” She made a mental note to check on the paint and look up “whatevering” stones.
West eyed her, took a sip of his coffee and said, “It’ll take me ten minutes to do both myself. I’ll take care of it.” She watched him transfer the vegetables onto the cheese she’d had him sprinkle on the eggs, then showed him to carefully flip half the omelet over.
She wanted to tell him to forget about it, but she wasn’t above accepting help when she really needed it. “I’d appreciate that, West. Thanks.”
“Least I can do,” he said, plating the omelet. He cut it in two, then slid half onto another plate, added another handful of cherries and brought both plates to the table. He was getting pretty good at this. “Really. You have no idea.”
So tell me, she wanted to shout.
They sat down at the table and he took a couple of bites of the omelet. “This is delicious,” he said. “I really hope I can do this myself when you’re not standing beside me. You’re a good teacher, Annabel.” He took a long slug of his coffee, finishing it, then got up. “How’s tomorrow after the restaurant closes for the lunch lesson? Could you come to the ranch? My daughter will be spending the night at her grandparents’ house, so I’ll have extra time and I like the idea of learning to cook on-site. But if it’s too late, I can come here in the morning.”
Alone with him at his house. At night. She cleared her throat. “Tomorrow after closing will be fine,” she said. “I’ll be over by nine-thirty. We close at nine, but I’ll need to help clean up.”
He nodded, took his Stetson off the coat hook by the door and left, twenty different thoughts scrambling around Annabel’s head. But the one that stood out was about how she’d feel being over at the Montgomery Ranch. For the second time.
* * *
Tuesday afternoon, just an hour after Lucy had come racing off the school bus, waving her “sight words” quiz with 100% and a smiley face at the top, West rushed Lucy to Doc McTuft’s office, cursing himself with what was left of his breath. They’d been in the backyard, Lucy on the low sturdy branch of her favorite climbing tree, calling out words and spelling them, West nailing on the piece of wood for the roof of the new dollhouse he promised to make for her. One minute Lucy had been saying, “Daddy, look how high I am—am, A M!”—and she’d been so high that he called himself an idiot for not watching more closely—and the next, she let out a high-pitched yelp and was on the ground.
Doc McTufts had assured him that Lucy was fine, no broken bones, and that the doc herself had fallen out of plenty of trees as a kid and lived to tell the tale to worried parents all over town. But of course, as they were settling up at the reception desk, who was giving him the stink eye but the Dunkins’ next-door neighbor, sitting with pursed lips next to her daughter and grandbaby. As West drove home, Lucy in her car seat in the back with her superhero coloring book, he figured the woman had already called Raina to let her know her poor granddaughter had almost been injured and had left the doc’s office with a big bandage over a nasty scrape.
Lucy was all right. That was what mattered. But he would keep a better eye on her when she was climbing.
“Daddy, can we have ice cream for dinner?” Lucy asked.
“How about your second favorite for dinner and ice cream for dessert?” he asked, smiling at her in the rearview mirror.
“French toast with strawberries for the mouth and blueberries for the eyes?”
“Sounds good to me,” he said, feeling pretty confident about his French toast after yesterday’s cooking lesson. Plus, hadn’t Annabel said that she’d often eaten breakfast for dinner in Dallas when she was feeling low or missed her family? Comfort food. The very reason he ate at Hurley’s so often.
He’d lain awake for hours last night, thinking about the cooking lesson. Annabel was so beautiful with that silky dark red hair caught in the ponytail, her pale, porcelainlike skin free of makeup, her long, lush body in low-slung jeans rolled up at the ankles and a loose white button down shirt tucked in. Her uniform, she’d called it. He called it sexy. She was like summertime, like sunshine, and her nearness, the scent of her, the sight of the swell of her breasts against the cotton shirt, the curve of her hip...it had been all he could do not to grab her against the wall and kiss her, memories of their time in the barn hitting him hard, as he’d shaken confectioners’ sugar on French toast, slid peppers around in the pan.
And then she’d touched him, her soft hand, her skin electrifying his with the most casual of gestures, moving his hand over on the knife. Her touch had sent a shock through him and brought him back to the barn to forty-five minutes when he thought he’d found his future, when he thought everything made sense.
Until it didn’t.
Back then West had been going nowhere fast. Annabel would have joined him there if he’d let something happen between them. After he and Annabel had almost gone too far in the barn, he forced himself to stop for her sake and said he’d better get back to the house. She’d gotten a funny look on her face, and he’d wanted to ask her if she was okay, to get a handle on why she seemed upset, but she seemed in a hurry to get away. From him. Maybe she’d just meant to pay her condolences, nice enough to bring him his favorite chili con carne that he always ordered to go after school, and he’d practically ripped her clothes off. Jerk. Maybe she was just being nice and he’d taken things too far, like always.
So then they’d gone back to the house so she could say goodbye to his parents, but his parents were standing outside, his mother crying, his father’s arm over her shoulder, and they’d seen West and Annabel come out of the barn. He held back a bit and it was too late to tell Annabel she had a bit of hay in her hair. He saw his mother stare at the hay, then glance at him, disapproval turning her grief-stricken eyes cold. West doing the wrong thing again—fooling around with a girl in the barn while friends and neighbors came to pay their respects. That wasn’t how it was, but it was how it had looked to his parents. West was sure of it.
Annabel had told his parents how sorry she was for their loss, glanced at West with such sorrow, then she’d gotten on her bike and raced away. Later that night, after the last of the relatives had left, West had come downstairs for a cold drink when he overheard his mother crying again and his father comforting her. The sound of his mother crying was like a slam in his gut, and West had stood there, frozen, his head hung, wishing he could go in and say the right thing, but he’d known, he’d always known, that he wasn’t “living up to their expectations” and he’d be no comfort, that the wrong Montgomery brother was gone. Then he’d heard his mother say Annabel’s name and he strained to hear.
Did you see West and Annabel come out of the barn together? his mother was saying. She had hay in her hair. Hopefully her grandmother will have the sense to tell Annabel to stay away from West. I hear she has a scholarship to culinary school in Dallas. I’d hate for her to give up her future.
West had gone rigid. He’d waited for his father’s response, for some kind of defense, but his dad had said, She won’t give that up to stay in Blue Gulch.
Plenty of girls give up their dreams for handsome boys they’re in love with, his mother had said. Annabel has her whole life ahead of her, and West will be here, doing what? Odd jobs. New girlfriend every weekend. I love West, but he’s...who he is.
Who he is... His heart in his throat, he’d crept back upstairs, lying awake for a long, long time, tears streaming down his face. He’d lost his brother. His parents thought he was nothing. And now he had to lose Annabel—to save her...from himself. His mother was right. Annabel was a good girl, straight A’s, helped out her grandmother by working in the family restaurant every day after school as a cook’s assistant and sometimes as a waitress when someone called in sick. And West was the troublemaker in the black leather jacket, calls to his parents from the principal about fights he got into with jerk jocks who thought they could say anything they wanted about anyone. And yeah, since barely graduating, he worked for room and board at a big spread on the outskirts of town, thinking he might want to be a rancher, breed cattle, raise horses. His dad was a mechanic who’d tried his hand at starting a small ranch on their property and hadn’t done well, so his father had figured West would fail at that life too. But West wasn’t like Garrett, who’d joined the military and planned to become a police officer, a trajectory his parents could be proud of.
Back then he’d lain awake for hours, vowing to avoid Annabel Hurley so that he wouldn’t screw up her life. In the barn, she’d taken off her sweater, let him touch her breasts in the lacy white bra, and kissed him deeper and deeper, driving him wild until he’d stopped things, afraid to go too far and take advantage of the situation.
So yeah, she liked him. That had been clear. Liked him enough to give up her scholarship and Dallas? Maybe. So he’d made the decision to avoid her from that moment on, let her go have her great life with a better guy than him.
And when Lorna Dunkin had told him the next day that she knew exactly how to make him forget his grief for a little while, looking him up and down and whispering in his ear, he took her to the flat-topped boulder where he often saw Annabel picking herbs for her grandmother, and he let Lorna help him forget everything—losing his brother, his parents’ disappointment in him, his disappointment in himself and giving up Annabel for her own damned good. At some point, he’d heard the crack of a twig and he knew it was her, knew that she saw, and the footsteps running away let him know he’d achieved his goal.
Some damned victory.
Except about six weeks later, Lorna had shown him a white stick that looked like a thermometer with a pink plus sign in a tiny window and said she wanted a big wedding.
Lucy had made everything he’d given up worth it. But those times when he’d be stacking hay or training a horse, he’d think of Annabel’s beautiful face, those round dark brown eyes, full of trust, of feeling, and he’d feel like the scum of the earth. He’d hurt her, no doubt. But hadn’t she gone off to Dallas to the fancy cooking school? Hadn’t he stepped out of her way? He’d heard she had a condo in a swanky apartment building near Reunion Tower. That she was a chef at a Michelin-starred American fusion restaurant, whatever that meant. She probably had a serious boyfriend in a fancy suit.
With Lucy lying on her stomach on the living room rug with her coloring book, Daisy half snoozing nearby, West opened the folder of recipes Annabel had given him. Breakfast was written in red marker on the tab in her neat script. He found the one for French toast, and set to work, cracking eggs, melting butter in the pan, getting out the bread. Soon enough he had four slices of French toast cooking, eyeholes cut out for blueberries and a mouth cut out for strawberry slices for Lucy’s portion. Smelled pretty darned good too.
He thought about all those women coming by, in the first couple of months after Lorna died, with casseroles and offers to cook for him. There’d been innuendo and flat-out invitations. More than a few times he’d taken up those invitations, needing to forget, to be taken out of himself. And more than a few times he’d failed Lucy. One time he’d been in a woman’s bed when he was supposed to pick up Lucy early from school for a dentist appointment, but the woman had made him forget himself so well he forgot his own daughter. Another time Lucy had been calling him over and over on the phone from Lorna’s parents’ house, where she was sleeping over, to tell him she lost a tooth, her first, but he’d shut the ringer so no one could interrupt him while a stranger with big breasts was naked beside him.
The next morning, the look of absolute disdain and disappointment on Raina Dunkin’s face had said it all. A father, especially a widowed father, needs to be reachable at all times, West, she’d practically spit at him. But it was the look on Lucy’s face, with one of her bottom front teeth gone, the where were you, Daddy? I tried to call you like one million times that had made him vow that was it. No more women. No more whiskey. No more hiding from his life. He’d focus on his daughter.
So beautiful women with long red hair and dark brown eyes, who made him want to rip off their loose jeans and white button-down shirts, women like Annabel Hurley, just couldn’t go around casually touching his hand while slicing mushrooms.
“Daddy, I think Daisy ate my silver crayon,” Lucy called from the living room. “She’s choking!”
West rushed into the living room, where Daisy was sputtering a bit, trying to get something out of her mouth and pushing on her teeth with her paw.
“Daddy, is Daisy okay?” Lucy asked, hazel eyes worried.
“Well, let’s see if we can help her,” he said, kneeling beside Daisy and opening the beagle’s mouth, where half a crayon was wedged in her back teeth. “Daisy, that couldn’t possibly have tasted good,” he said, shaking his head and trying to pop up the flattened, bitten crayon. Finally out it came. As the smell of something burning wafted into the living room, Daisy stood up and spit out the other half of the crayon.
Damn it, the French toast! It would be burned to a crisp by now.
The doorbell rang just as West was rushing back into the kitchen, so he quickly shut off the burner, then noticed he’d left the bag of bread too close to the burner; part of it started to cinder. He threw that in the sink and stood there for a moment, hands braced on the counter, wishing his headache away.
“Daddy, the doorbell rang again,” Lucy called out just as the smoke alarm started blaring.
“Lucy, it’s Nana and Pop-Pop,” he heard Raina’s shrill voice call out. “Come open the door, sweetheart.”
Oh, hell.
He quickly tried to fan the smoke from the alarm with a magazine, then hurried into the living room, where Raina and Landon glared at him.
“What is that burning smell?” Raina said, barreling in and heading for the kitchen. West could hear her shoving up the kitchen window, and in a few moments, the alarm stopped its beeping. Raina was back in the living room in seconds, holding the charred bag of bread. “Blackened bread is in a pan on the stove. This burned bag was in the sink, and the kitchen is all smoky, which can seriously hurt developing lungs. God, West.”
“We had a mergency with Daisy because she ate my crayon,” Lucy said, holding up the flattened sliver for her nana.
“Even the dog isn’t safe in this house,” Landon said, shaking his silver-gray head at West as he took the crayon from Lucy. “I’ll make sure this ends up in the garbage so there isn’t another ‘mergency.’”
“I heard Lucy was at the doctor today,” Raina said as she went over to Lucy to examine her leg. She peeled back the bandage and added her own head shake at the nasty cut. He watched Raina’s gaze take in Lucy’s torn purple leggings, the scrape on her arm, the knot clumping together a cluster of ringlets on the left side of her head, the dirt smudge on her cheek.
“I fell out of the tree today,” Lucy said proudly, sticking out her injured leg.
“Oh, I can see that,” Raina said, shooting a death stare at West. “Lucy, can you go play in your room?” she added through gritted teeth. “Grandpa and I need to talk to your father.”
When Lucy left, Raina lowered her voice. “You leave me no choice, West. We’ve given you a year to get your act together. But you’re unfit to parent Lucy alone. Landon and I will be filing for custody. This was the final straw.” She held up a hand. “Don’t bother to defend yourself,” she said, and then they swept out.
West dropped down on the sofa, his head in his hands. No one was taking his daughter away from him. But how would he fight the Dunkins when a lot of circumstantial evidence said he wasn’t exactly father of the year?
“Daddy, is the French toast ready? I’m starving,” Lucy said as she burst out of her room. “Hey, where’s Nana and Pop-Pop?” she asked, looking around.
Keep it together for Lucy, he ordered himself. The Dunkins aren’t taking your girl away. They can’t. He’d figure it out, he’d fight them, he’d...do whatever he had to do.
He sucked in a breath and let it out. “They had to get home. You know what, Lucy? Even Daisy wouldn’t eat the burned French toast. How about dinner at Hurley’s, just the two of us? Go wash your hands, sweetcakes.”
As Lucy grinned and ran to wash up, West felt a slow snake of cold fear slither up his spine. Could the Dunkins prove he was unfit? He was a better father now than he was in the terrible first month after Lorna’s death, when Lucy didn’t quite understand where her mother was, but had two sets of doting grandparents. He’d let them do what he should have done—been there for his daughter. Then his parents moved away...and he’d lost them too—permanently. Instead of focusing on being a good dad to Lucy, he’d drank too much and spent too many nights with women, trying to make himself forget who and what he was. A man very much alone who had no idea how to be a good father.
He would not lose his daughter. No matter what he had to do.
