Her Twins' Cowboy Dad

by Patricia Johns

  “It’s your uncle’s?” she asked.

  “Yeah, he had a few around the house.” Colt came into the office and picked up the gun, turning it over in his hand. He opened it, shook out a bullet and held it up.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “It was loaded!”

  “Beau always said that when he needed a gun, he needed a bullet, too,” Colt said, and he put the gun down again. “Sorry about that. I thought I’d found all his handguns. If I thought there was a gun rattling around here with kids in the house—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You sure there aren’t any more?”

  “I’ve checked everywhere,” he said. “Still, we should stay vigilant with the girls.”

  She nodded. “I always do.”

  Colt met her gaze and he held it for a moment. “You want some help in here?”

  “I wouldn’t turn it down.” She tossed the old, folded map into the box. “I thought you said you’d be busy.”

  “I am.” He gave her a rueful smile, then picked up a box from the corner and looked inside. “But I’m the boss now.”

  She wasn’t going to complain. It would be nice to have some company as she rooted through the remnants of a stranger’s life. She’d thought she wanted some time to herself, but now that he was here she realized she was glad.

  * * *

  Colt hadn’t exactly planned to come sort through the office with Jane, but he’d been thinking about her all morning and when he found himself with a couple of hours to spare...well, he found himself headed back to the house. He’d told himself he should lend a hand in clearing things out, but it was more than that. He missed her.

  Colt glanced over at Jane, and she looked tense. Her gaze was clouded and she tossed items from the drawer into a box with more force than was necessary.

  “You okay?” he asked after a moment.

  She shut the drawer and looked up at him. “Beau and Josh—they looked almost identical when Beau was young.”

  “Yeah.” He wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

  “These pictures—” She pulled out an envelope and handed them over. “The wedding photo. That could be Josh!”

  “He looked like his dad.” Colt squinted at her. “It happens in families.”

  “I know...” She sighed. “It’s nothing. I’m just—”

  She didn’t finish, but she seemed to visibly rally herself and she smiled quickly at him. She was covering up whatever had rattled her, and he wished she wouldn’t.

  “What was bugging you?” he asked. He flipped through the photos of his aunt and uncle, then looked over at her quizzically. “Josh put these together for his parents one year for their anniversary. I think it was the year before his mom died.”

  “That might explain why Beau kept them close,” she said quietly and when Colt continued to look at her she added, “He wasn’t a great husband, from what I’ve heard, but he must have loved her in his own way, I guess.”

  So she was seeing the family problem, was she? Colt sucked in a breath. “Neither of us got a great example of how a functional marriage worked.”

  “I was talking with Peg earlier,” she observed. “And she said she didn’t know why Sandra stuck it out. And I look at those photos, and I wonder if I wouldn’t have been in Sandra’s shoes in twenty years.”

  “They were a...unique couple,” Colt said carefully.

  “They started out happy—” She reached for the pictures and pulled out the wedding photo. “Josh and I had one almost identical to this one. This could be Josh—the exact same expression.”

  Colt looked down at the photo, and he could see what Jane was talking about. They’d started out looking pretty happy. Wasn’t that the fear, though? That whatever seemed to dog the Marshall marriages would cling to the next generation?

  “I’ve been hearing about Sandra from Peg,” Jane said. “She stuck it out. She wouldn’t leave him, and it sounds like he wasn’t very good to her.”

  Colt nodded. “True.”

  “But sticking around—that didn’t help, did it? Peg suggested that maybe they got married for the wrong reasons. Maybe Beau didn’t love her enough, or something like that. But how was Sandra supposed to know that?”

  This had really upset her, and Colt wasn’t sure what to say. This had been the problem all along for him—seeing marriages go sour before his eyes.

  “I know,” he said at last. “I don’t know what to say. But you’re right.”

  “That could have been me,” she said, then she licked her lips and looked away.

  Jane—unloved and resentful. It seemed impossible looking at how beautiful and vulnerable she was standing there. Could any red-blooded male turn off his heart with her? But relationships weren’t so simple, and Sandra had been young and beautiful once, too. The men in this family seemed to have a track record of messing things up with women who didn’t deserve them.

  “I guess that’s what we’re all a little scared of,” he said after a beat or two of silence.

  “The more I hear about Beau, the more he sounds like Josh,” she said quietly. “Josh was hard to be close to. He pulled back, didn’t share easily. And hearing about his parents’ marriage, I guess it makes sense that he’d have a few trust issues. But I’m sure Beau had his own reasons for becoming the bitter man he was, too.”

  “Hey, Josh loved you enough to keep you away from this place,” Colt said, stepping closer to her and catching her hand with his. “And maybe he didn’t know how to have a functional relationship, but the fact that he kept you away from here says that he was at least trying to keep all of this from affecting what he had with you.”

  “And I’m here because I want that family for my girls...” Jane looked up at him, and she didn’t pull her hand back. Sadness swam in her eyes. “I was hoping to find some family connection, not some foreshadowing of a miserable future together had he lived...”

  “You wanted some memories,” he said. “Some insights into why he hated strawberry ice cream. Some stories to tell your daughters.”

  “Why did he hate strawberry ice cream?” she asked.

  Colt smiled sorrowfully. “He ate it one year when he got the flu and threw it up. Never could eat it again.”

  “Oh...” She smiled sadly. “Yeah, that was the kind of thing I wanted to know. What else?”

  “I don’t know...” He cast about in his memories for something she might like. “We built a tree house together as kids. It was a good one—like really solid and respectable. We used to hang out in it all the way into our teens. We could talk there, open up.”

  “What did you talk about?” she asked.

  “Our hopes for the future,” he said with a shrug. “Josh would talk it out when he was mad at his dad. Which was often. I went there and cried when my mom left. She’d told me it was better for my future if I stayed and kept working with Beau. I’d wanted her to tell me to come with her, leave it all behind... And she’d told me it was a smarter choice to stay. I was only sixteen. I felt so grown-up right up until my mom drove away, and then I felt like a kid and cried my heart out in that tree house. It was Josh who eventually came out to find me.”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?” Jane asked.

  “Because Beau had already mentioned leaving me a part of the ranch,” Colt admitted, his throat tight. “You have no idea how much I sacrificed for this place.”

  They were silent for a few beats, then Jane heaved a sigh.

  “Josh talked about that tree house,” she said. “He’d been proud of the workmanship. It meant a lot to him, too, but there was so much he left out when he told me stories... He held back a lot. Even from me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colt said, and he moved his fingers over hers, wishing he could pull her into his arms and just hold her for a little while. It would be comforting for him, too, right now. But Jane didn’t deser
ve this heartache either, and looking down into those dark eyes, he wished he had something to say to make it better.

  She was so close that he could make out the scent of her perfume, and he could see the soft flutter of her pulse at the base of her neck. A strand of hair fell across her forehead. Without thinking, he lifted his free hand to brush it aside, but as his fingers touched her skin, his gaze flickered down to those pink lips. She opened her mouth as if about to say something but she didn’t; he found himself transfixed by her mouth, and a deep instinct inside him was tugging him closer.

  She was both beautiful and sad, and he longed to comfort her somehow. He wanted to tug her into his arms and hold her close... But his gaze kept dropping down to her lips, and it was like the rest of the room had evaporated around them, leaving just the two of them, the soft flutter of her pulse and this yearning to cover those lips with his own.

  A clatter from the kitchen made them both start, and Colt dropped her hand and took a step back. He cleared his throat.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “My problems with Josh are still private—”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You have to talk to someone. And I’m okay if that’s me. I can handle it. Of anyone, I understand where Josh came from.”

  “But now he’s gone,” she said, her voice shaking. “It isn’t right to tell our secrets now. He deserves to be remembered better than that.”

  “And he is,” Colt said quietly. “I promise you that.”

  Colt had had a whole childhood with Josh, an adolescence. They’d shared everything growing up, built a tree house together, and in that tree house he’d heard about the girls Josh had crushes on, he’d known about Josh’s hopes to join the army before anyone else had. Josh and Colt had come from the same fractured family, and Colt understood.

  “We were happy,” Jane said firmly. Trying to convince him? He wasn’t sure. But if a woman was so tired after a marriage that she didn’t want love again, then he was willing to guess that she wasn’t as happy as she declared.

  “Pretending things were better than they were isn’t going to comfort him. He’s past our fumbling attempts to fix it, isn’t he? I know you loved him with all you had, Jane. And that’s all you could give. You did your best.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” she said, and tears misted her eyes.

  Love never seemed to be quite enough to keep two well-meaning people together...or at least to keep them happy, and that knowledge had settled into his own heart years ago.

  “We’re kind of a mess here,” he said, his voice tight with repressed emotion. “I was honest about that from the start.”

  Jane shrugged. “Apparently, so am I.”

  If nothing else, she was in good company.

  “I’d better get back to work,” he said quickly.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  He met her gaze one last time, then turned for the door. Colt had idealized his aunt and uncle’s relationship because they were married still—unlike his own parents. But the more he saw of their actual relationship, the warier he felt about a marriage of his own one day. So far, he’d experienced a dad who walked away, and an aunt and uncle who made each other miserable. It had made him suspicious of the other married relationships he saw in the family at a greater distance. People hid their worst. Colt wasn’t so different from Josh. He’d just realized how messed up he was earlier than his cousin had. But they both came from the same family, had been raised with the same issues, and running away hadn’t helped Josh as much as he’d thought.

  But Colt didn’t want to think about any of that right now. Sometimes it was easier to just push it aside and get back out to the field where his problems seemed smaller under the wide, cloudless sky.

  Chapter Seven

  Jane stood in the empty office, staring at the doorway. She held a stray piece of paper in her hand, and when she realized it she dropped it into the box.

  What had just happened here? She’d opened up much more than she’d intended. She hadn’t meant to say so much, it had just been stewing around inside her and with Colt looking down into her eyes like that, she’d found herself wanting to talk. It had been a long time since she’d had someone who cared like that.

  Maybe it was that he could understand better than anyone else...but there had been a look in his eye that Jane recognized. She’d been married, after all. She knew what it looked like when a man was thinking about closing the distance between them. He’d been intense and focused, and even remembering it made her legs feel a little weak.

  Colt had been thinking of kissing her.

  She licked her lips, and her fingers fluttered up to her mouth. Why was she even entertaining this thought? Obviously, she couldn’t kiss him. That would be ridiculous, but that moment couldn’t be dismissed quite so easily, either. There was obviously some attraction between them. She’d have to be careful. The worst thing she could do right now would be to allow her loneliness to direct her steps. That was God’s job.

  That evening, Jane tried to help Peg in the kitchen but the older woman kept brushing her off.

  “I know what Colt likes,” Peg said. “You’re a guest here, anyway. Your girls need you. I can do this on autopilot.”

  So Jane did as Peg asked and left her alone in the kitchen. She got the girls into the bath and cleaned them up. Micha got loose and ran naked around the house shrieking in delight until Jane caught her, dried her off and got her into her pajamas. Suzie was quieter this evening, and while Jane combed their wet hair, they played with their dollies.

  The smells of cooking coming from the kitchen weren’t exactly appetizing, but Jane wasn’t going to complain. She had a few more days here, and then she’d be going back to her life in Minneapolis. She’d find a new job for a little while until she sorted out how exactly she’d open that bed-and-breakfast, but a future was finally opening up in front of her.

  Her phone blipped and she picked it up to see a text from a work friend.

  Jane, can you cover my Saturday shift? I’ve got a family thing. Let me know!

  Apparently, one of them hadn’t heard that she’d been a victim of the last wave of layoffs. She sighed and put the phone back down without response. She hadn’t been close enough with any of her work friends to even tell them that she was leaving town. Colt had been right—she did need someone she could talk to, but with her husband’s passing she’d lost the camaraderie with the military wives. Widowhood affected all of her relationships.

  It was time to start over.

  From the bedroom, Jane heard the side door bang shut, and the bass notes of Colt’s voice reverberating from the other room. Jane picked up the bedtime storybook that her girls loved and waited for them in the hallway.

  “Come on, Micha,” she said. “Suzie, come on.”

  The girls picked up their dolls and followed her down the hall toward the living room. She emerged into the room at the same time Colt came in from the kitchen.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.” She stopped short and smiled hesitantly, and they were both silent for a moment. She glanced over as Micha and Suzie pulled a throw blanket off the couch and entertained themselves by rolling in it and giggling together.

  “Look, Colt, I’m sorry about earlier,” she said quickly, keeping her tone low. “I shouldn’t have vented on you like that. It wasn’t fair to you, and it was—”

  “You were fine,” he interrupted, and he closed the distance between them in two quick strides. He was suddenly so close that her breath caught in her throat and she looked at him, her thoughts draining from her head.

  “Jane, I think we can count as friends at this point, can’t we?” he asked softly.

  Friends didn’t come that close to kissing each other, but he had a point, and to their credit they hadn’t crossed any lines. And maybe she’d misread the situation.

  “I think so
,” she said.

  “Well, friends talk. They open up. You weren’t out of line, okay? If anyone was, it was me.”

  They were adults with self-control and they could keep things solidly on the side of friendship if they wanted to.

  “Dinner is going to take another half hour,” Peg said, poking her head into the room, and Colt took a step back. She held two plates in her hands, and she glanced between Colt and Jane. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” Colt said brusquely.

  “You might as well have some apple crisp,” Peg added. “There’s some left over. But you promise me you’ll eat supper.”

  Peg deposited the plates onto the coffee table, two grayish masses, one tan slice of apple showing on top of one plate.

  “Mmm.” Colt seemed to be trying to look enthusiastic, but it didn’t make it to his eyes. He glanced over at Jane and she sent him a sympathetic look.

  “Hold on,” Jane said. “I saw a can of whipped cream in the fridge.”

  “Yeah?” Colt said, and she had to smile at the hope in his voice.

  Jane went into the kitchen, pulled the can of whipped cream out of the fridge and gave it a shake.

  “You sure you won’t let me give you a hand?” Jane asked Peg.

  “It’s just a matter of waiting on it,” Peg said, glancing up from where she was working on a crossword. She looked over at the oven, then back down at the crossword. “Half an hour,” she repeated. “Give or take.”

  Jane headed back into the living room where Colt was now seated on the couch and the girls were covering his knees with the throw blanket.

  “Nigh-nigh...” Suzie said, patting Colt’s knee under the blanket. “Nigh-nigh...”

  “Kiss,” said Micha, and she kissed his knee with tiny pursed lips. “Nigh-nigh...”

  “They’re tucking you in,” Jane said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, it looks that way,” he said. “Are you putting me to bed already?”

  “Nigh-nigh, Cat,” Micha said seriously holding up one finger in an imitation of Jane, and Jane rolled her eyes then held up the whipped cream.