Kate swiped the chalk-clogged eraser over the board at the back of her classroom at Marietta Elementary. At the end of a very long Monday full of kindergarteners, an awkward conversation with Judy Elsworth, the principal, regarding a phone call she’d gotten from the Bellmers about Saturday night, and a handful of parent-teacher conferences, she longed for nothing more than a glass of wine, a plate of homemade pasta and a foot massage, not necessarily in that order. But since her term of forced solitude was upon her, the foot massage was, unfortunately, not in the cards. Wine and pasta, alone, would have to suffice.
With a sigh, she glanced at her watch as she gathered up her things. Nearly five-thirty. Her last scheduled parent/teacher conference had cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for tomorrow. Which meant another long day. But she actually didn’t mind conference time. She looked forward to getting to know the families of the children in her class, even if the class was only hers temporarily. She already knew many of them. In a town the size of Marietta, practically everyone knew everyone, for better or for worse.
Glancing out the window, she noticed thunderheads gathering in the sky. Something was coming. Weather tended to move fast over the mountains, coming and going with a speed that matched the dramatic Montana landscape. She’d better get a move on, she thought, before getting caught in a thundershower.
On the near-empty playground, she noticed two of her favorites, Caylee and Cutter, five-year-old twins from Janice Brinker’s kindergarten class, climbing the taller of two geodesic dome jungle gyms on the now-empty playground. She guessed that Janice had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for today, too. The twins were the exception to the everyone-knew-everyone rule. As they were new to town, no one knew much about them at all, except that they’d just moved to Marietta before the start of school in mid-August.
On a nearby bench, head bent to her cell phone, was the young woman Kate had often seen picking up the pair at school. She was not their mother, Kate had been told, but a babysitter.
As Kate watched, Cutter—with typical five-year-old audacity—stood straight up on the climbing structure and twirled his arms like a bird. Kate gasped and pressed a helpless palm to the window. “Look up. Look up!” she begged the woman through the thick glass.
And just as the woman did look up, Caylee’s high-pitched squeal accompanied her brother’s pinwheel off the monkey bars toward the rubber mats below.
With a gasp, Kate dropped everything in her arms and ran. Slamming through the push-bar doorway at the end of the hall, she raced outside feeling like everything was happening in slow motion. The slow whoosh of blood in her ears, the sound of her shoes against the asphalt as she ran toward the playground and the boy lying at the base of the jungle gym.
The babysitter was holding the crying boy by the time she reached the monkey bars and Kate reached up to pull Caylee down safely. But the little girl hung back under the bars, staring wide-eyed at her brother. For his part, Cutter had relinquished every bit of his five-year-old bluster and was wailing loudly.
“I-It’s all my fault,” a distraught babysitter told Kate as she dropped down beside them. “I took my eyes off him for a moment and—”
“Is his head okay?”
Izzy had a hand clapped over her mouth. “I think so. It’s his arm. He landed badly. It might be broken.”
There was no question in Kate’s mind that was indeed the case. His wrist was already turning black and blue and beginning to swell.
From behind her came the sound of someone running and she looked up as a man dropped to his knees beside the boy. He scooped the boy away from the young woman and into his own arms and sat on the rubber mat, his back half-turned to Kate. “Hey, Snip, it’s okay, now. I’m here. Oh, man. That looks like it hurts.” He half-turned to the young woman. “I pay you to watch them, Izzy,” he said sharply. “What the hell happened?”
The sound of his voice made her breath hitch. Kate watched the man sooth a hand over the boy’s forehead and kiss him there and she felt her world tilt sideways.
Oh, no. It couldn’t be.
No, really, it couldn’t. But he turned to look at Izzy and all doubt vanished.
Finn Scott. Her Finn Scott. Scratch that. There weren’t enough possessive pronouns in the world to make him hers.
“It’s my fault,” Izzy was saying. “The twins were playing tag and I looked away for a moment and Cutter was—I’m so sorry.”
Twins? He and what’s-her-face had had twins?
“It was a accident, Daddy,” Caylee said. “Cutter was being a bird.”
Inconsolable, the boy buried his face against his father’s broad chest. Behind him, thunder rumbled across the prairie and a streak of lightning jagged across the sky. The heat from that jagged flash seemed to explode in her chest as he looked up, noticing her for the first time.
The instinct to run rolled through her like the thunder that rumbled across the sky and she scooted back away from him, hoping that he’d forgotten her as she’d tried to forget him. But she wasn’t that lucky.
Recognition, mixed with confusion, burned in his dark gaze. “Kate?”
He turned fully then, looking at her starkly with those brown-green-gold eyes. Eyes that had once had the power to melt her into a puddle of want and need. Those eyes brought to mind long, athletic Saturday mornings, sharing a thoroughly rumpled bed and slow, deep kisses.
Doomed. I am doomed.
A numb buzzing started up in her ears that had nothing at all to do with the nearby thunder.
She couldn’t think straight. Finn was sitting two feet away from her, holding his son and she couldn’t imagine what she should be doing with her hands.
And then she remembered Saturday night. No doppelganger. No ghost. It was him. Right here in Marietta. The hell?
“That’s Miss Candy,” Caylee said, using the name most of the five-year-olds used for her. “She’s not our teacher. She’s the other one.”
“That’s me,” she admitted in a small voice. “The other one.”
Her words elicited the proper response, a wince from Caylee’s father.
“Scott’s a pretty common last name around here,” she managed. “I never—I didn’t connect them with you.”
He rubbed a hand across his mouth and said, “You’re Miss Candy?”
Izzy, who’d been wallowing in self-reproach, now flicked a curious look at them over the steeple of her fingers, apparently relieved no one was looking at her anymore.
“I am,” Kate said, getting to her feet, “but I suppose if you’d ever come to school with your kids, you would have known that.” She instantly regretted the sharp bite of those words, but there was no taking them back now. Belatedly, she remembered what little she knew about him and the words ‘single-dad’ came to mind. Which meant.... A whole jumble of chaos kicked off in her brain.
Finn used to get a look on his face just before he nodded to the gate-puller, when he was all tucked and tied onto the back of some bred-to-be-vicious bucking-bull, his hand clamped down hard by the leather strap, his hat pushed down low over his eyes. He wore a look that said, ‘I’m ready,’ or ‘I’m all in.’ or ‘Don’t mess with me.’ He looked at her that way now as he got to his feet with his little boy in his arms.
She was a terrible person.
“I’ve got to get him to an ER,” Finn said. “Can you point me towards one?”
“Is my arm b-broke, Daddy?” Cutter whimpered.
“We’ll see,” he answered, kissing the boy’s forehead again. “I hope not, Snip.”
“The Marietta Regional Hospital is just down at the other end of town,” Kate told him. “Across from the fairgrounds on Railroad Ave.”
He turned around in a circle with the boy in his arms. “Railroad Ave....?”
“If you turn right out of the—it’s just down this way a bit and then...oh, never mind. I’ll take you.” Seriously, she thought a little wildly, she should have her head examined for blurting that out without a thought to t
he consequences. “Or,” she amended, “maybe it’s better if Izzy takes you?”
Izzy sniffed and brushed her wet cheeks with the base of her palms. “Or I could take Caylee home with me until you’re finished at the ER,” she offered. “I promise, Mr. Scott, she’ll be fine. If Miss Candy drives you, that is.”
“Canaday,” Kate corrected, shifting uneasily and looking at the sky. Rain was starting to fall. Small droplets splattered on the playground nearby.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Izzy said. “I’ve only heard about you as Miss Candy.”
She shook her head. “They all call me that. And it’s probably better if Caylee doesn’t have to sit in the ER waiting. She must be hungry.”
“You sure?” he asked Kate.
Not at all. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll just get my keys and purse from my classroom. I know an Orthopedic doc at the hospital. Ben Tyler. I’ll give him a call on the way.”
He gave her a tight nod, then turned to his daughter. “Caylee, you’ll be okay with Izzy for a few hours?”
“We’ll have dinner and make cookies, Caylee. Just you and me,” Izzy assured her, but Caylee clung to her father.
She was taller than average, as Cutter was. Long, yet petite, with delicate, pretty features that had his DNA written all over them. Kate’s heart squeezed a little. How she could have missed that in the last two weeks on the playground, when these two children were just children and didn’t yet belong to Finn? To him and to the woman Kate had—over the years—come to think of as She Who Shall Not Be Named.
“But what about Cutter?” Caylee asked, eyes watering. “He might need me.”
“I’ll take good care of him.” Finn bent low and kissed the top of her head. “He’ll need you to sign his cast when he gets home. You’ll be first in line.”
Kate blinked and stared down at her shoes. She would not be swayed by his tenderness with his children. Nor would she revise her feelings for the twins who—through no fault of their own—had once acted as both fulcrum and lever to pry away the life she’d hoped for. They were blameless. The same could never be said of their father.
“It’ll be okay, Cutter. Bye, Miss Candy.” Caylee had her father’s big, hazel eyes and she turned them, to full effect, on Kate now.
She tucked a strand of Caylee’s blonde hair behind her ear and felt something in her chest twist. She was a child who often seemed particularly in need of hugs from the female teachers in school. Could she have been drawn to her all along by the invisible thread that connected them all? “Bye, Caylee,” she whispered. “See you tomorrow on the playground?”
Caylee nodded and started toward the parking lot with Izzy.
Without further adieu, Kate back-peddled toward her classroom and called back to the man she’d left behind, “I’ll be right back.”
He just stood there, watching her go, his eyes locked on hers. So, she did the only thing a good self-preservationist would do. She turned and ran.
A Book Girl’s Guide to Marietta
Love nothing more than snuggling up with a western or cowboy romance? You’ve found the best place to start! A Book Girl’s Guide to Marietta includes everything a book girl needs to know about Tule Publishing’s most popular town for love, Marietta, Montana.
Starting with an exclusive foreword by founding Tule author and USA Today Bestseller CJ Carmichael, you’ll get insight to the history of Marietta, a map and guide to all of the key locations in town, an overview of every series and how their characters are connected, delicious recipes straight from the kitchens of Marietta residents, and much more!
Whether you’ve loved Marietta from the start, or are brand new to town, this guide is a must-have for every Marietta romance reader!
Keep Up with your Favorite Authors and their New Releases
For the latest news from Tule Publishing authors, sign up for our newsletter here or check out our website at TulePublishing.com
About the Author
Barbara Ankrum has a thing for the West and has written both historical and contemporary romances, all set in that magical place. Twice nominated for RWA’s RITA Award, her bestselling books are emotional, sexy rides with a touch of humor. Barbara’s married and raised two children in Southern California, which, in her mind, makes her a native Westerner. Like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.
For the latest news from Tule Publishing, visit our website at TulePublishing.com and sign up for our newsletter here!
A Cowboy to Remember Page 16
