The Lawman Lassoes A Family (Conard County: The Next Generation Book 24) (Contemporary Romance)

by Rachel Lee

  She bit her lip, then realized she didn’t want to be alone, even if they didn’t speak a word. “There’s room on the swing.”

  He crossed the yards and sat beside her on the swing. It shifted a little beneath his weight, then he started pushing them gently, giving her a break. “Krys seemed to have a great time today.”

  “She sure did. She wants to go back tomorrow. She’s mad that we had to wash off the face paint.”

  He laughed quietly. “As I recall, there wasn’t much left.”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you taking her?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. She wants another pony ride, too. I’m in one of those mixed-up-mother states. The fair only comes once a year, she’ll only be four once, but I don’t want to spoil her.”

  He sighed. “I’m no help with that. Utter lack of experience. One thought, though, if you won’t be offended.”

  Vicki tensed a little. “Fire away.”

  “You matter, too. If you don’t want to go tomorrow, you shouldn’t have to. Just sayin’.”

  It was true. “I just don’t know. I look back over the past year, and I wonder if I overcompensated with her.”

  “To some extent you probably had to. I mean, you became the only parent. But honestly, she doesn’t strike me as a little tyrant, so whatever you did couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “Thank you.”

  The swing continued to rock; the breeze ruffled the hair at the nape of Vicki’s neck, chilling her a bit. She pulled the afghan up until she was wrapped to her chin.

  Dan was a comfortable companion. Not in any way did he make her feel it was necessary to chat. The night’s quiet settled into her, disturbed only rarely by a passing car.

  “I had a great time today, too,” she said after a while. “Thanks so much for the treat.”

  “My pleasure.” He paused, then drove straight to the heart of her worry with unerring precision. “She’s afraid of losing someone else, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, God.” Vicki twisted until she could make out his profile, shadowy though it was beneath the porch roof. “You noticed.”

  “Kinda hard not to. Has she been doing a lot of that?”

  “One other time, when we first got here. She asked me not to go away.”

  He swore quietly.

  “My sentiments exactly. I guess Hal’s death had a bigger impact than she showed before. Of course, it had to. I mean, her daddy never came home anymore. But after a few weeks she stopped asking, and seemed to accept it. Now this. I don’t know if she’s been feeling this all along and just didn’t know how to tell me, or if this is something new because of the move. If it’s the move, I’m going to hate myself.”

  Dan shifted closer until he could put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s gotta be rough. I mean, does she even begin to understand death?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not that I didn’t try. It’s not that I didn’t tell her he wouldn’t be coming back, with all the sugarcoated stories about going home to heaven. I didn’t lie to her, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I didn’t think you had. It’s just that she’s so young. People my age have trouble comprehending it.”

  “Sorry,” Vicki said. Dan’s arm felt good around her, a friendly kind of support, and she needed support right now. She was truly worried about her daughter.

  And about herself. Despite all her promises, she was letting another lawman into her life. Any convenient amnesia she had been suffering the past couple weeks had been broken by his appearance at the fair. A gun and a badge, two things that now had only bad associations for her.

  “You know, I thought I got used to Hal being a cop. I lived in an alternate universe.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Oh, I convinced myself that while bad things happened, they weren’t going to happen to him. After all, most cops get to retirement without ever drawing their guns. Most never get hurt at all in any serious way. It was only when he got home and the relief washed through me that I realized how tense I’d been. How edgy.”

  Dan tightened his arm briefly, just briefly, but didn’t say anything. Letting her talk if she wanted to. He was good at that.

  “If there’s a level of denial deep enough, I never found it,” she said slowly. “You have to believe that everything’s going to be fine, but at some level you don’t quite make it. Or at least I didn’t.”

  “I pretty much went into denial for a while after we got Callie’s diagnosis,” Dan murmured. “Somehow we were going to cure her. I’m not sure I didn’t make it harder on her. I didn’t want to accept the truth. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes not.”

  “Yeah.” Vicki hesitated, wondering how much closer she wanted to get to this man. Knowing more about him would probably make it worse, but she plunged in, anyway. He was her friend, after all, even if he could never be more than that. “It must have been just terrible, Dan.”

  “It was.” A bald statement. “Took me a while to accept it. But eventually, I realized that even with all the anguish and pain at the end, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss loving Callie.”

  “What are you saying?” Vicki felt a flicker of anger, as if he were scolding her in some way. She resented that. But his next words calmed her again.

  “Only that I know how hard it is. We each have to find our own ways to cope. I found mine. You’ll find yours. Maybe you have. And then there’s Krystal. I can’t imagine trying to do what you’re doing. Just when life seems to freeze in a pain so consuming that all you want is to die, you have to live for someone else. Put on a good face. Be upbeat. At least I got to wallow for a while.”

  “Did wallowing help?”

  “I don’t know. I just did it. Hid in the apartment, neglected to take care of myself, damn near a cliché.” He laughed quietly. “I look back at it now and wonder if I was doing what I thought I should be doing. Who knows? I just know that for a while I’d wake up, turn over, see the bed beside me empty, and I’d pound the pillow, hating the fact that I had to face another day. It was hard on the pillows.”

  Vicki couldn’t help herself, because she felt her heart reach out to his pain, the same pain she had known. She leaned into him a bit and rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. His arm around her tightened a little, like a hug. Nothing to alarm her.

  “I pounded a few pillows, too,” she told him. “Once—and I’m ashamed to admit this—while Krys was at day school, I stood in the kitchen and smashed every single dinner plate we’d gotten as wedding presents.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Not a whole lot. I cussed myself out the whole time I cleaned up, worried that Krys might step on a pottery shard. When she came home that day, I was on my hands and knees using damp paper towels to be sure I got everything.”

  He squeezed her again. “Wow.”

  “Then I put on the bright face and we went out and bought new dishes. Very different ones. She was too young to even wonder about it. I did any number of stupid things at first. Well, they look stupid now. At the time I wasn’t questioning myself very much. Maybe it was just expressing the inexpressible.”

  “Yeah. I hear you.”

  “And now this with Krys. Man, I hope it wasn’t a stupid decision to move here.”

  “God, I hope not,” he answered. Then, astonishing her, he caught her chin in his hand and tilted her face up. She looked at him in surprise, trying to read his shadowed face, wishing there was some light. But then he bent his head and kissed her.

  This time it was no experimental touching of lips. This time his mouth was firm against hers, and when she didn’t immediately resist, he ran his tongue across her lips, asking for entry.

  She should have refused, but the fire he’d ignited with the first kissed leaped to renewed life, filling her with all the hungers and yearnings that life brought. She was alive. He was alive. Surely they were entitled to this little bit of pleasure?

  His tongue dipped inside her mouth, teasing hers, learning her
contours, finding ways to make shivers pass through her. Just a kiss, just a simple little kiss, but it seemed as momentous as a huge earthquake. She leaned into him, forgetting everything but the need he had awakened. She wanted him. If her arm hadn’t been tangled in the afghan, she’d have wound it around his neck to pull him closer.

  But then, with apparent reluctance, he withdrew. Vicki didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want reality to come crashing back. For just a minute, he had taught her that she could be free, alive and vibrant again.

  He ran his fingertips lightly across her lips, then wrapped his other arm around her, holding her close as he pushed the swing to and fro.

  “Now that,” he said after a while, “was no experiment.”

  No, it hadn’t been. The night seemed alive, suddenly, as if the darkness held promise. The whisper of the breeze in the trees felt like a song echoing the sensations he had evoked in her. Maybe he was the wrong guy, but it didn’t matter. She’d just taken a step forward for the first time since Hal.

  The front door opened slowly. Immediately, the two of them jerked apart.

  “Mommy?” Krys sounded barely awake.

  “I’m right here.” She hoped her daughter didn’t notice how breathless she sounded. “Do you need something?”

  “You were gone.” The answer that came was heart-wrenching. Bare feet padded on the wooden slats of the porch floor and soon the little girl in her nightgown stood in front of them. Before Vicki could move, Dan reached out and lifted Krystal, placing her between them. Vicki pulled the afghan free and wrapped it around her.

  “You should be in bed, sweetie. I’m not going anywhere. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I dreamed a monster was chasing you.”

  Vicki stroked the girl’s hair gently. “Well, you can see he didn’t get me. Want me to put you back to bed?”

  “No.”

  Vicki looked over Krys’s head at Dan. He seemed to meet her gaze.

  “That was a scary dream,” he said. “We’ll keep the monsters away, okay?”

  Then, without a word, he wrapped mother and daughter in his arms and held them close. Krys snuggled right in, and the swing kept moving, rocking to and fro.

  *

  Reality was biting Vicki in the butt again. There was no longer any question in her mind that the move to Conard City had disturbed and awakened her daughter’s deepest fears. Fears she had never expressed before. Maybe now she was old enough to speak them, but Vicki wondered just how much of a silent hell Krystal had been going through even as her mother had fought to make their days as normal as possible.

  But what could she do now? Moving back to Austin would just create more problems. Krys was already attached to Dan, and Vicki felt uneasy about it. Dan was a neighbor. He might be around for a long time or he might choose to go away. He certainly wasn’t bound to her daughter by anything except his friendship with Lena. And perhaps now by his friendship with Vicki.

  Of all possible men for Krystal to attach herself to, she’d chosen the worst, a cop. A man who might go off to work one day and never return. God, what if Vicki had walked her daughter into another nightmare?

  Krys had fallen asleep again, snuggled between the two of them.

  Dan spoke, little more than a whisper. “Want me to carry her to bed?”

  Vicki nearly refused, wanting him no more intimately involved with her or her daughter, but when she looked down, even in the poor light she could see that Krystal’s hand had knotted itself into Dan’s sweatshirt. Hanging on for dear life.

  Whatever was going on here, she didn’t want to make it worse. She looked at Dan and nodded.

  He scooped the girl into his arms before he rose. He didn’t try to take the blanket away, but kept her bundled in it.

  “Lead the way,” he murmured.

  Krys made a small noise but didn’t wake, merely curled more tightly into Dan.

  Vicki’s heart felt as if it were being torn in two. The child’s trust in him overwhelmed her and worried her. Maybe it was time to take Krys to a psychologist. She clearly had anxieties Vicki couldn’t begin to imagine how to soothe.

  Dan eased Krys down onto her bed, leaving her snuggled in the afghan. She sighed and rolled onto her side, sticking her thumb into her mouth.

  “I can let myself out,” he whispered.

  “I need to lock up.”

  “I have a key.” Surprising her, he pulled her into a quick, tight hug. “I’m off tomorrow. I’ll see you.”

  Then he slipped from the room with amazing quiet for a man so big. Vicki sagged onto the Boston rocker, determined to be there if Krys woke again.

  But it left her an awful lot of time to sit in the dark, pondering her past mistakes and wondering if she was making a bunch of new ones.

  Nothing about life seemed simple anymore. Everything had turned into a tangle of potential complications. But maybe it had always been that way. Maybe before, she’d just been too happy and secure to notice it.

  Still rocking, concerned about leaving Krystal alone, Vicki slowly fell asleep, remembering the peace of a group hug on the front porch swing.

  Chapter Six

  Sleeping in a hard wooden rocking chair all night left Vicki aching almost as soon as she stirred. Every muscle, every joint protested.

  Then she heard voices downstairs: Kystal, Lena and Dan. Krystal mostly. Vicki recognized that tone. Her daughter wanted something. Vicki had to get down there before someone gave in to her.

  When she stood, she groaned. Twisting and bending, she tried to ease the kinks out. What she needed more than anything was fresh clothes and a shower, but she decided that would have to wait. First she had to find out what was up with Krys.

  Good heavens, it was already past nine. The alarm clock beside Krys’s bed scolded her. She must have been more tired than she realized. Whatever, she had to get downstairs now, even if she looked like a witch, with tangled hair and rumpled clothes. Some things couldn’t wait, primarily a four-year-old who sounded like she was on a campaign.

  Vicki reached the bottom of the stairs in time to hear Dan say, “That’s up to your mother, Krys. She’s in charge.”

  Thank goodness for that, Vicki thought, feeling a flicker of amusement. She paused long enough to gather her hair into a tighter ponytail and rub some of the sleep out of her eyes. Then she walked into the kitchen, to find Dan, Lena and Krys gathered around the big round table having breakfast.

  “Good morning,” the two adults said.

  Krys chirped, “Hi, Mommy.”

  Vicki returned the greetings while she poured herself some coffee. Dan pulled out a chair for her. Today’s breakfast seemed to be sweet rolls from a bakery, Krys’s inevitable Cheerios and milk. Krys had a mustache from the milk, but no one seemed to care.

  “I must look awful,” Vicki remarked. “I need a shower and a change.”

  “We’ll forgive you,” Lena said. “You want something else to eat?”

  “This is fine.” Finally, she glanced at Dan and saw him smiling as he looked at Krys. Vicki sensed he was enjoying something.

  But all of a sudden she remembered their kiss and hug last night on the porch swing, and both warmth and desire washed through her. The man had given her and her daughter comfort, but he’d also given her something else. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  “I’m not s’posed to bug you,” Krys said, a bit of milk dripping from her chin. “Dan said.”

  Vicki propped her own chin on her palm. “But you’re going to be a little bug, anyway.”

  Krys grinned.

  With her free hand, Vicki grabbed a napkin and wiped her daughter’s mouth and chin. “Next time you do the wiping.”

  “’Kay.”

  “So were you bugging Aunt Lena and Dan?”

  Another grin, but no answer. Vicki looked at Dan and Lena. “Well?”

  “She wants to go to the fair again today,” Lena said.

  “Pony rides,” Dan added. “Oh, and face paint.”


  “I see.” Vicki looked at her daughter. “You had that much fun, kiddo?”

  “Yup.”

  Vicki could almost see the desire to plead written all over the girl’s face, but so far she was heeding Dan’s stricture not to bug her mother. Interesting. The child must be ready to explode.

  Vicki pretended to think about it, although in truth she was going to say yes. Krys had enjoyed it, the fair wouldn’t happen again for a year, and it seemed churlish to deny her. “First,” she said finally, “I need to take a shower and change. That rocking chair was not a comfortable bed.”

  Krys surprised her. Milky mouth and all, she jumped down from her chair, then wormed her way onto Vicki’s lap. “You stayed,” she said simply.

  “Yes.” Vicki barely got the simple word out as her throat tightened painfully and a weight seemed to settle in her chest. So many kinds of sorrow, she thought helplessly. Maybe the biggest one now evidenced in Krys’s insecurity.

  Bowing her head, she pressed her face into Krys’s silky hair, inhaling her daughter’s wonderful, familiar scent, hugging her tightly. “Do you wish we’d stayed in Austin?”

  “No!”

  The vehemence of the answer surprised Vicki. She looked down and Krystal looked up at her. “I like it here.”

  Well, of course, she thought, as Krystal slid off her lap and went back to eating her cereal. Dan and Peggy and Lena and the fair...it seemed her daughter was sprouting new connections rapidly. But still, she had climbed out of bed from a nightmare that something was chasing her mother.

  Sipping her coffee, Vicki watched her daughter eat, once again amazed by the complexity of a young child. Finally, she ate a piece of roll to tide her over, and excused herself to go clean up.

  The shower washed away the last stiffness from her body. For the first time in forever, she didn’t try to brush the curls out of her dark hair. Let them come. It would probably look like a wild cloud, and she was overdue for a cut, but today she just decided to let it do its own thing.

  Another step, she thought as she once again dressed in jeans, and a lightweight, blue polo shirt. At least her Austin casual clothes fit in here. Soon it would be time to think about getting some serious winter clothing, she supposed. While they had an occasional touch of winter in Austin, she was certain it was nothing like Wyoming.