The Valentine Two-Step

by RaeAnne Thayne

She cleared the lump out of her throat so Lucy wouldn’t hear how upset she was. How small and jealous those squeezy hugs always made her feel. “Yeah. I’m still here. I was just thinking.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  She sighed. “I know they like each other. We just have to make them admit it to each other.”

  “How?”

  “I think we’re going to have to do something drastic.”

  “Like what?” Lucy sounded nervous.

  “I read a book once about a girl whose parents were in the middle of a big divorce. She was all mad at them and ran away from home and while they were out looking for her, her mom and dad realized they still loved each other and didn’t want to get a divorce after all. It was really mushy and kind of stupid, but maybe we could try that.”

  Lucy was quiet for a moment. “I don’t want to run away, do you?” she finally asked. “It’s almost January and it’s cold outside. We’ll freeze to death.”

  “We could just pretend to run away and hide out somewhere on the ranch or something. Or we don’t even have to pretend to run away. We could just pretend we got lost. They’d still have to look for us.”

  “It doesn’t seem very nice to trick them like that. Wouldn’t they be awfully mad when they figured it out?”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Dylan snapped. “I don’t see you coming up with any great ideas.” Frustration sharpened her voice, made her sound mean. “I’m starting to think maybe you don’t want this to work. Maybe you don’t really want to be sisters as much as I do.”

  Lucy’s gasp sounded loud and outraged in her ear. For a minute, Dylan thought she was going to cry. “That’s not fair,” Lucy said in a low, hurt voice. “I’ve worked just as hard as you to push them together. It’s not my fault nothing has worked.”

  The hot ball of emotions in her stomach expanded to include shame. “You’re right. I’m really sorry, Luce. I’m just worried. I heard Mom on the phone to SueAnn tonight, and she sounded really depressed. I’m afraid if we don’t come up with something fast to bring them together, we’re going to end up having to move back to California.”

  “Your mom’s having a tough time, isn’t she?” Lucy asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” Dylan said, her voice glum. “I think things are really bad at work. Nobody wants her to treat their animals after what happened to your dad’s horses and the others.”

  Lucy was quiet for a moment. “If you want to run away, I’ll do it with you. We can pack warm clothes and even saddle a couple of horses if you want. It will be okay.”

  “No. I think you’re right. I don’t think it would work. It was a dumb idea. When they found us, they’d both be really mad.”

  “What else can we do, then?”

  “I don’t know. You think about it and I’ll think about it and maybe we can come up with something brilliant between now and Friday, when I’m staying over.”

  After she finally said goodbye and hung up the phone, Dylan lay on her horse-print quilt for a long time, staring out the window at the stars and worrying.

  “Okay. Stand back and watch the master at work.” With his greased fingers held up like a surgeon’s sterile gloves on the way to the operating table, Matt approached the ball of pizza dough on the counter.

  “This is so cool,” Lucy said to Dylan. “He twirls it around just like you see guys do on TV.” The two of them sat on the edge of the kitchen table, eyes wide with expectation.

  “That’s right.” He lowered his voice dramatically. “You’re about to witness a sight many have attempted but few have perfected.”

  “You’re about to see a big show-off.” Cassie rolled her eyes from across the kitchen, where she was chopping, slicing and shredding toppings for the annual Diamond Harte New Year’s Eve Pizza Extravaganza.

  “You’re just jealous because this is one thing in the kitchen I can do better than you.”

  “The only thing,” she muttered, and he grinned.

  He picked up the dough and started tossing it back and forth between his hands, working the ball until it was round and flat. He finished off with a crowd-pleasing toss in the air that earned him two wide-eyed gasps, then caught it handily and transferred it to the pizza peel Cass had sprinkled with cornmeal.

  He presented it to the girls with a flourish. “Here you go. Put whatever you want on it.”

  “That was awesome,” Dylan said. “Do it again!”

  “Sure thing, after we get that one in the oven.”

  The girls took the peel to the other counter where Cass had laid out a whole buffet of toppings from sausage to olives to the artichoke hearts he loved.

  With them out of earshot, he finally had a chance to corner his sister. “So why didn’t you go to the mayor’s party?” he asked sternly. “I thought that was the plan.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I decided I wasn’t in the mood for a big, noisy party after all. I’d much rather be here with the girls.”

  “I can handle the girls. It’s not too late. You’ve still got time to get all dressed up and drive over to the Garretts’. A couple of the ranch hands are going, and they said there’d be a live band and champagne and crab cakes flown in all the way from Seattle.”

  “I’d rather stay here and have pizza and root beer and watch the ball drop in Times Square.” She smiled, but there was that restless edge to it again that filled him with worry.

  She was so distant lately. Distracted, somber. No matter how hard he tried to find out why, she kept assuring him everything was fine.

  He sighed, knowing he had to try again.

  “Cass—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “Don’t start with me, Matt. I didn’t want to go, okay? I enjoy a good party as much as anyone, but I just wasn’t in the mood tonight.”

  “That’s just what my mom said. She didn’t want to go anywhere, either.” Dylan spoke from behind them.

  He turned at the mention of the woman who was always at the edge of his brain. He hadn’t seen Ellie since that morning in the barn three weeks earlier, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her, wondering about her. Brooding about her.

  Questions raced through his mind. How was she? What had she been doing since he saw her last? Why wouldn’t she answer his calls? Did she have a date for New Year’s Eve? He almost asked, then clamped his teeth together so hard they clicked.

  As much as he wanted to know, it wasn’t right to interrogate her kid. To his vast relief, Cassie did it for him.

  “What’s your mom doing tonight?” his sister asked, and he wanted to kiss her.

  “Nothing. She said she was just going to stay home and have a quiet night to herself.”

  Cass frowned. “That’s too bad. I wish I’d known. We could have invited her to have pizza with us.”

  “I’m not sure if she would have come.” Dylan paused, giving him a weird look under her lashes. “She’s pretty sad lately.”

  He stiffened. No way would she have told her kid what went on between them in the barn. So why was Dylan looking at him like the news should mean something to him? Was Ellie upset because of him?

  “Why is she sad?” he asked, trying to pretend he wasn’t desperate to hear the answer.

  Dylan cast another one of those weird looks to Lucy, who quickly looked at the pizza. “I think it’s because we’re moving back to California,” she finally said.

  “You’re what?”

  Dylan winced. “Don’t tell my mom I told you. I don’t think she wants anybody else to know.”

  He felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. As if the whole damn world had suddenly gone crazy. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing’s definite yet. Anyway, I don’t think she’s in the mood for a party, either. That’s why she told the mayor’s wife she wouldn’t be able to go to their house tonight.”

  It was none of his business, he reminded himself. She’d made that crystal clear the other week in the barn. If she wanted to pack up her kid and head f
or Timbuktu, he didn’t have a damn thing to say about it.

  Still, that didn’t stop him from pounding his frustration on the second hapless ball of pizza dough. By the time he was done, anger had begun to replace the shock.

  Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He whipped off the apron Lucy gave him for Father’s Day the year before and turned to Cassie.

  “Can you handle the girls on your own for a while?”

  “Sure.” She looked at him curiously. “Where are you going?”

  The last thing he wanted to do was tell his little sister he planned to go have a few hard words with Ellie Webster. He could just imagine the speculative look she’d give him. “I just need to, uh, run an errand.”

  She studied him for a moment, then smiled broadly. “Sure. No problem. And while you’re there, why don’t you ask Ellie if she wants to come out for pizza? I’m sure there’ll be plenty left.”

  “Who said anything about Ellie?” he asked stiffly.

  Cass grinned. “Nobody. Nobody at all. What was I thinking? Wherever you’re going, drive carefully. You know what kind of idiots take to the road on New Year’s Eve.”

  Still grumbling to himself about little sisters who thought they knew everything—and usually did—Matt bundled into his coat and cowboy hat and went out into the cold.

  Well, this was a fine New Year’s Eve, sitting alone and eating a frozen dinner. How pathetic could she get?

  Quit complaining, Ellie chided herself. You had offers.

  Several of them, in fact. SueAnn wanted her to go to Idaho Falls to dinner and a show with her and Jerry. Ginny Garrett, whose pet collie she’d fixed a few months ago, had invited her to what she deduced was the big social gala of the year in Salt River, the party she and her husband were throwing. And Lucy and Dylan had invited her out to the ranch to share homemade pizza and a video.

  Of the three, the girls’ party sounded like the most fun. Unfortunately, it was also the invitation she was least likely to accept. She couldn’t imagine anything more grueling than spending the evening with Matt, trying to pretend they were only casual friends, that she hadn’t come a heartbeat away from making love with him just a few weeks ago.

  Despite putting plenty of energy into it, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since that morning. About the way his eyes had darkened with desire, the way his rough hands caressed her skin, the soft words that had completely demolished her defenses.

  The way his lack of faith in her had broken her heart.

  She’d been right to turn him down, to put this distance between them. She wasn’t having much luck falling out of love with him, but at least she couldn’t go down any deeper when she didn’t have anything to do with him.

  Anyway, spending New Year’s Eve alone wasn’t so bad. With the exception of the frozen dinner, the evening looked promising. She had already taken a nice long soak in the tub using the new strawberry-scented bath beads Dylan had given her for Christmas and put on the comfortable new thermal silk pajamas she’d treated herself to. She’d been lucky enough to find a station on the radio playing sultry jazz and big band music, she was going to pop a big batch of buttered popcorn later, and she had a good mystery to curl up with.

  What else did a woman need?

  She turned up the gas fireplace so that flames licked and danced cozily, then watched the fake logs for a moment with only a little regret for the real thing. Although she might have preferred a cheery little applewood blaze, with the crackle and hiss and heavenly aroma, she certainly didn’t mind forgoing the mess and work of chopping, splitting and hauling wood.

  After a moment, she settled onto the couch, tucking her feet under her. She’d just turned the page when the doorbell rang right in the middle of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.”

  Marking her place, she went to the door, then felt her jaw sag at the man she found on the front porch.

  “Matt! What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be digging in to a big slab of pizza right about now?”

  “I came to talk some sense into you,” he growled.

  She stared at him, noting for the first time the firm set of his jaw and the steely glitter in his eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. Can we do this inside? It’s freezing out here.”

  Without waiting for her answer—or for her to ask what it was, exactly, he wanted to do inside—he thrust past her into the house, where he loomed in the small living room like a tomcat trapped in a dollhouse, getting ready to pounce.

  She closed the door carefully behind him, shutting out the icy blast of air, then turned to face him. He was obviously furious about something, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what she might have done this time to set him off.

  His glower deepened. “I can’t believe you’re just going to run away. I thought you had more grit than that.”

  She opened her mouth, but he didn’t wait for her answer. “Isn’t that just like a city girl?” he went on angrily. “At the first sign of trouble, you take off running and leave the mess behind for everybody else to clean up. Dammit, you can’t leave. You’ve got obligations here. A life. Your kid deserves better than to be shuttled around like some kind of Gypsy just because you don’t have the gumption to see things through.”

  She stiffened and returned his glare. “In the first place, don’t you tell me what my daughter deserves. In the second, do you mind telling me what in blazes you’re talking about?”

  For the first time since he’d stomped into her house, he looked a little unsure. “About you leaving. Dylan said you’re moving back to California.”

  “Dylan has a big mouth,” she muttered.

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She was seriously considering it. Not that she wanted to—the very idea made her stomach hurt, her heart weep. But she couldn’t keep her practice open without any patients. “I haven’t made a firm decision yet and I probably won’t for a few months yet. But even if I were leaving tomorrow, what business would it be of yours?”

  He shifted his weight. “I just don’t want you to make a big mistake. I know how much your practice means to you,” he went on. “It wouldn’t be right for you to give it up without a fight.”

  “Without a fight?” She hissed out a breath. “I feel as if I’ve been doing nothing but fighting for six months. Each time I treat an animal I wonder if it’s the last one. Every time I pay a bill, I wonder if I’ll be able to pay it the next month. At some point, I have to face the fact that I can’t keep waging a losing battle.”

  “Things will get better. You’ve just had a few setbacks.”

  “Right. I believe that’s what Custer said to his men halfway through the battle of Little Big Horn.”

  “Is this because of the outbreak?”

  “Partly. Funny thing,” she said pointedly, “but the rest of the ranchers around here don’t seem as convinced as I am that I wasn’t responsible.”

  He looked uncomfortable, and she regretted sounding so bitchy. “As I said,” she went on before he could respond, “although I’m considering leaving, I haven’t made any final decision yet. I don’t know why Dylan would have told you otherwise.”

  “I think she’s worried about you. She said you were sad.”

  A child shouldn’t have to worry about anything more earthshaking than whether she’d finished her homework. She hated that Dylan had spent even a moment fretting about her mother, about the future.

  For that reason, if nothing else, maybe she needed to give up this selfish desire for autonomy and take her daughter back to California, where she could make a safe and secure living, even if she found it suffocating.

  She also hated that Dylan had blabbed to Matt about her melancholy. She didn’t want to talk about any of it, so she turned the subject to him.

  “I can’t figure you out.”

  “What’s to figure out?”

  “Why would you pass up homemade pizza on New Year’s Eve t
o come give me a lecture about perseverance? You don’t even like me.”

  “That’s not true. I like you plenty. Too much,” he muttered under his breath.

  Before she could figure out how to answer that growled admission, he went on. “I care about you. When Dylan told me you were moving to California, I was furious.”

  His gaze locked with hers, his blue eyes burning with emotions she couldn’t even begin to decipher, and he reached for her fingers. “All I could think about was how much I would miss you if you left.”

  She drew in a shaky breath. “Matt—”

  “I know, it’s crazy. I don’t understand it myself. But I haven’t been able to think about anything else except how right, how completely perfect, you felt in my arms. And how I want you there again.”

  She closed her eyes, helpless against the tumble of emotions cascading through her. Listening to this big, gruff man speak words of such sweetness, words she knew would not come easily for him, affected her more than a hundred love songs, a thousand poems.

  How could she ever have been stupid enough to think she could lock her heart against him? She had no defenses against a man like Matt Harte. He might seem arrogant and authoritative most of the time, but he cared enough about her to drive out on a snowy night to try to prevent her from making what he considered a grave mistake.

  Why was she still fighting against him when she ached to be with him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life?

  She loved him.

  The sweetness of it seeped through her like hard rain on thirsty earth, collecting in all the crevasses life had carved into her soul. She loved this man, with his rough hands and his slow smile and his soft heart.

  When she opened her eyes, she found him watching her warily, as if he expected her to kick him out of her house any minute.

  “I’ve thought of it, too,” she answered, barely above a whisper.

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “What else can we do?”

  With a deep breath for courage, she stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his neck and lifted her mouth for his kiss.

  For just a moment after she stepped forward and lifted her mouth to his, Matt couldn’t move, frozen with shock and a fast, thorny spike of desire.