The Daddy Audition

“I’m Jack. Jack Crenshaw.” Should he insist she call him Mr. Crenshaw? The idea made him feel old. He stood and offered Annie his hand. “Why don’t we go find your mother now?”

“Will you ask her if I can have a puppy?”

“I think you need to listen to your mother. If she tells you you can’t have a puppy, maybe you need to wait.”

Annie stuck out her lower lip, and Jack sensed tears threatening. “I tell you what,” he said. “I have a young dog. Maybe your mom would let you visit and play with it.” He crossed his fingers that this would be all right with Mom. He could always ask his secretary to supervise a brief playdate in the meadow behind his office. Nugget would love it.

“Anne Marie Olney! What do you think you’re doing?”

Jack looked up and caught his breath at the sight of Tanya striding toward him. Her long hair billowing around her, her cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling with anger, she resembled a painting he’d once seen of one of the Furies, or some other avenging goddess. With a jolt he realized the girl he’d always thought of as pretty had grown into a very beautiful woman.

“Hello, Tanya,” he said, keeping his expression even, revealing none of the inner turmoil the sight of her caused.

“What are you doing with my little girl?” Her voice was even, but her eyes were fixed on his hand holding Annie’s.

He let go of the child, guilt heating his face, though he knew he’d done nothing wrong. “I found her wandering in the crowd.” He looked down at Annie. Her tears had dried, but if looks could kill, Tanya would be seriously wounded right now. “She seems upset.”

The guilt card was in Tanya’s hand now. “She wants a p-u-p-p-y,” she said. “That’s really not possible right now.”

“Mom, you’re spelling!” Annie protested. “I’m not a baby. I know you’re talking about the puppy.”

Tanya knelt in front of her daughter. She smoothed back Annie’s hair, then took a tissue from her purse and began cleaning her face. She moved with all the efficiency of an experienced mother, but also with great tenderness. That gentleness, combined with the way her jeans stretched across her shapely thighs and the wavy fall of her hair across her shoulders, made Jack feel a little unsteady. The stuck-up city woman he’d written off last night had morphed into this embodiment of everything feminine—sensuous and nurturing and amazingly alluring.

“It’s really not fair that you can’t have a puppy.” Tanya spoke to her daughter in a low, reassuring tone. “It’s not fair that you had to leave California and move here and live with your grandparents, either, but that’s how things are right now.”

Annie sniffed. “I don’t mind living here with Grandma and Granddaddy. I like it here.”

“They love having you live with them. They love you very much. We all do. And one day, I promise you we’ll have a dog. But not right now.” She turned to Jack.

“Thanks for finding her. I didn’t mean to snap at you just now—I was a little upset when she ran away and I lost sight of her in the crowd.”

“I understand.” He admired the way she’d handled a tough situation, but hesitated to say so. He didn’t want her to think he was trying to flatter his way back into her life. Not that she’d welcome him anyway. After all, he’d had the audacity to make something of himself by building the condos she so despised.

A voice over the loudspeaker saved him from having to say anything. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big round of applause for local favorites, Moose Juice.”

Zephyr, who’d donned a rhinestone-studded leather jacket over his ripped jeans and T-shirt, strode to center stage and strummed a rapid-fire series of loud guitar chords. “Here’s a new song I wrote in honor of the Humane Society fund-raiser—‘I’m stayin’ home with my dog because he thinks I’m a better person than you do.’”

Bryan spotted Jack standing with Tanya and joined them. “I thought you were going to get some tools to help us,” he said.

“Sorry. I got sort of sidetracked.”

Bryan glanced at Tanya and grinned. “I understand completely.”

“It was Annie,” Jack protested. “She ran into me and…”

“Shh! I’m trying to hear the song,” Tanya chided.

Jack leaned closer to Bryan and spoke in a whisper. “What did you do about the stage?”

“We just laid the boards up there. It’ll be okay.”

Jack eyed the makeshift plywood bridge between the small stage and the borrowed flatbed trailer. The board dipped in the middle where someone had affixed a microphone stand with crisscrossing layers of duct tape. “It’ll probably be okay if nobody stands on it,” he said.

But his words were drowned out by the chorus—something about a woman treating a man like a dog.

He glanced at Tanya. Annie had stopped crying and now snuggled in Tanya’s arms. Tanya balanced her daughter on one jutted hip, seemingly intent on the music.

As Jack was about to turn away, she looked over and he stared into the same blue eyes that had taught him everything about the joy and pain of first true love. But there was more in this gaze than memories. The woman that looked at him now had known pain of her own. She’d done and seen things about which he had no clue.

He saw no bitterness in her now, though he thought he recognized regret, and maybe a bit of the hope that had so fired her spirit when they were younger.

He felt the impact of that gaze deep in his chest. He knew he couldn’t let Tanya walk away from him again, not before he’d had a chance to solve the mystery of what had really happened between them. Had she gone to Hollywood to flee him and the life he offered here, as he’d once decided, or had she been searching for something there she could find nowhere else?

More important, had she found whatever it was she’d been looking for?

He started toward her, intending to suggest they find somewhere to talk quietly, but just as he reached her, the song reached its climax. Zephyr leaped into the air and came crashing down on—and through—the plywood bridge.

Chapter Three

While the crowd rushed forward to pull Zephyr from the wreckage of splintered boards and equipment, Tanya decided this would be a good time to make her escape. Annie had momentarily forgotten about the puppy and Jack was distracted by all the commotion.

She’d panicked earlier when Annie had disappeared into the crowd. In the crush of people attending the festival, Tanya had quickly lost sight of her daughter. Visions of Annie running unheeded into traffic or being stolen away by some pervert had crowded Tanya’s mind. She’d reminded herself this was Crested Butte, Colorado, not downtown Los Angeles, and Annie was perfectly safe.

But such reassurances had done little to quell her rising fear. Crested Butte wasn’t the same sleepy place it had been when she was a child; the world had discovered the town, so who knew what dangers had followed?

Only when she’d spotted Annie with Jack had she relaxed. Her first reaction upon seeing them together had been relief that Annie wasn’t with a stranger. Annoyance soon followed. Why had Annie run to Jack of all people?

Then, as Tanya drew closer to Jack, unexpected longing and regret had washed over her. She’d watched for a brief moment, unnoticed by man or child, as he crouched, his head close to the little girl’s. This was the sort of snapshot she’d once pictured for her family album. Of all the things she wanted to give Annie, a complete family with a loving father was the one wish that had eluded her.

Jack might not be Annie’s father, but at this moment he certainly looked the part. An expression of gentle solicitude transformed the intimidating, powerful man of Thursday evening into a knight errant whose strength lay in his gentleness. The boy who had taught her everything about love had become a man who embodied every woman’s fantasy—he had good looks, brains, a close family and a successful business.

He was a man who had once known her—both her body and her mind—better than anyone.

But those days were long past. Her time in Hollywood had taught her that fantasy wasn’t real. She’d returned to Crested Butte determined to focus on what was genuine and important—family and security and the kind of life she’d once abandoned, but that now seemed the most valuable thing in the world.

“Jack said I could come play with his puppy,” Annie said.

“His puppy?” Tanya blinked at her daughter. “Jack has a puppy?”

“Yes. And he said I could come play with it. Can I, Mom? Please?”

Unprepared to be on the losing side of yet another argument with her daughter, yet equally unwilling to agree to a situation that might involve being alone with Jack, even with her daughter and his dog as de facto chaperones, Tanya hedged. “We’ll see,” she said.

She didn’t trust her emotions right now where Jack was concerned. She’d left town determined to make a name for herself in Hollywood—to make everyone, and most of all, herself—proud of her. She’d wanted more than the little world her hometown had been able to offer her and had had to do a lot of maturing to see how precious that world really was.

Here she was now, home, if not with her tail tucked between her legs, certainly with a lot of tarnish on the golden-girl image she’d lived with most of her growing-up years. It had been tough enough admitting to her parents that she’d failed to realize her dreams; the thought of explaining herself to Jack was too much to bear.

BY THE TIME JACK had helped deliver Zephyr into the hands of the Gunnison County paramedics and pitched in to clean up the mess, it was well past noon. He snagged an extra-large chicken burrito from the Teocali Tamale booth and took it back to his office. He ate at his desk while he reviewed the specs for the condo project, but he had trouble keeping his mind on his work. Columns of figures kept morphing into the image of a certain shapely blonde.