Outlaw Hartes: The Valentine Two-Step / Cassidy Harte And The Comeback Kid

“Give me a break,” he muttered. “I did my best. You’re lucky you got anything but cold cereal and frozen pizza.”

He’d been twenty-two when their parents died in a rollover on a slippery mountain road. That first year had been the toughest time of his life. Grieving for his parents and their sudden death, trying to comfort Cassie, who had been a lost and frightened thirteen-year-old, doing his damnedest to keep Jess out of juvenile detention.

Trying to keep the ranch and the family together when he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

It had been a rough few years, but they had survived and were closer for it.

“At least we had to only go through Matt’s attempts to poison us for a while.” Jess grinned. “Then Cassie decided to save us all and learned to cook.”

“I had no choice,” she retorted. “It was a matter of survival. I figured one of us had to learn unless we wanted to die of food poisoning or starve to death. Matt was too busy with the ranch and you were too busy raising hell. That left me.”

Jesse immediately bristled, gearing up for a sharp retort, and Matt gave a resigned sigh. Cassie always knew how to punch his buttons. Jesse’s wild, hard-drinking days after their parents died were still a sore point with him, but that never stopped Cass from rubbing his nose in it.

Before he could step in to head trouble off, Ellie did it for him. “Well, you learned to cook very well,” she assured Cassie, with an anxious look toward Jess’s glare. “You’ll have to give me the recipe for your stuffing. I tend to over-cook it. Is that sausage I taste in there?”

She prattled on in a way that seemed completely unlike her, and it was only after she had successfully turned the conversation completely away from any trouble spots that he realized she had stepped in to play peacemaker as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life.

Had she done it on purpose? He wondered again about her background. She hadn’t mentioned brothers or sisters, but that didn’t mean she had none. What had happened when she was seven, the year after which she said she’d moved around so much?

He wanted badly to know, just as he was discovering he wanted to know everything about her.

* * *

“Come on, Ellie. It’s our turn to watch football.”

She looked at the dishes scattered across the table. “I can help clean up….”

“No way. The men get to do it—it’s tradition. That’s why I try to make the kitchen extra messy for them.” She smiled sweetly at her brothers. “I think I used just about every single dish in the house.”

Matt and Jesse groaned in unison. Unmoved, Cassie stood up. “Have fun, boys.”

With guilt tweaking her, Ellie let Matt’s sister drag her from the dining room, Dylan and Lucy following behind.

Cassie led her into a huge great room dominated by a towering river-rock fireplace. A big-screen TV and a pair of couches took up one corner, and a pool table and a couple of video games jostled for space in the other. As large as the room was, though, it was comfortable. Lived in, with warm-toned furniture and shelves full of books.

The girls immediately rushed to the pool table, and Cassidy plopped down on one of the plump, tweedy couches. “Boy, it feels good to sit down. I had to get up at four to put the turkey in, and I haven’t stopped since.”

“I’m sorry if I made extra work for you.”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done anyway, and it’s wonderful to have somebody else with a Y chromosome at the table besides Lucy!”

Cassie picked up the remote. “So which game do you want to watch? We have blue against red—” she flipped the channel “—or black against silver.”

“I’m not crazy about football,” she confessed.

The other woman sent her a conspiratorial grin. “Me, neither. I hate it, actually. When you spend your whole life around macho men, you don’t really need to waste your time watching them on TV. Let’s see if we can find something better until the boys come in and start growling at us to change it back.”

She flipped the remote, making funny comments about every station she passed until stumbling on an old Alfred Hitchcock film with Jimmy Stewart.

“Here we go. Rear Window. This is what I call real entertainment. Could Grace Kelly dress or what?”

Ellie settled on the couch, the seductive warmth from the fireplace combining with the turkey put her into a pleasant haze.

She couldn’t remember enjoying a meal more. The food had been delicious. And with the exception of the strange tension between her and Matt, the company had been great, too.

Their banter and teasing and memories of other holidays had been a revelation. This was what a family was all about, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was a part of it.

One strange thing, though. For all their reminiscing, they hadn’t brought up Lucy’s mother one single time. It was almost as if the woman had never existed. Come to think of it, nobody had ever mentioned the mystery woman to Ellie.

“What happened to Lucy’s mother?”

She didn’t realize she had asked the blunt question out loud until Cassidy’s relaxed smile froze, and she shot a quick glance at her niece. Ellie winced, appalled at herself. When would she ever learn to think before she opened her big mouth? At least neither of the girls was paying any attention to them, Ellie saw with relief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quickly. “That was terribly rude of me. It just slipped out. It’s none of my business, really. You don’t have to answer.”

“No. It’s just a…a raw subject.” She looked at her niece again, and Ellie thought she saw guilt flicker in her blue eyes, then she flashed a bitter smile. She lowered her voice so the girls couldn’t hear. “Melanie ran off with my…with one of our ranch hands. Lucy wasn’t even three months old.”

Ellie’s jaw dropped. She tried to picture Matt in the role of abandoned husband and couldn’t. Her heart twisted with sympathy when she imagined him taking care of a newborn on his own—late-night feedings, teething and all.

What kind of woman could simply abandon her own child like that? She thought of those first few months after Dylan was born, when she had been on her own and so very frightened about what the future might hold for the two of them.

Despite her fear, she had been completely in awe of the precious gift she’d been handed. Some nights she would lie awake in that grimy two-room apartment, just staring at Dylan’s tiny, squishy features, listening to her breathe and wondering what she had done to deserve such a miracle.

She couldn’t even comprehend a woman who would walk away from something so amazing.

Or from a man like Matt Harte.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, knowing the words were terribly inadequate.

Cassidy shrugged and looked toward the girls. From the raw emotion exposed on her features like a winter-bare tree branch, Ellie had the odd suspicion there was more to the story than losing a sister-in-law.

“It was a long time ago,” Cassie said quietly. “Anyway, Matt’s much better off without her. He’d be the first to tell you that. Melanie hated it here. She hated the ranch, she hated Wyoming, she hated being a mother. I was amazed she stuck around as long as she did.”

Why on earth would he marry a woman who hated ranch life? Ellie wondered. For a man like Matt who so obviously belonged here—on this land he loved so much—it must have been a bitter rejection seeing it scorned by the woman he married.

She must have been very beautiful for him to marry her in the first place and bring her here. Ellie didn’t even want to think about why the thought depressed her so much.

Cassie quickly turned the conversation to the Hitchcock movie, but even after Ellie tried to shift her attention to the television, her mind refused to leave thoughts of Matt and the wife who had deserted him with a tiny daughter.

As much as she hated bringing up such an obviously painful topic, she had to admit she was grateful for the insight it provided into a man she was discovering she wanted to understand.

No wonder he sometimes seemed so gruff, so cold. Had he always been that way or had his wife’s desertion hardened him? Had he once been like Jesse, all charm and flirtatiousness? She couldn’t imagine it. Good grief, the man was devastating enough with his habitual scowl!

After a moment, Cassie turned the tables. “What about Dylan’s father?” she asked suddenly. “Is he still in the picture?”

“He was never in the picture. Not really,” Ellie answered calmly. After so many years the scab over her heart had completely healed. “Our relationship ended when Kurt saw that plus sign on the pregnancy test.”

He had been so furious at her for being stupid enough to get pregnant, as if it were entirely her fault the protection they used had failed. He could lose his job over this, he had hissed at her, that handsome, intelligent face dark with anger. Professors who impregnated their star students tended to be passed over when tenures were being tossed around. Didn’t she understand what this could do to him?