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

Maybe he loved it too much. Reverend Whitaker’s sermon last week had been a fiery diatribe on the sin of excess pride, the warning in Proverbs about how pride goeth before destruction.

Matt had squirmed in the hard pew for a minute, then decided the Lord would forgive him for it, especially if He could look down through the clouds and see the Diamond Harte like Matt saw it. As close to heaven as any place else on earth.

Besides, didn’t the Bible also say the sleep of a laboring man was sweet? His father’s favorite scripture had been in Genesis, something about how a man should eat bread only by the sweat of his face.

Well, he’d worked plenty hard for the Diamond Harte. He’d poured every last ounce of his sweat into the ranch since he was twenty-two years old, into taking the legacy his parents had left their three children so suddenly and prematurely and building it into the powerful ranch it had become.

He had given up everything for the ranch. All his time and energy. The college degree in ag economy he was sixteen credits away from earning when his parents had died in that rollover accident. Even his wife, who had hated the ranch with a passion and had begged him to leave every day of their miserable marriage.

Melanie. The woman he had loved with a quicksilver passion that had turned just as quickly to bitter, ferocious hate. His wife, who had cheated on him and lied to him and eventually left him when Lucy wasn’t even three months old.

She’d been a city girl, too, fascinated by silly, romantic dreams of the West. The reality of living on a ranch wasn’t romantic at all, as Melanie had discovered all too soon. It was hard work and merciless weather. Cattle that didn’t always smell so great, a cash flow that was never dependable. Flies in the summer and snowstorms in the winter that could trap you for days.

Melanie had never even made an effort to belong. She had been lost. He could see that now. Bitterly unhappy and desperate for something she could never find.

She thought he should have sold the ranch, pocketed the five or six million it was probably worth and taken her somewhere a whole lot more glitzy than Salt River, Wyoming. And when he refused to give in to her constant pleading, she had made his life hell.

What was this thing he had for women who didn’t belong out here? He thought of his fascination with the California vet. It wasn’t attraction. He refused to call it attraction. She was just different from what he was used to, that’s all. Annoying, opinionated, argumentative. That’s the only reason his pulse rate jumped whenever she was around.

A particularly strong gust of wind blew out of the canyon suddenly, rattling the pickup. He sent a quick look at the digital clock on the sleek dashboard, grateful for the distraction from thoughts of a woman he had no business thinking about.

Almost six. Cassie would have dinner on soon, and then he would get to spend the rest of the night trying to keep his stock warm. He eased his foot off the brake and quickly drove the rest of the way to the house, parking in his usual spot next to his sister’s Cherokee.

Inside, the big house was toasty, welcoming. His stomach growled and his mouth watered at the delectable smells coming from the kitchen—mashed potatoes and Cassie’s amazing meat loaf, if he wasn’t mistaken. He hung his hat on the row of pegs by the door, then made his way to the kitchen. He found his baby sister stirring gravy in a pan on the wide professional stove she’d insisted he install last year.

She looked up at his entrance and gave him a quick smile. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Smells good.” He stood watching her for a moment, familiar guilt curling in his gut. She ought to be in her own house, making dinner for her own husband and a whole kitchen full of rug rats, instead of wasting her life away taking care of him and Lucy.

If it hadn’t been for the disastrous choices he made with Melanie, that’s exactly where she would have been.

It wasn’t a new thought. He’d had plenty of chances in the last ten years to wish things could be different, to regret that he had become so blasted dependent on everything Cassie did for them after Melanie ran off.

She ought to go to college—or at least to cooking school somewhere, since she loved it so much. But every time they talked about it, about her plans for the future, she insisted she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to be doing.

How could he convince her otherwise when he still wasn’t completely sure he could handle things on his own? He didn’t know how he could do a proper job of raising Lucy by himself and handle the demands of the ranch at the same time.

Maybe if Jesse was around more, things might be different. He could have given his younger brother some of the responsibilities of the ranch, leaving more time to take care of things on the home front. But Jess had never been content on the Diamond Harte. He had other dreams, of catching the bad guys and saving the world, and Matt couldn’t begrudge him those.

“Where’s Lucy?” he asked.

“Up in her room fretting, I imagine. She’s been a basket case waiting for you to get back from the school. She broke two glasses while she was setting the table, and spent more time looking out the window for your truck than she did on her math homework.”

“She ought to be nervous,” he growled, grateful for the renewed aggravation that was strong enough to push the guilt aside.

Cassie glanced up at his tone. “Uh-oh. That bad? What did she do?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he muttered and headed toward the stairs. “Give me five minutes to talk to her, and then we’ll be down.”

He knocked swiftly on her door and heard a muffled, “Come in.” Inside, he found his daughter sitting on her bed, gnawing her bottom lip so hard it looked like she had chewed away every last drop of blood.

Through that curtain of long, dark hair, he saw that her eyes were wide and nervous. As they damn well ought to be after the little stunt she pulled. He let her stew in it for a minute.

“Hey, squirt.”

“Hi,” she whispered. With hands that trembled just a little, she picked up Sigmund, the chubby calico cat she’d raised from a kitten, and plopped him in her lap.

“So I just got back from talking with Miz McKenzie.”

Lucy peered at him between the cat’s ears. She cleared her throat. “Um, what did she say?”

“I think you know exactly what she said, don’t you?”

She nodded, the big gray eyes she’d inherited from her mother wide with apprehension. As usual, he hoped to heaven that was the only thing Melanie had passed on to their daughter.

“You want to tell me what this is all about?”

She appeared to think it over, then shook her head swiftly. He bit his cheek to keep a rueful grin from creeping out at that particular piece of honesty. “Tough. Tell me anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Luce. What were you thinking, to sign me up for this Valentine’s carnival without at least talking to me first?”

“It was Dylan’s idea,” Lucy mumbled.

Big surprise there. Dylan Webster was a miniature version of her wacky mother. “Why?”

“She thought you’d be good at it, since you’re so important around here and can get people to do whatever you want. At least that’s what her mom says.”

He could picture Ellie Webster saying exactly that, with her pert little nose turned up in the air.

“And,” Lucy added, the tension easing from her shoulders a little as she stroked the purring cat, “we both thought it would be fun. You know, planning the carnival and stuff. You and me and Dylan and her mom, doing it all together. A bonding thing.”

A bonding thing? The last thing he needed to do was bond with Ellie Webster, under any circumstances.

“What do you know about bonding? Don’t tell me that’s something they teach you in school.”

Lucy shrugged. “Dylan says we’re in our formative preteen years and need positive parental influence now more than ever. She thought this would be a good opportunity for us to develop some leadership skills.”

Great. Now Ellie Webster’s kid had his daughter spouting psychobabble. He blew out a breath. “What about you?”

She blinked at him. “Me?”

“You’re pretty knowledgeable about Dylan’s views, but what about your own? Why did you go along with it?”

Lucy suddenly seemed extremely interested in a little spot on the cat’s fur. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Come on. You can do better than that.”