Renegade Father

She managed—barely—to lift her own tongue off the floor and yanked her gaze away from that smile she suddenly realized she would miss so desperately.

She stirred the spaghetti sauce with vigorous motions. “He’s just a little overenthusiastic. He’ll get over it. Besides, don’t you remember what it was like to be twenty-two?”

As soon as the words escaped her mouth, she wanted to grab them and stuff them back. The year he had turned twenty-two, she had been eighteen, and she had given him her love and her innocence on a sun-warmed stretch of meadow grass on the shores of Butterfly Lake.

Now, after her hastily spoken words, he was silent for one beat too long and she finally risked a look at him over the steam curling up from the bubbling pasta. That muscle worked in his jaw again and his dark eyes held a distant, unreadable expression.

“I do,” he said softly. “Every minute of it.”

Her breath caught and held, but before she could think of a reply, the outside door opened, bringing a gust of icy air, and the Santiago brothers tromped through the mudroom. The kitchen was soon filled with the sound of scraping chairs and melodious Spanish.

“That storm’s gonna be a real bi…er, beast,” Patch McNeil entered the kitchen behind them, his leathery cheeks red and wind-chapped above the white of the handlebar mustache he was so proud of. “I’m afraid we’re gonna lose some stock tonight.”

She barely heard the old cowboy, still flustered from the intense exchange with Joe. What could he have meant by those low words? Was she reading too much into it? Could he simply have been referring to being twenty-two or was he also haunted by the memory of those hours spent in each other’s arms? After his release from prison, he had never given her any indication he even remembered the encounter that had forever changed the course of her life.

They had never talked about it, about the day of her father’s funeral when he had come in search of her and found her lost and grief-stricken at the lake they’d spent so many hours fishing when they were younger.

While he was alive, her father had been stiff and un-affectionate, impossible to please, but she loved him desperately. He was the only parent she ever knew and his death had left her a frightened eighteen-year-old girl responsible for a six-hundred-head cattle ranch.

Joe had started out comforting her but she had wanted more from him. She had always wanted more from him.

She knew he regretted what they had done. He couldn’t have made it more clear when he left Madison Valley that night for a new job on a ranch near Great Falls, taking her heart with him.

In the years since, that hazy afternoon had become like the proverbial elephant sitting in the parlor that both of them could clearly see but neither wanted to be the first to mention.

Her mind racing, she drained the pasta with mechanical movements and spooned the sauce into a serving dish. She finally turned to set the food on the big pine table that ran the length of the kitchen and was startled to find all the men watching her, wearing odd expressions.

“What’s the matter?”

“I asked twice if you wanted me to round up C.J. and Leah.” Joe sent her a long, searching look and she hoped like crazy he couldn’t read her thoughts on her face.

“Um, yes. Thank you.”

Luke came in from outside just as Joe returned to the kitchen with C.J. riding piggyback and Leah trudging behind, resentment at her mother still simmering in her eyes.

As they began to eat, Annie thought about how much she had come to enjoy these evening meals with her makeshift family. It hadn’t always been like this. During her marriage, meals had been tense, uneasy affairs that she usually couldn’t wait to escape.

The first thing she had done after Charlie left was give notice to the crew he surrounded himself with, men whose insolence was matched only by their incompetence.

The second thing had been to steal Patch back from the ranch he’d gone to after she married Charlie so she could split kitchen duty with him.

In her father’s day, Patch had been the camp cook. In those days, the Double C had fixed one meal a day for its hands, usually supper. The ranch provided the food for the other meals but left it up to the men to prepare their own in the bunkhouse.

Charlie, though, had insisted Annie cook a full breakfast, dinner and supper for the men. It was just another of his many ways of keeping her in her place, of reminding her who was boss.

She had never minded spending time in the kitchen when it was voluntary. But because he was forcing her to do it, she had grown to hate it. Her cooking responsibilities had become symbolic of the mess she had created for herself.

Freeing herself from the kitchen had been almost as liberating as freeing herself from her sham of a marriage. Maybe it was a true sign of how far she had come that she had started to once more enjoy cooking on the nights when it was her turn.

Most of the time she enjoyed these evening meals, she corrected her earlier thought. This one wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of suppers. Leah said nothing, just glowered at everyone and picked at her food. None of the other men seemed in the mood for conversation and if not for C.J.’s constant chatter to Joe about his day, they all would have eaten in silence.

Finally Luke Mitchell wiped his mouth with his napkin and cleared his throat. “Tastes delicious, Miz Redhawk. As usual.” He must have finally worked up the nerve to speak, and he punctuated the compliment with a shy, eager smile across the table.

Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw Ruben and Manny exchange grins and she felt a flush of embarrassment begin at the nape of her neck and spread up. She was really going to have to do something about him, and soon.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“I mean it,” he persisted. “You make a real good spaghetti sauce.”

The fact that it was her night to cook had completely slipped her mind until she had returned from the barn after delivering the calf. She hadn’t had time to do much more than open a jar of store-bought sauce and mix it with ground beef, but she didn’t want to embarrass the eager ranch hand by pointing out the obvious so she just smiled politely.

“With that wind chill, we’re supposed to dip down to minus twenty tonight,” Joe interjected before Luke could say anything else. “That means we’re going to have to drop another load of hay after dinner. Mitchell, you and I can take the cows and calves up on the winter range. Manny, Ruben, you can take care of the bulls and yearlings down by the creek. Patch, can you handle the animals in the barns by yourself?”

The grizzled old cowboy nodded. For the next several moments, Annie listened with only half an ear to them discuss ranch business and the constant struggle to keep the livestock warm for the night. The rest of her waited, nerves twitching like a calf on locoweed, for Joe to tell everyone he was leaving.

He seemed to want to drag it out, though, while they discussed vaccinations and the yearly race to be the first ranch in the area to have the calving over with and how many of last year’s steers they would take to auction in a few weeks.

She waited all through dinner but it was only after the men cleared their plates and she had dished up leftover apple pie for dessert that Joe set his fork down with a clatter and pushed back his chair.

“I have an announcement,” he began. Damn. This was harder than he expected it to be. As he studied the faces around the table, his gut clenched and he scrambled for words.

“I’m, uh…I’m leaving the Double C,” he finally just said bluntly. “I’ll be taking a new job in Wyoming come April.”

Everyone was silent for several moments. He saw varying degrees of shock on everyone’s expression except Annie’s—from profound surprise in Patch’s good eye to what he could only describe as an odd kind of glee on Luke Mitchell’s smooth-cheeked features.

To his surprise, Leah was the first to react—Leah, who acted like she couldn’t stand him most of the time. She slid her chair back from the table so abruptly it tipped backward as she stood. She didn’t bother to right it again, just looked at him out of dark eyes wounded with an expression of complete betrayal, like he’d suddenly up and slapped her for no reason, then she rushed out of the kitchen.

The sound of her pounding up the stairs seemed to break the spell for all of them and everyone began talking at once.

“You’re gonna run out right in the middle of planting season?” Patch exclaimed.

“Where in Wyoming are you going?” Ruben asked.

“I guess that means Miz Redhawk’s gonna need to find herself a new foreman,” Luke said.

It was C.J.’s plaintive cry that pierced through the buzz of questions, and brought the men’s conversation to a grinding halt. “You can’t leave, too, Uncle Joe! You can’t!”

Awkward silence echoed through the kitchen while he scrambled for something to say to make things right. Before he could figure out a way to achieve the impossible, Patch cleared his throat, discomfort plain on his face. “Uh, boys, we’ve got some feed to put out if we want to spend the worst of that storm out there where it’s warm and dry. There’ll be time to talk about this later.”

Eager to avoid the scene they all must have known was inevitable, the men murmured their thanks to Annie for the meal then trooped out of the kitchen, leaving him alone with her and her son.

The boy was trying valiantly not to cry but a tear trickled from the corner of his eye anyway, leaving a watery path down the side of his nose. His fingers trembled as he swiped at it, damn near breaking Joe’s heart.

“C.J.—”

Whatever he was going to say was lost as C.J. cut him off. “You promised you’d take me campin’ and fishin’ on the Ruby this summer. You promised!”

He flashed a look toward Annie and found her watching her son out of green eyes filled with compassion and pain.