The Renegade Cowboy Returns

“Gage,” Chelsea said, “we’re going to need some things from the grocery, now that there are four of us. I’ll make a list, if you’d like to do the shopping.”

“I can do that,” he agreed, glad to be given an assignment. “I’ll pay for the groceries, if you’re going to be kind enough to fix meals.”

“We’re going to have pot roast and…” She glanced at Gage. “I forgot you’re a vegetarian. You’ll have to pick up the veggies and things you like to eat.”

Cat stared at her father. “You’re a vegetarian? That’s weird.”

Gage shook his head, having heard weird one too many times today. “I’ll take care of the groceries, Chelsea. Thank you both for cooking for us. Come with me, Cat. You and I will start clearing out the barn.”

“I don’t want to—” she said, putting down the spreader and following her father.

“I know,” Gage said. “It’s weird. But everybody works if they’re lucky enough to have a job, and we do. So you can help me clear the barn. I need to sketch a new structure, and then decide if this is the right location for a barn, according to Jonas’s new plans, and then we’ll talk to a few architects, let them draw up some things for the big man. How does that sound?”

“Terrible. Boring.” Cat followed her father out, almost at his heels.

Moira smiled at Chelsea. “Nothing a little cake and sweet tea won’t cure.”

Chelsea nodded. She hoped so, anyway. “I’m going to make a list for Gage, and then go write for a little while. Will you be all right?”

“I’m happy as a lark,” Moira replied. “I’m going to play with this new phone Fiona talked me into. She’s been texting me for the past hour, but I haven’t had time to look.” Moira beamed. “I want to see what my old next-door neighbor is up to now.”

“Probably something weird, to use Cat’s word.”

Moira laughed and Chelsea went upstairs to ponder her heroine’s dilemma. Life for Bronwyn Sang wasn’t getting any better. Bronwyn had been dangling off the edge of the cliff for three months. Chelsea’s book was due to her editor in one month.

She’d written only ten chapters.

“I’m in deep water here,” she told Bronwyn. “I’m starting to think your problem is that you’re passive. If you had an ounce of kick-ass in you, you wouldn’t be dangling. He’d be dangling.”

She sighed, and decided to write the grocery list first. That was something she could handle, a small little list that—

Chelsea stopped fiddling with her pen, her attention caught by Gage and Cat outside her window.

He was showing her how to aim his gun at a large can he’d placed on an old moldy hay bale near the ramshackle barn. “Argh,” Chelsea said. “It isn’t any of my business. You’re my business,” she told Bronwyn, turning back to her book, which was going nowhere fast. “If you were anything like Tempest, you wouldn’t just be hanging around—”

Tempest. Now there was a woman who had decided she wasn’t going to be a doormat to anyone, probably including evil villains. The photo of Zola as a child and the adult renderings of Tempest had been vastly different. Only the eyes had looked the same, eyes that had seen a lot in life.

Tempest, Chelsea wrote, tapping on the screen just under where Bronwyn dangled, awaiting certain death from the killer in book three of the Sang P.I. mysteries, is a woman who knows what she wants. She walked away from her small town and she never looked back, making herself into one of the most sought-after women in the world. She is beautiful and independent, and men throw themselves at her feet. But she is in charge of her own destiny, so she doesn’t need a man to save her.

I wish I could meet Tempest.

The crack of a gun outside made Chelsea jump. She peered out at Gage and Cat. Cat was receiving a high five from her father, and the can had been pretty much obliterated.

“Really!” Chelsea muttered. There had to be another way to bond with one’s long-lost daughter. Grinding her teeth, she put on her headphones and went back to Detective Sang.

* * *

“GREAT JOB.” GAGE retrieved the can and set it back up on the bale. “Looks like you’ve got sharp eyesight and good hand-to-eye coordination. You’d probably like archery, too.”

“I don’t know,” Cat said, looking like Eeyore. He felt sorry for his daughter with her half-shaved head. She’d be such a pretty girl without the angst written all over her. A bit of anger boiled up inside him at his ex-wife. It had been simmering ever since he’d found out Leslie had kept Cat a secret. Anger, he knew, did nothing, didn’t help anything. He preferred to blot those emotions, any emotion, really. Seesawing emotions blinded one to what needed to be done in life.

But his daughter shouldn’t look so despondent, even if she was a newly minted teen. “Hey, what do you say we go for a horse ride?”

“I don’t know how to ride a horse.”

“You live in Laredo. There are plenty of horses.”

“I know, but Mom’s afraid of them. So I never learned to ride.” Cat shrugged thin shoulders. “They’re just stinky animals, anyway.”

He remembered Leslie saying something like that. “Okay, you don’t have to ride.”

Cat looked around at the vast, empty acreage. “So I’m stuck here for the rest of the summer? With no friends? Surely there’s somebody besides the two oddballs in there.” She flipped her hand toward the house, and Gage sighed.

“First, we don’t know that they’re oddballs. Anyway, the truth about meeting people is that usually it’s best to give folks a chance. If you talk to them twenty times and you still don’t like them, then that’s just the way it is. But sometimes you get a wrong first impression. It’s easy to do.”

“Yeah.” Cat didn’t sound as if she thought she’d like Moira and Chelsea on closer inspection. “So, where’s your family you were talking about? Mom says you’re the loner, and that none of them really like you.”

Gage put his gun away and ran a hand over his daughter’s long side of hair. “Here’s the deal. I know you love your mom. And that’s a good thing. But let me suggest that Leslie hasn’t seen me in a great many years, so she doesn’t know me. And I think you’re old enough to make your own decisions about things.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying whatever your mom said about me and my family isn’t true, I’m just saying it may not all be true. And you owe it to yourself to make your own mind up.”

Cat took that in for a minute. “Okay.”

“Good.” Gage thought his daughter probably wasn’t a bad kid, probably just confused and somehow out of place. The mouth likely got her into trouble, and the air of I-don’t-give-a-damn, when she clearly very much did.

I remember that stage. It sucked.

“So, anyway, I guess I’ll never meet my aunt and uncles,” Cat said morosely.

Gage let out a breath and went to sit on the bale of hay. “Never is a long time.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged, and sat on the ground cross-legged. “Mom called your sister.”

Gage’s jaw clenched. “Did she?”

“Yeah. She told her about me. Mom said she was hoping maybe what’s-her-name would know where you were this summer.” Cat looked at him. “Mom said your sister didn’t know, but gave her your cell phone number and then said some rude things about her.”

Gage winced. “Don’t worry about that. It has nothing to do with you, Cat. Kendall’s mouth runs away with her at times.”

“I was hoping for a normal family,” Cat said, her tone wistful.

“We all do, sweetie. ‘Normal family’ is pretty much a fairy tale.”

“Brittany Collins goes to my school, and she has a normal family,” Cat insisted.

“That’s good,” Gage said, thinking that his daughter was very young, very confused. It was only to be expected that she might look around her and see girls whose lives she’d like to emulate. “We better get going to buy those groceries. And you wanted ice cream.”

“That sounds boring,” Cat said, and Gage laughed.

“Boring’s not so bad.”