“If I were going to become a stalker, why would I pick a washed-up recluse of an actor?”
“Because he’s a big hot bundle of yum?” Josie suggested.
Marcy made a face. “Yum factor aside, you know perfectly well he’s not washed-up, Ash. He walked away at the top of his game. I bet right this minute he could still step into any role he wanted and find himself back on the A-list. He just doesn’t want to be there.”
She had to admit, Marcy was right about that. Justin had the intensity and range of a truly great actor. And the cameras had loved him.
“I still cry every time I watch him in Warrior,” Josie said.
Ashley didn’t want to admit that she did, too—and that she’d watched the DVD just the other night.
“How many times did we drive to Idaho Falls to see Last Chance when we were sixteen?” Marcy laughed. “At least a dozen. Remember how you used to have that picture of him in your locker with his shirt half ripped off and his sexy black Stetson and that hard look in his eyes?”
Josie snickered as she twisted another egg roll. “If there was ever an obsessed stalker fan back then, it would have been you, Ash. I seem to remember you writing Mrs. Justin Hartford on everything from your algebra homework to the pizza napkins at Stoneys.”
“Will you two just forget about that? For heaven’s sake! It was more than a decade ago. Marcy’s already given me a hard time about my stupid crush.”
She loved her friends dearly. They had been friends since they were all in kindergarten and she found great comfort in that kind of continuity. She just sometimes wished they didn’t know every single detail about her life.
“You’re supposed to be sympathetic here. I was a silly teenager. What did I know about what to look for in a man? All I cared about ten years ago were dreamy eyes and six-pack abs.”
“Two things Justin Hartford still has,” Josie pointed out with a slightly overheated gleam in her own eyes. “He came into the hardware store last week for hex screws and I just about drooled all over his cowboy boots.”
“Dreamy eyes are fine but not when they come as a package deal with a man willing to abdicate his responsibility to his child.”
“That’s unfair,” Marcy spoke up as she drained the vegetables. “He invited you to come back and talk to Ruby about her behavior, didn’t he? I wonder if you would be so mad at him right now if you hadn’t had such a crush on him back in the day.”
“Yeah,” Josie warmed to the theory. “Maybe you built him up in your wild little fantasy world for so long that finding out the real man is just a struggling father with the same problems as the rest of us has left you heartbroken and disillusioned.”
She had to admit, there might be some truth in what they said. She had this image in her head of him as the hard-driving, hard-living hero he played so well. It was a little hard to reconcile that with the father of her biggest behavior problem.
She sighed. She was not looking forward to dinner the next night. How did a girl dress to have dinner with her teenage crush?
Eight
BY THE NEXT EVENING, as he was prepping the steaks for dinner, Justin still didn’t have a clue what was going on with Ruby and school.
He had tried to talk to his daughter about it a dozen times, but she had been acting strangely ever since she found out Miss Barnes was coming to dinner. She was popping out of her skin with an odd kind of excitement and every time he tried to bring up school, she made some excuse to escape.
He hadn’t pushed it, though he knew he should. He didn’t really have a good handle on the extent of the problem, and he thought maybe it would be better if he waited until the teacher was there.
Lydia hadn’t been much help, either. When he talked to her the night before, he found his aunt was firmly of the opinion that Ruby was only misbehaving as a coping mechanism to adjust to school. She wasn’t used to being around other children all the time, everything was new and she had the added complication of being the daughter of the town’s only celebrity, which automatically set her apart, Lydia thought.
She had talked to Ruby several times and the girl had promised she would do better. Lydia wanted to give her a little more time to adjust and she hadn’t wanted to bother Justin with it, especially as they had agreed she would be the liaison with the school.
She had nothing but praise for the teacher, though. Justin had had just about enough of hearing about all of Ashley Barnes’s wonderful qualities.
He sighed. He already had enough trouble with the females in his life. Why did he even think for a moment he needed to add more? Still, he hadn’t been able to get the teacher out of his mind. He had dreamed of her last night and had awoken aroused and embarrassed and with an intense hunger for cream puffs.
He jerked his mind away from those unruly images. “Ruby, you need to set the table,” he called. “Your teacher will be here any minute now.”
“Coming, Daddy,” she called from the other room and a moment later she flounced into the room. Flounce was exactly the word for it—she was wearing the ruffly girlie dress she and Lydia had bought the day before in Jackson.
She was all taffeta and lace, with mismatched ankle socks and her favorite sparkly sneakers.
He hid a smile. “Honey, you can’t wear that. You’ll ruin the pretty dress you and Aunt Lydia bought to wear to Sierra’s mom’s wedding next month.”
“I want Miss Barnes to see it. She’ll
