Ruby jumped into his arms. “Hi, Daddy. I’ve been telling Miss Barnes about all the fun things we do and how you’re such a good swimmer and a good horse rider. I bet she’d like to see you sometime.”
He raised an eyebrow and Ashley refrained from commenting that she had seen his particular riding style when he had nearly mowed her over the day before.
“Oh, and Miss Barnes thinks the playhouse you made for me is cool,” Ruby added.
He managed a smile. “Good to know. Uh, dinner is ready. I just checked on Lydia and she said she’s feeling a little under the weather tonight so it’s just the three of us, I guess. I hope you’re hungry.”
“I’m starving!” Ruby said with so much pathos in her voice, Ashley had to assume she had inherited more from her father than midnight-blue eyes and dark hair.
The little girl skipped ahead down the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.
She was intensely aware of Justin as they walked down the stairs. They didn’t say anything, but the thick awareness flowed between them, leaving her jittery and unsettled as they walked out into the moonlit night.
Thirteen
DINNER WOULD LIVE on forever in her memory as one of the most surreal experiences of Ashley’s life. She was having dinner with Justin Hartford—and not just any dinner, but one he prepared with his own hands. The fourteen-year-old girl who—she was ashamed to say—still sometimes popped up in her psyche wanted to swoon.
She found the whole experience disorienting. It was extraordinarily difficult to reconcile her different images of him—sexy, intense big-screen hero, then disinterested father—with the man who cut his daughter’s hot dog and did really lousy impersonations.
Somehow they managed to put aside their discomfort over that awkward scene before dinner as they talked and laughed and listened to Ruby’s apparently endless repertoire of bad knock-knock jokes.
She was charmed by both of them. This Ruby was a far different girl at home than she had been the past three weeks. Here was the girl she had met those first few days at school and Ashley wanted to know why she had disappeared.
And Justin. Every once in a while she would find him watching her with a baffled kind of heat in his eyes and her insides would flutter and sigh.
She was doing her best to ignore it, but she had never been so fiercely aware of a man.
Her heart was in serious danger here. She realized it sometime before they finished eating and he brought out her cheesecake. The man across the table was exactly the kind she dreamed of now, and that scared the heck out of her.
“I’m all done eating,” Ruby said after she had all but licked her dessert plate clean. “Can I go change into my party dress to show Miss Barnes, Daddy? Can I?”
He looked reluctant but he nodded. “Go ahead. Hurry, though.”
Without the buffer of Ruby and her chatter, Ashley’s awareness of him became almost unbearable. She couldn’t shake the disbelief that she was actually sitting on a starlit deck with Justin Hartford, a man she was finding increasingly attractive.
Without thinking, needing only to move suddenly, she stood up and started to clear away the dinner dishes.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We usually don’t make our guests clean up.”
She felt her face heat. “Habit. Sorry. With five kids in my family, we all had to pitch in to help. I don’t mind, though. Really, I don’t. This way you don’t have to clear them yourself later.”
He rose and started helping her, and they worked in a silence that would have been companionable except for the vibes zinging between them like the kids on the zip line at the school playground.
“The sheriff is really your brother?” he asked after a moment.
She nodded. “He’s always been good at telling people what to do. I guess that’s because he’s the oldest.”
“I’ve met him a few times. He’s a good man. Does that mean you grew up around here?”
She searched his rugged features for any clue that he might be patronizing her, but all she saw was genuine interest. “I’ve lived here all my life, except for the years I spent in college in Oregon. I suppose that must seem pretty provincial to someone like you.”
“Not at all.” He gave an almost bittersweet smile. “I envy you.”
Fourteen
SHE BLINKED. “Me? I’m a boring kindergarten teacher. I’ve never done anything exciting in my life.”
Before tonight, anyway, she corrected to herself.
“Climbing over my gates doesn’t count?”
She smiled. “Well, there was that. And the time I drove my dad’s pickup over the mayor’s mailbox.”
His laugh did funny things to her insides. “I’m serious,” he said. “It must be wonderful to have roots in a nice town like Pine Gulch. When I was looking at property to purchase, I knew the moment I stepped into town that this was what I wanted for Ruby.”
“You didn’t? Have roots, I mean?”
He was quiet for a long moment, leaning against the railing of the deck with the stars spilling across the sky behind him. “No. I grew up living out of suitcases and cheap hotels and sometimes even the backseat of my mom’s old Pontiac. She was a wanderer who didn’t like to stay in one place very long. When I was twelve, she dumped me off with Lydia in Chicago and never bothered to come back.”
She heard the old pain in his voice and her heart ached with sympathy.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, leaning against the railing beside him. “But I’m glad you had Lydia. I’ve taught children with no one at all to call their own.”
“You’re right. I was lucky, though I didn’t think so at the time. Lydia tried. But by age twelve I had been basically on my own for a long time and didn’t want much help from her. I equated caring with smothering. I took off when I was
