He stepped out of the car and faced his father warily. “Hey, Daddy, everything okay?”
“Fine, just fine,” Harlan said too heartily. He darted a worried look at Melissa, then added, “You’ll never guess who’s here to see you, son.”
Cody shot a desperate glance toward Melissa and saw that she was hanging on his father’s every word. He couldn’t imagine who might have turned up at White Pines uninvited, but experience with his father’s demeanor suggested he was right to be concerned. He regretted more than he could say having Melissa here at this precise moment. He should have walked home, even if it was twenty miles. He would have if he’d had any idea that trouble was going to be waiting on the doorstep.
He drew in a deep breath and braced himself. “Who?” he asked just as the front door creaked open and a slight figure with cropped black hair and a pixie face emerged. Shock rendered him speechless.
“Janey? What the hell?” He looked to his father, but Harlan merely shrugged. Cody turned back to the teenager who’d apparently tracked him down and come after him all the way from Wyoming. “What are you doing here?”
Even as he sought answers for Janey’s unexpected presence, he heard Melissa’s sharp intake of breath behind him. Before he could turn around, the car door slammed with enough force to rock the sturdy vehicle on its tires. He knew what that meant. He forgot all about Janey as he tried to get to Melissa before she got the wrong impression and took off in a snit. Correction, she already had the wrong impression. He just had to stop her.
“Melissa,” he protested just as the engine roared to life. “Dammit, we need to talk. Don’t you dare drive away from here!”
He might as well have been talking to the wind. The order was wasted. She’d already thrown the car into gear, then backed up, spewing gravel in every direction. He slammed his fist on the fender as she turned the car, shifted again and headed away from the house at a pace that would have done an Indy 500 driver proud.
“Terrific,” he muttered. “That’s terrific. Not five seconds ago, I actually believed she was starting to trust me and now this!”
“Cody,” his father warned, nodding toward the girl who had stopped halfway down the sidewalk.
Sure enough, Janey looked as if he’d slapped her. Cody raked his hand through his hair and tried to get a grip on his temper. It wasn’t the teenager’s fault that his personal life was a mess. He crossed to Janey Treethorn in three strides and looked into a face streaked with tears and eyes that were as wide as a doe’s caught in the cross hairs of a hunter’s gun. His anger dissipated in a heartbeat.
“Janey, don’t cry,” he said softly, pulling her into a hug. “Shh, baby, it’s okay.”
“I’m s-sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to mess up everything.”
“I know,” he soothed, awkwardly patting her back as he cast a helpless look at his father. Harlan shrugged, clearly as bemused by this turn of events as Cody was.
“It’s not your fault,” he told her, even though he very much wanted to blame her for ruining his fragile truce with Melissa. “Come on, let’s go inside and you can tell me why you came all this way. Does your dad know you’re here?”
“Ye-es-s,” she said, sniffling. “Your father called him last night.”
Cody’s heart sank. Obviously, Janey had run away from home, if last night was the first Lance had heard of her whereabouts. His former boss was probably fit to be tied. Janey was the least rebellious of his daughters. If she had pulled a stunt as crazy as this, the other two were likely to drive him completely over the edge. Lance needed a mother for those girls and he needed her in a hurry.
Inside, Cody suggested that Harlan go and see if Maritza could rustle them up some hot chocolate. He knew it was Janey’s favorite. There had been many cold winter nights when she’d fixed it for him and her father, then lingered in the shadows listening to them talk.
Before he sat down, he went into the closest bathroom and gathered up a handful of tissues and brought them back to her. He was careful to sit in a chair opposite her, since he had the terrible feeling that her crush on him was what had brought her all the way to Texas. He’d never done a thing to encourage it, except to be kind to her, but apparently that had been enough to cause this impulsive trip to Texas.
“Feeling better?” he asked after a while, when she appeared to have cried herself out and had finished the mug of hot chocolate Maritza had served with barely concealed curiosity.
Janey nodded, but wouldn’t meet his gaze. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. She tucked her jeans-clad legs up under her and huddled on the sofa like a small child expecting to be scolded. She looked so woebegone that Cody was having a difficult time maintaining what was left of his dying anger.
“Janey, tell me what this is all about.”
“I c-can’t,” she whispered.
“There must be a reason you left Wyoming and came all the way to Texas. How did you know where to find me?”
“I found the address in Dad’s papers.”
“Did something happen at home?”
She shook her head, looking more and more miserable. Finally she lifted her chin and met his gaze for barely a second, then ducked it again. “You left,” she said accusingly. “One day you just weren’t there anymore and you never said goodbye.”
Even though his reason for leaving had been an emergency, he could see how it might look from her perspective. He knew that in her reserved way, she counted on him.
“Didn’t
