The Ranch She Left Behind (4 page)

She knew she ought to go to the ranch. Or at least by her new duplex.

But she knew she wasn’t ready. It didn’t make any sense, but she needed more time to come to terms with being in Silverdell again—and with the big changes that were coming.

It didn’t help to remind herself that they were changes she’d wanted. Changes she’d
chosen.
Suddenly the changes seemed more than “big.” They seemed crazy. Risky. Terrifying.

Annoyed with herself, but unable to break through the emotional paralysis, she found a parking space and headed into the ice-cream shop. She was hungry and nervous. Even before she had grown a full set of teeth she’d learned that a banana split could make everything better.

Her father and Ruth would both have been horrified—ice cream before lunch?
Instead
of lunch? But they weren’t here. And she wasn’t a child. Surely this one tiny act of independent thinking wasn’t too much for her, even today.

Baby steps.

“Hey!” The string-bean-shaped young man behind the counter tossed down his magazine and stood at attention, apparently delighted to see her. The shop was empty, so maybe he really was. “What can I get you?”

She glanced at the calligraphy on the menu over his head. “I’d love a banana split. Double whipped cream.”

“Awesome!” He grinned as if she’d said the magic words and began pulling out ingredients. “It’s getting nippy out, and we don’t get much business once it turns cold. We sell hot chocolate, but it takes a lot of hot chocolates to pay the rent, you know?”

She smiled, thinking how close her calculations had been when she decided how much rent she’d need to ask for the other side of her new duplex.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“About a hundred million,” the young man said, inserting his knife into a banana as carefully as if he were performing surgery. “Plus, there’s no art to making a cup of cocoa. Not like a good banana split.” He arranged the slices into the curved boat, tossing away a couple of bruised bits. “Now this is something you can get creative with.”

A warmhearted ice-cream artist who worried about making the rent but couldn’t force himself to serve a bruised banana. She made a mental note to come in as often as she could. Her sweet tooth didn’t know seasons.

She smiled. See? She hadn’t taken a single bite, and she was already feeling better.

“Go ahead and grab a seat,” he said. “I’m Danny. This is my shop. I’ll make you something special, and bring it to you.”

She arranged herself by the window, dropped her purse on the other side of the table and pulled out her legal pad and pen. Maybe if she worked on her list, she would retrieve her courage, and she could head to Bell River.

She flipped over a couple of pages, filled to the margins with practical information about who to call if the water wasn’t hooked up, or the electricity went wonky. All that was important, but not right now.

The third page… That’s the one that mattered. She tapped her pen against her lips and read what she’d written so far.

The Risk-it List
.

The very words looked good, in her favorite turquoise ink, against the yellow lined paper. Last night, when she’d stopped—not wanting to arrive in Silverdell after dark—she had worked on the list. Right before she fell asleep, she’d doodled a small bluebird in the upper right corner of her paper.

The bluebird of happiness. That’s what Ro used to call it. Ro and Bree used to take Penny “hunting” in the woods, with butterfly nets that supposedly were magical, nets that could catch the bluebird that would make everything at Bell River right.

Obviously, they’d never captured one. But Penny had drawn birds, photographed them, been fascinated by them, ever since. This one was fat and contented, and smiled at the list below him.

The Risk-it List. She’d decided it should be twelve items long. She had six entries so far, and two check marks.

Sell town house.
Check.

Buy place in Silverdell— Don’t let Bree and Ro overrule. Don’t tell Bree and Ro until purchase complete!
Check
.

Host a party…wearing a costume.

Learn to juggle.

Learn to dance.

Cut hair.

Seven…Seven…

Penny chewed on the end of her pen—a habit she’d never been able to break—and tried to make up her mind what number seven should be.

Ben had been right, of course. When the shock of the wasp spray incident had worn off, a strange pride took its place. She felt empowered. Why shouldn’t she? She’d prevailed over a big, hulking intruder. She might have been terrified, but she hadn’t panicked. She’d kept her head, and she’d driven him away—without anyone getting seriously hurt.

She’d decided that very day to start the list. And before any doubt could set in, she’d accomplished numbers one and two. Sell the town house—almost frighteningly easy. And buy a small house in Silverdell—much scarier, as she didn’t have time to see it for herself but had to trust Jenny Gladiola, Silverdell’s longtime real estate agent.

But she’d accomplished both, and now here she was, less than three miles from Bell River Ranch. Here to stay. Here to call Silverdell home again, after all these years.

A shiver passed through her. Thanks to Jenny’s discretion, no one in the family yet knew she was in town. Jenny had been a Dellian real estate agent forever, and she’d kept her career flourishing, through good markets and bad, by knowing how to keep her mouth shut.

For now Penny was safe. However, telling Bree and Rowena absolutely had to be next.

Her sisters had been begging her for months to come live at the dude ranch with them. They could use the help, they said. They needed an art teacher, they said. But she knew the truth—they were worried about her. They wanted to slip her into their nest, straight from the nest Ruth had kept her in.

No one wanted her to learn to fly.

But, by golly, she was going to learn anyhow.

So…back to the Risk-it List. What should number seven be? She had to pick very carefully. After the two big jolts of selling the town house and buying the duplex, she wanted the rest of the list to be relatively easy. She’d tackle a few of her phobias—but she wouldn’t set herself up for failure. No wrestling pythons in the rain forest or taking a commercial shuttle to the space station.

Just juggling, costumes, kissing…

Ben would laugh. He was much more the space station type. She’d decided not to call hers a bucket list. It sounded too ambitious. That might come later, after she’d accomplished everything on this one. After she’d learned a little bit about who Penny Wright really was.

Instead, she’d called it the Risk-it List. A list of things she’d never had the nerve to do—though she’d always envied others who did. Things that looked daring, or exciting, or just plain fun. Things that might be mistakes. Things that might make her look silly. Things she had phobias about…

Aha! Phobias!

So seven would be:
Ride in a hot air balloon. (fear of heights)

Take a picture of someone famous. (shyness)

Get a beautiful tattoo. (fear of disapproval)

Kiss a total stranger. (fear of…everything)

Go white-water rafting (fear of dying
J
)

Make love in a sailboat.

Number Eleven, the white-water rafting, would probably be the scariest. She really, really found the rapids terrifying. So obviously she’d left that till toward the end of the list.

But where had that crazy Number Twelve come from? Was it from some movie she’d seen? Some couple she’d spotted setting off into San Francisco Bay…with her imagination supplying the rest?

“What’s so funny?”

Danny, the ice-cream artist, was at her table, holding a bowl so laden with beautifully arranged sweets that she knew she’d never be able to finish it.

He looked for a safe place to set it down. Flushing, she tilted her legal pad toward her chest to hide it, then felt ridiculous. Why did she care whether he saw it?

“Nothing, really,” she said awkwardly. “I just wrote the wrong thing… You know… I mean I spelled it all wrong.”

Argh.
Why did she always feel nervous if she did anything remotely unconventional? She
was
unconventional, darn it. She was an artist at heart, not a banker. She wanted to dress in flamboyant colors and patterns, and laugh loudly, and lie down on the sidewalk to get the best angle on a snail. She wanted to sing and dance and go to parties—and make love in a sailboat.

Ruth wasn’t here to reproach her. Her father wasn’t here to mock. No one cared. No one.

She could simply have laughed and said, “I wrote ‘sex on a sailboat’ on my wish list, though until this very minute I had no idea it was a fantasy of mine.”

Danny was probably no more than twenty-three, fresh out of college—he’d probably be a lot more embarrassed than she was.

New Number One: Stop Being Such a Doormat
.

Oh, well. Baby steps, remember? She gave him a warm smile to offset any insult he might have taken from the snatched-away list. She complimented his gorgeous creation, stuck a finger—
sorry, Ruth
—into the whipped cream, then stuck the finger into her mouth and sighed. Real whipped cream. Sinfully delicious.

“It’s fantastic,” she said. “I’ve moved back to town, and you can be sure I’ll be a regular customer!”

But it was too late. Obviously offended, he’d dialed his friendliness down about three notches. He wandered toward the ice-cream cases and began stacking and restacking prepackaged tubs—though they’d been perfectly aligned already.

Darn it.
She sighed, annoyed with herself all over again. That was three strikes. Afraid to pull into Bell River. Afraid to pull into her own new duplex. Afraid to let this nice man see that she was making a list of dreams.

She’d better stiffen up, and fast, or the ego boost of banishing her intruder would disappear into a cloud of self-doubt. Her life might slide right back into the gray, conformist soup of the past seventeen years.

No. Darn it. No.

She couldn’t stand that. She wouldn’t let it happen. One way or another, she’d find the courage to—

The bell rang out as the door opened. She kept her legal pad against her chest as two people walked in. A little girl, maybe ten? Sulky, angry about something.

As she did with everyone she saw, Penny mentally began to sketch the child. A duckling still, but with definite traces of swan showing up around the edges. Her chubby cheeks were out of proportion to her longish, narrow chin. Someday, in the next year or two, her contours would lengthen, and she’d have the sweetest heart-shaped face….

Her hair was a glorious mess—shining, thick, brown, glossy curls that she had no idea what to do with now. And her figure obviously was hard to fit. A thick waist over too-long, too-skinny legs that made her look a little like a candy apple on toothpicks today. But when she got her teenage growth spurt, and that torso stretched out to match the limbs….well, watch out, Dad.

Ohhhh.
When Penny’s gaze finally shifted to Dad, she felt a small kick beneath her ribs. What a wonderful face…and the rest of him wasn’t bad, either.

His coloring wasn’t dramatic—the daughter must have inherited that from Mom. He was brown-haired, with hints of honey in the strands, and a similar honeyed stubble on his cheeks and chin. His eyes, too, were brown—they caught the light through the window, and glowed amber, rich, a lot like the caramel sliding down her ice cream right now.

But he didn’t need to be painted with bold colors to be memorable. He oozed power—it was in the jut of his cheekbones, the knife-edge of his jaw, the full sensuality of his lips. And in that body. If he didn’t work outdoors, he must work out
indoors…
about twenty hours a day.

Something else made her lower her legal pad, uncap her pen and start to sketch, though. Not the power. She wasn’t impressed by power—in fact, it repelled her. No, what her pen flew across the page trying to capture was something less easily defined. Something in the curve of his neck, or maybe it was the elegant slide of light across his cheek, twinkling like a hint of magic in those tiny, unshaven shadows.

She bit her lower lip, frustrated. The pen wasn’t subtle enough; she needed charcoals, or watercolor. Or was watercolor too insipid? Pen and ink, maybe, would find the tightrope balance between sweetness and strength.

Suddenly, the sweetness took the upper hand. Oh, he was smiling, and that changed everything! A hint of rascal in the slight overbite, but a rush of kindness and harmony in the open lips, a torrent of sensuality in the wide expanse of…

Her pen froze. He wasn’t just smiling. He was smiling at
her.

He was watching her watch him.

Which, she realized as she stared at her pad, she must have been doing for quite a while. The drawing was taking shape, filling in with detail. It wouldn’t be mistaken for anyone or anything but him.

Her cheeks burned as she realized his daughter was watching her, too. How long had she been in her trance, drawing while the rest of the world disappeared? Father and daughter had already ordered, and the little girl was even now sucking absently on the straw of an ice-cream float while she stared at Penny.

Nervously, Penny set down the pad and pulled the top pages over to cover her sketch. She tried to make the movement look natural, but she knew it was hopeless.

“Why were you drawing my dad?” The girl frowned, pointing her float toward the notebook, as if to prevent Penny from denying it.

“Ellen. Don’t be rude,” the man said, still smiling. He reached out to pull back his daughter’s outthrust glass, but she made a petulant sound and lurched clear of him in one willful, rebellious motion.

Her father’s grip had obviously been gentle, so the force was twice what she needed to break free. The results were disastrous. Ice cream and root beer and whipped cream flew everywhere.