The Rancher's Dance (3 page)

His gaze traveled downward from her face, making that defensiveness settle in even more. It was all she could do not to cover the ugly scars knitting across her knee. Which was pretty strange considering she'd never before felt some need to hide them. Not from her family or her coworkers or even Lars. “I'm perfectly capable of running the mower. I've done it since I was a kid.”

His eyebrows lifted, as if he didn't believe her.

She grimaced. “And I've already cut the whole front side of the yard,” she added.

“I wasn't saying you were incapable. Just that you looked too—”

“Weak?” She might look at the man and feel strangely weak in the knees, but she was damned if she wanted him thinking that she
was
weak
because
of her knee. She'd had more than enough of that back in New York, thank you very much. And Lord knew that she'd conquered difficulties with the joint far more serious than a bad MCL sprain.

Of course, she'd been a healthy twelve-year-old girl at the time, versus an aging thirty-three whose body was considered worn-out by the very people who'd once lauded it. “I can do anything I did before I sprained my knee.” She pointed her foot as if it were wrapped in a pointe shoe instead of a dirty tennis shoe and extended her leg out almost beneath his nose.

She didn't know if it was surprise that pulled his brows together in that small but expressive frown, distaste over the
old scars or colorful bruising that were in clear evidence, or irritation that she didn't succumb to her “delicate” condition but she hit the throttle anyway. Setting the mower briskly into motion again, she swiped past the neat stacks of lumber and arrangement of power tools with barely an inch to spare and sailed across the grass until she reached the far end of the lawn where a wood-railed fence separated off the corral where she'd first sat on a horse as a little girl.

Only when she reached the fence and she turned the mower to run along it did she lower her extended leg. She lifted her hat in a jaunty wave toward him, then set it back on her head and continued mowing.

Unfortunately, the pain in her leg told her she'd be paying for her foolish bravado long after Beckett Ventura was around or would even care.

As usual, her pride was definitely going before her fall. And this time, it was because of a handsome stranger with a wedding ring on his hand and a wealth of emptiness in his eyes.

T
he afternoon had turned hot as blazes when Beck pulled his truck up in front of his house shortly before suppertime. The only things he was interested in were a cold shower, a cold beer and ESPN. Any order would work fine as far as he was concerned.

As beat as he felt, he still took the time to lock up his tools before going inside. His small parcel of land—the old Victor place, as most people around Weaver were still inclined to refer to it—was well off the beaten track. His closest neighbors were the Buchanans on the Lazy-B, and that was a solid five miles on up the road.

But old habits die hard.

A man wanted to lose tools—or anything else he held precious—in Denver, all he had to do was leave them out unlocked overnight.

He headed around to the side entrance of the house, bypassing the wraparound front porch and door that had
been used only a handful of times—maybe—since they'd moved in.

He'd have happily given away every possession he'd owned in Denver if he could have kept from losing the one thing that had mattered most.

His wife.

He pushed through the wooden screen door and his sixty-year-old father, Stan, looked over from where he stood at the state-of-the-art stove. He was wearing a towel wrapped around his still-trim waist and was stirring something in a large pot with a long wooden spoon.

It was a sight that still took some getting used to considering that all through the years when Beck had been growing up, if Stan had been around at all, the only thing he'd been stirring up was trouble. Liquor-fueled trouble.

“Shelby's in the dining room,” his father greeted, before turning back to the stove. “Been waiting like a little bird for you to get home so she can show you what they did at her summer camp today.”

There was no point in bracing against the prick of guilt Beck felt at the mention of his daughter. Ever since her mother had died, he got that guilty feeling every single time he left his little girl. Didn't matter if he had good reason. Didn't matter that he knew she was just as happy being cared for by Stan—who'd ended up being a helluva lot better grandfather than he'd ever been a father—or at her summer day camp or even in school.

Shelby and Nick were the only things left of Harmony. His daughter deserved to grow up with a father
and
a mother, just the way Beck and Harmony had planned it from the time they'd been high school sweethearts. She deserved to have what their son, Nick, had enjoyed growing up; namely the loving attention of his mother.

Dammit to hell.

Beck
hated
July.

The rest of the year he could manage to get by without sinking too deep into the grief that never really left him.

But July?

Not even the prospect of Nick coming home for the weekend to celebrate his twenty-first birthday was enough to make the month bearable.

He shoved one hand through his hair and focused on the here and now. “What's in the pot?”

Stan gave him a look, as if he knew good and well what put the gravel in Beck's voice. “Marinara sauce. Saw the recipe on that cooking channel the other day. Figured I'd give it a go. Gonna put it on some pasta.”

For the first time that afternoon, Beck felt a hint of amusement. Spaghetti noodles had become “pasta” since Stan had taken up watching the pretty female chefs on television.

Most of Stan's “give it a gos” were on the fair side of mediocre, but he was happy and willing to keep them in food so Beck and Shelby were happy and willing enough to let him. “Sounds good.”

“Guess we'll find out,” Stan said wryly. “Lord knows Nick'll tell me plain enough if it's not when he gets here tomorrow night.” He gestured with his spoon and a splotch of red sauce landed on the granite counter. “Don't forget Shelby.”

As if Beck would. He veered away from the back staircase he'd been aiming for when he entered the house and headed through the kitchen to the dining room instead.

His daughter was perched on one of the chairs, sitting on top of two old telephone books that raised her up enough so she could reach the table better. Her walnut-brown head was bent over the papers spread across the glossy wood surface of the long table. She heard his footsteps and her
eyes—Harmony's golden eyes—looked up at him, then swiftly shied away.

She might have been waiting for him just as Beck's father claimed, but it was still a hell of a note when his own daughter was shy with him.

Which left him feeling like he was always walking on eggshells around her. “Hey, peanut. Whatcha drawing?”

Her narrow shoulders hunched. “Pictures.” She leaned closer to the table, as if she wanted to hide whatever it was she'd been wanting to show him.

Since the moment they'd lost Harmony, Beck had missed his wife. But the times when he missed her most were in the morning when he'd first wake up and think—just for a split second—that his life was still complete and he could turn his head and find her laying beside him. And times like now, when he was with Shelby, wishing like hell that Harmony was there to help him be the kind of father their daughter deserved.

He slowly pulled out the chair next to his baby girl and sat down. “Pictures of what?”

Her shoulder hunched again. She was wearing a light pink shirt with dark pink flowers on it and for a second—only a second, he assured himself—an image of Lucy Buchanan danced in his thoughts.

She'd been wearing pink that morning, too.

And that afternoon, when she'd been driving that damn riding mower all over creation.

He touched the corner of one of the large pages. “Can I see?”

“I guess.” Shelby's voice was only a shade above a whisper. But at least this wasn't a habit she reserved only for him. Last year, her kindergarten teacher had repeatedly told him that she was trying to get Shelby to speak up in class.

“Is that you?” He pointed at the stick figure in the center of the page that sported a shock of brown hair and a pink dress that was about ten times too wide for the body. There was a house behind her and an enormous sun taking up an upper corner of the page.

“Uh-huh.” Showing a little more animation, Shelby rested her elbows on the table, leaning forward.

He got a whiff of baby shampoo and sweet little girl that made him hurt inside.

“We hadda draw what we wanna be when we're growed up,” she confided. “Annie Pope only drew one picture, but I hadda draw three.”

Annie was Shelby's friend from kindergarten. And it was Annie's mom who'd suggested that Shelby might enjoy going to the daily afternoon camp.

“Why three?”

“'Cause I don't know what I wanna be yet.”

“Well,” he considered that seriously, “that sounds fair to me.” He'd look at a hundred pictures a day if it kept his daughter talking to him. “So what are you in this picture?”

She gave him a strange look, as if he ought to be able to decipher it for himself. “A mommy.” She jabbed her finger against the page. “I'm holding a baby. Can't you see?”

“Oh. Right.” His daughter didn't know how her words sent a pain through him. She'd been barely three when Harmony had died. “I see that now.”

She pushed the paper aside, fussing with the other sheets of paper until they were just so. “Annie drew a horse,” she said under her breath. “She can't grow up to be a horse.” She giggled.

Beck smiled. His fingers grazed the ends of her hair where it lay in an untidy sheet down her back. It was still as soft as silk. He glanced from her face to the pages on
the table. “And this one?” He nudged one of the pages, sporting another stick figure with the same brown hair, this time accompanied by a dozen smaller stick figures.

Again, he earned another “duh” sort of look that he figured he'd be receiving plenty of the older she got. “A teacher.”

Meaning the mini-sticks were her students. “Okay.” He angled his head to get a better view of the last page.

And for some reason, he knew straight off what that drawing was.

Maybe it was the jagged-edged crown that sat atop the brown hair. Or maybe it was the stick arms that were thrown up above the crown. Or maybe it was because the thing Shelby liked pretending to be most was a ballerina.

“A ballerina,” he murmured.

“Mmm-hmm.” Shelby leaned completely forward until her chin was resting on her hands atop the table, with her nose only an inch from the drawing. “That's the best one. Grandpa says we'll hang 'em on the 'frigerator so Nick can see 'em when he comes home.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Beck tousled her hair. He wondered what Shelby would think if she knew that a real ballerina was hobbling around right next door. Not that he intended to make a point of telling her. Shelby would just end up fascinated, and the dancer would just end up leaving to go back to her normal life. The last thing his daughter needed was anyone else leaving her. “Grandpa will have supper ready soon. Go wash up your hands.”

“Okay.” She was back to a whisper and he stifled a sigh as she obediently slipped off her telephone books and chair, grabbed Gertrude, the hand-stitched rabbit that her mother had made before Shelby's birth, and hurried out of the room.

He scrubbed his hand down his face, his gaze on the ballerina drawing.

He didn't want to be reminded about Lucy Buchanan.

Not by his daughter's drawings and certainly not by his own thoughts.

She'd been in pain.

That fact had been as visible as the swelling and faded scars had been on her leg.

That incredibly…lithe…shapely…leg that seemed much too long for someone so small.

He pinched his eyes closed, forcing the image out of his head before shoving back from the table.

Too bad he couldn't forget about that pain she'd been suffering.

It nagged at him through a cold shower, when he pulled on a clean pair of cargo shorts and a T-shirt afterward, and particularly when he sat on the side of his bed and picked up the framed photograph that sat on the floating shelf beside it.

Harmony's face stared back at him.

His wife had always found the best in people, even when there wasn't a lot of “best” to be found. He was a perfect example of that. She also couldn't have turned a blind eye to someone's pain even if she'd wanted to.

Harmony hadn't been just the name that had graced his wife. It had been
who
she was.

He'd learned that when he'd met her when he was sixteen years old.

He'd been the local drunk's son who preferred getting in fights over trying to make friends. Who failed classes for the sheer pleasure of flouting his teachers' efforts.

She'd been the new girl in school who didn't look at him with pity in her eyes. And when she'd sat down beside him at lunch one afternoon, ignoring the silent warning that
screamed from his pores and smiled that smile of hers, he'd been a goner. Two years later, barely out of high school, she'd been pregnant with Nick and they'd eloped.

He rubbed his thumb over the photograph, as if he could still feel the thick ends of her vibrant hair.

But the only thing his thumb felt was cool, smooth glass.

Echoes of the angry kid he'd been still lingered in the man he'd become. He'd lost his wife and the harmony she'd created in his life. And no matter how badly he wanted to, now he couldn't even recall exactly how it had felt to run his fingers through her hair.

He pushed the frame back onto the shelf and stomped downstairs. Shelby and his dad were already sitting down to their dinner plates, which were situated around the breakfast bar in the kitchen rather than the dining room's long wood-planked table that Beck had commissioned from a wood artist he knew back in Denver.

When he'd packed up his family, he hadn't packed up the house he'd shared with Harmony.

Every stick of furniture that she'd chosen to fill the home he'd built for her had been left behind. Sold off or given away by the company that Beck had hired the day he'd realized that staying in that house without his wife was going to be the end of him.

He ate the spaghetti, which was better than usual, and watched Shelby suck in noodles through her pursed lips and giggle at her grandpa when he did the same.

Just another night in the Ventura household.

There was no reason—other than the looming anniversary of his wife's death—that Beck should feel like he was ready to climb out of his skin.

But he did.

And before either his daughter or father had finished
eating, he was pushing back from the breakfast bar. “And you think there's plenty of leftovers, even considering Nick's appetite when he gets here?” He headed toward the stove to look into the pot. Typically enough, it still held a whopping amount. Stan might have developed a penchant for cooking, but he still figured he might as well be expedient about it and get at least a few meals out of each effort.

“Yeah.” Stan supped another string of spaghetti into his mouth, every bit as messily as his granddaughter was doing.

Beck left them to their amusement and rooted out a clean plastic container from the mess in one of the cupboards and began filling it. When it was practically overflowing, he fit the lid on top and headed toward the door.

“Going to feed the homeless?” Stan asked dryly.

“Just the injured.” He glanced at his father. “I'll be back before Shelby's bedtime.” His daughter's lashes quickly lowered before she could get caught looking at him and he stifled a sigh as he went outside.

His father caught up to him before he could slide into his truck, though. “Where are you going?”

Beck set the container of food on the seat beside him. “I forgot something over at the Buchanan place.”

Stan's brows shot up. “Since when do you forget anything?”

Since he couldn't remember the feel of his wife's hair under his fingertips.