Cowboy at the Crossroads & That Cowboy's Kids: Cowboy at the Crossroads\That Cowboy's Kids by Linda Warren

Author:Linda Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Debra Salonen

For my mother and father,

who gave me time to dream.

For Paul, who gave me time to write.

CHAPTER ONE

“HOW MUCH LONGER, Daddy?” Heather asked plaintively.

Tom Butler stifled a sigh. “Five more minutes, punkin,” he said without consulting his watch.

“That’s what you said five minutes ago,” Angela grumbled, her words muffled by a thick wad of long dark hair.

Tom glanced at her. His twelve-year-old daughter, a spooky mixture of limbs and emotions, sat folded into a tight ball up against the passenger door of his pickup truck. With artistic finesse she winnowed out one ebony strand from the rest of the waist-length tresses and threaded it between sullen lips.

Grazing on hair, he thought, one more thing no one had warned him about.

“Don’t worry, Thomas. You’re doing just fine,” Janey Hastings had told him at dinner last night after Angel stormed off in a huff over some imaginary slight. Janey and Ed, who were more surrogate parents to Tom than mere employers, had been his lifeline these past four months, his tether to sanity. Sadly, next Monday the Hastingses would be off fighting demons of their own. Janey’s last mammogram showed a questionable spot, and her doctors had ordered her to Stanford.

“It’s a phase,” Janey had said sagely. “Just love ’em—that’s all that matters. Don’t sweat the small stuff. After all,” she’d said with an understanding smile, “it’s every teenage girl’s goal to drive her father crazy. My granddaughters were the same way. I was sure Peter was going to send them back here to live with me until they were old enough for college.”

Tom knew how much Janey missed her sons—Edward lived on the East Coast, Pete and his family in Colorado. Ed missed them, too, but he had Tom to fill the gap—a surrogate son to run the Standing Arrow H, the ranch and orchard operation that was Ed’s passion.

Angela sat up suddenly and jammed the inch-thick soles of her ugly black boots against the truck’s already cracked dashboard. “Why do we have to do this, anyway? It’s stupid.”

“Feet down, please,” Tom said, keeping his tone level. It had occurred to him more than once these past few months that dealing with a teenager was like breaking in a two-year-old colt—you do everything slow and careful and keep body parts out of kicking range. “It’s what the judge wants, honey, you know that.” They’d been over the issue a dozen times in the past two days.

Her feet didn’t budge. “Well, I ain’t gonna talk to no therapist. I ain’t crazy.”

Tom leaned across Heather, who seemed to shrink from the cross tone of her sister’s voice, and gently tapped Angela’s shin. “Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”

“Don’t hit me,” she bristled, pulling back.

Tom sighed wearily and gazed out the cracked windshield of his half-ton Ford. Angel’s moods changed faster than the weather. Some days she was Little Miss Homemaker, fixing tuna casseroles or macaroni and cheese on Tom’s two-burner hot plate; some days she sat glued to his small, black-and-white television watching whatever crap the talk shows aired.

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