Erin's Way. Laura Browning

As soon as it came out of his mouth, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Even his casual tone wouldn’t fool her.

      He had her attention now. Catherine was anything but stupid. “Stoner, you said ‘she’ when you mentioned someone taking out Sam’s fence. Would that ‘she’ be Erin?”

      He sighed as he sat next to her on the edge of the bed. They’d promised each other honesty when they’d healed their rift. “Yes.”

      “Where is she, Stoner? Is she hurt?” There was a pause. Disillusionment colored her voice when she spoke again. “Was she drunk…or stoned?”

      “She’s at Sam’s sleeping it off. She was stoned, Catherine. She hit her head, but nothing serious.”

      There was a long silence before Catherine touched his arm. “Stoner… Something’s wrong. She only came back last fall because of Tabby, then immediately took off again. Now she turns up out of the blue?” She shook her head. “Honey, do you think she’s in some kind of trouble? It’s not like her to come back home willingly.”

      The truth of that statement cut him to the core. Stoner knew how much it pained Catherine to acknowledge the depth of the rift between them and their daughter, but it was true. There had always been something about Erin that Catherine had never been able to touch, even when she was a little girl. Stoner might have been able to once, when Erin was small, but as the years passed his relationship with his daughter had gotten even worse than the one between mother and daughter.

      Stoner laughed, but it wasn’t with any true amusement. “When has Erin ever not been in trouble, Katie?” He raked a big hand through his gray hair. “God! She makes it so hard to love her. It’s like from the moment she was born, she took one look at me, and thought ‘what can I do to piss him off?’ I don’t want to feel that way about her, damn it. She’s my daughter.”

      “I know, honey.” Catherine took his hand and stroked the back of it. “Just a year ago, I would have chalked up your worry to concern about how Erin’s behavior would reflect badly on our family, but in the last six months you’ve changed.”

      He took her hand. “How do I get through to her?”

      She shook her head. “I wish I knew the answer. The two of you may be too much alike in some ways to ever have an easy relationship. You’re both hot-tempered.”

      Stoner snorted. “Yes, but where I hang on to a mood for a long time, Erin is a flash fire.”

      Catherine nodded. “There’s a lot to that. She could never understand how you could still be mad at her hours later when she had long since moved beyond whatever it was that triggered your argument.”

      “And I thought she was trying to deliberately provoke me with an attitude that seemed uncaring and unrepentant.”

      Catherine leaned her forehead against his shoulder. “God forgive me, Stoner. I don’t want to turn her away if she needs our help, but I can’t go back and relive what it was like all through her teenage years. It made our marriage nearly impossible to endure, and we weren’t on a great footing to start. We’ve come such a long way recently.”

      She paused and took a deep breath. “There’s a part of me that wishes she would stay away.” When she didn’t say anything more, he looked at her. Her expression pleaded for understanding, guilt and sorrow mixing in equal measure. “Whatever happens, for whatever reason she’s come back, please don’t let it come between us. I need you, honey. I need what we’ve found again. These last six months…”

      “…have been the best we’ve ever had,” he finished with a gentle smile as he leaned forward to kiss her lingeringly. “We could put her in the guesthouse.”

      “Stoner!” She drew back in horror.

      “Think about it. She’d have her privacy. We would have ours. She’s nearly twenty-seven, Katie. I’m sure there are areas of her life I don’t want or need to know about. And quite frankly, I think we’re due for a little privacy.” He grinned at her. “Maybe a lot of privacy.”

       Chapter 2

      Sam woke up and lay still for a moment, instantly alert, darkness thick around him. The time he’d spent in the military had left a lasting effect. He assessed his surroundings, listening for what had awakened him. He heard it again. Crying. Who? Erin.

      She never cried. Even as a kid. It was one of the things he’d always remembered about her. With Stoner in her face, she’d been dry-eyed and defiant, as tough and hardheaded as any of the Richardsons.

      Sam bolted out of bed, snatched a pair of sweat pants over his boxers, which were already a concession to having a female in the house, and padded silently along the hallway. She lay on the couch, curled on her side toward the woodstove. He started to say something to her, then realized she still slept. He approached her cautiously. God, when had he ever approached Erin with anything but caution? He squatted next to her.

      “Don’t hurt them,” she mumbled. “Not Matty!”

      “Erin,” he coaxed. “Come on, baby, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

      Suddenly he was pinned by her dark, blue-gray gaze. With awareness of where she was and who stared at her, her expression changed. She wiped away the emotion and her look became unreadable.

      “You okay?” he asked, knowing any additional sympathy would put her on the attack.

      “Yeah.” She laughed cynically. “It was a stupid dream. Sorry if I woke you up. Was I yelling?”

      Sam half smiled. “Yeah.” No way would he tell her she had cried. He had never, ever seen Erin cry, not when she broke her arm, not when Stoner put her pony down because it jumped the fence and was hit by a car, and not even when he had dragged her out of Sam’s bed. Erin never cried. To hear she did so in her sleep? It ripped his guts right out. Even if she believed him, he couldn’t imagine how mortified she would be. “Uh. I was up anyway. You want a cup of tea?”

      Erin snorted. “Only if you can lace it with some bourbon.”

      He looked over his shoulder at her. “Sorry, I got enough of alcohol when my father was alive.” Sure he took a drink now and then, but he wasn’t about to tell her he had booze in the house.

      She rolled away from him. Once again, he stared at her stiff back. Obviously their conversation was over as far as she was concerned. Sam forced himself to walk away. He shouldn’t think about her. He didn’t want or need a complication like Erin. The problem was that every time he started dating other women, he compared them to her. Somehow, they ended up too boring, too stupid, or too weak-spirited. And boy would that be embarrassing if anyone knew, the bachelor lawman and the wild child of Richardson Homestead. Too much history stretched between them. He thought of the birth control pills again. She had moved on, and so should he.

      Sam heated water in the microwave, dumped a teabag in, and waited for it to steep. He remembered when Erin had crashed the party at the country club last fall. She had been stoned out of her head, maybe drunk as well, but underneath, the feisty defiance that had always called to him was still there. It had been enough to make him step between her and Stoner when her father would have slapped her.

      “Sam?”

      He turned so abruptly he nearly spilled his tea. Erin stood there leaning against the doorjamb. She had changed into some kind of baggy cotton pants and a long sleeved, high-necked shirt that hung nearly to her knees. Such modest attire for sleeping made for a contrast that was hard to reconcile with what she wore in public.

      “What is it?” he asked, rubbing the ache in the back of his neck. He didn’t want to play any more games.

      “I—tea would be okay.” The defensiveness was gone from her voice. It actually sounded like she was making an effort to be friendly, even if she didn’t quite meet his gaze. Sam wanted her to look at him with the same intensity; he was relieved she didn’t. It didn’t make sense, but then whatever