A Cinderella Story. Maureen Child

this do?”

      The slight lisp brought a reluctant smile even as he moved toward her. She’d stopped in front of a vise that probably looked both interesting and scary to a kid.

      “It’s a wood vise,” he said. “It holds a piece of wood steady so I can work on it.”

      She chewed her bottom lip and thought about it for a minute. “Like if I put my doll between my knees so I can brush her hair.”

      “Yeah,” he said grudgingly. Smart kid. “It’s sort of like that. Shouldn’t you be with your mom?”

      “She’s cleaning and she said I could play in the yard if I stayed in the yard so I am but I wish it would snow and we could make angels and snowballs and a big snowman and—”

      Amazed, Sam could only stare in awe as the little girl talked without seeming to breathe. Thoughts and words tumbled out of her in a rush that tangled together and yet somehow made sense.

      Desperate now to stop the flood of high-pitched sounds, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

      She laughed and shook her head so hard her pigtails flew back and forth across her eyes. “I go to pre-K cuz I’m too little for Big-K cuz my birthday comes too late cuz it’s the day after Christmas and I can probably get a puppy if I ask Santa and Mommy’s gonna get me a fairy doll for my birthday cuz Christmas is for the puppy and he’ll be all white like a snowball and he’ll play with me and lick me like Lizzie’s puppy does when I get to play there and—”

      So...instead of halting the rush of words and noise, he’d simply given her more to talk about. Sam took another long gulp of his coffee and hoped the caffeine would give him enough clarity to follow the kid’s twisty thought patterns.

      She picked up a scrap piece of wood and turned it over in her tiny hands.

      “What can we make out of this?” she asked, holding it up to him, an interested gleam in her eye and an eager smile on her face.

      Well, hell. He had nothing else to work on. It wasn’t as though he was being drawn to the kid or anything. All he was doing was killing time. Keeping busy. Frowning to himself, Sam took the piece of wood from her and said, “If you’re staying, take your jacket off and put it over there.”

      Her smile widened, her eyes sparkled and she hurried to do just what he told her. Shaking his head, Sam asked himself what he was doing. He should be dragging her back to the house. Telling her mother to keep the kid away from him. Instead, he was getting deeper.

      “I wanna make a fairy house!”

      He winced a little at the high pitch of that tiny voice and told himself that this didn’t matter. He could back off again later.

      * * *

      Joy looked through the window of Sam’s workshop and watched her daughter work alongside the man who had insisted he wanted nothing to do with her. Her heart filled when Holly turned a wide, delighted smile on the man. Then a twinge of guilt pinged inside her. Her little girl was happy and well-adjusted, but she was lacking a male role model in her life. God knew her father hadn’t been interested in the job.

      She’d told herself at the time that Holly would be better off without him than with a man who clearly didn’t want to be a father. Yet here was another man who had claimed to want nothing to do with kids—her daughter in particular—and instead of complaining about her presence, he was working with her. Showing the little girl how to build...something. And Holly was loving it.

      The little girl knelt on a stool at the workbench, following Sam’s orders, and though she couldn’t see what they were working on from her vantage point, Joy didn’t think it mattered. Her daughter’s happiness was evident, and whether he knew it or not, after only one day around Holly, Sam was opening up. She wondered what kind of man that opening would release.

      The wind whipped past her, bringing the scent of snow, and Joy shivered deeper into her parka before walking into the warmth of the shop. With the blast of cold air announcing her presence, both Sam and Holly turned to look at her. One of them grinned. One of them scowled.

      Of course.

      “Mommy! Come and see, come and see!”

      There was no invitation in Sam’s eyes, but Joy ignored that and went to them anyway.

      “It’s a fairy house!” Holly squealed it, and Joy couldn’t help but laugh. Everything these days was fairy. Fairy princesses. Fairy houses.

      “We’re gonna put it outside and the fairies can come and live in it and I can watch from the windows.”

      “That’s a great idea.”

      “Sam says if I get too close to the fairies I’ll scare ’em away,” Holly continued, with an earnest look on her face. “But I wouldn’t. I would be really quiet and they wouldn’t see me or anything...”

      “Sam says?” she repeated to the man standing there pretending he was somewhere else.

      “Yeah,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “If she watches through the window, she won’t be out in the forest or—I don’t know.”

      He was embarrassed. She could see it. And for some reason, knowing that touched her heart. The man who didn’t want a child anywhere near him just spent two hours helping a little girl build a house for fairies. There was so much more to him than the face he showed to the world. And the more Joy discovered, the more she wanted to know.

      Oh, boy.

      “It’s beautiful, baby.” And it was. Small, but sturdy, it was made from mismatched pieces of wood and the roof was scalloped by layering what looked like Popsicle sticks.

      “I glued it and everything, but Sam helped and he says I can put stuff in it for the fairies like cookies and stuff that they’ll like and I can watch them...”

      He shrugged. “She wanted to make something. I had some scrap wood. That’s all.”

      “Thank you.”

      Impatience flashed across his face. “Not a big deal. And not going to be happening all the time, either,” he added as a warning.

      “Got it,” Joy said, nodding. If he wanted to cling to that grumpy, don’t-like-people attitude, she wouldn’t fight him on it. Especially since she now knew it was all a front.

      Joy took a moment to look around the big room. Plenty of windows would let in sunlight should the clouds ever drift away. A wide, concrete floor, scrupulously swept clean. Every kind of tool imaginable hung on the pegboards that covered most of two walls. There were stacks of lumber, most of it looking ragged and old—reclaimed wood—and there were deadfall tree trunks waiting for who knew what to be done to them.

      Then she spotted the table and was amazed she hadn’t noticed it immediately. Walking toward it, she sighed with pleasure as she examined it carefully, from the shining surface to the twisted tree limb base. “This is gorgeous,” she whispered and whipped her head around to look at him. “You made this?”

      He scowled again. Seemed to be his go-to expression. “Yeah.”

      “It’s amazing, really.”

      “It’s also still wet, so be careful. The varnish has to cure for a couple of days yet.”

      “I’m not touching.”

      “I didn’t either, Mommy, did I, Sam?”

      “Almost but not quite,” he said.

      Joy’s fingers itched to stroke that smooth, sleek tabletop, so she curled her hands into fists to resist the urge. “I’ve seen some of your things in the gallery in town, and I loved them, too, by the way. But this.” She shook her head and felt a real tug of possessiveness. “This I love.”

      “Thanks.”

      She thought the shadows in his eyes