The Renegade Cowboy Returns. Tina Leonard

Chelsea muttered. There had to be another way to bond with one’s long-lost daughter. Grinding her teeth, she put on her headphones and went back to Detective Sang.

      * * *

      “GREAT JOB.” GAGE retrieved the can and set it back up on the bale. “Looks like you’ve got sharp eyesight and good hand-to-eye coordination. You’d probably like archery, too.”

      “I don’t know,” Cat said, looking like Eeyore. He felt sorry for his daughter with her half-shaved head. She’d be such a pretty girl without the angst written all over her. A bit of anger boiled up inside him at his ex-wife. It had been simmering ever since he’d found out Leslie had kept Cat a secret. Anger, he knew, did nothing, didn’t help anything. He preferred to blot those emotions, any emotion, really. Seesawing emotions blinded one to what needed to be done in life.

      But his daughter shouldn’t look so despondent, even if she was a newly minted teen. “Hey, what do you say we go for a horse ride?”

      “I don’t know how to ride a horse.”

      “You live in Laredo. There are plenty of horses.”

      “I know, but Mom’s afraid of them. So I never learned to ride.” Cat shrugged thin shoulders. “They’re just stinky animals, anyway.”

      He remembered Leslie saying something like that. “Okay, you don’t have to ride.”

      Cat looked around at the vast, empty acreage. “So I’m stuck here for the rest of the summer? With no friends? Surely there’s somebody besides the two oddballs in there.” She flipped her hand toward the house, and Gage sighed.

      “First, we don’t know that they’re oddballs. Anyway, the truth about meeting people is that usually it’s best to give folks a chance. If you talk to them twenty times and you still don’t like them, then that’s just the way it is. But sometimes you get a wrong first impression. It’s easy to do.”

      “Yeah.” Cat didn’t sound as if she thought she’d like Moira and Chelsea on closer inspection. “So, where’s your family you were talking about? Mom says you’re the loner, and that none of them really like you.”

      Gage put his gun away and ran a hand over his daughter’s long side of hair. “Here’s the deal. I know you love your mom. And that’s a good thing. But let me suggest that Leslie hasn’t seen me in a great many years, so she doesn’t know me. And I think you’re old enough to make your own decisions about things.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying whatever your mom said about me and my family isn’t true, I’m just saying it may not all be true. And you owe it to yourself to make your own mind up.”

      Cat took that in for a minute. “Okay.”

      “Good.” Gage thought his daughter probably wasn’t a bad kid, probably just confused and somehow out of place. The mouth likely got her into trouble, and the air of I-don’t-give-a-damn, when she clearly very much did.

      I remember that stage. It sucked.

      “So, anyway, I guess I’ll never meet my aunt and uncles,” Cat said morosely.

      Gage let out a breath and went to sit on the bale of hay. “Never is a long time.”

      “Yeah.” She shrugged, and sat on the ground cross-legged. “Mom called your sister.”

      Gage’s jaw clenched. “Did she?”

      “Yeah. She told her about me. Mom said she was hoping maybe what’s-her-name would know where you were this summer.” Cat looked at him. “Mom said your sister didn’t know, but gave her your cell phone number and then said some rude things about her.”

      Gage winced. “Don’t worry about that. It has nothing to do with you, Cat. Kendall’s mouth runs away with her at times.”

      “I was hoping for a normal family,” Cat said, her tone wistful.

      “We all do, sweetie. ‘Normal family’ is pretty much a fairy tale.”

      “Brittany Collins goes to my school, and she has a normal family,” Cat insisted.

      “That’s good,” Gage said, thinking that his daughter was very young, very confused. It was only to be expected that she might look around her and see girls whose lives she’d like to emulate. “We better get going to buy those groceries. And you wanted ice cream.”

      “That sounds boring,” Cat said, and Gage laughed.

      “Boring’s not so bad.”

      “Maybe not,” Cat said doubtfully. “Maybe you should ask the Weirdos again if they want to go with us.”

      Gage glanced at his daughter. “You wouldn’t mind?”

      She shrugged. “We’ll look like a freak show, but no one knows me here, I guess. And the old lady was nice to bring me some birds. I really like them. Mom won’t let me have pets—she says they’re dirty. She’d flip out over birds, I bet.” Cat sounded cheered by that. “And that lady you stare at all the time—what’s her name?”

      “Chelsea,” Gage said, “and I do not stare at her.”

      “Yeah. You do. Kind of like my mom stares at Larry.” Cat shuddered. “Larry is such a loser. I don’t know why she stares at him. He looks like a frog.” She glanced at her father. “You don’t look like a frog.”

      “Thanks.” Gage smiled. “You want to go inside and invite the ladies?”

      “Do I have to?”

      “Your idea.”

      “Ugh.” Cat walked into the house to the kitchen, where she knew she’d at least find the old lady who loved pink clothes. “Hey, Dad’s taking me for ice cream. He said it would be nice if you and your daughter came along to keep us company. He says we don’t know what to say to each other, and that it’s pretty awkward.”

      Moira glanced up from her cookbook and smiled at Cat. “What a bonny idea. As a matter of fact, I was thinking you and I should make a trip to the library one afternoon.”

      “What for?” Cat asked suspiciously.

      “As we were discussing Macbeth,” the old lady began, and Cat shut that down in a hurry.

      “You were discussing Macbeth. I just didn’t want you giving me any fried newt eyes.”

      Moira smiled and tied on her rain cap.

      “What’s that for? It’s not raining.”

      “You’re right. It’s not,” Moira said, tying the pink polka-dotted plastic securely on her head. “Could you be a love and run upstairs and get my daughter, please? Knock first, and only go in if she says you may. She might be writing.”

      “Something awful, I’m sure,” Cat said, her tone depressed and certain that whatever Chelsea was writing, it had to be worse than a third-grader’s school paper. She banged on the door.

      Chelsea opened it, smiling when she saw Cat. Cat sniffed to let her know she didn’t like her. “Dad says you and your mother have to come eat ice cream with us. He says he needs you because we don’t like each other very much. Your mom’s putting on her hair thing, and she looks kind of weird, but she’s going to take me to the library someday, so that’ll be a real drag.”

      Chelsea nodded. “Ice cream sounds wonderful.”

      Cat looked past Chelsea into her room. “You’re probably not a very good writer.”

      “Um—”

      “I bet nobody would ever buy your books.” Cat looked up at her. “Anyway, you should be a schoolteacher or something.”

      “Why?” Chelsea asked, following her down the stairs.

      “You look like one,” Cat said, making it sound as if it wasn’t good to look like a teacher.