Falling For The Cowboy Dad. Patricia Johns

problems.

      After he and Tracy moved to Denver, he’d somehow lost touch with Grace. He’d tried calling a couple of times, but he’d gotten nothing back. And if he could read better, he would have tried to reach out online, but he struggled with reading, and he pretended he was just old-fashioned to hide that fact. It would have been nice to get some of her advice when things were falling apart with Tracy. Whatever—they’d drifted apart. But he’d missed Grace more than he should have, and more than Tracy liked.

      “Daddy!” Poppy’s tone got more reproachful. She was already used to making him jump.

      Billy crossed the room to his daughter’s side and looked down at the lines she was raking in the sand.

      “Very pretty,” he said.

      “Read it!” she said excitedly.

      His heart stuttered, and he forced another smile. Easy enough for Poppy to say, but he couldn’t make out any letters in her raking, and even if he could... “Um...why don’t you read it to me?”

      “It says Hi Dad. See? And that there says unicorn. And that there says pancake.”

      “Yeah, yeah, there it is.” He glanced over at Grace, and she was looking down into the sand, not at him, thankfully. Her eyebrows climbed, and her gaze flickered toward Billy.

      “Very nice, Poppy,” Grace said, but there was surprise in her voice. It looked like Poppy had done something right.

      “I would have written a whole letter, but there’s no space,” Poppy said.

      “Here.” Grace grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. “Do you want to try on this?”

      “Okay...” Poppy settled down at a table. She’d written him a few stories over the last few days—but whether she could actually spell and all that, he had no idea. For as long as Billy could remember, whenever he looked at a page of writing, the letters just jumbled together without meaning. They got mixed up between the page and his head. There’d been a good reason he’d dropped out of school in the tenth grade—he couldn’t fake it any longer.

      “So, how much can she do, exactly?” Grace asked.

      “I’m not sure,” Billy said with a faint shrug. “I don’t even know where to start. I was hoping you’d have an idea.”

      “Does she just have an interest in certain words, and you’ve shown her how to spell them, or is this something more? Do you read to her?”

      “No, I don’t read to her a lot,” he confessed. Not at all, more truthfully.

      “Is she reading on her own?”

      “She reads anything she can get her hands on, from the microwave instruction manual to the cereal boxes.”

      “Well, there are several tests I can give to find out her reading levels. What’s she like with numbers and math?”

      “She corrected the cashier at the grocery store the other day,” he said.

      “And she’s four, you say?”

      “Four,” he confirmed.

      “Wow.” She shook her head. “That’s something. You’re going to have your hands full, Billy. The smarter they are, the more demanding they are. They don’t know how to satisfy their own intellectual curiosity yet, and they wait for adults to provide it.”

      “Great.” Billy scraped a hand through his hair. That was going to be a problem, because he wasn’t going to be much use to the kid, unless he could show her how to fix an engine or ride a horse. He’d tried reading her a book the other day, just making up the story as he went along. He thought he was telling a pretty good one, but Poppy got furious with him for “messing up all the words.” She wanted accuracy, and he couldn’t give that.

      “Daddy, how you spell extra special beautiful?” Poppy asked from her seat at the little table.

      “Just do your best,” Grace said. “Let’s see if you can get close on your own, okay? I don’t mind if you spell stuff wrong. It’s the trying that counts.”

      That was a good answer—he’d have to remember that one. So far, Poppy didn’t know how limited his own education had been, and he wanted to keep it that way. No man wanted to give up hero status in his own child’s eyes.

      “Sorry,” Grace said with a bashful look. “I’m curious to see what she can do when you don’t help her. I hope you don’t mind.”

      “Not at all,” he said. The truth was, he’d hidden his reading problem from Grace, too, and he wasn’t in any rush to fess up.

      “Does she get this from your side of the family?” Grace asked with an impish smile.

      Billy barked out a laugh. “Now you’re just being mean. And unless Carol-Ann was hiding some genius, I have no idea where that little brain cropped up.”

      “Her mom... Carol-Ann never mentioned it when she dropped her off?” Grace pressed.

      “Nope. I have to say, I had more immediate questions than how well she read.”

      He could still remember that last goodbye between mother and daughter. Seeing the shock and heartbreak in his daughter’s big blue eyes had shredded his heart, and he didn’t even know Poppy yet. Carol-Ann had promised that she’d be back, but Billy had seen the lie in Carol-Ann’s eyes. Was she telling the truth about Germany, or was she just walking away from her responsibilities?

      Billy had been raised by an uninterested mother, so maybe he and Poppy had a few things in common. But he was determined he’d be the parent Poppy could count on for the rest of her life. No more betrayals. No more people she loved walking out on her. Billy was the end of the line here—and he’d be the superhero she needed to feel safe, whatever the cost.

      “I’m done!” Poppy hopped up from her seat and brought the page over to Billy. He looked over it, pausing for the amount of time it seemed to take other people read a page of print, then passed it to Grace.

      She took it from his hands, her soft fingers brushing his.

      “This is very sweet,” Grace said, then nudged Billy’s arm. “Isn’t it?”

      “Yeah,” he said with a curt nod. “Sure is.”

      He wished he could take it home and spend some time poring over it. Sometimes he could sort out the short words. Poppy had filled the page with her diagonally slanted lines of printing, and he wished he knew what she’d so lovingly put onto that page.

      “Do you mind if I hold on to this?” Grace asked. “I’d like to show Mrs. Mackel.”

      “Yeah, sure,” he said, pulling his eyes off the page, trying to push away that welling sense of disappointment. This was a good thing—Grace would show the principal, and the school would know just how smart his little girl was. Then they could give her that much-needed challenge that he didn’t know how to provide.

      “Thank you.” Grace shook her head and shot him a grin. “She sure loves you, doesn’t she?”

      What had Poppy written?

      “I hope so,” he said uncertainly.

      “Well, I think we can see how much she does,” Grace said, tapping the paper on her hand. “Poppy, this is really well done. I think you’re going to have a lot of fun in our classroom. Are you looking forward to meeting the other kids?”

      Poppy squirmed, glanced around the room and then cast Billy an anxious frown. “I want to stay with Daddy...”

      Billy squatted down next to her and looked into those worried little eyes. She’d had her mom walk out on her recently. And then she’d watched a big fight between Billy and Tracy, and Tracy had packed her bags... It was no wonder she was anxious. Let alone the fact he was virtually a stranger.

      “You’re