him into the complicated mess her life had become.
Jade had been all sharp edges and angles. Charlotte Caine, on the other hand, had those soft curves that a man wanted to spend days, weeks, months exploring....
“So why were you carrying the fudge lady?” Peyton asked.
He flushed, remembering that surge of unexpected heat when she was in his arms. “You saw that, did you?”
She pointed to the window over the sink, which he realized provided a fine view out into the street.
“I guess I startled her this morning when I said hello as she was jogging past. She lost her balance and ended up twisting her ankle.”
“Oh, way to go, Dad.”
At her caustic tone, he jumped immediately to the defensive. “Yeah. It was totally on purpose. I like to lie in wait, then jump out of the bushes when unsuspecting joggers appear. Makes a fun ending to my own workout.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
He would like to wring the neck of whatever idiot invented that word that was wielded so freely by his daughter.
“It was totally accidental, I promise. I was just being friendly when I saw her go past. I figured she would have seen me. Turns out, she lives up the street in that little white cottage with the blue shutters and the ivy.”
“And you had to carry her home.”
“Didn’t have to, no. But I didn’t want her putting weight on her ankle.”
Peyton raised a skeptical eyebrow, always looking for the worst in him, and he waited for the dreaded w-word. To his surprise, she must have decided to demur.
“You knew her when you lived here before, didn’t you?” she asked instead, in almost a civil tone. Charlotte must have made quite an impression with her kindness. Peyton had seemed genuinely touched at her welcome gift.
“Yes,” he answered, weighing how much to tell her. He had been fairly closemouthed about his life here in Hope’s Crossing, figuring his childhood wasn’t exactly much to brag about. She hadn’t showed much interest but when she did ask, he evaded and dissembled.
He had spent most of his adult life trying to forget his beginnings here. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t remember ever having a conversation with Pey about those hardscrabble times, the weekends when he would eat ramen noodles for three meals each day because that’s all they had in the house and about all he knew how to fix.
Another reason he had loved the café, because Dermot would always make sure he went home with something in his stomach and usually a doggie bag of food he could heat the next day.
That was one of his worries about being home, actually. Peyton already thought the worst of him. What would she think once she discovered how much everybody likely hated him here?
On the other hand, he wouldn’t exactly win any popularity contests in Portland, especially since the Pioneers had struggled the past few years without him. He knew things had been rough for Peyton at school, enduring taunts and ridicule about her drug-dealing asshole of a father, but at least she also had a core of loyal friends there.
He wondered again if he was doing the right thing, dragging her away from what little she had left. He had to cling to the idea that, if he could make things work here in Hope’s Crossing, he might be able to open other options for them both in the future.
“Charlotte’s family was always kind to me,” he finally said, which was a bit of an understatement. “I was good friends with her older brothers. My mom was a waitress and I washed dishes at her dad’s diner in town. The Center of Hope Café.”
“You washed dishes? Seriously?”
“Yeah. And I swept the floor at the hardware store after school. And delivered papers at 5:00 a.m. every day from the time I was twelve.”
He had figured out early that if he and his mother were going to be able to afford to keep the utilities turned on in the house she had inherited from her mother, one of them was going to have to work to make it happen.
“Newspaper delivery boy. Really?”
He had no regrets, at least about the paper delivery job. As miserable as it might have been riding his secondhand bike around the hilly streets of Hope’s Crossing, especially on bitter January mornings, he gave that job a lot of the credit for his throwing arm that Sports Illustrated once called supersonic.
“Yeah. Really. It taught me a lot, that job. Maybe you ought to think about picking up a route.”
She snorted. “Right.”
Her phone bleeped with a text and that apparently was the end of their conversation. She turned her attention to the device and started thumbing a message, probably about her idiot of a father.
“After I shower, I need you to get dressed and grab your laptop or whatever other gadgetry you want to take.” He tried for a firm paternal tone. “I’m heading into the recreation center today. Until I can hire a housekeeper, I guess you’ll have to come with me.”
She stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why can’t I be serious?”
Her eyebrows nearly reached her fringe of bangs. “I’m almost thirteen. I don’t need a babysitter! I’m old enough to be a babysitter, for heaven’s sake.”
Yeah, how many nights had he spent on his own? After his grandma had died when he was nine, Billie sometimes wouldn’t come home for a couple days at a time. Of course, she didn’t spare a thought for the child she only remembered half the time.
A vivid memory flitted through his mind, the first time she had decided to stay at the bar all night until closing and then go home with somebody who bought her a few drinks. He remembered locking the front door and huddling in his bed, missing his grandmother like crazy. He hadn’t slept at all that night and had been so bleary-eyed, he had ended up in detention for dozing off in class, where he was warm and safe.
He hadn’t thought about these things much in years. He wasn’t sure he liked the way the memories had started to bubble up to the surface since his return, like some geothermal hot spot reinvigorated by volcanic activity deep beneath the crust of the earth.
Peyton probably was old enough to stay by herself but the idea didn’t sit well with him, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.
“I have no problem with you being on your own for a few hours. Even three or four,” he said. “But this is all day long. I just don’t feel good about leaving you in a strange house by yourself when you don’t know anybody in town yet that you could call in case of an emergency.”
“I don’t want to sit around a stupid, boring recreation center all day!”
He licked the last bit of yogurt from his spoon and tossed it in the sink and the empty container into the trash. “It’s a recreation center,” he reminded her. “By its very definition, you should find plenty to do. Swimming, racquetball, mountain biking. You won’t be bored unless you want to be, trust me on that, ladybug.”
“Would
