by a sea of people clad in green scrubs.
Tate and Garrett pushed their way through, then stood on either side of their brother.
Austin’s face was so swollen and discolored they wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t crooked up one side of his mouth in a grin that could only have belonged to him.
“That was one bad-ass bull,” he said.
“You’re going to be all right,” Garrett told Austin, his face grim.
“Hell, yes, I’m going to be all right,” Austin croaked out. His eyes, sunken behind folds of purple flesh, arched to Tate. “Just in case, though, there’s one thing I need you to know for sure, big brother,” he added laboriously, his voice so low that Tate had to bend down to hear him. “I never slept with your wife.”
CHAPTER ONE
Three months later
CHERYL’S RELATIVELY SMALL backyard was festooned with streamers and balloons and crowded with yelling kids. Portable tables sagged under custom-made cakes and piles of brightly wrapped presents, while two clowns and a slightly ratty Cinderella mingled with miniature guests, all of them sugar-jazzed. Austin’s childhood pony, Bamboozle, trucked in from the Silver Spur especially for the birthday party, provided rides with saintlike equanimity.
Keeping one eye on the horse and the other on his daughters, six years old as of 7:52 that sunny June morning, Tate counted himself a lucky man, for all the rocky roads he’d traveled. Born almost two months before full term, the babies had weighed less than six pounds put together, and their survival had been by no means a sure thing. Although the twins were fraternal, they looked so much alike that strangers usually thought they were identical. Both had the striking blue eyes that ran in the McKettrick bloodline, and their long glossy hair was nearly black, like Cheryl’s and his own. His girls were healthy now, thank God, but Tate still worried plenty about them, on general principle. They seemed so fragile to him, too thin, with their long, skinny legs, and Ava wore glasses and a hearing aid that was all but invisible.
Cheryl startled Tate out of his reflections by jabbing him in the ribs with a clipboard. Today, her waist-length hair was wound into a braided knot at the back of her neck. “Sign this,” she ordered, sotto voce.
Tate had promised himself he’d be civil to his ex-wife, for the twins’ sake. Looking down into Cheryl’s green eyes—she’d been a beauty queen in her day—he wondered what he’d been drinking the night they met.
Gorgeous as Cheryl was, she flat-out wasn’t his type, and she never had been.
He glanced at the paper affixed to the clipboard and frowned, then gave all the legalese a second look. It was basically a permission slip, allowing Audrey and Ava to participate in something called the Pixie Pageant, to be held around the time school started, out at the Blue River Country Club. Under the terms of their custody agreement, Cheryl needed his approval for any extracurricular activity the children took part in. It had cost him plenty to get her to sign off on that one.
“No,” he said succinctly, tucking the clipboard under one arm, since Cheryl didn’t look like she intended to take it back.
The former Mrs. McKettrick, once again using her maiden name, Darbrey, rolled her eyes, patted her sleek and elegant hair. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she complained, though he had to give her points for keeping her voice down. “It’s just a harmless little pageant, to raise money for the new tennis court at the community center—”
Tate’s mind flashed on the disturbing film clips he’d seen of kids dolled up in false eyelashes, blusher and lipstick, like Las Vegas showgirls, prancing around some stage. He leaned in, matching his tone to hers. “They’re six, Cheryl,” he reminded her. “Let them be little girls while they can.”
His former wife folded her tanned, gym-toned arms. She looked good in her expensive daffodil-yellow sundress, but the mean glint in her eyes spoiled the effect. “I was in pageants from the time I was five,” she pointed out tersely, “and I turned out okay.” Realizing too late that she’d opened an emotional pothole and then stepped right into it, she made a slight huffing sound.
“Debatable,” Tate drawled, plastering a smile onto his mouth because some of the moms and nannies were looking in their direction, and they’d stirred up enough gossip as it was.
Cheryl flushed, toyed with one tasteful gold earring. “Bastard,” she whispered, peevish. “Why do you have to be so damn pigheaded about things like this?”
He laughed. Hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans. Dug in his heels a little—both literally and figuratively. “If other people want to let their kids play Miss This-That-and-the-Other-Thing, that’s their business. It’s probably harmless fun, but mine aren’t going to—not before they’re old enough to make the choice on their own, anyhow. By that time, I hope Audrey and Ava will have more in their heads than makeup tips and the cosmetic uses of duct tape.”
Eyes flashing, Cheryl looked as though she wanted to put out both hands and shove him backward into the koi pond—or jerk the clipboard from under his arm and bash him over the head with it. She did neither of those things—she didn’t want a scene any more than he did, though her reasons were different. Tate cared about one thing and one thing only: that his daughters had a good time at their birthday party. Cheryl, on the other hand, knew a public dustup would make the rounds of the country club and the Junior League before sundown.
She had her image to consider.
Tate, by contrast, didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thought—except for his daughters, that is, and a few close friends.
So they glared at each other, he and this woman he’d married years ago, squaring off like two gunfighters on a dusty street. And then Ava slipped between them.
“Don’t fight, okay?” she pleaded anxiously, the hot Texas sunlight glinting on the smudged lenses of her glasses. “It’s our birthday, remember?”
Tate felt his neck pulse with the singular heat of shame. So much for keeping the ongoing hostilities between Mommy and Daddy under wraps.
Cheryl smiled wickedly and rested a manicured hand on Ava’s shoulder, left all but bare by the spaghetti strap holding up her dress—a miniature version of her mother’s outfit. Audrey’s getup was the same, except blue.
“Your daddy,” Cheryl told the child sweetly, “doesn’t want you and Audrey to compete in the Pixie Pageant. I was trying to change his mind.”
Good luck with that, Tate thought, forcibly relaxing the muscles in his jaws. He tried for a smile, for Ava’s sake, but the effort was a bust.
“That stuff is dumb anyway,” Ava said.
Audrey appeared on the scene, as though magnetized by an opinion at variance with her own. “No, it isn’t,” she protested, with her customary spirit. “Pageants are good for building self-confidence and making friends, and if you win, you get a banner and a trophy and a tiara.”
“I see you’ve been coaching them to take the party line,” Tate told Cheryl.
Cheryl’s smile was dazzling. He’d spent a fortune on those pearly whites of hers. Through them, she said, “Shut up, Tate.”
Ava, always sensitive
