“good old faithful Grace” to him. She’d been there for him through thick and thin, and he’d never once seen her as more than a friend. She’d never told him how she felt.
“I’m just really glad to see you, Gracie,” Billy said with a smile. “I missed you.”
It wasn’t fair, because when he said he missed her, he meant it in a casual sense. He missed having that loyal friend always ready to hang out with him, help him out when he was in a bind and watch movies with him on a weekend. He missed the friendship, but she missed something much deeper than a pal—she missed him, his heart. His way of seeing things, the way he’d lean close and nudge her with his elbow when he was making a joke...
She pulled her mind out of the past and forced a smile. “I’ve got two weeks here, and then I’m heading back to the city.”
It was a reminder for herself as much as for him, because she was going to keep him firmly at arm’s length. Billy Austin was her weakness, and she wasn’t willing to lose her heart to him all over again. She’s spent too many years in love with the man, only to watch him fall for the more beautiful, funnier, more spirited Tracy Ellison. Grace had learned a lot through that process—the most important lesson being that she was tired of being the best friend. She was tired of being seen as a buddy instead of as a woman. And she wasn’t going to apologize for her figure, her looks, her personality or anything else about her that shuffled her off to the friend zone over and over again with Billy Austin.
It was a painful lesson, but a necessary one. Grace was a different woman now, and if Billy thought they could just pick up where they’d left off, he’d better think again.
* * *
“DADDY, COME SEE!” Poppy called from the sand table.
Daddy. It still felt weird to be called that, but Billy liked it more than he ever imagined he would. He was this little girl’s dad—the muscle-bound bodyguard who stood between her and an unfair world.
Billy glanced over at Grace. It was really good to see her again. With that glossy brown hair tumbling around her shoulders, her sparkling blue eyes and a soft, round figure that made him think things he really shouldn’t associate with his oldest buddy.
Had she changed somehow since he’d seen her last? He didn’t remember her being quite so...womanly. They’d been friends through elementary school and junior high. After he dropped out of high school, they’d reconnected when Grace was working at the cheap restaurant where he went for dinner after his ranch chores. They’d liked the same movies and she had a quick wit when it came to tearing apart the ones they didn’t like. She’d also enjoyed horseback riding, and he used to take her out on the ranch where he worked on his days off. She was easy to talk to, and she’d had good advice when it came to his girlfriend 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
