again, Kendra looked to make sure Madison hadn’t turned up in the cottage doorway, all ears. “She was one of Jeffrey’s girlfriends.”
Hutch swore under his breath. “That rat bastard,” he added a moment later.
Kendra stiffened her spine, squared her shoulders, jutted out her chin a little way. “I beg your pardon?” she said in a tone meant to point out the sheer irony, not to mention the audacity, of the pot calling the kettle black.
“Could we not argue, just this once?” Hutch asked hoarsely.
“Just this once,” Kendra said, and one corner of her mouth twitched with a strange urge to smile. Probably some form of hysteria, she decided.
“I’m sorry I called your ex-husband a rat bastard,” Hutch offered.
“You are not,” Kendra challenged, still without looking at him. Except out of the corner of one eye, that is.
“All right,” Hutch ground out, “fine.” He sighed and shoved a hand through his hair. “Let me rephrase that. I’m sorry I didn’t keep my opinion to myself.”
A brief, sputtering laugh escaped Kendra then. “Since when have you ever been known to keep your opinion to yourself?”
“You’re determined to turn this into a shouting match, aren’t you?”
“No,” Kendra said pointedly, bristling. “I am not planning on arguing with you, Hutch Carmody. Not ever again.”
“Kendra,” Hutch said, “you can hedge and stall all you want, but eventually we’re going to have this conversation, so we might as well just go ahead and get it done.”
She made a swatting motion in his general direction, as though trying to chase away a fly. Now she was digging in her heels again and she couldn’t seem to help it. “Madison is my daughter now, and that’s all that matters.”
“You’re an amazing woman, Kendra,” Hutch told her, and he sounded so serious that she swiveled on the seat of her lawn chair to look at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“I mean it,” he said with a gruff chuckle, the sound gentle and yet innately masculine. “Some people couldn’t handle raising another woman’s child—under those circumstances, anyhow.”
“It isn’t Madison’s fault that Jeffrey Chamberlain was a—”
Hutch’s mouth crooked up at one corner and sad mischief danced in his eyes. “Rat bastard?” he finished for her.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s about the size of it.”
He grinned full-out, which put him at an unfair advantage because when he did that, her bones turned to jelly and her IQ plummeted at least twenty points. “Well now,” he said. “We finally agree on something.”
“Go figure,” Kendra remarked, going for a snippy tone but not quite getting there.
“We’re on a roll.”
“Or not.”
He laughed, shook his head. “I’m about to say something you’ll have to agree with, whether you want to or not,” he warned.
She felt a weird little thrill and could have shaken herself for it. “Is that so?”
Hutch nodded toward the cottage doorway, where Madison finally stood, rubbing her eyes and yawning, Daisy at her side. “You’re lucky to have that little girl in your life, however it came about, and the reverse is true, too. You were born to be a mother, Kendra—and a good one.”
“Damn it,” Kendra muttered, at a loss for a comeback.
Hutch grinned as Madison’s eyes widened—she was slowly waking up—and a glorious smile lit her face. She scrambled toward them.
“Hello, cowboy man!” she whooped, feet still bare, curls rumpled, cheeks flushed.
Hutch laughed again. “I guess you might as well call me that as anything else,” he said. He exuded the kind of quiet, wholesome approval little girls crave from daddy-types.
Not that Hutch was any such thing.
“Do you like dogs?” Madison asked earnestly.
As if she’d already made her own decision on that score, Daisy suddenly leaped into Hutch’s lap in a single bound, bracing her forepaws on his shoulders and licking his face.
“Yep,” he said from behind all that squirming dog. “And, as you can see, they’re inclined to like me, too.”
“Good,” Madison said.
Kendra felt unaccountably nervous, though she couldn’t have said why. “Madison—” she began, but her voice fell away.
“Do you like kids, too?” Madison pressed.
Kendra groaned inwardly.
Hutch set Daisy carefully on the ground, patting her still-bouncing head. “I like kids just fine,” he said.
“Do you have any?”
Hutch shook his head. “Nope.”
“Madison,” Kendra repeated, with no more effect than before.
“Do you like my Mommy, too?”
Kendra squeezed her eyes shut.
“As a matter of fact,” Hutch replied easily, “I do. Your mother and I are old friends.”
Kendra squirmed again and forced herself to open her eyes.
Even rummaged up a smile that wouldn’t quite stick.
Before she could think of anything to say, however, Hutch unfolded himself from his lawn chair with Madison standing nearby, still basking in his presence. “I guess I’d better head on home before I wear out my welcome,” he drawled, and there was a twinkle in his eyes when he snagged Kendra’s gaze. “See you around,” he added.
Madison caught hold of his hand. “Wait,” she said, in a near whisper.
He leaned down, resting his hands on his knees. “What?” he asked, with a smile in his voice.
“Will you be at the rodeo thing?” Madison continued.
“Sure enough,” Hutch said, his tone and manner so void of condescension that he might have been addressing another adult. Maybe that was his gift, that he treated children like people, not some lesser species. “Never miss it. After all, I’m a cowboy man.”
Madison beamed, evidently satisfied, and when Daisy bounded off in pursuit of a passing butterfly, her small mistress gamboled after her, arms wheeling as if she might take flight.
“Cowboy man,” Kendra reflected thoughtfully.
“I’ve been called worse,” Hutch joked.
“That’s
