Meg Maxwell - A Cowboy In The Kitchen

“One more bite of chicken?” he said to Lucy.

She smiled, the dimple that matched his popping out in her left cheek, her big, round hazel-green eyes, just like her mother’s, darting to her lap. “Okay, Daddy.”

He watched her pick up a piece of the chicken with her fingers and surreptitiously slide her hand under the table where he knew Daisy was waiting. “Lucy Montgomery,” he chastised, but couldn’t help the smile.

Hell, he didn’t want to eat his tough, bland dinner either. He scooped up Lucy from the table and held her tight, her arms around his neck the best feeling in the world. “You be a good girl for Miss Letty. She’s going to watch you while I’m at a cooking class.”

Annabel Hurley came to mind, tall and curvy, with that porcelain skin and long, silky auburn hair. He could still remember wrapping his hands in that hair, the cocoa-butter scent of it, the feel of her soft skin. The sight of her shyly taking off her sweater in the barn loft, the lacy white bra driving him mad with desire for her. If he could go back in time seven years ago, he’d have handled that night differently, wouldn’t have let things have gone that far, no matter how badly he’d wanted things to have gone much, much further. But not with Annabel Hurley. Then again, if he could go back, there’d be no Lucy. That wasn’t anything he wanted to imagine.

“Will you learn to cook ice cream?” Lucy asked, slipping Daisy another bite of chicken. Lucy’s favorite thing on earth—besides a tree to climb—was a hot-fudge sundae.

“I will,” he said, a chill snaking up his spine as he remembered his last conversation with Raina Dunkin, Lucy’s grandmother—and Lorna’s mother.

No young child should be having a hot fudge sundae at eleven o’clock in the morning! Raina had screeched at him in her high-pitched Texas drawl two days ago. She’d barged in for “an impromptu visit to check on my grandchild,” in her trademark silk pantsuit and heels, and didn’t even say hello to Lucy before asking Lucy to hand over the bowl of ice cream and then dumping it in the sink.

Furious, West had told Lucy as calmly as he could to go play in her room while he talked to Nana. The moment the girl left the room, Raina had stabbed her manicured finger at him and said, You listen to me, West. You’d better start taking proper care of your daughter or Landon and I will have no choice but to petition for custody. We’ve given you plenty of time to adjust to being a single father. But it’s constant hot dogs and candy. And now it’s ice cream before lunch, which I have no doubt will be a fast-food burger. And her hair. God, West. Brush the girl’s hair. Put it in a ponytail. And throw out those damn raggedy green pants already!

How he’d held his temper was beyond him. First of all, it’s Saturday, he’d snapped. She can have messy hair if she wants and wear her favorite pants. Second of all, I’m doing the best I can, he’d added, anger—and shame—burning in his gut.

Your best isn’t good enough, now, is it? she said. And if you’d watch her more closely, she wouldn’t have scrapes and marks all over her legs like some wild boy.

West loved to watch his daughter race around the yard and the playground structure after Daisy, following the beagle down the slide. Yeah, Lucy landed badly sometimes, and there were scrapes and cuts and bruises. When they played hide-and-seek, he always knew he’d find her hiding in the crab apple tree, so high up that sometimes it scared him. But Lucy was happy and loved and cared for. He had the love part of fatherhood down pat; it was the rest he wasn’t great at. He mangled meals and resorted to fast food or Hurley’s too many times. And he had trouble with the knots in Lucy’s hair, so he let the shoulder-length ringlets do their own thing, resulting in weird tufts that his sitter would fix if she could. Miss Letty was a great sitter, kind and patient, and lived just five minutes down the road at the next ranch, but she’d said she’d never been much of a cook and West had to leave meals for her to heat up for Lucy.

My disappointment of a daughter couldn’t even beat an egg, Raina had continued, but at least she had Lucy looking presentable in public. Get your act together, Weston Montgomery, or I will see you in court. She’d turned and stalked to the front door.

So much for his temper. Don’t you ever refer to Lucy’s mother as a disappointment again, he’d said through gritted teeth at Raina’s back, his anger reaching the boiling point.

His and Lorna’s marriage hadn’t been good, and Lorna had told him she was leaving permanently—and leaving Lucy behind—just a day before the car accident that had taken her life. But preserving a good memory of Lorna for his daughter was important to West, and no one, especially not Raina’s mother, who had a history of slinging cruelty, would disparage his child’s mother.

Raina had rolled her eyes and stormed out and West had needed to do something physical to get his anger out, so he’d taken Lucy over to Miss Letty’s for an hour and then ridden fence along his vast property, mending and hammering his frustration out.

West vs. Parents. Story of his life. Lorna’s wealthy, powerful parents had never liked him. Not only had his family been from the wrong side of the tracks in Blue Gulch, but he was the Montgomery family’s black sheep. He and his own parents had never gotten along well; they’d lost their golden boy and had been left with the troublemaker when West was nineteen. Back then, West could imagine his father wishing it had been West who’d been killed overseas in Afghanistan, and his mother responding: As if West had it in him to fight for his country in the first place.

They’d never said that, but they might as well have. And before he could even try to show them who he was, they’d hightailed it out of Blue Gulch to start fresh in Austin, where Garrett had always wanted to live; a way to honor him, West figured. And to get away from West and his pregnant girlfriend and the gossip in town. But just a few months in, a fire had broken out from faulty wiring, and West had buried his parents, everything in him numb. Lorna and the Dunkins hadn’t had much patience for him and his grief, which had turned him even more inward.

His relationship with the Dunkins hadn’t improved much over the years either; he’d gotten their “little girl” pregnant and stolen her dreams, they’d said, then trapped her on a ranch in a life she never wanted ten miles from town, where they lived in a huge Colonial.

He couldn’t lose Lucy—and not to the Dunkins. He’d do whatever he had to keep her. Which meant learning to cook. He’d tried hiring a housekeeper after Lorna’s death, but one woman had harshly scolded Lucy for leaving her toys out in the playroom and made elaborate meals that West had told her neither he nor Lucy wanted to eat, such as beef bourguignon. The next housekeeper forgot Lucy was allergic to soy and made her some inedible vegetable-fruit smoothie with soy milk, which landed Lucy in the emergency room with severe stomach pains and a strained visit from the Dunkins about his carelessness.

He would learn to cook.

Taking a class from a Hurley would kill two birds too. Everyone in town, including the Dunkins, liked Gram Hurley, respected her, which was saying something. Essie Hurley had never been wealthy, but she was wise and had been something of a grandmother to most everyone in Blue Gulch in some way or another. Essie had once saved Raina Dunkin from public embarrassment; Lorna had told West all about it when they first got married. Raina would likely back off from threatening to sue for custody once they found out Essie’s granddaughter, with her fancy Dallas culinary school background, was giving him cooking lessons. If they didn’t, well, West had taken over his parents’ small cattle ranch and had turned it into a very prosperous operation; he had the money to hire a good lawyer, but the toll it would take on West, the distraction from work and from Lucy, would just about kill him.