Peggy Moreland - Hard Lovin' Man

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“No harm done,” he said and continued with his observation. “I noticed right off how pretty they were, and I knew immediately that they were sisters.”

“How? They don’t look a thing alike.”

“Their colorings different, and they’re built differently, but the similarities are there.”

Having completed her first aid, she gave him a nudge with her hip, making room for herself on the bench, then dropped down beside him. Pulling the kit to her lap, she started replacing the supplies. “Enlighten me.”

“The way they walk, the way they talk. They’re all three strong women, sure of themselves and each other and their place in the family unit.”

Lacey snorted and closed the lid with a snap. “Well, if that’s what you’re basing your assessment on, you’re wrong, because I don’t have a place in this family.”

“Yeah, you do.” He grinned when she turned to glare at him. “You just haven’t found it, yet.”

“Yeah, right,” she muttered and stood, stretching to replace the kit in the cabinet.

Travis watched her, noticing the way her shirt molded those firm breasts, the tiny waist, the slender hips, the long stretch of muscular legs. He appreciated a beautiful woman, always had, and he considered the one he was currently looking at a prime example of the gender.

Deciding the trip to the Double-Cross might not be a total loss after all, he smiled as he took advantage of her precarious position and bumped his foot against her left boot, knocking her off-balance. She sucked in a startled breath, flailing her arms in an attempt to recover…but dropped neatly into his lap, just as he’d planned.

He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind and snugged her back against his chest, nuzzling his nose in her hair. “Is this a bed I’m sitting on?” he whispered at her ear.

She held her body rigid against his. “Y-yes.”

“Is it big enough for two to lie down on?”

“N-no.”

“That’s okay,” he said, and nipped playfully at her earlobe, “’cause I was kinda hoping you’d be stretched out on top of me, anyway.”

Lacey wasn’t sure who she was madder at. Travis for making a pass at her, or herself for being tempted by it.

She quickly decided it was Travis who deserved her anger.

“Of all the nerve,” she muttered darkly as she stalked down the long hall in search of Mandy. Imagine him making a move like that, and after she’d been nice enough to doctor his wounds for him, too. And he’d called his brother crazy. She snorted in disgust. In her opinion, Travis was the one with the mental problem.

She stopped at the door one of the guests had directed her to, and drew in a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down before she stepped inside for the long-awaited meeting with her half sisters.

Mandy rose with a sigh of relief from behind a massive desk. “I was afraid you’d given up on us and left.”

Feigning nonchalance, Lacey lifted a shoulder. “Thought about it.” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a movement and glanced over to find Merideth and Sam sitting on the couch. Sam smiled at her. Merideth, her lips pursed in displeasure, merely lifted a neatly arched brow.

Mandy gestured toward a wingback chair placed at an angle to both the sofa and the desk. “Please, have a seat.”

Feeling much like she had at the age of twelve when she’d been called to the principal’s office for putting a frog in Elizabeth Conners’s lunchbox, Lacey dropped down onto the edge of the chair and wiped damp palms down her thighs.

Mandy sat too. “I apologize for the delay, but—” She laughed and sank wearily against the chair’s back, lacing her fingers over her abdomen. “It’s been rather an unusual day.”

“You can say that again,” Lacey replied dryly.

“Why don’t you tell us about yourself,” Mandy suggested, offering a warm smile of encouragement.

“You mean, about my relationship to Lucas?”

“Well, yes,” Mandy said and shrugged self-consciously. “Naturally, we have a few questions.”

“I doubt I have any answers.”

With a humph, Merideth folded her arms across her breasts. “Some proof that you’re Lucas’s daughter would be nice.”

“Merideth!” Sam and Mandy exclaimed, mortified by her rudeness.

Their sister flung out an arm, sending the gold bangles on her wrist clinking musically as she gestured toward Lacey. “Well, how do you know she isn’t some scam artist who’s trying to steal a piece of the Double-Cross?”

Mandy gave Merideth a quelling look before turning to Lacey, her expression softening with regret. “I’m sorry, but surely you must realize how difficult this is for us all.”

Though Merideth’s comment had stung, Lacey fought back the resentment, knowing that of all the reactions her claim to be Lucas’s daughter had drawn, Merideth’s was the most logical. “No apology necessary. I’d probably want the same, if I were in y’all’s position.” She lifted her hands, palms up. “But I don’t have the proof you want. Only what my mother told me.”

Mandy leaned forward, resting her forearms on the desk. “And what was that?”

“Just that she met Lucas at a horse show when she was nineteen. I don’t know how old he would’ve been at the time, but I’m twenty-three, so you can do the math. They had an affair. A brief one. I was the by-product,” she added bitterly.

Though she would have liked nothing better than to end the explanation there, she took a deep breath and forced herself to go on, hoping that once they heard it all, they would allow her to leave in peace. “When my mother discovered she was pregnant, she contacted Lucas and demanded that he marry her. He refused. My mother had been dating another man off and on for a while, both before and after Lucas, and he agreed to marry her instead. I didn’t know until my twenty-first birthday that the man she’d married wasn’t my father.”

As she listened, Mandy puckered her brow in confusion. “Why did your mother wait until you were twenty-one to tell you the truth of your parentage?”

“She probably wouldn’t have told me then, but she had no other choice.” She sat up straighter, refusing to let the pain of Lucas’s rejection show. “Lucas didn’t want me, but he set up a trust fund for me that became mine on my twenty-first birthday.”

“You’ve known for two years that Lucas was your father?”

Lacey glanced at Sam, who had asked the question, and slowly nodded.

“So why did you wait until now to come here?” Merideth snapped peevishly.

Lacey narrowed an eye as she shifted her gaze to Merideth’s. “It took me that long to get past the hate.”

Silence hummed in the room for a full thirty seconds as the two women engaged in a stubborn staring match. Lacey was the one to break it. She turned to Mandy, her eyes darkened in anger. “My turn to ask a question. Why is it that no one, other than her,” she said, with a jerk of her head in Merideth’s direction, “seems to doubt my claim to be Lucas’s daughter?”

“I don’t doubt your claim,” Merideth cut in. “It’s your motive that I question.”

Lacey was on her feet, her eyes blazing, before Mandy or Sam could chastise their sister again for her rudeness. “If you think I’m here to claim a part of this ranch, you’re wrong.” She jammed a hand in her pocket, jerked out a folded piece of paper and slapped it on the desk in front of Mandy. “That’s my check for the twenty-five thousand Lucas put in trust for me, plus the interest it earned over the years. My only purpose in coming here today was to shove it down his throat and tell him I don’t need him or his money.”