The Bridal Path: Danielle (8 page)

“I’ll bet Dani has fallen her share of times. And I know her sister Sara did when she was trying to learn to ride a bronco. It’s just part of learning to ride.”

Timmy sniffed. “That’s what Dani said.”

“Didn’t you believe her?”

“I figured she was just trying to make me feel better. She does that all the time. She jokes around until you forget whatever happened to make you feel bad.”

“Dani’s pretty terrific, isn’t she?”

Timmy’s expression began to clear. His eyes brightened. “She’s the best.” He regarded Slade slyly. “I think she likes you, too.”

Slade swallowed hard as memories of that bone-melting, sizzling kiss came roaring back. “What makes you think that?” he asked in a choked voice. That kiss had been a warning to steer clear of her, unless he wanted to risk both of them getting hurt eventually. Passion didn’t equal love. It never had. One could exist quite nicely without the other, assuming love between men and women even existed at all.

Now, love between parent and child, that was something else again, he thought, gazing at his son. Given his background, he’d been stunned by the strength of that bond. Timmy and Kevin might baffle him most of the time, dismay him quite a lot of the time and infuriate him some of the time, but the strongest emotion he felt through all of it was love.

From the first moment he’d held them in his arms, his heart had been lost. He’d vowed then and there that they would always know exactly how much they meant to him, that he would never try to control and dominate and, failing that, then dismiss as his father had.

“I think she likes you because of the way she looks at you when you come around,” Timmy told him, his expression thoughtful as he struggled to put his conviction into words.

“How does she look at me?” Slade asked, unable to curb his curiosity.

“All mushy like they do in the movies right before they kiss.” He studied Slade intently. “Have you kissed her yet?”

“If I have, it’s none of your business,” Slade said stiffly.

Timmy’s expression turned all too knowing. “You have, I’ll bet. What’s it like kissing a girl?”

“You’ll find that out for yourself soon enough,” Slade told him. He grinned. “And it’s a little like riding a horse. Sometimes you get it wrong, but it gets better and better the more you do it.”

Timmy’s fascination with kissing clearly faded at the mention of horseback riding. His face clouded with concern again. “Did you ever fall off a horse?” he asked hesitantly.

Ah, there it was, Slade thought, the question he’d been hoping to avoid. “Quite a lot, actually. I was younger than Kevin.”

“You rode a horse when you were that little?” Timmy asked incredulously. “How come?”

“My father insisted on it.”

“Grandfather rode horses?”

“All the time.”

“Why?”

Slade was sure that given enough time he could come up with an evasive answer that would have satisfied Timmy and kept him away from a subject he would rather avoid. After his conversation with Dani, though, he wondered if he’d be able to steer clear of it forever. Maybe it was time to bite the bullet and admit a few things about his past, about his sons’ heritage.

“Because he’s a rancher,” he said eventually.

Timmy’s eyes widened predictably. “Like Mr. Wilde?”

“Exactly like Mr. Wilde,” he said with an edge of dry humor his son couldn’t possibly understand.

“How come you’ve never told us that before?”

“Because your grandfather and I don’t get along so well, so I don’t like to talk about him much.”

“He’s still alive?” Timmy asked, disbelief written all over his face. “I figured he was dead.”

“No, Duke Watkins is very much alive.”

“Where does he live?”

“In Texas.”

“Can we go there sometime?” he pleaded, clearly oblivious to Slade’s distaste for the subject. “Not to ride horses or anything,” he added hurriedly. “Just to see our grandfather.”

“I don’t know about that,” Slade said evasively.

For once Timmy didn’t argue. He apparently had too many questions.

“Do we have a grandmother, too?” he asked.

Slade nodded.

“Wow, awesome!” He hesitated. “Do you think they’d like me and Kevin?”

Slade sighed, then said candidly, “They would adore you.”

“Wow! Wait until I tell Kevin.”

Before Slade could stop him, Timmy rushed from the room and clattered down the stairs, shouting for his brother. So much for old secrets, he thought with a sigh. His past was about to come out of the closet with a vengeance.

He hoped like hell Dani would be satisfied at the can of worms she’d opened up by dragging the boys out to the ranch. Of course, he had a feeling that even if she’d known precisely what the outcome would be, she would have gone ahead with her plans anyway.

But when the boys started clamoring for a trip to Texas, maybe he’d just send Dani along with them so she could get a firsthand look at what a real control freak looked like. Maybe then she’d come to appreciate her own father’s far more mild-mannered form of meddling.

* * *

As distraught as Timmy had been the night before over embarrassing himself in front of Dani, Slade decided he had no choice but to go with the boys on Saturday when they planned to hold the yard sale at Dani’s. When he saw relief wash over Timmy’s face he was glad he’d reached that decision. Apparently a little fatherly moral support was just what he needed to face Dani again.

They arrived precisely as planned at seven o’clock. The yard sale had been advertised around town on handmade posters, with a scheduled start time of eight. Already, though, Dani looked besieged. Half a dozen cars were parked at the curb, the occupants looking like an anxious swarm of locusts.

The Bleecker boys were struggling to get their card table opened and ready for the lemonade sale. Two identical twin boys, Dirk and Kirk Hinson, their mouths covered with chocolate frosting, looked as if they’d already eaten up most of the potential profits from the cupcake sale. Only that daylong trip to Three-Stars had probably saved them from being eaten straight out of the oven two days ago.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Dani said, pausing long enough to hug both boys. The look she exchanged with Slade was so frazzled, so unexpectedly vulnerable that he concluded right then he would have fought dragons for her.

“Did this get just the teensiest bit out of hand?” he inquired, very glad he’d insisted they leave Pirate at home that morning. The dog would have been the last straw. Dani might very well have flipped out right before his eyes with Pirate chasing everyone in sight.

“Don’t gloat,” she warned. “Just start carting those boxes in the garage out to the lawn. And if one single person gets out of a car, belt them.”

“Is that how you’ve held them at bay up until now?”

“I waved my shotgun at the first car. Word spread,” she told him with a grin.

“I can imagine. I doubt I’ll have any trouble with them.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what the sight of a few boxes of cast-off belongings will do to otherwise rational people. I ought to know. I nearly trampled a woman to get that old-fashioned cookie cutter I have in the kitchen. Paid top dollar for it, too.”

Slade chuckled at her triumphant expression. “Nothing stands in your way when you want something, does it?”

“Nothing,” she confirmed, then grinned at him. “You might want to remember that.”

He was still trying to puzzle out the meaning of her remark as she dashed across the lawn to nab the card table just before it upended with three pitchers of lemonade.

“Dad,” Timmy prodded. “Dani said to get the stuff in the garage.”

“Oh, right,” he said distractedly.

“Now,” Timmy said emphatically.

“Okay, okay.” He followed his son to the garage, where a dozen or more cartons were crammed with every conceivable kind of junk. He couldn’t imagine that the combined worth was more than a few dollars. Obviously the avid people in their cars thought otherwise.

For the next half hour he carried boxes and helped to arrange the items they contained on old blankets and tablecloths that had been spread over the grass until it looked like some sort of country patchwork quilt.

At precisely eight o’clock Dani surveyed everything, gave a little nod of satisfaction and gestured toward the growing crowd of would-be buyers. They emerged from their cars like racers exiting a starting gate.

In no time at all the boys were overwhelmed with enthusiastic shoppers. Dani’s hair, which she’d tucked into some sort of a knot on top of her head, was coming loose, tendril by silky tendril. Slade had the most incredible desire to sweep a few curls away from the back of her neck and kiss her on that exposed bare skin.

She turned just then and, as if she’d guessed his thoughts, blushed prettily. Then almost at once she returned her attention to a customer who was bargaining enthusiastically for some china knickknack that couldn’t have been worth more than a dollar new, but appeared to be selling for 12.50 now that it had a little wear and tear on it.

Slade decided at that moment, with his sons shouting happily over each sale, with Dani clearly in her element and desire slamming through him like a freight train, that he would forever think of garage sales in an entirely different way. Maybe they could have one every weekend. Surely there was enough stuff crammed into his grandparents’ attic to keep this crowd going for weeks on end.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Sara Dawson, Dani’s sister, said, surprising him. He hadn’t even known she’d arrived. He recognized her from an occasional glimpse he’d caught of her in town.

“Actually, I’m a little out of my element,” he confessed.

“Didn’t look that way to me. I saw the way you were staring at Dani. I recognized the look.”

He swallowed hard and forced a casual note into his voice. “Oh, and what look would that be?”

“A hunter about to claim his prey.”

He chuckled at the comparison. “I expected something a little more romantic.”

“Hunger is hunger,” she said. “No matter which kind it is.” She eyed him intently. “Just where do things stand between you and my sister?”

The blunt question didn’t surprise him. The Wildes were obviously a very direct clan. “Isn’t that between your sister and me?”

“Not if you intend to hurt her,” she said fiercely. “Then it becomes a matter for all of the Wildes and the Dawsons and the Fords.”

“In other words, the Wilde sisters and their mates stick together.”

“You bet. And Daddy’s the toughest one of us all.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“See that you do.” She grinned then. “In the meantime, you might try to knock her socks off. She deserves to have her world go topsy-turvy for once, instead of being the rock who holds the rest of us together.”

Slade nodded soberly. “I’ll remember that, too.”

Dani dashed up just then and scowled at Sara. “What are you telling him?” she said, clearly fearing the worst from her very direct, red-haired sister.

“Not a thing,” Sara swore, casting a thoroughly innocent look at her sister.

“You’re not meddling?” Dani asked doubtfully.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sara insisted. “That’s Daddy’s job.”

Dani faced Slade. “Is she telling the truth?”

He exchanged a grin with Sara, who was looking a little worried suddenly about where his loyalties might lie. He decided, for the sake of family peace and his own peace of mind, he’d better stick to her story just this once. “Absolutely,” he swore.

“Good,” Dani said, obviously relieved. She held out her hand to him. “Come with me. I need help with Mr. Garrett. He’s trying to steal my favorite old records for practically nothing. I told him I had to check with someone who’d submitted a sealed bid that was higher than what he was offering.”

Slade grinned at the blatant lie. “You love this, don’t you?”

“What’s not to love? I get rid of all my junk. People leave with treasures they’re sure they got at bargain prices.”

“Bargain prices, my eye. I saw you negotiating over that silly china dog. You bamboozled that woman.”

“Did not. She would have paid twice that. She has a collection. She knew exactly what she was getting. So did I.”

“If you say so. Just remind me to watch my back if we’re ever trying to strike a deal.”

She reached up and patted his cheek. “Don’t worry. I’ll always give you fair warning before I bamboozle you.”

Again there was a spark in her eyes that struck him as downright dangerous. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was behind it.

Before he could worry too much about it, he was caught up in the negotiations for a bunch of dusty old 78 RPM records that were probably collector’s items. The old man he was supposedly bidding against had an avaricious gleam in his eyes that suggested there was a lot more room for bargaining.

Just as Slade figured they had reached top dollar, a flustered, gray-haired lady wearing a loose-fitting jogging suit and bright red sneakers jumped off a motorcycle, ran up, listened for the latest bids, then topped them both by twenty bucks.

“Sold!” Dani said before either Slade or the other bidder could react. She threw her arms around the woman. “Congratulations, Mrs. Fawcett!”

“I was so worried we wouldn’t get here in time,” the older woman said. “Your father was dillydallying all the way over here. He said this whole sale was a bunch of nonsense. He seems to think if you need money, you ought to be coming to him, not selling off your belongings on the front lawn.”

“This isn’t about the money,” Dani protested. “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, what’s wrong with him?”

Slade turned and stared at the man in question, who was just now climbing off the Harley and sauntering their way. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. Trent Wilde wearing a motorcycle helmet and careening around town on a motorcycle with his lady love was about as unexpected as watching sweet little Dani bargaining like Donald Trump.

“Did you get here in time to get those silly records?” he asked Matilda Fawcett.

“No thanks to you,” she shot back, drawing grins from Slade and Dani.

“What the devil are you planning to do with them, anyway?” Trent demanded.