Free Midnight Promises by Sherryl Woods Page B

her father’s thoughtless words.
Instead of talking back to her father, though, she whirled on Daisy. “That’s my dress!” she announced in a voice loud enough to carry to several nearby girls, who immediately giggled. “Mom must have dug it out of my throw-away pile.”
Elliott frowned at his niece. “Selena, enough!” he said sharply since Ernesto seemed to have no interest in correcting his daughter. “You’re deliberately trying to embarrass your cousin.”
“She’s not my real cousin,” Selena said nastily. “And you’re not her real dad.”
At Selena’s cruel words, Daisy looked stunned, then burst into tears and ran from the room. Elliott hesitated only long enough to give Selena a disappointed look. “I thought your mother had raised you to be kinder than that,” he said quietly. He held his brother-in-law’s gaze. “And you have nothing to say about this kind of behavior?”
Ernesto only shrugged. “What can I say? She’s her mother’s daughter.”
Elliott shook his head, wondering not for the first time what on earth was happening to his sister’s marriage. “I’ll deal with both of you later.”
He took off to find Daisy. She was pushing ineffectively at a locked door at the end of the corridor.
“Niña,” he said quietly. “Little one, I’m sorry.”
“I want to go home,” she pleaded, turning her tear-streaked face toward him.
“And I will take you, if that’s what you really want,” he told her. “But sometimes when people misbehave as badly as Selena did in there, the best thing to do is hold your chin up high and show people that you’re better than that.”
“But everybody’s laughing at me,” Daisy said, her eyes filling once more with tears. She regarded him with bewilderment. “I thought we were friends. Why would she be so mean?”
Elliott wondered about that himself. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But I think perhaps she is very unhappy tonight.”
Daisy looked intrigued by his response. “How come?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, not wanting to suggest that Ernesto had let her down. “But I think she took her own unhappiness out on you. That was very wrong, but perhaps you will be the bigger person and find it in your heart to try to understand and forgive her.”
Daisy seemed to consider his words for a very long time before she met his gaze and asked with a sniff, “Do I have to?”
Elliott had to turn away to hide a smile. “No, little one, you don’t have to, but I hope you will. Despite what happened here tonight, we’re still family.”
She sighed heavily. “Okay, I’ll think about it.” She met his gaze. “But I still don’t want to go back. Please, can we go?”
“Why don’t we go to Wharton’s for ice cream?” he suggested. “How about that?”
She gave him a wobbly smile. “Ice cream would be good.”
On the way to Wharton’s, she wiped away the last of her tears and turned to him. “Before Selena said all those things, I had a good time, Elliott. Thank you for taking me.”
“Anytime,” he assured her. “And I had a good time, too. Next year’s father-daughter dance will be better. I promise.”
And first thing in the morning, he intended to get to the bottom of whatever had made his niece behave in such an uncharacteristically rotten way. His brother-in-law might be comfortable letting it slide, but he most definitely was not.
* * *
     
“Selena said what to Daisy?” Karen asked, her expression stunned when Elliott described the awful scene at the dance. “Why would Selena do such a thing? Daisy adores her. She must have been crushed.”
“At first, yes,” he admitted. “But a hot fudge sundae seemed to go a long way toward making her feel better.”
“At least this explains why she went straight to her room when you got back here just now and didn’t answer when I asked about the dance.”
“She felt humiliated, no question about it,” he admitted, looking chagrined. “For my niece to do such a