Free Renegade Father by RaeAnne Thayne Page B

“Want us to take some of your calves to make it fair?”
    His own smile slid away and he didn’t say anything for a moment, as if sensing her mood. Finally he took the needles from her. “No. Wouldn’t want to give you any reason to say we didn’t win fair and square.”
    He wheeled Quixote around, then the horse cantered off across the pasture, leaving her watching after him.
    Â 
    Joe poked at the cedar log in the fireplace, sending sparks fluttering up the chimney. Outside the wood-frame foreman’s cottage, snowflakes drifted softly to earth. But inside the four-room cottage was warm and cozy.
    He watched the fire for a few moments, lost in the hypnotic dance and sway of the flames and the hiss and chatter of wood being consumed, then he returned to the easy chair facing it.
    This is what he had missed so desperately in prison—this satisfying ache in his muscles from knowing he’d put in a good, honest day’s work, the calm assurance that he’d left no chores undone, a warm, comfortablechair, and a good book to come home to at the end of the day.
    Other inmates filled the endless hours in the joint talking of what they missed most on the outside—their friends or their women or their whiskey. But Joe had dreamed of only simple, pure moments like this.
    And of Annie.
    He picked up his book, angry at himself for always coming back to her. He’d had no business dreaming of her then and he had even less business dreaming of her now.
    Besides, the laughing, gutsy girl that had sustained him through those grim years when he thought he would shatter apart if he had to endure one more day was just a memory. That girl didn’t exist anymore.
    In her place was a sad-eyed, skittish woman who jumped at shadows and trusted no one.
    Occasionally the girl he had known reappeared, though. This afternoon, for instance. He set the book down and gazed once more at the flames as if he could conjure her there.
    It had been so good to see Annie laughing and joking with him, to see that flush on her cheeks again and that sassy spark in her eyes.
    He missed the old Annie, the one who used to see the world as one big challenge for her to conquer. The Annie who found joy in the simplest of things and who was willing to take on a bully twice her size on the school bus when Joe stoically refused to respond to his taunts.
    He hadn’t realized how much he missed her until he caught that rare, fleeting glimpse today.
    He had loved that girl. It had been his guilty secret through most of his life. Annie had represented everything he didn’t have in his life—sweetness, laughter, joy—and he had craved her like an addict desperate for his next fix.
    He’d tried to hide it and thought he had succeeded pretty well until the day he had found her grieving for her father up at the lake. He had kissed her only in comfort, but that one embrace had sent all his bottled-up feelings—some he hadn’t even admitted to himself—exploding out of him like Roman candles.
    The memory was etched in his mind, right alongside the day he learned she had married his brother.
    He found out the same day he had been transferred from the county jail to Deer Lodge. He didn’t know what he remembered more, his first official day as a convicted murderer or that solemn, devastating letter from Colt.
    Annie and Charlie.
    He had thought it was a joke at first. When he finally realized Colt was serious, he thought he was suffocating, being buried alive.
    She hadn’t even bothered to write to him herself. He was amazed at how much that still hurt, even though he admitted he was probably to blame for that. She had tried to come visit him before his sentencing and he wouldn’t even see her. He had been too ashamed to let her see him.
    Maybe if he hadn’t been so stubborn, maybe if he could have swallowed his pride, he might have been able to talk some sense into her before she did