“Then the gossips are going to throw a ticker tape parade when they find out about Dani.”
She sent him a quizzical look. “Who’s Dani?”
“My daughter.”
Kenzie stared at him, stunned. “You’re serious? You have a child?”
Spencer nodded. “A little girl.”
There were so many thoughts swirling through her mind, she didn’t know where to begin.
“How old is she?” she asked, latching onto the most obvious question first.
“Three. Well, almost four.”
“Are you...married?”
He shook his head. “No. Never. I mean, I would have married Emily, but she never told me that she was pregnant. In fact, it was only six weeks ago that I found out about Dani.”
“I can’t... I never...wow.”
“Yeah, that about sums up my reaction, too,” he admitted.
She took another minute to absorb the information he’d provided, but her brain was stuck on the fact that the wild child of the esteemed Channing family had a child of his own now. But maybe even more shocking was that the object of her adolescent adoration was sitting in her kitchen talking to her about it.
And while it had taken a concerted effort not to drool over his hotness as she sat beside him eating her dinner, this new information made her uneasy, because now she knew she hadn’t been ogling—surreptitiously, of course—the hottest guy in school but a little girl’s father.
Obviously her tired brain needed caffeine to process this.
She reached into the cupboard for a mug, then remembered the hot guy still in her kitchen. “Do you want coffee?”
“Sure,” Spencer said.
She grabbed a second mug, then popped a pod into the single-serve brewer. “Cream? Sugar?”
“Black’s good,” he said.
She handed him the first mug then brewed a second, to which she added a splash of milk.
“So.” She lifted her cup toward her lips, sipped. “An almost-four-year-old daughter.”
He nodded.
“And you only found out about her six weeks ago?”
He nodded again.
Which jived with the timing of his shoulder injury, she realized. Probably not a coincidence. More likely, he’d been distracted by the revelation when he’d climbed onto the back of the bull for that fateful ride.
“Why did her mom track you down now?” Kenzie wondered.
“She didn’t,” he acknowledged, his tone grim. “Emily died in a motorcycle accident three months ago.”
“Oh, Spencer.” She set her mug on the counter and instinctively reached out to touch a hand to his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Mostly for Dani. But I’ll admit to being a little frustrated, too, because now I’ll never know why she didn’t tell me about my child.”
“Then how did you find out?”
“Linda—Emily’s mom and Dani’s grandmother—tracked me down through the PRCA,” he said, referring to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.
“Just to stop by and tell you that you were a father?”
“No, to tell me that Emily put in her will that she wanted me to have Copper Penny—her horse—and custody of Dani.”
“Wow,” she said again.
“Can you picture it?” he asked her. “Me? With a kid?”
She lifted her mug to her lips again.
It was obvious what he thought her response would be, and her knee-jerk reaction was to give him the definitive “no” he expected. Because when she tried to picture the Spencer Channing she’d known in high school as a dad, the image refused to form. But when she looked at him now and took a moment to really consider his question, she realized that her instinctive reaction wasn’t just unfair, it was wrong.
“Actually, I can—and it’s not as hard as I would have imagined.”
“Well, I can’t,” he told her. “I mean, what was she thinking? We met at a rodeo—she knows what my life is like.”
But there was a hint of something in his voice that made Kenzie think he wished his situation was different—something that suggested he might want to be a father to his daughter but just didn’t know how. “She was probably thinking that a child should be raised by a parent,” she told him.
“Without even giving me a heads-up that I was a parent,” he noted.
She could empathize with his frustration, but there was a bigger issue at the forefront of her mind. “Where’s Dani now?”
“In Denver. With her grandmother.” He unlocked his phone, then turned it toward Kenzie.
The wallpaper on his screen was a picture of a little girl with familiar Channing blue eyes, wispy blond hair and a sweet Cupid’s-bow mouth curved in a tentative smile. “Oh, Spencer. She’s beautiful.”
“She is, isn’t she?” he said, sounding pleased and proud—and more than a little overwhelmed.
“Are you going to honor her mother’s wishes?”
He turned the phone around again and studied the picture for a long minute before responding to her question. “I’m going to try. Maybe I wonder about the wisdom of Emily’s choices and worry that I’m going to screw up...but Dani’s my daughter—and I want to be her father.” He managed a wry smile. “And no one could be more surprised by that realization than me.”
Obviously Kenzie’s perceptions were colored by her own experiences. She’d grown up without a father because her own had abandoned his pregnant wife and, as a result, Spencer’s quiet determination to do the right thing made him even more appealing to her.
Not that she would ever let him know it. Although he’d been flirting and teasing earlier, she had no intention of opening up her heart to him again. The revelations about his daughter only strengthened her resolve, because Dani’s grieving heart was the only one that mattered.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked cautiously. “What’s going to happen next?”
“Well, I’m still hopeful that I can compete at the National Finals.”
Which she knew took place in December—barely six weeks away, and which confirmed her suspicion that his return to Haven was only temporary.
“I meant with Dani,” she clarified.
“The caseworker thought she should stay with Linda until I had suitable accommodations.”
“Caseworker?” she echoed, surprised.
He explained that Dani had been in the care of a teenage babysitter when Emily was killed. Apparently she’d promised to be home by ten o’clock, and when it got to be midnight and she still hadn’t returned, the babysitter tried to reach her on her cell phone. Emily didn’t answer, so the babysitter called her parents, who then contacted the police. They, of course, reached out to family services to take custody of the child until her next of kin could be contacted. At the time, that was her grandmother because nobody knew anything about Dani’s father.
He