They rode off together, with Faith gaining more confidence with each rotation of the wheel.
“You’re welcome,” Lucy said, as the children pedaled out of earshot.
He gave her a long look. “Am I?”
“How long has she been trying not to learn how to ride a two-wheeler?”
He made a face. “About two years now. How did you know?”
She shrugged, keeping a careful eye on the children. He tried to do that, too, but found his gaze straying back to her despite his best efforts. “I’ve been watching from the house for the past fifteen minutes. Nobody but Carter seemed to be having a good time.”
“Faith can be obstinate when she’s in a mood.”
“Poor thing,” she said with a dry look. “She must have inherited that trait from Jessie.”
The name seemed to shiver between them. Her best friend and his late wife.
“No doubt,” he murmured and quickly changed the subject. “How’s the house? Still smell like a campfire in there?”
She shook her head. “I found a couple of box fans in the cellar. I threw open all the windows on the ground floor and for the last two days I’ve been trying to blow all the air out. Now it smells like a Colorado April afternoon.”
“That should help. You’ll want to wash the curtains in that room, like I said, maybe have the upholstery on the furniture cleaned. Sometimes that smoke can cling for weeks, especially in textiles.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.”
They lapsed into silence, both watching the children as they reached the corner. Brendan held his breath as Faith navigated the turn. She was a little shaky and he thought she would fall, but she set her leg down to help stabilize the bike and then picked up the rhythm again.
The kid was a natural. He had known she would be once she conquered her mental block and pushed past her apprehension. For that, at least, he owed Lucy.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night about coming over to bring the gifts you bought for the children,” he said on impulse. “The evening got away from me, as they tend to do, with homework and laundry and dinner and everything.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, her eyes filled with a sympathy he found as surprising as it was unwelcome. He didn’t want her feeling sorry for him. Yeah, being a single father was tough, but he had plenty of help from his family and good neighbors.
“Whenever you want to come over should be fine. Tomorrow after school would work. I’m not on the schedule at the station for a few more days.”
“Thanks. I would go get them now but I don’t want to stop the forward momentum here.”
The kids rode up to them just then. Faith even managed a credible job of staying balanced while she braked.
“Did you see that, Dad?” Faith’s sweetly serious little face glowed. “I rode all the way to the corner and back!”
“I watched the whole time. You were terrific. I knew you could do it. It was just a matter of practice.”
And a little bit of Lucy magic, he added to himself. It wasn’t a completely comfortable thought.
“Can we go for a bike ride to the park?”
He chuckled. “Two minutes ago, you couldn’t ride without your training wheels. Now you’re ready to go across town to the park?”
“It’s not across town. I meant the little park that’s just on the other side of Tulip Street.”
He had a hundred things to do that evening. Reports to file, bills to pay, dishes to wash. But he couldn’t discourage her from practicing this new skill he had fought so hard for her to attain.
“Sure. We can go to the park. Stay on the sidewalk and don’t cross the street until I get there.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
She beamed at him and rode off, still a little wobbly but really doing remarkably well, considering she had only actually been riding without the training wheels for about ten minutes.
He followed after her and had walked only a few steps when he realized Lucy was still standing where he had left her, in front of the Browns’ driveway.
He turned around, struck by how lovely she looked there in the long shadows of afternoon with the fading sunlight haloing her hair and burnishing her skin.
He didn’t want to notice that about Lucy or any woman. Not yet. He forced himself to push it out of his mind.
“You’re not coming with us?” he asked gruffly, gesturing after the kids.
She blinked a little at his tacit invitation then smiled. “Oh. Yes. I could use a walk this evening.”
He waited until she caught up with him, and they walked in silence for a few moments. The air was pleasantly cool. He always enjoyed this time of year, when the grass was beginning to green up again and the trees were bursting with buds.
“I had forgotten how pretty Hope’s Crossing is in the evening,” she said.
He had lived here most of his life, except the few years he was away on a scholarship playing college football and earning his degree and then the two short years he played pro football before a knee injury permanently sidelined him. To him, Hope’s Crossing was just...home. But on a spring night in April, he could see the appeal of the well-kept, charming houses, the tree-lined streets, the mountains that encircled the town.
He waved to old Mr. Henderson, driving past in his beat-up old Chevrolet pickup truck. “It’s a nice little town, especially for kids.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
They walked a little farther and he raised a hand in greeting to two more people driving past.
“You must know everybody in town,” she said.
“Not even close. We’ve got so many people moving in or building second homes in the area, it’s hard to keep track. I just happen to know those two. And that one, my neighbor, Mrs. Peabody.”
He waved at the longtime widow who used to teach him in Sunday school. He saw her shield her eyes with a hand as she tried to make out the identity of his companion and his stomach dropped.
He suddenly regretted asking Lucy to join him on this little excursion. Hope’s Crossing was a small town. People were bound to take notice when their favorite object of pity, that poor widower Brendan Caine, started walking around town with a woman new to Hope’s Crossing—or at least recently returned to town.
The last thing he needed were rumors starting up about him and Lucy. He didn’t want anybody deciding to put more into this than exactly what it was, a casual walk to the park with his kids.
In reality, they were two people who disliked each other, linked only by the woman they had both loved and by the two children who rode ahead of them.
He needed to keep reminding himself of that and not allow himself to be seduced by a lovely evening, an even lovelier woman and the quiet enjoyment of a little adult companionship, for a change.
* * *
A WEEK AGO, if somebody had told her she would be spending a beautiful April evening sitting at a park in Hope’s Crossing on a bench next to Brendan Caine, she would have laughed out loud at such a preposterous notion.
Life had the strangest way of throwing curveballs at a woman when she least expected it.
A week ago, she had been confident she had the world figured out—or at least her place in it. Now everything had changed, and she was left trying to find her way again.
Once