LITMIR.BIZ

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jammed under a table only a few feet high, couldn’t possibly be comfortable for her, with her tall, lithe frame, and yet she had an enthusiastic smile on her face and didn’t look the least bit put out by the awkward position. He suspected her feet might be protruding out the back, although he couldn’t confirm that from his current vantage point.

      She shined the flashlight at his face, momentarily blinding him, and he held up a hand to block the light.

      “Simon?” she questioned, surprise lining her tone. “Simon West?”

      He was astonished she recognized him. He’d added a few inches to his frame in the years since they’d seen each other last, not to mention a few pounds. He’d stayed at the outskirts of John and Mary’s funeral and hadn’t spoken to anyone but Mason and Charlotte.

      “Uncle Simon,” he corrected her tersely, nodding toward the twins. “It’s an honorary title.”

      Of which he was very, very proud.

      “Well, Uncle Simon, you’re more than welcome to join us.” She shifted herself and the twins to the side to make room for him in the tiny strung-up tent.

      “I’m welcome to—” he repeated. He’d walked into her house out of the blue. She had no idea why he was here, and yet she’d immediately offered him the opportunity to join in their...adventure.

      “What are you doing here, by the way?” she asked curiously.

      “I—er—”

      Her offer completely threw him off his game, and for a moment he was fairly certain he was gaping and couldn’t remember his own name, much less why he had come.

      Eventually, he shook his head. There was no way he was going to get his large frame under that small table, no matter how hard he squeezed. And honestly, he didn’t even really want to try.

      “We can make it work,” Miranda insisted, clearly not taking no for an answer. “I’m sure the twins will love spending quality time with their uncle Simon.”

      She couldn’t possibly know it, but she’d just touched on his weak spot. He hadn’t been spending as much time as he should have with his godchildren. If she’d been trying to give him a guilt trip, those words would have done it, especially given the reason he was here.

      “Grab another sheet from the linen closet in the hallway, and grab a few more books from the shelf,” she instructed. “Oh, and get a chair from the kitchen. Drape the end of your sheet across the card table and onto the chair. That’ll give us all a bit more wiggle room. Believe me, these two are regular squirmy wormies.”

      By the time he’d followed all her instructions and lengthened the makeshift tent, she was fully absorbed reading the twins their book. He stood before them, wondering how he was going to get where Miranda wanted him to go.

      She flashed the cover of the book at Simon, as if finding out what she was reading would somehow convince him to crawl in.

      “We’re reading Little Red Riding Hood. Hudson likes the wolf, don’t you, buddy?” she asked the baby, making a growling sound and tickling his tummy.

      Hudson squealed and giggled happily.

      “Tell Uncle Simon you want him to come on down,” she said to Harper, giving her the same affectionate tickling treatment Hudson had just received. “I think he’s being a little bit stubborn, don’t you?”

      Simon balked at her words. He wasn’t being stubborn. He was being practical.

      And this was definitely not how this confrontation was supposed to go. He hadn’t envisioned anything of the sort when he’d first knocked on her door, but then, how could he have? This whole scenario was mind-boggling.

      He was losing his momentum by the second and he couldn’t seem to do anything to stop it.

      “But this is—” he started to say.

      Ridiculous.

      Humiliating.

      Mortifying.

      She raised a jaunty, dark eyebrow. There was no question about it. She was outright daring him to make a fool of himself with the twinkle in her pretty hazel eyes.

      This was nuts. He was crazy just to be thinking about it.

      There was no way he was going to get out of this with his dignity intact. But he’d never been the type of man to walk away from a challenge.

      Not now. Not ever.

      Grumbling under his breath at the ignominy of it all, he dropped onto his belly to army crawl into the mixed-up files of Miranda’s imagination makeshift dwelling.

      “Pirates or spaceships?” she queried as he settled himself in. Grinning, she passed him a handful of crayons.

      “Uh—spaceships, I guess.” Not that he had any real preference for one over the other. He’d honestly never given it any thought.

      “So in your most secret heart of hearts, you long to be an astronaut and not a cowboy, right?”

      Absolutely not.

      He supposed he had imagined exchanging his cowboy hat for a space suit when he was a child—but his childhood had gone by in the blink of an eye, almost as if it had never really existed at all.

      Reality was reality, and he was a cowboy.

      Sort of.

      “Yeah. I guess I did. When I was a really little tyke. Maybe three years old.”

      Back before his mother—a single mom herself—had gotten thrown into drug rehab one too many times. Before social services had gotten their hands on him and he’d been tossed into the pitiless foster system and left to sink or swim. His childhood dreams had morphed into a nightmare that he couldn’t wake from.

      “Coloring is another way of dreaming, you know.”

      Simon scoffed softly. He knew better. He had dealt with far too much reality in his life for him to imagine anything past the trials of the day. Scribbling on paper wouldn’t change a thing.

      And dreaming? That was a fool’s errand.

      He was a responsible man now. He colored black-and-white, inside the lines. But when Harper batted her hand at his coloring book and babbled her baby nonsense at him, he took a blue crayon and started filling in the page before him.

      “So, you’re not an actual, live spaceman,” Miranda said with a mock frown of disappointment. “What do you do for a living, then?”

      “I breed and train cattle dogs,” he explained as he switched a blue crayon for red.

      “I don’t know why, but I assumed you’d grow up to be a rancher like Mason.”

      He shrugged. “I’m not really cut out to be a rancher,” he explained. “I can ride a horse and rope a cow, but I didn’t grow up in the country. I didn’t live on a ranch until I was sent to the McPhersons in Wildhorn when I was a teenager. Training dogs is a better fit for me than herding cattle.”

      Dogs were reliable. They loved unconditionally. Not like people.

      He didn’t give his trust easily. Bouncing from one foster family to the next as a kid had taught him to depend on only himself. He wasn’t much in the relationship department, either. He’d never really learned how to make a relationship work out. He was broken. Like the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz, he was fairly certain he didn’t have a heart.

      It was hard enough to learn how to rely on God, never mind people.

      He paused. “I do own an acreage with a few head of cattle, and I like the hat.”

      That wasn’t exactly a rarity. Nearly all the men in Wildhorn, Texas, wore cowboy hats, from the time they were old enough to sit in a saddle until the day they were laid to rest. Even the local florist sported a Stetson.

      “I

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