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“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 remember when you moved to town,” she admitted, her cheeks coloring under his gaze. “You were in tenth grade. I was in seventh.”
He couldn’t imagine why she would recall that, other than that he and Mason were such best buddies. He’d never been a popular kid and hadn’t had many friends. The truth was, he hadn’t made much of a mark in Wildhorn, then or now, and what he had done he wasn’t proud of. He had a lot of ground to make up for.
“I never had a dog, even though I grew up on this ranch,” she said thoughtfully, referring to the Morgan holdings, on which her cabin rested. “We only kept ranch animals. We had a couple of herding dogs and a mean-spirited barn cat, who never let me anywhere near him. Once I started my photography career, I was traveling too often to consider a pet.”
“That’s a shame. There are many reasons to have a dog, the least of which is that they are good for your health. And they are the perfect companions. They’re easy for anyone to care for.”
He probably sounded like a commercial, which he kind of was, since dogs were his life’s passion.
She grinned. “Trust me, I’m the exception to that rule. When I was about ten years old, my mom put me in charge of the garden for exactly one season.”
Why was she talking about plants?
“Nothing grew but weeds. No vegetables thrived, and hardly any of the flowers bloomed. I took my mother’s beautiful, colorful garden and murdered it.
“When I lived in my loft in Los Angeles, I experimented again and tried keeping a cactus. You know—the kind that don’t need a lot of attention. Mary helped pick it out. She was the real green thumb of the family. She told me plants helped clean the air.”
She stopped and swallowed hard. He didn’t need her to tell him what she was struggling with, how fresh her grief must still feel for her. It was written all over her face, and tears glittered in her eyes.
Immediately, his innate masculine protective instinct rose in him, but he didn’t trust female tears any more than he did the crying woman so he quashed it back.
Still struggling to speak, Miranda cleared her throat.
“Mary assured me a cactus was the easiest to keep and that even I couldn’t fail, but I managed to strangle the life out of the poor thing within a matter of months.”
“You forgot to water it?” He managed to keep his voice neutral, but he couldn’t help but be concerned. If she was afraid of owning a houseplant or a pet, how was she going to get on with twin babies?
“Sometimes. I’d go weeks without thinking about it at all, and then I’d suddenly remember and overwater.”
Her face flamed.
“Anyway,” she said, taking a deep breath and swiping a palm across her cheeks to remove the lingering moisture, “at the end of the day, I destroyed it. What’s the opposite of green thumb? Black thumb? That’s me.”
He chuckled despite himself.
“So you can see why I’d be concerned about owning a dog. Fortunately, I don’t need a live animal to keep me healthy. I’m in good shape. I work out and eat clean, most of the time. Barring chocolate. Chocolate anything is my weakness.”
She wouldn’t be concerned about her physical condition. She was in really good shape—objectively speaking.
“You could use one for good therapy, then. Dogs make great listeners.”
He didn’t know why he was trying to sell her on the benefits of owning a dog. He wouldn’t put one of his dogs in her care in a million years. She had more than enough responsibility with the twins.
She laughed. “I guess we can all use a little good therapy from time to time, can’t we? I imagine a dog is far cheaper than a psychologist.”
“And a therapist isn’t overjoyed to see you when you walk in the door at night like a dog is.”
“Point taken.” Miranda helped the twins change their crayons to a different color.
He didn’t want to like anything about this woman, but he had to admit she did already appear to have somewhat of a handle on keeping the twins occupied and happy. Much better than he’d thought she would have, in any case.
“So tell me about your dogs.” She propped her chin on her palms.
He raised a brow. Most people’s eyes simply glazed over when he tried to talk about his life’s passion, yet Miranda was urging him to do so.
“My herding dogs are the way I make my main living,” he said. “I own a few especially well-bred Australian cattle dogs with excellent working lines, and between all my females, I manage several litters of puppies every year. I train them and sell them to local ranchers in Texas and surrounding states. I’ve developed enough of a reputation that I’ve got a waiting list for my puppies. That’s my bread and butter.”
He didn’t know why he was telling her all this. He hated talking about himself and didn’t like to brag. But there was something about Miranda’s personality that pulled the words right off his tongue.
Harper rolled over and stared up at him with her big brown eyes. He planted a kiss on her chubby cheek, making her smile and pat his whiskered face with her soft palm.
“I have a dog rescue on the side, and that’s where my true life’s work lies,” he continued. “I take dogs from kill shelters and help them find forever families. That’s the name of my shelter—Forever Family. But some of the dogs I pick up have health or behavioral issues and can never be rehomed, so they stay with me.”
Her eyes widened. She was probably imagining how many dogs he sheltered. She would be surprised when she knew the truth, because she was probably guessing too few.
“I teach all my dogs—cattle dogs and rescues alike—to pass the American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen program. That certification goes a long way into making the dogs more adoptable.”
“How interesting,” she said, and sounded like she meant it. “All the shelters I know just keep the dogs in cages and walk them from time to time. It’s commendable for you to put in the extra effort to make them ready for their new adoptive families. And I imagine there aren’t too many people who would be willing to take on a dog that they knew at the outset they couldn’t rehome.”
“No, I don’t suppose—” Suddenly, he clamped down on his jaw and lowered his brow. Why was he continuing to yammer on about his work? It made him feel vulnerable that he’d shared a part of himself that he rarely revealed to others.
In general, he kept his thoughts to himself, and this—this was Miranda Morgan he was opening up to, telling her all about his life.
His guard snapped up. He sure as shootin’ hadn’t come to visit her on a social call, much less to put himself in the hot seat—or underneath a makeshift tent with crayons in his hand.
This was ludicrous. How was he going to turn the conversation around to the real reason he was here?
“No, no, Hudson,” Miranda said when the boy started gnawing on the end of his crayon. “That’s not your snack.” She reached into a plastic bag she’d stored beside her and withdrew a hard cracker, replacing the crayon with the finger food.
Simon didn’t want to be, but he couldn’t help but be impressed.
Again.
The woman had actually considered that Hudson and Harper might want snacks before she’d arranged the twins—and herself—in the tent.
Miranda had been a single socialite and suddenly she was a mother. She couldn’t possibly have adapted to her new role as much as it appeared she had. He must be seeing something out of the ordinary, catching her in an especially good moment.
But he had to admit she seemed to have thought of everything. He knew he wouldn’t have fared so well, despite having known and interacted with Hudson and Harper since their births. He would have gone in with nothing and would have had to crawl in and out of the tent every time the twins needed something else.
He wouldn’t have even thought of the tent.
He hated to consider the possibility, but apparently, despite that she’d just arrived in town and had only been the twins’ official guardian for a few days, there was something Miranda could teach him about caring for babies.
Who knew?
