finally settling on her now beaming mother. “Contrary to popular opinion, I’ve been an adult for quite awhile now.”
A soft male snort drew her attention. Her father shook his head, amusement lighting his—no, not amusement this time. Good Lord, could that possibly be moisture making his eyes shine? “Ye have our blessing to live in Spellbound Falls,” he added, thickly. “Alone in your own home, if ye prefer.”
Oh yeah, definitely dreaming. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “I take a job in a town a hundred miles away without telling you, then run off to Colorado without telling you, and you all of a sudden decide you don’t have a problem with any of that?”
“Nay, you finally decided that what I think no longer matters.”
“That’s the real test for any child,” her mother said. “It doesn’t work unless you figure it out for yourself, Katy. Like when it came to you riding that horse, though it was ultimately your father who convinced me.”
“Really?”
Libby gave a small laugh. “If he hadn’t, you’d still be writing to Santa asking for that Olympic-caliber horse.”
Katy reared back in her chair. “You . . . you were against my getting Quantum?”
Her mother instantly sobered. “Do you have any idea how many riding accident victims I patched back together when I was a full-time surgeon in California? Or how many people I had to tell that their child or loved one probably wouldn’t ever walk again?”
Katy slid her gaze to her father, then back to her mother, at a complete loss as to what to say. Or think. Or feel. She propped her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. “What about Brody getting his motorcycle?”
“I managed to postpone that until his senior year in high school, when Michael finally asked if I wanted our son learning to handle a bike in Boston traffic instead of on our open roads, since we both knew he intended to buy one the moment he got to college.”
Katy felt her mother’s touch on her arm and lifted her head. “Robbie was almost nine when I realized I was only hurting myself by insisting Michael make the boy wear a helmet when he rode his pony.” She gestured at her husband. “To which he not-so-eloquently informed me that he had no intention of raising ‘a weak modern who was too afraid of dying to truly live.’”
Katy had grown up knowing “modern” referred to anyone born in this or the last century and that all the original time-traveling MacKeages and MacBains and Gregors thought most modern men were soft—which was why the displaced Highlanders insisted on raising their sons to be warriors and their daughters to be . . . well, eventually rebellious, apparently.
Michael slid an arm around his wife and drew her to him with an affectionate squeeze. “Your mother may be stronger than me in many ways,” he said, smiling down into Libby’s big brown eyes. “But she just couldn’t see the value of buying a twelve-year-old lass a young, spirited horse.” He turned his smile on Katy. “Looking at you now, I do believe I made the right call on that one.”
Katy dropped her head back into her hands. Okay, he might have killed her dream of being in the Olympics, but she couldn’t deny the many pleasurable years he’d given her racing the wind on Quantum. She lifted her gaze and shook her head at her parents. “You two are something else.”
Michael stood and pulled back his wife’s chair, then shot Katy a wink. “Why don’t you ladies head to the parking lot so your mother can see for herself that ye didn’t spend the last two months falling off mountains in Colorado.”
Katy’s body went cold. Wonderful. Just when it looked like she might actually pull this off, her father offers her up for examination. Well, at least the explosion would be in a deserted parking lot instead of the middle of the airport.
“A hint wouldn’t have killed you,” Katy said as she slipped her arm through her mother’s, deciding to go on the offensive the moment they exited the restaurant. “It would have been nice to know that disagreeing with you two was even an option.”
Libby pulled her to a stop. “And just how would telling you that have made you an adult?” She reached up and took Katy’s face in her delicate surgeon’s hands. “When I was your age, I was still being a dutiful daughter to a father who