it was all he could do to get through the day on his own. He was grateful every single minute of it, though, that his parents had been willing to take Annie in when he hadn’t been up to it. She’d been better off with them than she would have been with him. He’d been too bitter, too filled with resentment toward her mama to be any kind of example for an impressionable kid.
“You know I’m grateful,” he began.
“We don’t want your thanks,” his father said, cutting him off. “We love Annie and we love you. We know the jam you were in after the accident. We understood you needed some time to get back on your feet.”
“But—”
“Let me finish now. Your mama and I aren’t up to raising Annie the way the girl ought to be raised. We had a houseful of boys. Girls just aren’t the same, even though Annie seems bent on being the toughest little tomboy in the whole town. Besides that, times have changed since you and your brothers were kids. The world’s a different place.”
“Not in Wilder’s Glen,” Slade protested. “It’s perfect for Annie. It’s a small town. She’ll be as safe there as she could be anywhere.”
“Her safety’s not the only issue. Even if it were, she’ll be just as safe in Los Piños. No, indeed, there’s a more important issue, and you know it. She misses you. She belongs with you. We were glad enough to fill in for a while, but it’s time for you to take over now and that’s that. Otherwise the child will be scarred for life, thinking that her own daddy didn’t want her any more than her mama did.”
“But—”
“No buts, and you can forget coming after her. We’ll bring her to you this weekend,” Harold announced decisively, as if he no longer trusted Slade to show up for her.
Slade sighed heavily. The sorry truth was he wouldn’t have, not even with a deadline staring him in the face. He would have called at the last minute with some excuse or another, and counted on his parents to hang in with Annie a little longer.
Hearing a date and time for assuming responsibility for his daughter all but made Slade’s skin crawl. Much as he loved Annie, he wasn’t cut out to be a parent to her. His experience with her mother was pretty much evidence of his lack of understanding of the female mind. He was also flat-out terrified that the resentment he felt toward Suzanne would carry over to their daughter in some way he wouldn’t be able to control. No kid deserved that.
Annie was the spitting image of his ex-wife in every way, from her gloriously thick hair to her green-as-emerald eyes, from the dusting of freckles on her nose to her stubborn chin. Apparently she had her mama’s wicked ways about her, too. She’d caused more trouble in the last year than any child he’d ever known. She’d topped his own imaginative forms of rebellion by a mile and she hadn’t even hit puberty yet. What on earth would her teenage years hold? To be fair, he couldn’t blame his parents for not wanting to find out.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his own voice desperate now. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for her to come here. She’s comfortable there with you. She’s starting to think of that as home. She spent the school year there. She’s made friends. Uprooting her all over again won’t be good for her. Besides that, the Adamses don’t even know I have a daughter. I’m living in a bunkhouse. Some days I don’t get to bed till midnight and I’m back up again at dawn.”
He’d ticked off a half-dozen excuses before he was done, most of them flat-out lies. He knew that a staunch family man like Harlan Adams would never object to Slade bringing his daughter to the ranch. If anything, he’d be furious Slade hadn’t brought her to be with him before now.
As for the living arrangements, Harlan Adams would make adjustments for that, too. It had been Slade’s choice to live in the bunkhouse, rather than one of the other homes dotted across Adams land. He’d wanted to stay close to the horses that were his responsibility. Horses were something he understood.
He tried one last panicked ploy. “I could get you some help,” he offered. “Maybe a housekeeper.”
“This isn’t about cooking and cleaning,” his father scoffed. “It’s about a little girl needing her