Willowleaf Lane by RaeAnne Thayne Page B

familiar surge of bitter anger scorched through him. He pushed it away, knowing it was as pointless as ever and somehow didn’t belong in the midst of the pure beauty he drove through.
    Summer evenings in the Colorado high country were divine, green and lush and full of long, lazy shadows. He had forgotten that in the years he was gone.
    He glanced over at his daughter, thumbing her way through what passed for a conversation these days with one of her friends.
    “Thanks for coming with me today. I appreciated the moral support.”
    She made a hmmph sort of sound. “Funny. I don’t remember you giving me much choice.”
    “You couldn’t have been bored. Every time I saw you, you were doing something. Swimming in the pool, trying the machines in the weight room, hanging out in the lobby with your computer. It looked like you made a few friends.”
    She shrugged, her eyes still on her phone. “Not really.”
    “I saw you talking to some girls.”
    From his perspective, she had looked animated and even happy, but the next time he had walked past, she had been sitting alone with her computer again, with no sign of the other girls.
    “I guess.”
    Little Miss Loquacious, apparently. “Were they nice?”
    She hesitated for a moment then shrugged. “Sure. Until I told them who I was. More important, who you were. Then they wanted to ask me all kinds of questions about you and about Mom and everything.”
    His hands tightened again, this time with anger directed at himself. He hated that his child had been affected by the hot mess created by the adults around her.
    And this, kids, is what happens when a stupid nineteen-year-old boy jumps into the deep end before he learns to swim and signs a multimillion-dollar contract, which attracts all the wrong sort of women.
    He would give anything to go back and fix his mistakes—except that would mean he wouldn’t have this smart, funny, beautiful girl for a daughter.
    He just had to hope that things would get better for both of them.
    “I don’t know what we have to fix in the groceries I had delivered. Feel like going out somewhere tonight?”
    “Whatever.”
    Ah, there it was. He fought down a sigh and turned his SUV toward downtown, knowing just where he wanted to go.
    He found a parking place on Main Street, across from the bookstore and coffee bar he’d stopped at his first night in town.
    He had heard it belonged to Maura McKnight. Her kid brother Riley had played ball with him, though he’d been a few years older. Maura had once been married to Chris Parker, lead singer of Pendragon—one of Peyton’s favorite bands.
    He wondered what might be his chances of swinging an autographed poster or something, though he couldn’t imagine that would be enough to make Peyton hate him less.
    “Where are we going?” she asked as he moved around to open the car door for her.
    “Remember how I told you I washed dishes at the café Charlotte’s dad runs? I thought you would like to see the place. You might enjoy imagining me elbow deep in dishwater.”
    She looked intrigued as they crossed the street, with its historic reproduction streetlamps and hanging flower baskets.
    “What was her name?” she asked after a minute.
    “Who?” he stalled.
    “Your mom. You said this morning she had been a waitress there. You never talk about her. She would have been my grandma, right?”
    “Yeah.” He didn’t know what to say about her. He had loved her fiercely and had once beat the crap out of a punk at school, Corey Johnson, for calling her a drunk.
    When she was sober, she had been funny and bright, full of stories and jokes. She had played ball with him in the backyard and had taken him cross-country skiing.
    Through his teen years, she hadn’t been sober very often.
    “Her name was Billie,” he finally answered. “She grew up here in Hope’s Crossing but left to go to college in California, where she met my dad. She was a really talented artist and loved to read.”
    He