Roping the Rancher (Harlequin American Romance) Read Free Page B

the message. She was the most important thing in his life and it was high time he proved it. So he asked for a hardship discharge, left the National Guard Reserves and returned to Estes Park.
    Looking at her now standing in his office, he realized every day she looked more like her mother. Same petite frame, long chestnut hair and warm coffee-colored eyes as her mother. Jess was the constant reminder of how young and in love he’d once been. Sometimes he looked at her and tried to find bits of himself. Today he didn’t have any trouble finding a similarity. Her chin pointed at him in stubborn defiance she inherited from him. He braced himself for whatever hand grenade she was about to throw his way.
    “Cody Simmons asked me out to a movie on Saturday. Can I go?”
    He closed his eyes for a second to regroup. Times like these he missed having her mother around to tell him whether or not he was being too much of a hard-ass. “As in out for a date, asked you out?”
    “The word date was never mentioned.”
    “I’m not falling for that one again.” She’d burned him with technicalities more than once before he learned to choose his words very carefully and scrutinize every one of hers for land mines. “Would you be going with a group of friends?”
    “Not exactly, but—”
    “Then it’s a date, and the answer is no.”
    Cody was a good kid. He was an honor student, worked part-time at the Cinemaplex and was a pretty good bronc rider in the junior rodeo circuit, but none of that mattered to Colt. Just thinking about Jess dating shoved his panic into overdrive, especially since he knew what seventeen-year-old boys were like. Basically a bundle of hormones fantasizing about sex every thirty seconds. He hadn’t been much older than Cody when he and Lynn started having sex. By graduation she’d been pregnant and they were planning a quickie wedding.
    No way did he want history repeating itself with his daughter.
    “Your ‘no dating until I’m sixteen’ rule is so old-fashioned.”
    “Then you better go get your bonnet, missy.”
    Three more months were all he had before he started greeting boys at the door with a shotgun and giving them his own version of the Spanish Inquisition before he let them out the door with his daughter. He now understood why man invented the chastity belt.
    “All my friends have been dating since they were fifteen. What difference will a few months make?”
    “What difference will it make to wait?”
    She crossed her arms over her chest, shifted her weight onto one foot and glared at him. Such determination and strength, and yet so much hurt behind those beautiful brown eyes. How could a mother walk out on such a wonderful child?
    Leaving him, he got. He and Lynn had troubles from the moment the ink dried on their marriage license. She wanted so much that he couldn’t give her. Bright lights, the big city, adventure. Being a military wife and later a rancher’s wife weren’t what she had in mind.
    If only he’d known that earlier, but they’d been high-school sweethearts who swore the love they felt would last forever. They were too young and foolish to know what they didn’t know. He wondered now if their relationship would’ve run its course sooner if Lynn hadn’t gotten pregnant.
    But then he wouldn’t have Jess, and he wouldn’t trade being her father for anything. She was the only good thing that came out of his marriage.
    “You don’t understand what it’s like being the only one who can’t date. I’ll become a social outcast.”
    He bit his lip to keep from laughing at her woeful my-life-is-over look and drama queen voice. To a teenage girl everything turned into a Greek tragedy. Life with her was like walking a tightrope. One misstep, either with being too strict or too permissive, could lead to a big fall.
    “In a couple of days everyone will forget that your hard-ass dad won’t let you date.”
    “If I say no, Cody will probably ask another girl to go with