Page 76 of Risking it for the Cowboy

Daisy dropped it and threw her hands over her mouth, muttering quietly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin the whole thing. Don’t be mad at me please…”

T.R. froze. Eyes flashed unreadably at Charlie, then he squatted down in front of Daisy and peeled her hands from her mouth as his brow riveted with something akin to suppressed fury. “Sweet girl, why would you think I’d be angry?”

Daisy stood silent, eyes watering, as he brushed back a blond wisp from her eyes.

Sweet girl. Charlie’s heart squeezed. That was what she always felt in her heart whenever her daughter was let down.

“But-but my dad is always mad if I make a mess, and I-I thought…”

A tick in T.R.’s jaw jumped. “What’s he do when he gets mad?”

Charlie stepped up behind Daisy and rested her hand on her daughter’s shoulder in solidarity.

“Yells,” Daisy said sheepishly. “Breaks stuff.”

His hands white-knuckled on Daisy’s. She watched him will them to relax.

Then he grinned that bright grin. “Well now, no sense in gettin’ bent out of shape over some pencil. I screw up designs all the time. That’s what erasers are for.”

Daisy’s watery blues widened up at him now. “I’ve got an eraser in my backpack!”

He nodded once and chuckled. “That’s all we need, Daze. An eraser so we can try again.”

“It’s right next to my book in the front pocket! Momma, I got the book all done for tomorrow. Mrs. Rodriguez is going to be so proud of me.”

Daisy bolted away and vanished up the path leading back to the cabin, tramping up the stairs, and through the back door of the house. T.R’s smile vanished like an iron gate slamming shut.

“How on earth did you get her to read? I know it’s a struggle for her, and I try to go slow, but she usually shuts down before we start.”

He shrugged, shook a noncommittal head as if he wasn’t able to speak yet as the proverbial elephant in the room suffocated the silence. Jason’s impact on Daisy.

She looked down at the intricate rendering rolled out across the table. Perfect angles. Layers of lines and measurements jotted neatly in the margins. A drawing sat on the next sheet over. A frontal view of an enclosed hutch, a wired-in yard, perches.

So realistic, like a photograph.

“There’s no way you did all of this over the past two hours.”

He rolled his tongue in his cheek, still tempering his anger and failing at it. “Sat up drawing it out last night,” he bit out. “Didn’t sleep well knowin’ y’all were there alone.”

A series of acronyms in caps, hyphenated, beside numerical quantities sat in a neat list on a spiral legal pad. Not a single line out of place, save Daisy’s scrawl across the page.

Charlie leaned in closer, avoiding harder the worry that lived like a virus in her stomach about Jason, brushing a finger along the perfectly complicated drawing.

“You’re a … genius,” she murmured, taking in a complex equation in crisp numerals. He glanced down at her. Face blank, eyes searching hers as if she hid an alternative meaning. “What?”

He shrugged, a dark laugh rumbling in his chest as he glanced back at the rendering. “I been called a lot of names in my life, but genius ain’t never been one of ’em.”

In spite of his self-deprecating joke, that tick to his jaw worsened, mounting anger that wouldn’t be suppressed no matter how hard she tried to deflect. Guilt burrowed deep that she hadn’t pushed him away, that he was now invested in her life and was going to end up suffering for it and yet, how much she ached, knowing he was attaching himself to her and Daisy, wanting to protect them even if he didn’t know how, because no one could as long as the judge continued to give Jason a pass.

“What’s that equation?” she forced out through a thickening throat, inching closer to him to ease his tension.

T.R. slipped his glasses back on with his free hand and looked where she was pointing. “Findin’ the degrees of an arc. Need to measure the swing of the door in and out of the coop so no supports obstruct it.”

“This is professional work. You were the math whiz kid, weren’t you?”

He shrugged, the darkness still brewing, despite his curt words and efforts to force that smile. “Only class I aced. Charlie, we gotta talk—”

“What do these letters mean?”