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“Ah, there you are.”

Her mother’s voice from behind them almost made her jump. Strangely, she hadn’t even heard her approach. She was usually always tuned in for the sound of the chair on the track her father had built. She wasn’t, however, surprised that hermother was here. She’d figured she wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to meet the man.

As she often did when someone met her mother for the first time, she watched him for his first reaction to the woman in the chair. In a smooth, easy motion, he crouched down until they were at eye level. More points to him, since her mother hated when people bent over her.

And she knew from the glint in her mother’s eye that she’d also noticed. And approved.

“Mrs. Baylor?”

Nic somehow liked that, too, that he didn’t assume. “Mr. Thorpe,” her mother said, smiling so widely, it pleased Nic even more. She had to remember her mother was meeting someone famous that she admired.

But his next words startled her. “Am I late?”

“Not at all. I just finished my last session a little early.”

“Good,” he said with a crooked smile. “I’d hate to start off wrong-footed.”

“You sound like you’ve had some experience with that.”

“Sometime I’ll tell you about my high school history teacher. The terror of the entire school district.”

Mom laughed and looked up at Nic. “Sounds like Mrs. Valencia, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, acknowledging the now-retired teacher’s ability to strike fear into anyone who took her subject lightly—but who’d also had the knack to inspire her students to greater heights than even they had ever imagined they could reach. Including her. She had gone from near-terror that first day to near the top of the class, to her own shock.

Mom turned back to the man she clearly admired. “Shall we go inside? I’m sure you’d like to see where it all happens. And we can discuss a plan.”

“And payment, of course,” he said, straightening up. And Nic noted he’d never wobbled or complained, just stayed in that crouch the entire time.

“What,” she finally asked, “are you two talking about?”

“You didn’t tell her?” Mom asked, looking at the man who was glancing once more at his son, who had stopped Pie for some apparently required patting of his neck.

He looked back. “We... hadn’t gotten to that yet.”

Nic sighed. “I was busy apologizing, Mom.”

“Oh,” her mother said. “Good. I’m sure you needed to.” Then, briskly, she went on. “We’re going to discuss my possibly tutoring Jeremy. Bring him in, in about a half an hour, will you?”

“I... sure.” Her mother was going to tutor Jackson Thorpe’s son? And this meeting had clearly been planned ahead of time. How had she missed this?

Too busy hating on the guy you didn’t even know?

She started out watching them go back toward the house, but found herself appreciating the way he moved and the way his jeans fit a little too much, and turned around to watch Jeremy and Pie trotting around the corral.

When she took the boy inside at the requested half hour later—when it was officially work-related, and her mother said half an hour, that’s what she meant—she found both of them laughing. And she noticed that when Jeremy saw his father laughing, he relaxed a little and smiled.

“Thank you, dear,” Mom said.

“Come on in,” Jackson—she was thinking of him that way now—said to the boy. “I think we’ve got a plan you’ll like.”

“I will?” the boy asked.

“It’ll mean you have to come here every day during the week, though,” his father said.

Jeremy lit up. “Really?”

He sounded so excited it warmed a part of Nic she rarely heard from, the part that occasionally thought about having kids to pass her love of this place and this life on to.