Page 51 of Lost and Found Cowboy
She’d tried to put Lyle’s threatening note—and the fact that he’d broken into her shop—out of her mind and keep her focus on the precious time she was getting to spend with Max.
They’d had fun running the booth together, taking turns on who had to pick up the rings and who got to hand out the cheesy plastic prizes, but she was ready to sit down and have one of those funnel cakes they’d talked about earlier.
They’d arrived at the school a few hours ago and had enough time to eat corn dogs and curly fries and wander around most of the booths before she and Max had to report for ring toss duty. But her son was far from being done with hanging out at the carnival.
He still had plans to try his hand at winning a prize in the cake walk, and doing the basketball shoot, the fishing game, andthe balloon pop. And he’d talked Mack into running the parent/kid three-legged race with him later. Mack wasn’t his parent, but the rules were pretty lenient where the family member was concerned, and she was just thankful that it was Mack who had to make a fool of himself instead of her.
She scanned the crowd for the tall cowboy, and grinned as she saw him walking toward them, a happy Izzy strapped in the carrier on his chest. He had a large cup of lemonade in one hand and a funnel cake in the other.
“I thought you’d be ready for this,” he told her, leaning down to brush her cheek with a kiss. He smelled sweet and the dusting of powdered sugar on his face suggested he might have already sampled a piece.
She tickled the toes and nuzzled the neck of Izzy, who was facing forward in the baby carrier. Mack seemed to always know what she needed. “Thank you. I amsoready. That ring toss business is hard work.” She took a sip of the lemonade then brushed the sugar from his cheek, and tried not to think about how comfortable she was doing both acts that were so intimate in nature. It had been years since she’d so casually touched another man’s face or shared a straw. “Looks like you might have already tried the funnel cake.”
He grinned again. “Guilty. But I swear I didn’t give any to Izzy.”
She laughed. “That’s a relief. Funnel cake is not usually on the approved list of solids for infants.”
“But it is on the list for six-year-olds,” Max said, squeezing between them. “So, pass me a piece, would ya?”
Lorna laughed again—she sure had been doing a lot of that in the last several days—as they found a place to sit at one of the lunch tables in the center of the cafeteria, which also served as the gymnasium.
“Izzy and I have been having a great time,” Mack told her, palming the baby’s tummy in his large hand and jiggling it to make her smile. “Haven’t we, baby girl? We checked out all the booths again and took a walk outside. They’ve got a little petting zoo set up by the playground we missed when we were walking around earlier.Andwe won a chocolate cake and two dozen peanut butter cookies in the cake walk.”
“Oh shoot. How many times did you do it?” Lorna asked.
“And where’s the cake?” Max wanted to know.
Mack laughed. “It made Izzy giggle, so I think we did it five or six times, and I ate three of the cookies then put the rest of themandthe cake in the minivan to share when we get home.”
When we get home.
The words hit her like a punch to the chest, and she put her head down and took another sip of lemonade—not quite sure why the tears had just sprung to her eyes. They had come so easily out of Mack’s mouth, and even now, as she stuffed another piece of funnel cake in her mouth, they were sitting in her gut like a stone she had swallowed.
This pretend relationship sure brought up a whole lot of real feelings.
Thank goodness there were funnel cakes and kettle corn to stuff them down with.
“Let’s go,” Max said.
“Yeah, we need to go if we’re going to get through all these tickets,” Mack said, pulling a stack of tickets from the pocket of the baby carrier.
“Oh no,” Lorna said. “You didn’t have to buy all those.” She’d scrounged around her house that afternoon and had come up with a ten-dollar bill, several singles and six quarters, so she had enough to buy at least a few tickets that night.
“I know I didn’t have to,” Mack said. “But I wanted to. All the money goes to support the school, and I’m having fun. I love all this stuff.”
She frowned, weighing her guilt for letting him treat them to all those tickets with the joy Max would get from spending them.
Mack nudged her shoulders. “I never got to go to a school carnival as a kid. And if Ihadbeen able to go, I never would have had the money to buy handfuls of tickets. Let me do this. Please.”
She hadn’t weighed Mack’s happiness or the reasons behind his generosity into her decision. She did now.
“Okay, let’s go blow a buttload of tickets.”
Max’s eyes went wide as he clapped his hand over her mouth. “You saidbutt.”
She laughed then let her son drag them all over the gymnasium, where he won four cheesy plastic toys and a small stuffed cow he said reminded him of his new calf.
“Hi, Aunt Maisie,” Max called, running up to his favorite librarian, who was running a booth for the library.
