“She’s the nicest person I’ve ever met,” Reno said. “And she’s got a four-year-old daughter who’s going to love you so hard you’ll need to lie down afterward.”
Madison’s mouth twitched exactly the way Hank’s did. Steeles didn’t smile easily, but they all smiled the same way when they finally did.
A car turned into the drive. Headlights swept the front window.
Madison stood up. “How do I look?”
“Like trouble,” Reno said. “Which is perfect.”
Lily made it through the front door, took one look at Madison, and stopped dead.
“Are you the big girl?” Lily breathed. “You’re so pretty.”
Madison crouched down to her level, which Reno had not coached her to do and which told him most of what he needed to know about the kid Hank was fighting for. “I’m Madison. Are you Lily?”
“I’m a princess,” Lily corrected. Then, generously, “But also Lily.”
“Okay, Princess Lily. Do you know what I have in my backpack?”
“What?”
Madison reached into the bag at the foot of the stairs and produced a paperback so soft and bent at the corners it had clearly been read a hundred times. The cover showed a small bull sitting under a cork tree, smelling flowers.
Lily squealed at a pitch only dogs and velociraptors should be able to hear. “FERDINAND!”
“My favorite when I was little,” Madison said. “You want to read it after dinner?”
Lily looked up at Grace with her whole soul in her face. “Mommy. The big girl has Ferdinand.”
“I heard,” Grace said. Her voice wasn’t quite even.
Reno glanced at her and found her looking at Madison kneeling with her scarred book that she’d brought all the way across the country with her. Grace was blinking back suspicious brightness in her eyes.
Grace was carrying three pies in individual carriers, a fourth box was held flat against her chest like she was smuggling state secrets.
“Let me,” Reno said, reaching for the boxes.
“You can take the pies.” She turned her shoulder and kept the flat box out of his reach. “Not this one.”
“What’s that one?”
“That one,” Grace said, “is none of your business until dessert.”
Behind her, in the doorway, Tessa was wearing an expression he could only describe as a woman trying very hard to look like she wasn’t in on something. Dillon, beside her, was failing the same test worse.
Reno’s lawyer brain, which never fully turned off, flagged the inconsistency and set it on the pile with the face-down phone and the second grocery bag and the too innocent nope from Grace this morning.
He decided, for once in his life, not to cross-examine the witness. He took the pies and carried them to the kitchen.
Supper was loud and fun, the three brothers talking over each other while the women let them and the children ran the actual meeting.
Makayla, who at eleven considered Lily a delightful pet and future protégé, had brought her fiddle and was talked out of playing it at the table only by the combined diplomatic efforts of her mother and a dinner roll.
Lily sat between Madison and Grace and narrated. Reno sat across from Grace, where he could watch her, which he had arranged on purpose.
“So,” Hank said to Grace, in the tone of a man trying to sound casual in his own house and fooling no one, “Reno tells me your bakery’s the best in the valley.”
“Reno’s biased,” Grace said. “But he’s also right.”
