Page 4 of Cowboy and the Convict

"WHERE THE FUCK is my flat iron, Olivia?" Riley stormed out of the hall bathroom all three of his girls shared right as Devon reached the top of the stairs. Her eyes went wide as she jerked to a stop. "You’re home."

"I'm home." He gave her the most disapproving face he could muster up. "And you just dropped an F-bomb."

Riley scoffed, dramatically swinging one arm in the direction of the room her younger sisters shared. "We’re in a hurry and Olivia stole my freaking flat iron. Again." She raised her voice, as if the sister in question couldn’t hear her rant. "Like we don't have a whole regular iron she could be using instead."

Olivia appeared in her doorway, eyes rolling back into her skull, the hair tool in question clutched in one hand. "I took it for like, two seconds." She shoved the heated clamp at her older sister. "And there's no reason for me to go all the way to the basement to find the iron when I just needed to smooth out one of my hair ribbons."

Devon scrubbed one hand over his face, trying to ease away the exhaustion that plagued him. "I'll order another flat iron." He glanced into Olivia and Gwen’s room as he passed and it was his turn to widen his eyes. "Actually, I probably shouldn't, considering the fire hazard you two live in."

He loved his daughters. Loved being a dad. Wouldn't give it up for the world. But being a single parent was the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. Even more difficult than losing his wife, their mother, and the future he thought was in store.

Some days it felt like his time with Mags had been a fever dream. Like it hadn't really happened. Then one of his girls would start screaming at her sister, providing proof he and Mags really had made a family together. One that was currently fueled by tubes of black eyeliner and buckets of estrogen.

Raking a hand through his hair, he turned away from the avalanche of clothes and shoes piled up on the floor. "Can you please try to get it under control? Maybe just a path in case the place really does go up in flames and they need to come get us out?"

Olivia wrapped the ribbon of sisterly theft around her ponytail, tipping her head toward where the youngest of his daughters was stretched across her twin bed, a tablet clutched in one hand. "Gwen will have to do it. I'm already going to be late for the game since Riley isn't ready to go yet."

"Riley isn’t ready to go yet because you stole her freaking flat iron." Riley shot her sister a glare before taking the tool and plugging it in beside the bathroom vanity. "You little klepto."

Olivia shrugged, looking unbothered by her older sister’s aggravation. “Maybe if you stopped leaving your crap all over the bathroom, it wouldn’t be so easy to take.”

“Maybe if everyone started to clean up after themselves we wouldn’t be living in squalor.” Devon turned his glare onto each of the girls, rotating through them one by one. “Tomorrow we’re spending the whole day cleaning. This place is a pigsty.”

They had the decency to look moderately apologetic, eyes dropping to the floor. But the contrition only lasted ten seconds before each one blurted out an excuse for not being able to clean away their Saturday.

“I have to work.”

“I’m supposed to help make the decorations for the Homecoming dance.”

“I’m taking the practice ACT.”

Looked like he was going to be handling it on his own. Again.

"Fine." He waved one hand toward the stairs. "Go. Do your thing."

He wasn't mad as much as he was disappointed. He’d reached the point of parenthood where getting time with his kids was next to impossible—they had their own interests, their own friends, their own schedules. Cleaning the house wasn't his number one priority—obviously—he'd just been hoping the four of them could hang out together. Maybe order some pizza. Even if they didn’t make any headway with the house, it would've been fine. Eventually the place would get cleaned.

But he would never get this time with his girls back. If there was one thing losing Maggie taught him, it was to cherish every fucking second, because you never knew when you wouldn't get another one.

The three girls swarmed him all at once, layering him in a group hug as they made apologies they probably meant alongside promises he knew they wouldn't keep. Promises they also knew he would never hold them to. Life was hard. Growing up was even harder. Especially when all you had to get you through it was a clueless father who had to Google every question they had surrounding menstruation, bras, and the best way to make glitter stick to your hair.

As quickly as they’d advanced on him, the three of them were gone, with Riley and Olivia headed out the front door and Gwen holed up in her room, consuming whatever novel she'd recently loaded onto her Kindle.

Hopefully it taught her about sex, because he really wasn't looking forward to having that conversation again.

The house was so quiet his resigned sigh seemed to echo around him as he turned and went into his bedroom, peeling away the layers of his uniform before changing into jeans and a thermal shirt. They were well into fall, and once the sun went down the air got pretty cool. He had another hour's worth of work ahead of him—all of it spent outside— and didn’t want to freeze his ass off like he had the night before.

Pausing on his way out the door, he decided to get a head start on tomorrow’s tasks and spent a few minutes collecting his dirty laundry from the floor, stacking it into the already overflowing hamper. It was yet another chore that had gotten away from him as he tried to juggle everything that went with being a single parent to three busy kids. After using a previously worn T-shirt to half-assedly wipe away the layer of dust on his dresser, he gave up. His own bedroom was the least of his concerns when it came to getting the house together. And if he didn't get out to the barn soon, there would be hell to pay.

Making his way back downstairs, Devon kicked at the pile of shoes just inside the door, pretending it would look better if they took up less square footage of the un-swept hardwood. Ignoring the jackets and backpacks haphazardly discarded along the hall, he went to the kitchen to grab a snack on his way outside. The granola bar he found in a mostly empty box on the counter was fully shoved into his mouth by the time he pulled the back sliding door open and stepped out onto the deck he’d once imagined sitting on with Maggie, drinking coffee every morning as they grew old together.

But that was never in the cards for them, no matter how they fell.

Following the path from the steps and around the treeline cutting across the main yard, he pulled out his phone, the chill of the evening even cooler than he’d expected. After firing off a quick text to Olivia to make sure she had a jacket, he slid open the barn’s heavy door and stepped inside. His entrance was immediately greeted with an indignant huff and a few dramatic stomps.

"You're not going to catch an attitude with me too, are you?" He moved to where Winston, the rich, chocolate brown gelding he'd owned for nearly ten years poked his head over the gate of his stall. "Looks like the girls let you in, but they didn't give you anything to eat, huh?" To be fair, he'd only asked his daughters to let the horses in, not to feed them, so maybe that was on him.

Swiping one hand along the horse’s neck, he leaned closer, lowering his voice. "Next time I'll make sure they give you a little snack too, how’s that sound?"

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