Page 46 of Snowed in with the Rancher

“I think it's for the best, until we get their new place worked out. As a bonus, I'm here all day every day myself, so they'll probably see more of me this way than they have the last couple of weeks.”

Thomas nodded in that patient way of his. Tate felt his own blood pressure rising. It was not a logical reaction, he knew, but it was something that had been happening between them since he'd hit fifteen and developed the never-ending urge to escape out from under his father's scrutiny.

“You don't see a future with Olivia, then?”

Running a hand through his hair, Tate watched as Jackie landed face down in a pile of snow and then popped up giggling like a maniac. Melissa brushed her sister off and stood her back on her feet before falling into the same pile herself on purpose.

“I didn't plan this, Dad.” Tate looked at his father, trying to push down his resentment. “Olivia was special to me—sheisspecial to me. But I wasn't looking for a wife and kids. I'll do everything I can for the girls, and I want Olivia to be happy, but I've been single all these years for a reason. I'm not the kind of guy who can give her what she needs.”

Thomas cleared his throat as if to answer, but instead he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled to Jackie to trade sleds with her sister.

He nodded at the girls' response before turning to his son. “Is that what Olivia thinks? That you're not the kind of guy who can give her what she needs?”

Tate opened his mouth, then shut it again. He felt a throbbing headache developing at the base of his skull. “She accepts what I'm telling her.”

Thomas snorted and shook his head. “I'll tell ya, you may have got your sensitive nature from your mama, but that stubbornness is one hundred percent my father. Not sure how the McConnell bullheadedness skipped a generation, but genes are a strange thing.”

“I could argue you're just as stubborn, insisting I should be someone I'm not.”

A small smile curled up Thomas's cheeks. “All parents are stubborn when it comes to their children's happiness. You'll find that out soon enough.”

“I'm happy, Dad. My kind of happy is just different from yours.”

“Mm-hmm.”

They watched Melissa spin in a circle in the middle of the hill as Jackie slid by laughing.

“You going to be happy when Olivia finds a new man—and he becomes the girls' stepdaddy?” Thomas asked casually.

Tate's heart clenched, the reaction unexpected and sudden. He brought his fist to his chest, rubbing the spot unconsciously. In his head, a rotating collection of faces shuffled through as every bachelor between twenty-five and forty in the county suddenly came to life inside his mind. Men with properties, men with homes. Men who were outgoing and funny. Men who were kind and easygoing. Politicians, ranchers, restauranteurs, artists. Montana was full of men and lacking in women. Olivia was going to be very popular once word got around that she was single.

His brow furrowed as he thought about seeing Olivia around town with someone else. Seeing the girls with someone else. He'd barely gotten to know them himself. What if Olivia moved in with another man, and they spent all that time with him?

“I thought so,” Thomas muttered under his breath.

Tate rebounded, the aforementioned stubbornness rearing its disruptive head. “I want her to be happy. If she meets someone who can give that to her, then I'll support it.”

Thomas turned to Tate, a sad smile on his face. He slapped his only son on the shoulder a little too firmly before he said, “Son. You're a total idiot.”

Then he walked back into the house.

* * *

“So you're the famous Olivia,” Tate's second cousin, Roxanne, said as she stood next to Olivia at the buffet set up in the dining room.

Olivia smiled at the bleached blonde while she scooped mashed potatoes onto a plate for Melissa. “I didn't know I was famous.”

The other woman smiled broadly. “Oh, you are. All Lucy and Thomas have talked about for days are you and the girls.” She patted Melissa on the head kindly. “And they were right—y'all are just as cute as can be.”

Melissa nodded seriously. “Grandpa says I look just like Daddy when he was little, and he was cute, too.”

Olivia handed the full plate to Melissa and pointed her toward the table where Jackie was already seated with some other kids.

“I tell you what,” Roxanne said. “I never would have thought I'd hear anyone calling TateDaddy.”

Olivia nearly snorted out loud. Yeah, she got that.

“He's settling into it,” she told Roxanne. “He's really good with the girls, and he's getting better at it every day.”

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