Page 89 of Return of the Bad Girl (Rock Canyon, Idaho 4)

Her father scowled at her. “Are you going to invite me in or not? I am still recovering from a heart attack, you know, and these stairs were hell.”

Jumping forward, she took his arm and helped him inside. He was breathing hard, and once she had him settled, she asked, “Do you want something to drink?”

“Just water, please,” he said, leaning his cane against his leg.

Caroline stood up to get him a glass, and when she came back, some of his color had returned.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the glass from her.

After several quiet minutes, she finally prodded him. “I’m surprised to see you, Dad.”

“I wanted to speak with you about what you told me, but I needed time to process everything,” he said, setting his water glass aside.

Again, he was silent, and she shifted in her chair. “And gather information?” she suggested. At his surprised look, she said, “Ellie told Val, and Val told me you were investigating Kyle.”

“I’m going to have to talk to Ellie,” he said, clearing his throat before continuing, “I needed to have more information on Kyle’s . . . extracurricular activities before I could decide where to go from here. I just needed you to know that I would never allow anyone to hurt my daughters this way, no matter who his father was.”

Caroline raised her eyebrow. “But it’s okay for you to write your daughters off and pretend that they don’t exist?”

His lips thinned with displeasure. “I haven’t always been a pinnacle of patience.”

“

Ha, that’s an understatement,” Caroline said, recovering from her initial shock. When she’d run out of his house after she told him about Kyle, and he hadn’t contacted her, she figured he’d taken Kyle’s side after all, that he’d found something in Kyle’s background that made him believe Kyle was innocent.

Her father gave her a long-suffering look. “After your mother died, I didn’t know what to do with any of you, but at least you seemed to realize the importance of a good education. If I’d known what that—” He cut himself off, and Caroline wondered if he’d been about to call Kyle a nasty name.

Edward Willis almost cursing and admitting he was wrong in one day?

“If I’d known what Kyle had done, I would have pressed charges,” he said, adding, “No matter who his father is, he had no right to hurt and humiliate you.”

Caroline couldn’t seem to stop blinking in surprise. She was on the verge of asking if he was on painkillers. It was one thing for Edward Willis to be a blustering hard-ass but for him to be almost . . . well, comforting? Talk about a personality adjustment; the man had had a damn transplant!

“Dad, I don’t want to be rude, but . . . are you high?”

Her father’s face snapped into a scowl. “Excuse me?”

“Okay, you have never, ever in your life admitted that you might have been rash or made a mistake,” Caroline said, laughing a little. This was a scenario she never thought would come about, but the fact that her father was actually acting like a father as well . . . weird. “And I’m sorry, but the complete one-eighty of the personality is kind of freaking me out.”

“I pushed you girls, I know, but I wanted you to be the best. To do the best thing for—”

“For the Willis name,” Caroline finished for him. “We know. We’ve had the Willis name and everything it means beaten into our heads since we were born, but honestly, do you think it helped any of us? I mean, I left home before I graduated; Val married the man you wanted her to, yet she was miserable; and Ellie is so screwed up, I don’t know what to do about her. So explain to me how having a distinguished name and money has turned any of us into a sane, functioning adults?”

“You seemed to have turned out just fine,” he said.

White-hot anger shot through Caroline. “Oh no. You can take credit for my stubbornness and my will to succeed, but what I did after I left your house . . . that’s on me and a few friends I made along the way. Everything I have, I worked my ass off for, and yeah, at times I did some things I wasn’t proud of, but the Willis name had nothing to do with my success.”

“Fair enough,” her father said, far too reasonably, further confusing Caroline.

“Is this some kind of near-death experience thing?”

“Really, Caroline, I am trying to control my temper, but your obnoxious attempts to bait me are grating,” her father snapped.

The crack in his bizarre Stepford-ness made her smile. “That’s better.”

Huffing, he said, “All I wanted to make clear was that if you would like to press charges against him now, I will do whatever I can to help.”

It was still hard for her to believe her father was here for her, but she needed to give him the benefit of the doubt if she wanted a real truce between them. Besides, she couldn’t deny his support warmed her and gave her hope that maybe old, stubborn dogs could learn new tricks. “Thank you, Daddy,” Caroline said, adding, “I take it the investigation is going well?”

---