Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) by RaeAnne Thayne Read Free Book Online Page B

hoped maybe seeing Carter make the effort might spur Faith to try a little harder.
    Instead, as she watched her brother master the bike in just an hour, Faith only seemed to cling tenaciously to her conviction that she wasn’t ready.
    “You’re doing great, Car,” he called. “Keep going.”
    “I loooove my bike,” Carter sang out at the top of his lungs in one of his spur-of-the-moment song compositions as he rode past. “I love love love my bike.”
    He had to smile at the sheer exuberance Carter brought to everything he did. What would he have done the past two years without both of his kids?
    Probably wandered into the wilderness and became a hermit or something, growing a four-foot-long beard and living off beef jerky.
    “Riding bikes is awesome and cool. I want to ride my bike to school,” Carter sang.
    Even Faith smiled at her little brother.
    Brendan took that as an encouraging sign. “Okay, let’s try one more time.”
    Her smile slid away. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me, Daddy.”
    “You can do it, Faith. You just have to believe in yourself,” he urged, feeling like the worst parent on earth for pushing her out of her comfort zone. On the other hand, wouldn’t catering to her unreasonable fears be more harmful in the long run?
    “I don’t want to!” she protested.
    “One more, that’s all. I promise. And then we can put the bikes away and go for a walk.”
    “I want to ride a bike,” she said, with traces of her mother’s stubbornness—okay, and his, as well—in her voice. “I just want to ride a bike that still has training wheels. Why can’t you put them back on?”
    If the kid spent as much time trying to focus on her balance as she did arguing about why she couldn’t, they would all be better off.
    “One more time, Faith. Come on, kiddo. You’ve got this.”
    She glared at him but apparently accepted that he wasn’t about to back down. With him holding on to the seat for balance, she started her wobbly way down the ride.
    “Don’t let go,” she said. “Promise!”
    He didn’t answer. Instead, when she seemed to have sufficient speed and had reduced the wobble, he enacted one of those difficult parental betrayals and released his hold on her.
    She rode about six feet before she realized he wasn’t holding on anymore...and promptly fell over.
    “Owwww,” she wailed, not quite crying but close to it. “You let go! You promised you wouldn’t let go!”
    “I never promised I wouldn’t let go.”
    “Yes, you did! You did!”
    She wouldn’t listen to him in this state, and he wasn’t going to stand here arguing with her. Close to the end of his patience, he was about to tell her so when an unwelcome voice intruded.
    “Wow, Faith! You’re riding a two-wheeler? That’s wonderful!”
    Both of them turned around swiftly to find Lucy walking down the sidewalk toward them.
    She looked lovely and bright and more casually dressed than he had seen her in a long time, in jeans and a plain green tailored cotton shirt that matched her eyes. With her hair pulled up into a loose hairstyle on top of her head, she looked pretty and sweet and far too young to have been the marketing director at a major software company until recently.
    He was supposed to make arrangements with her to drop off a few things for Faith and Carter. He hadn’t precisely forgotten; he had just done his best to put it out of his head so he didn’t have to dwell on more thoughts of her that seemed to have intruded far too frequently since she returned to town.
    “Aunt Lucy!” Faith exclaimed, her voice overflowing with joy.
    Her father’s minor treachery forgotten, she jumped up from the toppled bike and raced to Lucy, throwing her arms around her waist with an exuberant delight he rarely saw in his quiet, serious oldest child.
    Lucy closed her eyes as she returned Faith’s embrace with a soft expression on her features that brought a weird lump to his throat.
    He and Lucy might not get along