Grumpy Cowboy (Single Dad Collection)

“Joey? Leah? Where the hell is everybody?” I call out into the empty space as I make my way through the living room toward the kitchen.

“In here, daddy!” Joey calls from the kitchen, influencing me to speed up my steps.

When I round the corner, my weird arrival home gets even weirder. Joey and Leah are both seated at the table, a cake with burning candles on top of it in front of them and pink, blue, and white balloons covering the entire surface of the tile floor.

“Surprise,” Leah says, her face a complex mix of excited and nervous that I’ve never seen before.

“Surprise, what? What’s going on?”

“Jo-Jo, why don’t you get daddy a beer from the fridge,” Leah suggests instead of answering me, shoving the chair beside her out with a foot and gesturing toward it.

Joey jumps up with a mumbled, “Got it!” and yanks open the door to the refrigerator. There’s a beer right there in the front, on a low shelf she can reach without help—a place they’re not normally kept—and at the sight of it, I’m starting to think this entire thing is a whole lot of planning away from impromptu. I search the recesses of my mind for an occasion I’ve forgotten about, but as hard as I try, I can’t think of any.

Joey hands me the beer before bounding back around the table and climbing up in her chair again, and with the way the two of them are staring at me, I’m starting to think I’m the target of something nefarious. Did they bring home another damn dog?

“Leah darlin’, I’m gonna need you to be tellin’ me what’s goin’ on soon, before you can officially say you’ve witnessed two Jameson men have a heart attack.”

Leah’s face gapes at my audacious assertion. “You know what?” she snaps, grabbing something from behind the cake and slamming it down on the table in front of the chair she’s kicked out. “Here. I was trying to be all cute about it, and you had to go and bring up one of the worst days of our lives. Tex is alive and well, and so are you—and apparently, more than that, you’re virile enough to go against statistics.”

Joey giggles from her spot on the other side of the table, getting up on her knees in her chair so she can look over the cake at me.

I look from Leah to the object she set down, and then slowly, I sink to my knees.

I recognize the shape and the feeling of seeing this test in front of me, but the amount of happiness dumping into me? It’s completely unfamiliar.

“You’re…you’re pregnant?” I ask, staring down at the test that proclaims with digital wording that she’s very much so.

Pregnant, it reads again and again as my eyes bounce back and forth over and over.

When I finally tear my eyes away from the test to look at her, Leah is nodding and smiling, and a couple happy tears run down her face in an apparent surge of good hormones. “Joey and I were in Target, and she said she needed toothpaste.”

“I did!” Joey adds enthusiastically, absolutely thrilled to be a part of this whole thing.

Leah laughs a little before continuing, “I ran down the aisle to get it, and on the way back, I looked over and saw the pregnancy tests. Instantly, nausea and awareness hit me like a freight train. My boobs are bigger and everything, but I didn’t even think about it because I’ve been on birth control.”

“Mama says I’m too young to know what that is right now,” Joey chimes in.

I lick my lips and shake my head at the complete out-of-body experience of finding out this news with my daughter in the room—of finding out this news at all. When I left this morning, I told Leah not to come home with any more living creatures than she left with—and she didn’t. But, boy oh boy, was the joke on me.

“But you took the test?”

Obviously, she did. I mean, it’s sitting on the table in front of me. But right now, my head feels too much like my ass and vice versa to make a ton of sense.

Leah takes pity on me and doesn’t tease. “Yes. While answering a million questions from Joey,” she says with a laugh. Looking me in the eyes, she shrugs. “I know it’s not the normal thing to include her in the part where you find out, but I don’t think I could have stopped it if I’d tried. Once she saw the test in the cart, she was like a miniature Sherlock Holmes.”

Joey gives the thumbs-up, and I can’t help but laugh.

We’re having a baby! Joey is going to be a big sister! And more than that, she’s getting the family she’s always deserved. A daddy and a mommy, and now, a little baby brother or sister.