The Daddy Dance by Mindy Klasky Page A

enough to read that tone of voice. What’s the bad news?”
    Where to start? Kat could say that her niece was a brat. That her sister was a lazy, irresponsible waste of an excuse for a grown woman. That the dance studio was falling down around her ears.
    Or she could step back and make herself laugh at the mess she’d volunteered to put right. Squaring her shoulders, she chose the latter route. “There’s not a single coffee cart on one corner in all of Eden Falls. And they’ve never heard of an all-night drugstore.”
    Haley laughed. “I’d send you a care package, but you’ll probably be gone by the time it could get there. Any sign of the prodigal daughter?”
    “Rachel? Not a hint. As near as I can tell, she actually took off about three months ago.”
    “Ouch. You guys really don’t talk to each other, do you? But didn’t your mother just tell you last week?”
    “Exactly,” Kat said grimly, not bothering to recite the hundreds of reasons she didn’t keep in touch with her sister. “Mama didn’t want to worry me, or so she says.” Kat wouldn’t have worried about Rachel. Not for one single, solitary second. Getting enraged with her, now that was something else entirely….
    “Do they have any idea where she is?”
    “She sends my niece postcards. The last one arrived two weeks ago, from New Orleans. A picture of a fan dancer on the front, and postage due.”
    Haley clicked her tongue. “She really is a piece of work, isn’t she?”
    Kat sighed. “The thing is, I don’t even care what she does with her own life. I just hate seeing the effect it has on my parents. And Jenny, too. She’s not a bad kid, but she hasn’t had any structure in her life for so long that she doesn’t even know how to be good.”
    “How much longer are you staying?”
    That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, wasn’t it? “I’m not sure. At first, I thought that I could only stand a week here, at most.”
    “But now?”
    “Now I’m realizing that there’s more work to take care of than I thought there was. Mama’s dance studio has been a bit…ignored since Daddy got sick.”
    “I thought your sister was taking care of all that.”
    “I’ll give you a moment, to think about the logic of that statement.” Over the years, Kat had vented to Haley plenty of times about Rachel. “I’ve got my goals in place, though. Rye should be able to get everything pulled together in another week or so. Ten days at most.”
    “Rye?” There were a hundred questions pumped into the single syllable and more than one blatantly indecent suggestion. Kat’s heart pounded harder, and she glanced toward the hallway where Rye was working.
    “Don’t I wish,” Kat said, doing her best to sound bored. Haley had been intent on making Kat forget about her disastrous relationship with Adam; her roommate had even threatened to set up an online dating profile for her. Haley would be head over heels with the idea of Rye Harmon, even though she’d never met the guy. Trying to seem breezy and dismissive, Kat said, “Just one of the locals. A handyman.”
    But that wasn’t the truth. Not exactly. Rye had driven down from Richmond that morning, to take care of the studio’s plumbing. And he wasn’t just a handyman—he was a contractor. A contractor who was taking her project quite seriously…
    “Mmm,” Haley said. “Does he have any power tools?”
    “Haley!” Kat squawked at the suggestive tone.
    “Fine. If you’re not going to share any intimate details, then I’m going to head out for Master Class.”
    A jolt of longing shot through Kat, and she glared at the paneled wall of the studio office. She had really been looking forward to the six-week Master Class session taught by one of Russia’s most prominent ballerinas. She pushed down her disappointment, though. It didn’t have anything to do with her being trapped here in Virginia. In fact, she would have felt even worse to be out of commission in New York,