She swallowed back tears. Oh, God, she couldn’t start crying again. When she started, she had a hard time stopping. And she didn’t want Luke to see her weeping. He must already think she was a candidate for a straitjacket.
“Trucking isn’t a safe job for a woman alone, much less with a child,” Luke commented as he pulled his Blazer into the street, the trailer rattling behind them.
“No,” she agreed, grateful he’d eased over the awkward moment. If he’d offered sympathy, she’d have lost it.
“So the restaurant industry is your best bet. But you should be more ambitious. You’ve got management experience now—managing a staff, keeping the books…”
“Who in their right mind would trust me with money?” She sighed. “Anyway, that sort of job would require me to put together a résumé and go through interviews. I’d rather just walk in someplace, put on an apron and wait tables.” She knew she sounded pathetically unambitious.
Luke didn’t say anything else about her future. He was probably frustrated with her attitude, and she couldn’t blame him. She just wasn’t herself.
He pulled in the driveway of his house—a big, old, prairie-style frame home with a front porch that spanned its entire width.
“This house is bigger than I remembered,” she said idly. “I thought you’d have filled it full of kids by now.”
“What woman would have me?” he quipped, but his smile seemed slightly forced. He pulled all the way around to the back, where there was a detached garage—three narrow stalls with a second story above them. “I haven’t been inside the carriage house in a long time. Last time I checked, it was okay, though.”
And what if it isn’t now? Cindy wondered.
They parked and climbed out. Adam was awake now, looking around curiously. Odd that he’d slept through the slamming trailer door, but pulling quietly into a driveway had awakened him. Cindy had long suspected he was extremely sensitive to her moods. Now he sensed her anxiety about her new temporary home.
The baby held his arms toward Cindy. “Ma-ma-ma-ma.”
She grinned. “Luke, did you hear that? He said mama.”
“Is that the first time?” Luke seemed to share her wonder. He came around to her side of the car and peered in at Adam when she opened the back door.
“He’s been vocalizing for a while now, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether he’s actually saying something or just babbling.” She unbuckled the various straps on the car seat and extracted Adam. “But that was pretty clear. He was looking at me and reaching for me and saying mama.” She hugged her son. “You’re such a smart boy, aren’t you, Adam.” Those pesky tears returned to her eyes, but these weren’t tears of despair. She was suddenly awash in sentimentality. And there was Luke, standing too close, almost touching, and she felt as if she ought to be resentful toward him due to the simple fact that he wasn’t Jim, he wasn’t Adam’s father, and a boy’s father should be there when he speaks his first words.
But resentment was only a tiny part of what she felt. It was such a bittersweet moment, and mostly she was just glad that she’d been able to share it with someone. She’d borne so much all alone since Jim’s death. Adam had only been two months old. Jim had missed his first steps, his first tooth, the ear infection that had sent her flying to a Tyler hospital in a dead panic. Then her mother’s unexpected death.
No wonder she’d turned to Dex so easily. Finally there had been someone to lean on, someone to confide in and share the burden as well as the joys. She must have been an incredibly easy target.
All at once, she couldn’t keep the tears at bay and she sobbed.
“Cindy?”
She couldn’t bear the concern in Luke’s voice. She wanted to hit him. She wanted to put her arms around him and never let go. But then she’d be doing it again, falling all over the first man to show an interest in her, the first man to act as if he cared.
With Dex, all he’d really cared about was getting into her bed and her bank accounts. She knew Luke didn’t want to steal her money. But what did he want, really? And was she in any position to figure it out?
“I’m s-sorry.” She wiped her eyes, getting the tears under control before they could turn into a full-fledged crying jag. “Sometimes it just h-hits me.”
Thankfully Luke didn’t make a big deal of it. He grabbed a couple of tissues from a travel box he kept in his glove compartment and handed them to her. Then he busied himself with finding the key to the carriage house while she wiped her eyes and blew her nose while juggling Adam from hip to hip.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s see this apartment.”
She walked up the stairs ahead of him, then stood aside on the landing so she could unlock the door, which led directly into the tiny kitchenette. They both entered, then recoiled from a nasty smell.
“Did something die in here?” Cindy asked, only half kidding.
“It’s been closed up for a long time,” Luke said. “Probably just needs a good cleaning and airing out.”
Cindy didn’t particularly look forward to that. She’d spent the last two days scrubbing down the boat to make it habitable. And it hadn’t smelled nearly this bad.
She moved on into the living room holding Adam tightly. She didn’t dare set him down in this nasty place. Luke, directly behind her, flipped on a light. Three huge, gray creatures jumped and hissed, then scuttled for cover beneath a reprobate sofa.
Cindy screamed and nearly ran over Luke as she tried to get as far away as possible from the critters. Adam started crying.
“Oh, my God,” she said from the relative safety of the kitchen. “What were those things?”
“Possums,” Luke said grimly. “Guess the carriage house wasn’t uninhabited, after all.” He laughed. “Those were some big ones, too. I think we scared them more than they scared us.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ll be waiting outside.”
She couldn’t get down the stairs fast enough. As she waited by the Blazer, calming Adam down, her terror receded. In its place a slow anger started to burn. She had a trailer full of stuff and nowhere to put it. She put Adam down on a small patch of grass. He liked grass, always had. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled slowly across it, stopping every second or so to pat the soft green blades with the palms of his hands, investigating the texture. He pressed his face into it.
Luke came down the stairs a couple of minutes later. “Well, I figured out how the possums got in. There’s a broken window in the bedroom. Also, there’s a pretty bad leak in the roof. That’s going to have to be fixed, and the carpeting pulled out.”
“So, in short, it’s not livable.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“And you’re just figuring this out now?” Whatever warmth she’d felt for him a few minutes earlier had dissipated like a morning fog.
“I guess I should have checked it out before—”
“Yeah, no kidding! The boat might not have been ideal, but at least it didn’t have disgusting creatures nesting in the furniture.” Other than a few spiders, but she’d dislodged them in short order.
“I’ll fix the damned place. You can bunk in my spare bedroom until I get the carriage house fixed up. Shouldn’t be more than a few days.”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Luke looked surprised by her outburst.
“You