“Thanks.”
“De nada.” Was she hallucinating, or was he focusing entirely too much on her mouth? Then he lifted his hand, and she held her breath …
… and he swatted away a tiny night critter fluttering around her face.
Then, with what sounded like a frustrated sigh, he gently fingered a loose curl hovering at her temple.
“I’m a mess, Dana.”
“So I noticed.”
He dropped his hand. And laughed, although the sound was pained. “And here I always thought Southern women bent over backward to be diplomatic.”
“Clearly you’ve been hanging out with the wrong Southern women.”
“Clearly,” he said, his expression unreadable in the harsh security light. Then, gently: “Go, Dana. For both our sakes … go.”
Only, after she slid behind the wheel, he caught the door before she could close it. “That was my father,” he said. “On the phone.”
Her breath caught. “Oh? Um … I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be. I finally got some things off my chest. Someday, I’ll tell you the whole sordid story. If you really want to hear it, I mean.”
Afraid to speak, she simply nodded. He pushed her door shut; her throat clogged, Dana backed into the street, put the car into Drive, drove away. Noticed, when she glanced into her rearview mirror, C.J. still standing in the driveway, hands in his pockets, watching her until she got all the way to the end of the street.
“Oh, Merce,” Dana whispered to herself. “Now this is huge.”
“No news yet?” Val asked from the doorway to C.J.’s office.
He swiveled in her direction. “What? You’re bugging the phones now?”
“No, I was on my way to the kitchen and your voice carries. And when you’re the youngest of seven you get real good at deducing what’s going on from only one side of the conversation.” She waltzed in and plopped down across from him. “So what’d she say? That private investigator gal?”
“Not much. But if Trish is working off the books somewhere, or hasn’t used a credit card recently, it might be harder to track her down.”
“Well, the child couldn’t have just vanished. She’s bound to turn up, sooner or later.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“I don’t understand, I thought you wanted to get things settled. Legally. So there’d be no question.”
On a weighty sigh, C.J. leaned back in his chair, tossing his pen on his desk. Frankly, he doubted things would ever feel settled again. With Trish, with Dana …
Oh, God, Dana. The more he was around her, the less he could figure out if she was the best thing, or the worst thing, to happen to him. If she’d had any idea how close he’d come to kissing her the other night …
And then what? Take her to bed? Lead her to believe things were headed in a direction he couldn’t, wouldn’t go? That much of an idiot, he wasn’t.
At least, he hoped not.
He stuffed his thoughts back into some dark, dank corner of his brain and once again met Val’s quizzical, and far too discerning, gaze. “If Trish doesn’t reappear soon,” he said, “the law’s on my side. I’d get custody free and clear. It’s the limbo that’s killing us.”
“Us? Oh. You and Dana?”
He let his gaze drift out the window. “Until we know what Trish is really up to, we can’t make any permanent arrangements. Which we very much want to do. Need to do. For Ethan’s sake.”
The older woman eyed him for several seconds, then rose. “Well, I truly hope it all works out. For everybody. And soon. So … subject change—you ever decide who to take to the charity dinner Saturday night?”
Despite the permanent knot in his chest these days, C.J. chuckled. “It’s not the prom, Val. And I’m taking Dana.”
“‘Bout time you did something right,” she said, and waltzed back out.
Big whoop, he thought. One measly thing out of, what? A hundred? A thousand? Not that he didn’t want to do the right thing, or things, it was just that he still wasn’t sure what, exactly, that was.
Two showings, an office meeting and a closing later, he walked through the garage entrance into his house to be assailed by the mouth-watering aroma of roast pork, the pulse-quickening beat of bluegrass fiddle. Tugging off his tie, he followed his nose to the kitchen, where Dana—oblivious to his arrival—was stirring something in a pot on the stove, her white-shorted fanny wiggling in time to the music. In one corner, safely out of harm’s way, Ethan sat up in his playpen, gnawing on a set of plastic keys. The instant he caught sight of C.J., though, the keys went flying. With a huge grin, the baby lifted his arms, yelling “Ba!”
Dana whipped around, her hand splayed across her stomach. As usual, several pieces of her hair had escaped her topknot, curling lazily alongside her neck, the ends teasing her collarbone and the neckline of her loose tank top. She laughed. “Somebody needs to put a bell on you, mister! You’re home early!”
Home. The word vibrated between them, like a single note plucked on a violin, clear and pure and destined to fade into nothingness. A word C.J. had never associated with this house. Or any other place he’d ever lived, for that matter. A concept he’d never associated with himself, he realized as he set down his briefcase and scooped up his baby son, who began to excitedly babble about his day.
C.J. stood there, literally soaking up his baby’s slobbery smile. At that moment, he felt as though he’d stepped into some family sitcom, where no matter what tried to rip apart the characters during the course of the episode, family ties always triumphed in the end. Except real life wasn’t a sitcom, and the habit of a lifetime wasn’t going to be fixed in twenty-two minutes.
“What’s all this?” he asked, deliberately derailing his own train of thought.
“Nothing ‘all this’ about it. Business was slow so I took off early, figured I might as well throw the pork in the oven. We’re eating in the dining room, by the way.”
He glanced toward the room in question, saw the table set with place mats, cloth napkins, candlesticks. A centerpiece, for God’s sake.
“I never eat in the dining room,” he said.
“Then it’s high time you did,” she said.
Honest to Pete, she’d had no agenda behind dinner beyond feeding everybody. Roasts were no-brainers, for heaven’s sake. As were boiled potatoes and steamed asparagus. Okay, so maybe the gravy was a little tricky, but not if you’d been making it since you were twelve.
And really, she hadn’t been trying to impress him or anything with the table setting, she’d just thought it seemed a shame, never using the dining room. The man needed to start appreciating his own house, that’s all.
So the look on his face when he’d walked in, smelled the cooking, seen the table, taken that first bite of pork … was icing on the cake. Seriously.
His chuckle when she handed him a dessert dish of Jell-O topped with a fluffy mountain of whipped cream, however … priceless.
They’d progressed to the family room, ostensibly to watch a film. She’d raided her parents’ stash of DVDs, hauling back everything from old Hepburn-Tracy flicks to Clint Eastwood westerns, vintage Woody Allen to Indiana Jones, eighties-era chick flicks to over-the-top disaster movies. But the slim, colorful cases lay fanned out on the coffee table, temporarily forsaken. Instead, C.J. sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace with Ethan in his lap, halfheartedly fending off the baby’s attempts