“Why?” She tipped forward and lowered her voice. “Are you scared?”
“Shit.” He shoved another milk carton into her hand. “Drink your milk, kid. It’s good for you. Helps you grow up straight and tall, so you can torment old folks like me.”
“Jody?”
He winced at the sound of Ellie’s voice behind him. Across the table, Jody looked like her lunch was curdling in her stomach. “Uh-oh,” she said.
Fitz grimaced and dropped his chicken. “Busted.”
Ellie circled the end of the table and slipped into the empty space next to her daughter. “Been looking for you,” she said. “Gran wanted to take you to town with her.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
Ellie handed her a napkin. “Better run up to the house.”
Jody quickly wiped her fingers and jumped up, ready to leave immediately. When she moved past him, Fitz reached out to grab her wrist. “Wait a minute.”
The look on Ellie’s face made him drop Jody’s arm.
“It’s my fault she’s here,” he said. “We were in the middle of a discussion about…lots of different things, and I asked her to join me. Look,” he pointed out, “she hasn’t finished her lunch yet.”
Ellie transferred her Go To Your Room glare to him. Uh-oh.
“That’s okay,” said Jody. “I don’t want to keep Gran waiting. Thank you for lunch, Fitz. It was delicious.”
Ellie waited until her daughter was out of range before rising from the table, the better to let him have it from both barrels at chest level. “I’d appreciate it if, in the future, you’d avoid undercutting my parental authority in my daughter’s presence.”
Fitz swallowed. It wasn’t much of stretch to turn in a performance as a chastened man. “Yes, ma’am.”
Ellie shot him a sharp, scary nod and stalked off to the big main barn. Something about the slight swagger in those subtle hips of hers had him twitching and itching again. Damn if she didn’t have the strangest way of getting under his skin.
It wasn’t infatuation, not with her bee-stung boy’s shape and her sweat-stained western wear. It wasn’t fascination, not with her stuck-up nose and her snippy attitude. It was…something else. Or everything else. He couldn’t figure it out, and the mystery was making him reckless.
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