One more little hill before they reached Haven proper. “I bet if you had a chance to know Jenna better, you’d really like her.”
Dawn laughed. Not what he was expecting. And she was hard enough to figure when she did something he was expecting.
“What?” he asked.
She said, “Nothing,” which would’ve ticked him off if she hadn’t immediately followed up with, “You’re going to make an amazing father,” which simply threw him.
To Nebraska.
“What makes you say that?”
“Deductive reasoning is kind of my stock in trade,” she said with a smile. “Watching how you handled Elijah, the way you related to him…” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught her breasts lifting with the force of her sigh. First time in his life he’d ever thought of his peripheral vision as a liability. “At least I won’t have to worry about leaving our child alone with you. Me, on the other hand…”
The insecurity flickered in her voice for barely a second, just long enough to bring back another memory, this one of a eight-year-old girl, her chin defiantly tilted up underneath a quivering mouth, who’d refused to come right out and say how much it hurt when that man Ivy was supposed to marry suddenly moved away. Charley…Beeman, that was his name.
“What do I need a daddy for, anyway? And besides, Mama says a man just gets in the way of what a woman wants to do….”
Cal frowned, bringing himself back to the present. “Well, sweetheart, if things go the way I hope, you won’t have to worry about leaving him or her alone with me at all.”
Several beats passed. Then: “Stop the truck.”
“You gonna be sick?”
“Possibly. But not because of the baby.”
He pulled onto the shoulder; she jumped out and took off down the road. Cal stuck his head out the window. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Walking the rest of the way!”
Grumbling to himself, Cal got out and went after her.
“You know—” the words came in little puffs as he trotted along behind her “—the one thing I used to admire about you was that you never pulled this female crap.”
“Yeah, well,” she puffed back, “I’ve never felt this much like a female before.”
Along about this time, Cal happened to notice her behind had filled out some with the pregnancy, too. Not a lot, and not so’s anybody but him would notice, probably, but there it was, jiggling away in front of him as she strode, and while one part of him was pretty ticked at her behavior—he liked kids, but not ones his own age—she looked so damned silly and cute and sexy, hoofing it away like this, that, well, something crazy just bubbled up inside him and made him want to kiss her.
So he did.
After he caught her, that is.
She was too shocked to protest. At least, that’s what he was working with. Oh, there was a little mmphh on her part when their lips met, but he chalked that up to the surprise element.
Oh, yeah, she was a natural talent, all right. And she tasted like barbecue sauce and fresh peach cobbler, which Cal decided right then and there pretty much summed up his definition of heaven. Except he could have done without the mmphhs, which were definitely increasing in their intensity.
The fists beating on his shoulders weren’t doing much for the mood, either.
He let her go, grinning down at her.
She was not grinning back.
“And you did that why?” she said.
No way was he telling her about the bigger-butt revelation.
“Because I felt like it. And I had fun. Well, I would have had fun if you’d cooperated more—”
She burst into tears and sank onto the ground.
Cal squatted beside her. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
That got the head-shaking, air-batting routine, then a series of sobbed syllables not even remotely related to the English language. Figuring she probably wasn’t going anywhere in the next few seconds, Cal went back to the truck and retrieved two or three tissues from the smashed box in the glove department, then returned to where she was still sitting and handed them to her. When she was drier and—he presumed—more coherent, he said, “You wanna run that one by me again?”
A few rattly sighs, a few more eye wipes, and at last she said, “You are such an idiot.”
At that he figured he might as well join her in the dirt and weeds.
“You mean that in general?” he said as his backside touched down. “Or you got something specific in mind?”
“At the risk of this going straight to your head, if not elsewhere—” she looked pointedly at the elsewhere in question “—my being hot for you isn’t the issue here.”
“It’s…not.”
She smacked him in the arm, honked into one of the tissues, then gave one of those oh-God-deliver-me-from-the-clueless sighs. “You didn’t exactly have to talk me into your bed a couple months ago. If you recall.”
He squelched the laugh just in time. “Yeah, I seem to remember a certain…eagerness on your part. But I figured that was…”
“What? You figured that was what?”
“That you were still hurtin’ after that guy dumped you, is all,” he said gently, refusing to look at her. “And maybe you were looking for someone to boost your self-confidence back up a notch or two.”
Silence. Then: “I was a little…bruised, it’s true. But more because I was duped than dumped. Andrew and I broke up because our visions of marriage—or rather, his vision of what he expected of a wife—didn’t mesh. What pissed me off was that he didn’t bother to tell me this until after we were engaged. And I felt, I don’t know…betrayed as much as anything, I guess.”
“About what?”
She yanked a poor defenseless weed out of the ground, then shifted to sit cross-legged, making lines in the dust with the weed as they talked. “We were really compatible on so many levels. Similar tastes, similar viewpoints, similar personalities.” Her shoulders hitched. “He was…comfortable. After some of the so-called men I’d gone out with, it was a pleasure being with someone I never had to second-guess. Or so I thought.” Her mouth hitched up into a rueful smile. “When he proposed, my first thought was, No more stupid dates! No more worrying about making an impression!”
Cal frowned. “Oh, yeah, that sounds like a real good reason to marry somebody.”
“Trust me, after what I’d been through, it was a damn good reason. Anyway, I figured our lives wouldn’t change all that much after we got married, that we’d just be a typical professional New York couple. But it turned out…”
The weed snapped in two; she tossed it away and squinted into the sun. “He didn’t love me, I know he didn’t, but he still wanted more from me than I could possibly give. Looking back, I think he didn’t want kids because the competition would’ve made him crazy, because Andrew wanted to be my world. For me to love him in a way I knew I never could. In a way I know I’ll never be able to love anybody.”
Cal waited out the stab of pain before he asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded surprised, like she hadn’t expected him to challenge her. “Just the way I’m wired, I guess.”
“I see.” His insides churning, he focused on a clump of late-season wildflowers shivering in the breeze. “So…you’d rather be alone?”