Folding her arms over her chest, she frowned, feeling sulky. “I don’t ‘grab things on the road.’”
He smiled, leaning across her to press the button for the elevator. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing to it. I’ll show you how.”
“Oh brother!”
“Besides,” he said, his smile fading and eyes darkening seriously as he leaned close to say it softly, “we have some things to talk about. This will give us a chance to do that.”
Her heart began to thump in her chest. So he wasn’t going to ignore their situation after all. Well, good. Maybe. But just the fact that he thought they could discuss things on the fly given an odd moment or two didn’t bode well. You just didn’t make life commitments that way, did you?
As they hit the highway and left city traffic behind them, her anxiety began to melt away. How could she stay tense when that big ole Texas sky was shockingly blue and almost cloudless above them? There was something irresistible about an open road. She relaxed, her hands loose on the wheel.
Mitch had been quiet since they’d left the parking garage. Glancing at him sideways, she wondered what he was thinking. Was he preparing what he wanted to say to her? Or was he still mulling things over? Why didn’t he just go ahead and get it over with? She had a feeling it must be really bad if he couldn’t just spit it out on the spot.
Now she was getting tense again. This was no good.
“What kind of music do you like?” she asked, suddenly wanting something to fill the silence between them.
“You choose.”
She hesitated. “Well, are you still Texan enough to take in a little country and western? Or have you become too cosmopolitan and sophisticated for us hayseeds?”
“Am I still Texan?” He turned toward her, appalled by the question. “Is the Pope Catholic?” She refused to give him a smile. “Last time I looked.”
“There’s your answer.” He snorted. “Am I Texan?” he repeated, and for good measure, he sang her a few lines from, a popular song, finally coaxing a smile from her.
“Not bad,” she had to admit. “You’re a man of many talents, aren’t you?”
He laughed softly. “Darcy, I have only just begun to reveal myself to you.”
She shook her head but she knew he was still feeling a bit full of himself after the way all those women had treated him that morning. He stretched out his long legs as best he could in the confinement of the car, and suddenly she was very much aware of him as a man—a man with a hard, gorgeous body, which she remembered only too well. She caught her breath as memories flooded her for a moment, pictures of his golden form stretched out on white sheets in lamplight.
Oh my. She hadn’t thought of that for ages—and she really should block those things out of her mind, if she possibly could. She started to reach to turn up the air-conditioning, then caught herself just in time. But she couldn’t stop the heat from flooding her cheeks, and she was only glad he seemed too occupied with the passing landscape to notice.
“You know, Darcy, you’ve got a few surprising facets to your persona as well,” he said a few minutes later, turning toward her again. “It was a real shock to find out you had … the twins.” His voice deepened. “I have to admit, though I thought of you often over the last two years, I never pictured you as a mother.”
Well, that was just downright annoying. Sure, she was a mother. But that very fact made him a father. He seemed to be forgetting that part.
“I never thought of you as a Texas businessman,” she shot back. “So we’re even.”
He frowned. “I’m not a Texas businessman,” he protested.
“No?”
“Not really. Only temporarily.”
“Well, cleaned up like you are, you could pass for one.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
They were silent for a moment, then he spoke again.
“So what did you think of me as?” he asked curiously.
She raised an eyebrow. “Fishing for compliments?”
“Not at all. Just curious.”
She hesitated. What had she thought that day when she’d opened the door to Jimmy’s pied-à-terre and found the hunky hero from her teenage years standing there in the Paris rain? He was exactly what any woman would have conjured up for herself if she’d had a magic wand. But what had come to mind at the time?
“An adventurer I guess.” That wasn’t exactly it, but the best she could come up with on short notice.
“An adventurer.” He said the word as though that startled him, as though he wasn’t sure he liked it.
“That’s not the way you see yourself?”
He shook his head, looking distracted. “No. Actually I see myself more as a human rights worker.”
She looked at him in astonishment, then had to swerve back into her lane. A human rights worker? And here she’d thought he was some sort of modern day mercenary. Maybe they had different ways of defining that term.
“You’re kidding. Right?”
He sighed. “Never mind. For now, I guess I’m a businessman.”
“So that’s for sure, is it?” she asked, turning onto a smaller two-lane road. “You’re saying that this return to your home town isn’t permanent? That it’s just something temporary in order to make your mother happy for a while?”
That seemed to offend him. “Leave my mother out of this,” he said gruffly.
She looked at him in surprise. After all, he was the one who had originally brought the subject up. She hadn’t realized it was out of bounds.
But he seemed to recognize what she was thinking.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sort of defensive about my mother right now. I’m feeling a little protective.”
Mitch protective toward his mother. She’d thought rebelling against his family situation had been the whole point. That was the impression she’d had from what he’d told her in Paris. Obviously she didn’t have a handle on the full picture.
She pulled the car into the parking lot at the construction site. The twin mobile trailers, which served as the administration and engineering offices, sat in front of where they’d parked. Switching off the engine, she turned to look at the man beside her.
“I’m not sure why you came back,” she told him candidly, “but since you did, we need to settle the business about the twins. We can’t leave it up in the air the way it is now. Just what is your role going to be in their lives?”
He didn’t answer right away, but he was studying her face, his gaze sliding over her lips, her nose line, her smooth skin, then tucking into the protected area around her ear. When his gaze finally rose to meet hers, she saw a sort of storminess there. But only for a moment.
“We’ll talk,” he promised. “Later today. Right now, we’ve got work to do.” He turned away and reached to open the door. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
She followed more slowly, wondering