“Anything will suit me. I’ll get dressed.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look as he strode back into the bedroom and gently closed the door.
She got up and went to the kitchen, surprised to find that her hands shook when she got the pans out and began to put bacon into one.
Emmett came back while she was breaking eggs into a bowl. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, which stretched over his powerful muscles. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He looked rakish and appealing. She pretended not to notice; her memory was giving her enough trouble.
Melody wasn’t dressed because she’d forgotten to get her clothes out of the bedroom the night before. That had been an unfortunate oversight, because he was staring quite openly at her in the long green gown and matching quilted robe that fit much too well and showed an alarming amount of bare skin in the deep V neckline. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but her blond-streaked brown hair and freckled pale skin gave her enough color to make her interesting to a man.
Emmett realized that she must not know that, because she kept fiddling with her hair after she’d set the eggs aside and started to heat a pan to cook them in.
“Where are the plates?” he asked. He didn’t want to add to her discomfort by staring.
“They’re up in the cabinet, there—” she gestured “—and so are the cups and saucers. But you don’t have to…”
“I’m domesticated,” he said gently. “I always was, even before I married.” The words, once spoken, dispelled his good mood. He went about setting the table and didn’t speak again until he was finished.
Melody had scrambled eggs and taken up the bacon while the biscuits were baking. She took them out of the oven, surprised to see that they weren’t overcooked. People in the kitchen made her nervous—Emmett, especially.
“You couldn’t get to your clothes, could you?” he mused. “I should have reminded you last night.”
It was an intimate conversation. Having a man in her apartment at all was intimate, and after having met him in the altogether in the bathroom, Melody was more nervous than ever.
“That’s all right, I’ll dress when the boys get up. You could call them…?”
“Not yet,” he replied. “I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
He motioned her into a chair and then sat down across from her, his big, lean hands dangling between his knees as he studied her. “About what you said last night. I’ve been thinking about it. Did Adell tell you that it was loving Randy, not hating me, that broke up our marriage?”
Melody clasped her hands in her lap and stared at them. “She said that she married you because you were kind and gentle and obviously cared about her so much,” she told him, because only honesty would do. “When she met Randy, at the service station where she had her car worked on and bought gas, she tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, that she wasn’t falling in love. But she was too weak to stop it. I’m not excusing what she did, Emmett,” she said when he looked haunted. “There should have been a kinder way. And I should have said no when Randy asked me to help them get away. But nothing will change what happened. She really does love him. There’s no way to get around that.”
“I see.”
He looked grim. She hated the wounded expression on his lean face.
“Emmett,” she said gently, “you have to believe it wasn’t because of you personally. She fell in love, really in love. The biggest mistake she made was marrying you when she didn’t love you properly.”
“Do you know what that is?” he asked with a bitter smile. “Loving ‘properly’?”
“Well, not really,” she said. “I haven’t ever been in love.” That was true enough. She’d had crushes on movie stars, and once she’d had a crush on a boy back in San Antonio. But that had been a very lukewarm relationship and the boy had gone crazy over a cheerleader who was more willing in the backseat of his car than Melody had been.
“Why?” he asked curiously.
She sighed. “You must have noticed that I’m oversized and not very attractive,” she said with a wistful smile.
He frowned. “Aren’t you? Who says?”
Color came and went in her cheeks. “Well, no one, but I…”
It disturbed him that he’d said such a thing to her, when she’d been the enemy since Randy had spirited Adell away. “Have the kids given you any trouble?”
“Just Guy,” she replied after a minute. “He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like anybody except me,” he said easily. “He’s the most insecure of the three.”
She nodded. “Amy and Polk are very sweet.”
“Adell spoiled them. She favored Guy, although he took it the best of the three when she left. I think he loved her, but he never talks about her.”
“He’s a very private person, isn’t he? Divorce must be hard on everyone,” she replied. “My parents loved each other for thirty years—until they died. There was never any question of them getting a divorce or separating. They were happy. So were we. It was a blow when we lost them. Randy wound up being part brother and part parent to me. I was still in school.”
“That explains why you were so close, I suppose.” He cocked his head and studied her. “How did they die?”
“In a freak accident,” she said sadly. “My mother was in very bad health—a semi-invalid. She had what Dad thought was a light heart attack. He got her into the car and was speeding, trying to get her to the hospital. He lost control in a curve and wrecked the car. They both died.” She averted her eyes. “There was an oil slick on the road that he didn’t see, and a light rain…just enough to bring the oil to the surface. Randy and I blamed ourselves for not insisting that Dad call an ambulance instead of trying to drive her to the emergency room himself. To this day I hate rain.”
“I’m sorry,” he said kindly. “I lost my parents several years apart, but it was pretty rough just the same. Especially my mother.” He was silent for a moment. “She killed herself. Dad had only been dead six months when she was diagnosed with leukemia. She refused treatment, went home and took a handful of barbiturates that they’d given her for pain. I was in my last few weeks of college before graduation. I hadn’t started until I was nineteen, so I was late getting out. It was pretty rough, passing my finals after the funeral,” he added with a rough laugh.
“I can only imagine,” she said sympathetically.
“I’d already been running the ranch and going to school as a commuting student. That’s where I met Adell, at college. She was sympathetic and I was so torn up inside. I just wanted to get married and have kids and not be alone anymore.” He shrugged. “I thought marriage would ease the pain. It didn’t. Nobody cares like your parents do. When they die, you’re alone. Except, maybe, if you’ve got kids,” he added thoughtfully, and realized that he hadn’t really paid enough attention to his own kids. He frowned. He’d avoided them since Adell left. Rodeo and ranch work had pretty much replaced parenting with him. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it until he got hit in the head.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” Melody asked unexpectedly. She hadn’t ever had occasion to question his background. Now, suddenly, she was curious about it.
“No,” he said. “I had a sister, they said, but she died a few weeks after she was born. There was just me. My dad was a rodeo star. He taught me everything I know.”
“He must have been good at it.”
“So am I, when I’m not distracted. There was a little