be as stubborn as she was fragile. Once inside the store, she insisted on pushing the cart, her grocery list clutched in one hand. “I can handle this,” she told him, wrestling with the cart’s wobbly wheels. “Do me a favor and keep your distance.”
So he trailed her, never losing sight of her blue jeans and the wave of blond hair that fluttered down her back. She was thin, but with a few more pounds she’d be rounded in all the right places, he decided. And despite her slenderness, her breasts were full. He’d noticed them beneath the transparent cotton of those girlie pajamas she’d been wearing that morning—and then immediately felt guilty for it.
But the young man standing nearby and stocking the breakfast cereal didn’t seem to suffer the same pangs of conscience. Emmett watched his bold gaze flick over Linda, checking off face, breasts, legs, then wander back to linger on her chest.
Forgetting her admonition, Emmett strolled up behind her. “Everything okay, honey?” he asked, shooting a warning look at the cocky kid and placing a hand on Linda’s shoulder.
She jumped. “What?”
He soothed her with a gentle stroke of his palm. “Everything okay?”
“I…sure. What…?” A flush tinged the fair skin of her cheeks.
Emmett smiled when the stock boy took the hint and returned to his work. “The what is that pimple-faced Lothario who was leering at you a second ago.” Beneath his hand, her arm felt warm and her bones delicate.
Her gaze jumped to the kid, then back to his face. “No,” she said. “I’m old enough to be his mother.”
He laughed and couldn’t stop himself from stroking her arm. “Not a chance.” There was nothing the least bit matronly about the soft mouth, the gleaming length of blond hair, those breasts that didn’t show much beneath the T-shirt she wore but that he could remember so well from the morning—
He dropped his hand with a silent curse at himself. He was supposed to be Linda’s protector, not another lecher like the damn kid up the aisle. “Go on ahead with your shopping.”
Another wide-eyed glance, and then she turned away from him to push the cart onward. In the next aisle she paused again, staring at the array of soup cans and sauce jars. Emmett kept his distance, staying several paces behind as she moved on to the bread and rolls, and then the produce section.
It was when she’d lingered there for several frozen minutes that he realized there was nothing in the bottom of the cart. Nothing. Not one item had made it from the shelves into her basket. In that same instant, she started pushing the cart again, moving in rapid strides down the aisle and then out the doors of the store. In her wake, her shopping list fluttered to the blacktop parking lot. He swooped it up, then broke into a jog, catching up with her just as she shoved the cart into a corral of others.
“Linda?”
She whirled, staring at him as if it were the first time she’d seen him. In her wide eyes he saw the unmistakable sheen of tears. Her lower lip trembled.
“Are you all right?” he asked. Stupid question. She wasn’t all right. She looked frightened and upset and he didn’t know what she needed or how to help her. Without knowing what else to do, he offered her the page of lined paper with its neat column of items. “You dropped this.”
Her fingers drew the list from his. “There’s so many choices,” she whispered, staring down at it. “I wrote cornflakes, but there is more than one brand and then so many other kinds of flakes that I couldn’t make up my mind which box I wanted. And bread. Wheat bread, white bread, butter-top, multigrain…”
Her voice trailed off as a single tear tracked down her cheek.
She was killing him. Killing him. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.” He should have taken her to a smaller store her first time, he thought. A mom-and-pop place where she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. “We’ll go home now and figure it out later.”
“No.” Her spine straightened and she lifted her chin, the wet trail of that tear still evident. “No, I can do it.”
And damn if she didn’t. With that stem of hers stiffened, his fragile flower took herself back into the grocery store. This time he stayed by her side, directing the cart through the aisles and limiting her selections to one or two when she seemed confused or uncertain. They made it back to the car thirty-five minutes later, both of them, he figured, exhausted.
But she still helped load the bags into the back of his truck. Then, as he approached the passenger’s door to unlock it for her, he caught sight of her tired, yet elated grin.
“What?” he asked, but he was almost smiling himself, infected by the sense of accomplishment he could see she was feeling. “Pretty proud of yourself, huh?”
She nodded, her grin widening. “Pretty proud of myself, huh. I know it might seem like a small thing to you, but—”
He put his hand over her mouth. “It’s no small thing, I know.” The warmth of her lips moved against his fingers, and shafts of heat raced across his skin and down his back. He thought of her in those flimsy pajamas again and had to step away.
He looked down at his still-tingling hand. “Did you say something?”
She closed the gap between them. “I said thank you.” And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Linda Faraday went into his arms.
Technically, he supposed she hugged him, but because his hands closed around her slender back, she was against him, warm and secure within the circle of his body.
It was innocent gratitude on her part, that never-say-die protective instinct on his.
Except that when he breathed in the golden-sunshine scent of her hair, when he felt her heartbeat through his palms, it was more than protection that rose within him.
It was lust, and it was only going to complicate everything.
Three
Linda’s first day of “independent” living included more dependence than she’d counted upon. But Emmett—the man, not the machine—helped make her first grocery store experience a success. After unloading the food, a light lunch and a much-needed nap, she decided that the morning’s accomplishment had given her the courage to take a first step toward tackling the most difficult item on her make-a-life-for-herself list.
It was time for her to try acting like a mother.
She found Emmett in the spare bedroom, tightening the bolts on a treadmill that sat in one corner of the room. He was dressed as she was, in jeans and a T-shirt, though he filled his out much better than her. It took her another moment to look away from him and notice the other pieces of gym equipment in evidence—a pyramid of free weights, three sizes of stability balls, a large, rolled-up mat. “What’s all this?” she asked.
“I like to work out,” he answered. “You need to. Nancy and Dean agreed to let me outfit this room as a home gym.”
“I used to pride myself on my good condition,” she remembered, frowning at her reflection in the mirrored closet doors. “Now I’m more stick girl than cover girl.”
“You’ve missed the new trend
