we’ve talked or written or anything.”
“Then I guess you didn’t know she and Darryl are having another baby?”
“Mama might’ve said something about it. Their third?”
“Fifth.” He grinned. “Now there’s one shotgun wedding that took.”
No response.
They drove past the turnoff that led back to the farm. For a second, he’d thought about asking if she wanted to come back, to see the cradle. But only for a second.
“So…Ryan and Maddie are doing okay, I take it?” Dawn asked.
Now, Cal knew it had not been her intention to hike up the temperature inside the truck several degrees. Except the last time Dawn would’ve seen them all was on July Fourth. The day he and Dawn made the baby. Which naturally provoked some real vivid memories of just how they’d made the baby, although to the casual listener—as in Dawn—his thoughts, like his words, were totally focused on Maddie’s youngest taking her first steps a few weeks ago, how his new sister-in-law had worked wonders to bring his reclusive workaholic brother out of his shell.
“And Hank and Jenna?” she said. “Mama told me they were getting married?”
He glanced over at her, his brain jumping its tracks as his gaze landed on her mouth. Which, when it wasn’t yapping a mile a minute and making him crazy, was soft and warm and—
He looked back, mentally flogging himself. This sex-as-mental-comfort-food business was fine to a certain extent, but at some point, a man’s gotta grow up and eat his vegetables.
“Right after Thanksgiving, yep.”
“I liked Jenna a lot,” she said, crossing her arms. “Her books are good, too. And I don’t usually read mysteries.”
“Her next one’s coming out in hardcover,” he said, thinking about that mouth. About how he’d kissed a fair number of women in his time, but Dawn…well, she was what you’d call a natural talent. “You know,” he said, because thinking about her mouth was making him feel reckless, “even though Jenna’s lived all her life in D.C., she doesn’t seem to have any reservations about moving out here.”
No response. Again.
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.”
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