heard the first knock. Who on earth? she wondered. Her sister and brother-in-law, Joan and Griff Shaw, were out of town for several days so Griff could ride in the rodeo, and they always took Danna with them during the summer. Amy’s parents hadn’t said anything about coming down from Oklahoma City; they rarely left home anymore. Her best—and if she were honest, only—friend, Ruthie, should have been at work. She was of half a mind to ignore it. After all, who else could it be except some solicitor or…No, he wouldn’t, not after the way she’d treated him and his daughter this morning. She sighed, pondering again her reaction to her new neighbor. What was it about him that made her want to jump up and run in the opposite direction? It had to be simply a matter of bad timing. He’d come along just when she was trying to quit smoking. Yes, that was undoubtedly it.
Her caller proved persistent, so much so that she finally stuck her head out of the bathroom door and shouted, “Just a minute!” Grumbling, she pulled on denim shorts and a worn, white T-shirt, tugged a comb through her hair, and went barefoot to the door. She couldn’t believe it when she opened up and found that it was, indeed, him standing there. He wore running shorts, a skimpy sleeveless “muscle” shirt and athletic shoes without socks. The man was obviously in fine physical shape. His lower arms and legs, she noticed, were dusted with fine black hairs, and so, too, she suspected, was his upper chest. For some reason that seemed strangely…erotic. Mark, she recalled, had been inordinately proud of his full head of sandy brown hair, but he’d hardly sported a hair on any other part of his body. Now why would she compare the two of them?
“I was hoping that we could start over,” Evans Kincaid was saying.
Amy shook her head to clear it, a movement that Kincaid interpreted as a refusal of his truce. He rolled his eyes, threw up his hands and started to turn away. Impulsively Amy reached out to stop him. This morning’s fiasco could be laid squarely at her feet, after all. “Don’t go,” she said, her hand clamped down over his forearm.
Surprised, he looked at her hand, then lifted his head to beam upon her a smile so bright that it was blinding. “Well, all right.”
She snatched her hand away, suddenly feeling ridiculously shy and disheveled. Her hand crept up to her drying hair. “Um, maybe you’d better come in.”
He stepped inside and closed the door. “Now what?” she wondered, unaware that she’d spoken aloud until he chuckled.
“Ah, how about a cool glass of water?”
“Oh. Right.” Now she was laughing. “Come on back to the kitchen.” She signaled for him to follow and turned away to pad across the living room, past the dining suite, and into the hall. She pulled the door to her bedroom closed, not wishing him to witness its clutter, then turned left into the kitchen. “Actually, I have some iced tea if you’d prefer that.”
“Tea would be great.”
She opened a cabinet door, realized there were no clean glasses there and went to the dishwasher, hoping she’d remembered to run it. Thankfully she had, though she couldn’t remember exactly when that might have been. Taking the tea pitcher from the refrigerator, she dropped a few ice cubes into the glass and poured it full. “It’s already sweetened. Would you like some lemon?”
He shook his head, then sipped the tea and promptly nodded. “Guess I’d better have lemon, after all.”
“Too sweet?” Her mother had always told her that she made syrup, not tea.
He nodded apologetically. “A little.” Obviously it was a lot too sweet.
She rummaged in the refrigerator for a lemon, eventually finding a few dried up slices in a tiny bowl. Biting her lip, she closed the refrigerator and suggested that he might prefer water, after all.
“Oh, this is fine,” he said unconvincingly, whereupon she snatched the glass out of his hand and dumped its contents into the sink. Quickly she rinsed the glass, filled it partway with water and carried it to the freezer for a couple of ice cubes.
“Thank you,” he said when she handed him the glass of water. “May I take a seat?”
“Of course.”
He pulled out a chair at her dinky kitchen table and sat down. “Won’t you join me?”
She pulled out another chair and sat.
He ran a fingertip around the lip of his glass. “I, um, thought perhaps that if we got to know each other a little better we could, ah, get along.”
Amy passed a hand over her eyes. “I get along just fine with all my other neighbors.”
“Are any of them teenagers with only one parent and that one of the opposite sex?”
Amy grimaced. “No. Actually there isn’t another soul on this whole block under fifty.”
He grinned. “I know. It was the deciding factor in the purchase of my house.”
She gave him an openly curious look. “Want to explain that?”
He nodded. “Actually, I do.” He sipped from his glass and set it down again. “I hoped this neighborhood would have a…calming effect on my daughter. You see, Mattie was just twelve when her mother died.”
“Tough age,” Amy muttered.
“Very. She was an early bloomer, deep in the throes of puberty. We were very close, Mattie and I, from the day of her birth. I couldn’t wait to have a child. Neither could Andie. In fact, we were married in October and Mattie was born just a year later.”
“I take it there were no others,” Amy commented lightly.
He sighed. “Nope. We always intended to have another, but Mattie was just everything we could have possibly asked for, and we didn’t want her to share her early childhood with a sibling. We always had it in the back of our minds to have another when she started school, but then Andie started thinking about going to college—I think I told you that she was only eighteen when we married. Anyway, I thought she ought to have the chance to go, so when Mattie started school, so did Andie, and, well, she loved it, so much so that after she finally got her bachelor’s degree, she started in on her master’s. She always said we’d have that second baby before she hit forty. But she hardly got past thirty.” He stared at his glass, watching the condensation bead on the outside. “She was crossing the street to her car after class and some hopped-up frat pledge jumped the median and mowed her down.”
“I’m so sorry,” Amy said gently.
He nodded, keeping his gaze on his glass. “I couldn’t believe it. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but Mattie…She and her mother were practically inseparable just then. She was suddenly becoming a young lady, and Andie was so good with her. To tell you the truth, I was feeling kind of left out. They were always giggling together and trying on makeup and God knows what all. And suddenly Andie’s gone.” He shook his head and sat up straighter in his chair, finally lifting his gaze. “Mattie’s a good girl, Mrs. Slater, but she’s been through a lot. Losing her mother sort of knocked her off kilter, and she doesn’t seem to have ever really gotten back in balance. She’s going through this stage right now, rebellion, I guess, and there was this boy back in California…” He told Amy about the rocker, which explained Mattie’s rather bizarre style of fashion. “Actually, the whole scene was pretty rough out there, gangs and all. When I conceived this notion of moving her out of that climate, I went to my pastor,”
