Brenna Morgan was definitely a pretty woman.
To cleanse himself of the disturbing thought, Luke allowed his gaze to drift over her totally nonexistent figure. She looked like a balloon overinflated with helium, the skirt of her blue maternity dress swirling around her swollen feet and ankles.
Luke expelled what might have been a sigh of relief. He admired long, shapely legs on a woman. Though he couldn’t see Brenna’s legs under the long blue skirt, her puffy ankles certainly failed his desirability test.
As well they should. She was pregnant, some kid’s mother-to-be.
She was some guy’s wife. She was of no interest to him whatsoever.
“Is your husband going to be ticked off that you’re stuck with jury duty and that your poor unborn child is going to be exposed to lawyers and their sleazy clients for days on end?” Luke asked jovially, purposefully, as they reached the main entrance of the building.
Brenna, in the midst of pulling on her oversize light-brown parka, looked up at him, in that serious, earnest way of hers. “I don’t have a husband. This baby is mine and mine alone.”
She pushed the double doors open and walked off, leaving him staring after her, his jaw agape.
“You were picked for jury duty in your condition? Are they nuts? Did you tell them the baby is due in six weeks?” Cassie Walsh, Brenna’s next-door neighbor, was outraged on her behalf.
Cassie’s three-year-old daughter, Abigail, sat on the floor, transfixed by a video of Winnie the Pooh, and didn’t look up as Cassie rolled an ottoman toward Brenna, who was resting in the armchair.
“I told them.” Brenna wearily propped her swollen feet up on the ottoman. “It didn’t matter. The judge told us at the beginning of the day that they were cracking down on people getting out of jury duty.”
“How can you be expected to sit for hours when you’re so far along in your pregnancy?” Cassie demanded. “Can’t you get an excuse from your doctor?”
“But then my name would go back in the jury pool and I might be chosen after I have the baby. I’d rather get it over with now. Anyway, sitting in the courtroom isn’t any different from sitting in an office all day—or me sitting in my studio drawing for hours, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Uh, one of the jurors is the brother of our congressman, Matt Minteer,” Brenna added, keeping her voice carefully casual.
It bothered her that she had to make an effort to sound uninterested. She should be naturally uninterested! Even worse was the realization of how much she wanted to talk about Luke Minteer to Cassie, because she knew that Cassie’s brother, Steve, was a lobbyist in Harrisburg and a reliable source of information about Pennsylvania politicians. And maybe about the brothers of politicians, too?
Brenna blushed. She was attempting to pump her friend for information about a guy—like some infatuated thirteen-year-old! A wave of hot embarrassment swamped her.
“Which brother?” asked Cassie. “Matthew Minteer has three brothers, Mark, Luke and John.”
“Luke,” mumbled Brenna. She still couldn’t believe she was playing this game. It was so very unlike her!
“Ah, Cambria County’s most notorious bachelor.” Cassie chuckled. “He’ll sure bring a wealth of experience to any jury!”
Brenna stared silently into space. She was too preoccupied with Luke Minteer, and that was not a good thing, she warned herself. She could visualize him so clearly in her mind’s eye, it was as if he were standing right in the room with her….
Brenna gulped. Luke Minteer was one of those too-handsome, too-charismatic, too-masculine-for-his-own-good men. Certainly, for her own good.
She saw his thick, dark hair, cut slightly long, which gave him a certain rakish air. And then there were those blue eyes, such a brilliant and distinct shade of blue. The strong line of his jaw, his well-shaped mouth. Oh, that mouth!
Brenna laid her palms against her flushed cheeks to cool them. But those visuals of Luke Minteer in the courtroom kept coming.
His long-sleeved blue chambray shirt seemed to accentuate, not conceal, the breadth of his shoulders and chest and the rippling muscles in his arms. And he’d boldly worn jeans, in spite of the dress code printed on the jury summons that said “no jeans or shorts allowed.”
Never mind that half the people who’d shown up were wearing jeans, too, Luke Minteer wore his jeans too well, like a sexy cowboy in a magazine ad. Brenna gave her head a quick shake to dislodge that uncensored thought.
By wearing jeans Luke Minteer had deliberately flaunted the rules, that’s what she intended to think. And what else could you expect from a political dirty trickster who’d been fired by his own brother? Brenna tried hard to summon up some hearty disdain for the man.
Instead, she found herself picturing his hands.
They were large and strong, with long, well-shaped fingers and short, clean nails. That she had been aware of such minute details, had seemingly committed them to memory, appalled her. And then additional mental pictures flashed before her, scenes that dropped below his chest to his flat stomach and—
Brenna sat bolt upright in the chair.
“Brenna, are you all right?” Cassie was immediately concerned.
Brenna nodded weakly. “A…little twinge. A cramp, I think.”
“That’ll keep happening the farther along you get,” Cassie, a mother of three, said sympathetically. “Braxton-Hicks contractions. Try not to let it worry you.”
Brenna gulped. She wasn’t worried about twinges and cramps; she’d read all about them, she even expected them. But this alarming awareness of Luke Minteer…
That was totally unexpected. What was the matter with her? Was she losing her mind? She was heading into her ninth month of pregnancy, and the last thing she should be thinking about was—
And suddenly a blanket of calm descended over her. Of course. She was heading into her ninth month of pregnancy…. That explained it all.
Hormones!
Every pregnancy book she’d read—and there were plenty—had claimed that her hormones would go into over-drive and could cause wildly irrational thinking, emotions and even behavior. So far she had remained remarkably immune from all that, but now it appeared she had succumbed at last.
“You had a long, tiring day, Brenna,” Cassie continued, her tone soothing. “Why don’t you stay for dinner tonight? Ray has a meeting at the high school and will be home late, and Brandon and Tim are eating at their friend Josh’s house. I made macaroni and cheese for Abigail and me, and there’s plenty of it. And we have chocolate cake for dessert, my grandma’s recipe.”
“Thanks, Cassie, but I…I really should go home,” Brenna said weakly. “I ought to work on my—”
“Stay!” Cassie insisted. “I’ll fill you in on your fellow juror, Luke Minteer. According to my brother, Steve, Luke was kind of a legend around
