there, waiting for her to say something, and finally she did. “J.T., Joshua or Josh?”
There was a certain reluctance to his voice when he answered. “J.T. will do.”
“Then shall we get started, J.T.?”
Chapter Two
If Tate had given it any thought, he would have expected Natalie Grant to be…hell, he didn’t know. Older. Stuffier. More the type to be interested in the affairs, both governmental and personal, of an old man. He would have imagined her as shorter, stockier, grayer and wearing sensible clothes.
The woman walking beside him toward the house was none of those things. She was beautiful. Leggy. Wearing a summery-looking dress that was short and sleeveless and clung from shoulder to midthigh. And she was a redhead.
When he’d come around the corner from the barn and seen that, his breath had caught in his chest, robbing his groan of any sound. Red hair came fourth on his list of weaknesses—right after Jordan, Lucinda and Josh—especially that particular shade of shiny-new-penny red. And long legs ranked right up there, too, along with sultry Southern accents.
Not only was he going to hell, but God was going to see to it that he suffered here on earth first.
“Interesting layout.”
He glanced at her and saw her gesture toward the house. “Mother-in-law troubles.”
“Whose?”
“The man who built the place sixty years ago. His wife insisted on her mother living with them. Unfortunately, the old lady’s only purpose in life was to make him miserable, so he built this house, but instead of putting the porch across the back, he stuck it between the two halves. The mother-in-law lived in the north half, while he and his wife lived in the south half. Now Mom lives in the north half.”
“And you, Tate and Jordan live in the other half?”
Tate swallowed convulsively. When he’d agreed to impersonate his brother, he’d realized he was going to have to answer to Josh’s name—though he was glad she’d offered him the chance to use J.T. instead. He’d actually been called that, off and on in his life, so it didn’t feel totally foreign.
But somehow he hadn’t realized that he was also going to wind up talking about himself as if he were someone else. Listening to Jordan admit to being Tate’s son, hearing her refer to Tate just now…it was too strange an experience.
“Actually, I have…my own place, but I’m…staying here while Tate’s gone.”
“He doesn’t trust Jordan to be alone,” she said with a knowing nod.
His anger flared. “He trusts Jordan completely. He’s a good kid.”
“I’m sure he is. But teenagers, no matter how good, are trouble waiting to happen.”
No one knew that better than Tate. He’d been sixteen and planning on going to college and having a career, instead of a backbreaking job on a ranch, when he’d met Stefani Blake, and he was seventeen and devastated when she’d told him she was pregnant. He’d offered to marry her, but she wasn’t interested. She’d had her future planned, like him, and there was no place in it for him or his kid. Two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, she’d given birth to Jordan, signed away all her rights and they’d never seen her again.
Tate had forgotten about college, a career elsewhere and everything else, and had put all his energy into being a father and making a go of the ranch. He’d changed diapers, fixed bottles and learned to bathe and dress a wriggly, squirmy kid, and he and Jordan had done a bit of growing up together.
He had no doubt Stefani had given him the better deal. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, it couldn’t be as satisfying as his life.
“This is a nice place. Have you always lived here?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you have any employees?”
“We hire on help when we need it, but usually it’s just us.”
“And what do you raise?”
“We’re a cow-calf operation.” At her blank look, he explained, “We have a dozen bulls we breed with our cows. We sell the little boy calves, keep the little girls and let them be girlfriends with the bulls when they’re old enough.”
She gave him a chastising look. “I don’t need the explanations quite that simple.”
“Sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t. Digging in his pocket for his keys, he led the way up the steps and across the deck to the side door of Lucinda’s quarters, then inside. The door opened into a broad room that doubled as a mudroom and laundry room. Off the connecting hallway, there was a bathroom on one side, a closet on the other, then a small dining room and kitchen straight ahead. From the kitchen a doorway opened into the living room, and from there another hallway led to the three bedrooms and the bathroom they shared.
The house was about twenty degrees cooler than outside, and was dimly lit, the blinds having been tightly closed against the sun. It smelled of furniture polish and mulberry, his mother’s favorite scent in the world, and it felt strangely empty.
Natalie gave a soft sigh as she closed the door behind her. “I don’t care what anyone says. Dry heat is not more comfortable than humid heat. At least you can breathe when there’s moisture in the air.”
“Have you always lived in Alabama?”
“No. We moved a lot because of my father’s job. I settled there about nine years ago.”
“What was his job?”
She turned from her study of the rooms they were walking through to give him an uneasy look. “He’s retired now, but he was a—a journalist. Maybe you’ve heard of him—Thaddeus Grant.”
Tate shook his head, wondering why she called herself a reporter and her old man a journalist. A mild case of hero worship, maybe. After all, she had followed in his footsteps.
“He won the Pulitzer Prize so many times they considered just automatically giving it to him every year, and the college he went to renamed its journalism school after him. He’s one of those people who becomes so much more than the job. Instead of merely reporting the news, oftentimes he is the news. These days he spends his time entertaining the rich and powerful, lecturing and giving promising young journalism students the full benefit of his years of experience.”
“Sounds intimidating.” Definitely hero worship, with a little something else underneath. Resentment? Jealousy? Anxiety?
He gestured toward the first bedroom they approached. “This is my mother’s room.” Then, down the hall, “Bathroom, guest room, guest room.”
She walked into the third bedroom, went to the windows that looked out on yard and pasture out back, yard and woods on the north, and nodded once. “This is fine. Am I allowed to go shopping for groceries?”
“Sure. You can go with me when I pick up a few things.”
“I’m surprised
