Читать книгу Staking His Claim - Karen Templeton - Страница 11

“Just remember,” Dawn said as Cal held open the door to Ruby’s two hour later. “I’m only letting you do this because I’m starving. Got that?”

Her shampoo scent distracted him for a second, but he caught himself fast enough to both say, “Yes, ma’am,” and swallow his smile. She narrowed her eyes slightly, then turned to head inside. Only she wheeled back around so fast her hand whapped him in the stomach.

“And not one word about…you know.”

She’d been right, that there really hadn’t been much point to his sticking around for the exam, especially since Ivy threw him out before they got to the fun stuff, anyway. Except that being there helped make the whole thing feel more real, somehow. Dawn would probably have kittens if she knew, but he’d already been up in the attic and found the cradle he and his brothers had used as babies, the one his daddy had made the instant he found out he was gonna be a daddy, after nearly fifteen years of marriage. And when Cal thought about his own baby lying in it, looking up at him with a big, goony grin, he got all choked up.

When he thought about Dawn having the baby in New York…well, it just made him sick, is what. But he also had enough sense to know when to back off.

“I’m not stupid, Dawn,” he said, nudging her from behind before they attracted any more attention than they already were. As it was, the noise level in the diner—which at lunchtime generally hovered somewhere between deafening and mind numbing—dropped considerably at their entrance. Cal was tempted to call everybody on it, only he knew that would only make it worse. Besides, Dawn had gone still as a statue, one arm pressing against her stomach.

Damn. He’d forgotten what she’d said about strong smells. And the grease-to-air-molecule ratio in here was running, at a conservative guess, a good fifty-to-one.

“You okay?” he said quietly, taking her elbow whether she liked it or not. The look she gave him pretty much indicated she didn’t.

“What?”

“The smell,” he whispered. “Is it getting to you?”

Except for a couple of clips, her hair was hanging loose down the back of her light blue sweater, which was the same color as the flowers in another of those long, floppy skirts that looked like something her mother would wear. Just like the ugly, clunky shoes. The ends of her hair teased the top of his hand, sending memories racing around inside his skull for a second until he silenced them by focusing on the present.

“Lord, yes,” she whispered back. “I want every single thing on the menu. Oh, there’s a booth! Grab it!”

As the noise level gradually worked its way back up, Charmaine Chambers, Ruby’s newest waitress and the same age as Cal and Dawn, leaned over to wipe down their table, her initial—and customary—smile for Cal vanishing the instant she caught sight of Dawn.

“Special today’s a boneless barbecue rib sandwich,” she announced in a monotone, her breasts shifting restlessly underneath a baggy uniform that was so bright pink it hurt Cal’s eyes to look at it. She straightened, then poured them both water from a dripping plastic pitcher she’d grabbed from the nearby station. “You need a menu?” she asked Dawn, her words all tight.

Dawn flicked a glance at Cal, then pressed one hand to her chest. “Hey, Char! It’s me, Dawn.”

The brunette’s slate-blue gaze bounced off Dawn. “I know.” Her mouth twitched, but calling it a smile was pushing it. “Thought you were in New York.”

“I’m…here visiting my mother. How’re those gorgeous boys of yours?”

“They’re fine. You know what you want yet?”

Dawn shoved a hank of hair behind her ear, obviously wrestling to keep her thoughts to herself. “The rib sandwich sounds great. That come with fries?”

“And slaw, yeah. Soup’s extra, though.”

“What kind?”

“Split pea.”

“Really?” she said, her whole face lighting up. “Lord, I can’t remember the last time I had split pea soup. Could I get a double bowl?”

Wordlessly, Charmaine scribbled the order down on her pad, then took Cal’s, yelling them out to Jordy, Ruby’s husband, before stomping off to tend to the next customer.

Dawn sighed. Cal leaned over. “Don’t let her get to you—”

“It’s okay. We weren’t exactly best buddies when we were kids, you know.”

“Maybe not, but the thing is…she’s been having a hard time of it lately. Brody walked out about a year ago, leaving her with the kids. Ruby gave her a job ’cause she felt bad for her, but I don’t think waitressin’s exactly her thing.”

Dawn’s dark brows dipped. “Brody left her?”

The split had surprised Cal, too, especially since Charmaine and Brody had been tight as ticks since the seventh grade. That they’d managed to wait until after high school to get married had been a miracle in itself, although Cal knew for a fact they hadn’t waited about anything else.

“Yeah. Kids took it real hard, too.”

“I bet they did. Oh, God, Cal,” she said on a sigh, “how awful for her.” Her eyes following the waitress’s moves, Cal supposed, she asked, “Is she at least getting child support?”

“I seriously doubt it—”

“Dawn Gardner!” Ruby Kennedy said next to them, hands the color of bittersweet chocolate parked on seriously wide hips. “What on earth you doin’ back here so soon, honey?”

“Giving you a hug, that’s what,” Dawn said with a laugh as she clambered out of the booth and did just that.

After they’d hugged themselves out and Dawn was settled back in the booth, Ruby asked, “You order the rib sandwich, baby?”

“Like I was gonna pass up Jordy’s ribs,” she said with a grin. “Or the fries or the slaw or the soup.”

Ruby mm-mm-mm’d and said, “Why is it the skinny one’s’re always the ones who can pack it away? Me, all I have to do is look at one of Jordy’s ribs and my butt starts expandin’. Oh, and Maddie brought over a peach cobbler this morning that’s so pretty it’ll make you cry. You want me to save you some?”

“Whoa, whoa—” Cal raised his hand. “I don’t hear you offering to save me any!”

“That’s because, Mr. Me-Too,” Ruby said, “being’s Maddie’s your sister-in-law, I suppose you can taste her cobbler anytime you like—”

“Hey!” Charmaine yelled over by the display of gum and candy bars and stuff underneath the cash register. “You have to pay for that—come back here!” Cal looked over just in time to see a blond kid just this side of puberty tear out the door, nearly knocking over Homer Ferguson in the process.

Seconds later Cal was hot on the kid’s tail, his much longer legs catching up to the boy before he’d even reached the Hair We Are two doors down. He grabbed the skinny thing around the waist and plucked him right up off the ground, getting a barrage of elbows and fists and rubber-soled feet for his efforts.

“Lemme go! I didn’t do nuthin’!”

“You gonna run?” Cal said softly in the kid’s ear.

“What do you think?”

Cal let go, but not before getting a good handful of too-big T-shirt just in case the boy had any ideas about booking it. The kid took a swing at him, but he didn’t really put his heart in it. Besides, Cal ducked.

“I said, let me go!”

Still hanging on with one hand, Cal held out the other one, palm up. “Give me what you took.”

“I didn’t—”

“Now.”

The boy glared at him for several seconds, his breath coming in sharp bursts. He didn’t exactly look like he’d had a bath any too recently, but then, how many boys his age did? Finally the boy rammed his hand into his pocket and yanked out a slightly smashed candy bar.

“That it?” Cal asked.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“You don’t believe me, you can look for yourself.”

“Okay, you can ditch the attitude. Unless you like lookin’ ugly.” When the kid only scowled harder, it suddenly struck Cal where he knew him from. “You’re Jacob Burke’s boy, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have to tell you nothin’.”

Cal was sorely tempted to cuff the kid upside the head. Or feed him, one. “What’s your name?” he said gently.

More scowling.

“You can tell me now, or I can call your daddy—”

“Elijah.”

“That what they call you, or you got a nickname?” At the shake of the shaggy head, Cal grimaced at the Three Musketeers in his hand. “You mean to tell me you caused all this ruckus for one lousy candy bar? How dumb is that?”

“Yeah, well, it’s none of your business, is it?”

“You stole something from a friend of mine. That makes it my business—”

“Is he okay?”

Cal turned at the sound of Dawn’s voice, noticing a small crowd had gathered to watch the proceedings. For Haven, this qualified as excitement.

“Yeah, he’s fine.” He handed her the flattened candy bar.

“This, however, isn’t. Come on,” he said, tugging the boy in the direction of the diner.

“I ain’t goin’ back there.”

“Yes, you are. And when we get there, the first thing you’re gonna do is apologize for your momentary lapse of good sense. Then we’re gonna see what you can do for Ruby to make up for it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of job, I’m thinking.”

“A job? No way! For one candy bar?”

“I’m a firm believer in nipping things in the bud, bud.” The small crowd dispersed when Cal dragged Elijah through the door, Dawn on their heels. “We’re back, Ruby,” he hollered from the doorway. “Where you want him?”

“Kitchen’s good,” she called from the back of the diner.

They all trooped back into Ruby’s gleaming kitchen, Elijah a trifle more subdued than he had been five minutes before. Especially when he caught sight of Jordy, Ruby’s bald, bad, six-foot-three, 280-pound husband. After a brief discussion, it was decided Elijah could mop the floor after the lunch rush.

“I don’t know how.”

“Well, I suppose you can learn, can’t you?” Ruby said, after which four people chorused, “You hungry?”

After Dawn and Elijah had packed enough away between them for a church potluck, Cal and Dawn took the boy and his bicycle, which he’d left in front of the hardware store, back out to the small farm he lived on with his widowed father. Who, as best they could figure out from Elijah’s grudging explanation, had been on disability for some time. He also told them he was home schooled, since his father needed him around to “help.” Help with what, was the question, since neither the small, drab house with its peeling paint and missing shutters, nor the bare dirt yard littered with junk and a couple of old pickups, indicated that any attention had been given to either for a very long time. Granted, Cal had seen worse, but the bleakness of the place turned his stomach. No kid should ever have to live like this.

“Mind if we come in for a minute?” Dawn asked, but the kid said no before the words were all the way out of her mouth.

“We won’t say anything about the candy bar,” Cal added.

“It ain’t that,” Elijah said, pushing open the back door of Cal’s extended cab truck. “It’s just…uh, Daddy’s usually asleep this time of day. An’ he don’t like bein’ disturbed.”

With that, he bolted out of the truck and across the yard, stopping for a second to pet a large mongrel dog tied up to the lone tree in front of the house before bounding onto the porch and on through the screen door.

Dawn kept her eyes on the house as they drove back down the dirt road leading to the highway. “I hate seeing kids left to their own devices like that.”

“Oh, I imagine he’s all right,” Cal said, briefly meeting her gaze when she finally brought it around. She blew out a sigh, then faced front, her brow knit, as the truck meandered over the gently rolling, lush green hills that Cal couldn’t imagine giving up for skyscrapers and concrete and rush hour traffic.

“Still,” she said, holding her hair with one hand so it wouldn’t blow to kingdom come. “Somebody should check up on him. From the county, I mean.”

“There’s no real cause, far as I can tell. I didn’t get the feeling he’d been abused. And he has to take tests or something if he’s being home schooled. If he doesn’t pass, they’d catch it.”

“But he’s so thin! A stiff breeze would blow the poor kid away!”

A smile inched across Cal’s face. “You’re obviously forgettin’ how skinny I was as a kid then. Just because he’s all bones doesn’t mean he’s not eating.”

“He stole, Cal.”

“A candy bar. Because he’s twelve and it was there and he saw what looked like a golden opportunity.” He glanced over.

“Didn’t you ever take something just to see if you could?”

“No! Never!”

“You were never even tempted?”

“Well…maybe. But I didn’t act on it.” She sucked in a breath. “Did you?”

“Yeah, once.”

“Oh, God.”

“Oh, unknot your panties. I was nine, for cryin’ out loud. It was maybe a few months after my mother died. I snitched a pack of gum from the supermarket checkout, pretty much like what Elijah did.”

“What happened?”

“Well, at first I felt like hot stuff because I pulled it off without Ethel catching me. But somehow the gum didn’t taste near as good as I figured it would. And I couldn’t sleep that night. So I finally confessed to Daddy.”

“Ouch. I can imagine how well that went over.”

“All he did was look at me. Like I’d let him down. Well, and march me back to the store to ’fess up to the manager, which was humiliating as hell. I was never even tempted to filch anything after that.”

“Never?” He heard the smile in her voice.

“Almost never, anyway.”

She laughed, but it didn’t last long. “Still,” she said, “it worries me. About Elijah.” He could feel her gaze on the side of his face. “I’d call Family Services myself, but I wouldn’t be around to follow up….”

He didn’t know which irked him more, her leaving or her pushing him to do something he didn’t think needed doing.

“Dawn, I hear what you’re saying, I really do. But I’m not gonna embarrass that kid, or his father, by calling the authorities on ’em when I don’t see any reason to. Looks to me like they’ve got enough to deal with without people sticking their noses in where they don’t belong.”

She pushed herself back against the truck door, as if needing to distance herself from him. “Problems aren’t always obvious, you know—”

“And living in the city for so long has made you see spooks lurking in every shadow. This isn’t New York—”

“Neglect is neglect, Cal. No matter where it happens.”

“You know what? If you’re so hot about this, why don’t you stick around and take care of it yourself?”

“Because I can’t, which you know. And how dare you try to blackmail me!”

Cal let out a nice, ripe cussword, to which Dawn spit back, “My sentiments exactly.”

Nobody said anything for another mile or two. Then she said, “I suppose I can at least make the initial call before I go back.”

Cal sighed. “You really feel that strongly about this?”

She turned to him, and he could hear her voice shake. “If you’d heard what I have, seen the effects of people looking the other way, you would, too. Working with these women and children hasn’t made me delusional, it’s made me think twice about taking things at face value. And I couldn’t live with myself if something happened that could’ve been prevented by a single phone call.”

He glanced over to see her mouth all set like it used to get when she was a kid. Aw, hell. “Tell you what. If I promise to personally check up on the boy, and his father, would that be enough to keep you from making that call?”

“Are you serious?”

“Are you out to see just how far you can try my patience before I lose what’s left of my mind? I wouldn’t’ve said it if I didn’t mean it…hey!”

She’d flown across the seat to hug him, nearly sending the truck off the road. “Thank you,” she murmured into his neck, her breath far too soft and far too warm for anybody’s good right now.

“Honey? Not that I’m not enjoying this, but I think that’s Didi Meyerhauser’s Bronco closing in on us, so you might want to—”

She was instantly on the other side of the seat like nothing had happened.

Not that anything had happened.

Exactly.

The preacher’s wife passed, waving. Cal and Dawn waved back, Cal suddenly remembering that Dawn used to be friends with Didi’s daughter.

“You seen Faith yet?” he said.

“Faith? No. Not sure there’d be any point. It’s been years since 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.”

At that he figured he might as well join her in the dirt and weeds.

“You mean that in general?” he said as his backside touched down. “Or you got something specific in mind?”

“At the risk of this going straight to your head, if not elsewhere—” she looked pointedly at the elsewhere in question “—my being hot for you isn’t the issue here.”

“It’s…not.”

She smacked him in the arm, honked into one of the tissues, then gave one of those oh-God-deliver-me-from-the-clueless sighs. “You didn’t exactly have to talk me into your bed a couple months ago. If you recall.”

He squelched the laugh just in time. “Yeah, I seem to remember a certain…eagerness on your part. But I figured that was…”

“What? You figured that was what?”

“That you were still hurtin’ after that guy dumped you, is all,” he said gently, refusing to look at her. “And maybe you were looking for someone to boost your self-confidence back up a notch or two.”

Silence. Then: “I was a little…bruised, it’s true. But more because I was duped than dumped. Andrew and I broke up because our visions of marriage—or rather, his vision of what he expected of a wife—didn’t mesh. What pissed me off was that he didn’t bother to tell me this until after we were engaged. And I felt, I don’t know…betrayed as much as anything, I guess.”

“About what?”

She yanked a poor defenseless weed out of the ground, then shifted to sit cross-legged, making lines in the dust with the weed as they talked. “We were really compatible on so many levels. Similar tastes, similar viewpoints, similar personalities.” Her shoulders hitched. “He was…comfortable. After some of the so-called men I’d gone out with, it was a pleasure being with someone I never had to second-guess. Or so I thought.” Her mouth hitched up into a rueful smile. “When he proposed, my first thought was, No more stupid dates! No more worrying about making an impression!”

Cal frowned. “Oh, yeah, that sounds like a real good reason to marry somebody.”

“Trust me, after what I’d been through, it was a damn good reason. Anyway, I figured our lives wouldn’t change all that much after we got married, that we’d just be a typical professional New York couple. But it turned out…”

The weed snapped in two; she tossed it away and squinted into the sun. “He didn’t love me, I know he didn’t, but he still wanted more from me than I could possibly give. Looking back, I think he didn’t want kids because the competition would’ve made him crazy, because Andrew wanted to be my world. For me to love him in a way I knew I never could. In a way I know I’ll never be able to love anybody.”

Cal waited out the stab of pain before he asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded surprised, like she hadn’t expected him to challenge her. “Just the way I’m wired, I guess.”

“I see.” His insides churning, he focused on a clump of late-season wildflowers shivering in the breeze. “So…you’d rather be alone?”

She seemed to think about this for a second. “I’ve been on my own for a long time and I’ve learned to enjoy my own company. But I’m not a recluse. I wouldn’t have agreed to marry Andrew otherwise. I have nothing against male companionship. Or sex,” she said with a tilted smile. “I can even love, in my own way. Just not the way the rest of the population loves. Or wants to be loved.”

Cal wondered if she heard the sadness in her voice. Oh, she undoubtedly thought she was being…well, whatever people who came to conclusions like that were. Upfront? Resigned? Something. Frankly, Cal thought she was several sandwiches short of a picnic.

The thing was, though, it didn’t matter what he thought, did it? Because it was what she believed that mattered. It was like what Ryan said about attitude affecting a person’s health—people who expected to get sick generally did far more often than people who didn’t think about it too hard. So Cal could sit here and tell Dawn she was full of it until the cows came home, but as long as she was convinced she couldn’t love like a normal person, he’d be wasting his breath.

“So,” she was saying, “about that night. You were flirting, and I’ll admit I was still feeling a little off balance, and from everything I’d heard, I figured I probably wouldn’t regret going to bed with you.”

His eyes snapped to hers. “From everything you’d heard?”

“Hey. Women talk, too. And unlike men, we don’t embellish. Granted, my information was a little out-of-date, but…”

She shrugged. Cal looked back out across the road. A couple of trucks passed. Everybody waved. Cal figured Ruby’s would be buzzing to beat the band by tomorrow.

“In any case, I wasn’t pushing you away just now because I didn’t want to be kissed, but because kissing you is like opening a can of Pringles. Sour cream and onion. Or nacho cheese, in a pinch. If I start, I can’t stop until I’ve eaten the whole damn can.”

“So…what you’re saying is, all those rumors you heard about me…?”

“Weren’t rumors. Which is one of those good-news/bad-news kinds of things. Wanting to have sex with you isn’t the issue. But it would totally ball things up. And I think things are plenty balled up enough already, don’t you? And dammit, I’d kill for a can of Pringles right now.”

After a couple of tense seconds, during which Cal mentally beat back enough testosterone to fuel the sex drive of every man in the state, he stood, then extended his hand to pull Dawn to her feet. “C’mon. Here’s one problem I can solve.”

Fifteen minutes later, having bought, not one, but three cans of Pringles from the Git-n-Go and used the bathroom—both of which would have raised Angel Clearwater’s penciled brows if her tightly pulled-back hair hadn’t already made them an inch higher than normal—Dawn sat with her legs dangling off the lowered gate of Cal’s truck, having a scarffest. Without her saying anything, Cal’d pulled off the road to park underneath the whacky old cottonwood where they used to go when they were kids. Split by lightning long before they’d been born, it looked like a huge gray hand, its fingers bent toward the sky. It still put out more leaves than any other tree for miles around, though, the sunlight lancing through the sharp green, casting quivering shadows over the two of them, reminding her of other times. Happy times. Times she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember right now.

She hadn’t meant to blab about Andrew, especially considering she wasn’t exactly proud of her naiveté at having taken the man at face value. And God knows, if Cal hadn’t kissed her, she would never have brought up her, um, interest in him. But since he had, she figured she might as well disabuse him of the notion that he could seduce her into coming back to Haven.

“I was really that good, huh?” he said beside her.

She nearly choked. And nodded, since her mouth was full of chips. Just her luck to find the only man in the universe who could read a woman’s mind.

“So tell me…” Cal leaned back on one elbow, his hands folded across his hard, flat, definitely yummy tummy. “What is it about New York that would make you sacrifice this—” he swept one hand over his torso “—for that?”

There he went, being just Cal. Charming. Goofy. Making light of things.

Feeling suddenly and unaccountably tetchy, Dawn crammed more chips into her mouth and mumbled something about being sick and tired of everybody equating city dwelling to devil worship.

Chips flew six ways to Sunday when Cal grabbed her wrist. She jerked her head around to see his brows slammed together.

“Maybe I don’t understand why anybody’d want to live where you can’t go outside without a hundred people shoved up against your butt, but that doesn’t mean I think there’s anything wrong with people who do. All I did was ask you a simple question.” He released her. “Don’t go reading things into it that aren’t there.”

“Sorry,” she said softly, wiping her salty fingers on a tissue.

“Bad habit.”

“Preemptive strikes?” he said behind her.

She skootched around to rest her back against the truck-bed wall, flipping her skirt out over her legs. “I guess.” She sighed.

“I can’t even explain it.”

Cal looked at her steadily for a long moment, then said, “I’m not looking to judge you. I’m only trying to understand.”

“I know that. It’s just…”

“Honey? Why don’t you try just answering the question?”

His refusal, when they were younger, to let anything get to him used to irritate the life out of her. Now, however, even though his cocksure attitude only reinforced her conviction about how different they were, her battered psyche yearned to inhale his unflappability, like she’d done the Pringles a few minutes ago. Those cool green eyes said, I’ve got you, it’s okay, I won’t let you fall. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.

If only.

Those eyes, and his goodness, were treacherous. And it finally whapped her over the head that this was possibly her only chance to convince him, once and for all, to let her go.

Not only for her sake, but for his.

“To be truthful,” she said, “I didn’t know what to expect when I first got there. An eighteen-year-old hick in the big city?” She smiled. “I thought I’d be eaten alive. My first place was a shared room in a cramped apartment with five other roommates, and it took me twenty-four hours to get up the nerve to go out by myself. But within a week I was hooked.”

“Why?”

“It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there. I mean, in many ways New York is just like any other place, mostly filled with ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, cooking and shopping and doing laundry and eating out.”

“There’s just a lot more of them.”

“Okay, yeah. It’s crowded. But there’s this…energy that pulses through the city, you know? This sense of possibility, that any second, every second, something exciting could happen.”

His mouth curved just enough to show off the dimples. “Even when you’re doing your laundry?”

“I didn’t say it made sense. And it’s not easy living there, don’t get me wrong. It’s expensive and competitive and, yes, crowded. But God—I can go straight to a major museum from work, or get a half-price ticket to a Broadway show on the spur of the moment. And the music…” She leaned forward, her eyes shining. “The Metropolitan Opera, Cal. Think of that.”

He made a face. “That’s Hank. Opera’s not my thing.”

“Okay, fine. The Mostly Mozart Festival, then. The freaking New York Philharmonic. Live. In person. Free concerts in Central Park—”

“You’re still not makin’ any points here, sweetheart. Although Ryan would be in hog heaven.”

“And then there’s shopping. Bergdorf’s. Barney’s. Bloomingdale’s.”

He just stared at her.

“So maybe that’s not working for you, either. But just think—our child would be able to go to some of the world’s greatest museums on a regular basis, see shows and go to the ballet and…” She paused. “Wouldn’t your mother have been thrilled to know her grandchild would get to hear one of the greatest orchestras in the world on a regular basis?”

Cal pulled himself up to sit across from her, stretching out his legs so she could feel his sun-warmed jeans against her calves. “Did you know she spent a year studying at the Manhattan School of Music?”

“No! Wow. No wonder she was so good.”

He got this funny look on his face then, one that made her insides pitch, made her ache to put her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder and comfort him, somehow. But comforting was what got them into this predicament to begin with. So instead she nudged his hip with her foot. Which was bad enough.

“I know this isn’t an ideal situation,” she said, talking through, over, around another kind of ache, “but once I make partner, I’ll be making pretty good money. And I can work from home at least a couple days a week, if I need to, so I’ll be there for our baby. And we’ll come back a lot, I promise.”

He sat there, silent, staring straight ahead, then suddenly scrambled out of the truck bed, reaching out to help her down, as well.

“Guess I’d better get you back to Ivy’s,” he said. “Gotta lot of work to do this afternoon.”

He said nothing else until he’d deposited her a few minutes later in front of her mother’s house, and then only to ask when she was leaving.

“Saturday. Cal—”

“Don’t make it worse, okay?” he said, then took off, leaving her standing on the sidewalk feeling like sludge.