The Baby Notion

by Dixie Browning

  She took a deep, steadying breath. Her eyes burned. Her nose was stopped up. She reached behind her to dig out her handkerchief and her knuckles brushed Jake’s groin. He stiffened. She groaned. Another flowerburst appeared in the sky, followed by the same deep, distant boom. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—that is, I wasn’t—”

  She sniffled and without releasing her, Jake dug a handkerchief out of his own pocket and shoved it into her hand. “Blow,” he said, and blow she did.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I have these silly spells.”

  Jake didn’t know, either. All he knew was that women were about as predictable as a Texas twister. And about as dangerous.

  “I knew an old man once who used to cry over the Three Stooges,” Jake said. He didn’t. He’d only heard about him thirdhand, but he thought it might make her feel better.

  “I’ll wash your handkerchief for you. I—the dryer’s working now. Do you want starch, because I know how to iron, too.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble,” he told her, wondering why he didn’t order his feet to get him the hell out of there before it was too late.

  Probably because of the way her hair tickled his chin, and the way her firm little bottom was nuzzling him right where it counted.

  “It’s like bombs bursting over a battlefield, isn’t it?”

  “Come again?”

  “The fireworks. Bombs bursting in air. You know. Like ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”

  “Now that you mention it, I reckon it might look like that.” If he’d thought about it at all, it would probably have reminded him of rodeo parades. Or the time he’d overdosed on beer and chilidogs at the annual celebration and woke up on the back stoop of the Baptist church with the granddaddy of all bellyaches when somebody set off a bunch of firecrackers right beside him. He’d been thirteen at the time.

  Priss shrugged, and Jake’s body registered every nuance of movement. When his arms tightened imperceptibly, she burrowed a little closer. He was more than willing to oblige. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to keep his enthusiasm under control.

  She sighed, and he wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking. “You know, when I was a little girl,” she said softly, “Mama told me about her great-granddaddy, who was named Walter Raleigh Gilbert Ambrose, who was in The War, and about his great-grandfather—I don’t know how many greats—who fought the British in northern Virginia and died a hero. D’you think maybe that’s why marching music always makes me want to cry? Thinking about men like that, who went off to war? Only that wouldn’t explain the planes or the buses, would it?”

  “The planes and buses. Uh-huh.” Jake tried in a halfhearted sort of way to make sense of what she was saying, but his mind was on more important matters, such as turning her around in his arms and kissing her until her knees buckled.

  And then, maybe making arrangements to get together later, after she was settled back on her own turf, so they could meet on more or less equal terms.

  Equal. Right. Baker’s bastard and Barrington’s little princess.

  And then she turned in his arms. Propping her forearms on his chest, she peered up at him just as another rocket burst in the air, and said, “You know, I get these feelings sometimes. Mama used to get so put out—”

  “I know what you mean, darlin’. I get these feelings, too.”

  So what the hell—he kissed her.

  Fireworks. That about described it. And quicksand. Jake knew he was in trouble the instant his mouth touched hers. She was soft as a cloud, but so warm…so sweet, like whiskey and honey.

  And willing. She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck like a pea vine climbing on a hogwire fence.

  She kissed with her mouth closed, which was, somewhat to Jake’s surprise, a turn-on. She wasn’t real stubborn about it, though. With a little effort on his part, she opened to him, and then the fireworks commenced bigtime. Jake felt like a rocket all ready to launch.

  A hundred years later, he came up for air. Panting, he rested his chin on the top of her head and tried to make sense out of what was happening. “Prissy? Honey?”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Priss said softly. “I didn’t mean to do that.” Kissing was no new experience. She’d been kissed before, lots of times. Well…maybe not lots of times, but enough to know that there were kisses, and then there were kisses.

  Evidently, the power had been off those other times. This time, it had been switched on. She felt as if she must be glowing in the dark. “I think maybe I’d better go to bed,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, I think maybe that would be a good idea,” Jake said.

  Priss was a little disappointed that he agreed so readily, but it was probably for the best. What with all that had happened to her since yesterday, she hardly even recognized herself.

  Dreamily massaging revitalizing cream into her face and throat a little while later, she wondered why a man Jake’s age had never learned to dance. Everybody knew how to dance. She’d had dancing lessons before she was out of grammar school.

  And then she wondered how he felt about children. What was it Faith Harper had said about him? That he’d been married?

  Priss brushed her hair slowly, trying to picture the kind of woman Jake might have married. And if he had been married, then where was his wife? Because, try as she would, she couldn’t imagine any woman who was lucky enough to capture a man like Jake Spencer ever allowing him to get away. He was nothing at all like the boys she had dated at college. Or the men she had dated since then. He wasn’t polished. In fact, in his own way, he was almost as big a social misfit as she was, if for an entirely different reason.

  She wondered what his reason was. Remembering the way he had looked in the Baby Boutique, surrounded by stuffed animals and tiny furniture, she wondered if he had ever thought about having a family.

  Little boys, who could follow him around while he did whatever it was that he did.

  Little girls who could wear blue jeans and get dirty and yell and climb trees, and have puppies and eat in the kitchen and never once have to think about who they were.

  Seven

  The early morning sun hit him right square in the face, which had never happened before. It didn’t improve his mood. Jake scowled down at the kitchen table, which was covered with a cloth for the first time since he’d bought the place furnished off old man Holloman six years ago.

  What he should’ve done was manufacture another trip into town. He’d lain awake half the night trying to figure out what to say to Priss after making a fool of himself out on the front porch. Smelling her hair. Feeling her soft backside pressed up against his hard frontside. She had to have known what she was doing to him. One touch and he’d been hot as a branding iron.

  Dammit, he should have known she’d be trouble the first time he’d seen her out at old man Barrington’s auction. Instead, he’d watched for her every time he’d come to town, and then gone home and fantasized about her while he lay awake at night after his bedtime beer.

  Finally, he had worked up his nerve to speak to her, and now…

  Doggedly, Jake concentrated on the mound of scrambled eggs on his plate, studiously not looking at the woman across the table from him. He should never have followed her into that damned boutique place. Never have spoken to her. Never have looked into those big, clear, whiskey-brown eyes.

  She wasn’t like any other woman he had ever known, and not just because she looked at the world through a slightly cockeyed lens. Faith Harper liked her. Faith was a nice girl. Which meant that Priss was probably a nice girl, too, and Jake didn’t have all that much use for nice girls. He went in more for the rowdy, weekend type. Weekend women didn’t have families. Hell, some of ’em didn’t even have last names.

  Priss had a grandfather a bunch of generations back who’d fought in the American Revolution. Jake didn’t want to know that kind of stuff about her. It made her too real. Too close.

  Jake had never met his own grandfathers. Never
even seen a picture of them. All he knew about his mother’s father was that he was supposed to be an upstanding citizen in some little town in west Arkansas, but he’d gone and turned his back on his only child when she’d gotten into trouble. Which didn’t say a whole lot about upstanding citizens.

  As for the paternal side of his so-called family, Jake figured Baker had probably sprung up in the middle of a cow flop one night after a hard rain, like some kind of fungus.

  All in all, Pricilla Joan Barrington and Jake No-middlename Spencer didn’t have a whole lot in common. Not that it mattered.

  Hell, he’d even forgotten to drink his beer last night, he’d been so caught up in picturing her standing in the doorway, waiting for him to come home. Picturing her in his bedroom. In his bed.

  Priss cleared her throat, bringing him back to his senses. “I’m sorry about your shirt,” she announced.

  He reached for the salt shaker and concentrated real hard on oversalting his eggs.

  “I mean, about scorching it. It was the first thing I ironed, before Pete showed me about the settings I, um—I could buy you a new one…”

  That and a new hat. At the rate she was going, he thought, she was going to owe him big time. He’d see how good she was at paying her debts.

  No he wouldn’t. He might not be a gentleman born and bred, with ancestors, a college degree and all the trappings, but he did have his standards. Taking advantage of a woman who was under his protection, so to speak, wasn’t going to happen.

  But dammit, he didn’t want to know all that stuff about her family, or the way she felt about marching bands. He didn’t want to hear about the ancient housekeeper who ought to be put out to pasture, but who was still working because some blonde with big hair and an even bigger heart wanted to make her feel useful.

  All that was supposed to matter to him was the way Priss looked in tight-fitting jeans.

  And out of them.

  Hearing her draw a deep breath, Jake braced himself. She shoved back her plate untouched and squared her shoulders, and it occurred to him, not for the first time, that shoulders were a highly underrated part of a woman’s body.

  “About last night,” she said, brushing crumbs off the tablecloth—which was just one of the changes that had happened around here since Jake had brought Priss home with him.

  “Forget it,” he growled, and watched her head come up. If she’d been a horse, her ears would be flat on the back of her head. As it was, he didn’t know whether to back off or move in.

  “I’ll forget it just as soon as I even the score between us.”

  Even the score? Hell, so far nobody on either side had scored. If he knew what was good for him there wasn’t going to be a score.

  “I smudged your best hat, and don’t tell me it’s just some old thing you wear mucking out the stalls, because Petemoss told me how much you paid for it and how careful you were not to bruise the felt.”

  “Pete can go—”

  “And your shirts. After I scorched the one you’re wearing, I turned the heat down, but it was still too hot for your wash silk, so it made a hole in the yoke, but if you want my opinion, the shirt didn’t look all that good even before I ironed it. There’s a lot of real cheap silk around these days. Your shirt practically fell apart in my hands when I pulled it out of the washer.”

  Jake choked on a piece of bacon. By the time he had recovered, she was standing beside him, getting ready to whack him on the shoulder blades. The way his luck was running, he’d end up in traction if she did.

  “And you might as well know I broke two plates yesterday. If you had a dishwasher, those things wouldn’t happen. Oh, and Pete would really like to have a TV set in the living room so he wouldn’t have to watch his soaps on that teensy little thing in your office. You could move the chair into—”

  “Whoa. Just hang it up, will you?” Jake stood and shoved his chair under the table. When he turned around, she was too close and he stepped back, bumping his legs on the oven door, which had been left open to cool down after Pete had baked biscuits. “Dammit, woman,” he growled, “We need to get a few things straight.”

  “I agree.” She crossed her arms and waited.

  “First off, I liked things just fine the way they were around here. I like my table turned around the other way so I don’t get a face full of sun in the morning. I like my cotton shirts dried in a dryer, and not ironed.” Truth was, he didn’t give a hoot in hell how his shirts were laundered, as long as they were reasonably clean. Clothes had never been a real big priority, but she didn’t need to know that. “I like my silk shirts dry-cleaned, the way the Good Lord intended, and—”

  “But wasn’t it—I mean, it looked like—”

  Jake ticked off another item on his fingers. “I like my best wool suit pants—” his only suit pants “—dry-cleaned, not shrunk all out of shape. I like my sausage fried in halfinch patties, my pancakes served with butter and sugar and cinnamon, and I like my—”

  “I thought they were acrylic.”

  “My pancakes?“

  She hadn’t bothered to paint her face before breakfast. Jake was fascinated by the sweep of her sand-colored lashes, and the way they twitched when she blinked. Which she was doing a lot of. “Aw, hell, you’re not going to cry again, are you?”

  Up went those militant little shoulders again. It was all he could do to keep his hands off. “I never cry,” she said coolly.

  “Right. Just like you don’t like being touched.”

  Tactically, it was the wrong thing to say. He knew it the minute the words left his mouth. Using the same tone of voice he’d used on many a skittish horse, he said, “Look, why don’t we just call it square? A couple of shirts—hell, that’s no big deal. Pete says you’ve been hustling your buns—uh, bones—around here, cleaning up, changing beds, washing dishes and all. We’ll just call it even. Is it a deal?”

  She shook her head. The haystack hair, which he’d been astounded to learn took her nearly an hour to arrange so that it looked like she’d just crawled out of bed, slid a little more to the leeward. “Barringtons always pay their debts,” she declared.

  Which elicited a lifted eyebrow from Jake. The way he’d heard it, her old man had died owing twice what he was worth to the IRS and various other creditors.

  She must’ve noticed his skepticism. For all the lady looked so soft, she was sharp as a tack. He knew just what she was thinking. She was thinking she knew just what he was thinking. What the whole town, if not the whole state of Texas, had thought when old Horce T. had kicked off. There’d been enough publicity.

  It wasn’t Jake’s style to grovel. On the other hand, he’d have cut out his tongue before he deliberately hurt her feelings. Frantically, he wracked his brain to come up with some way to defuse the situation. “Hey, did I tell you I got asked to go to the dance the other day?”

  Her expression was neither interested nor encouraging. So he tried harder. “Thing is, I’ve always had two left feet. That’s why I didn’t want to dance last night. But now I’m thinkin’ maybe if I had somebody to give me a few pointers, maybe show me how to aim ’em in the same direction, I might give it a try sometime.” He risked a quick glance, wondering if she would take the bait. A bead of sweat trickled down his neck and puddled at the base of his throat.

  “You want me to teach you how to dance?”

  “Well, not what you might call dance, but at least how to shuffle around a dance floor without tripping over a lady’s feet.”

  Against all odds, her eyes began to sparkle. The corners of her mouth twitched. Jake started to protest that it wasn’t all that funny when he remembered how they’d met. He started to chuckle and she did, too, and then, damned if they weren’t wheezing all over the kitchen.

  “The place was so jammed full of stuff—”

  “I didn’t even see you standing there until—”

  “And then you came barreling down the aisle—”

  Priss gave one last shuddering gasp, wipe
d her eyes, and looked up at the strikingly masculine man in the worn jeans, the scarred boots, the big brass buckle and the scorched shirt. He was most definitely not her kind of people, but she wished with all her heart that she was his—kind of people, that was.

  Or maybe just his, period, she thought with a sense of wonder not untouched with fear.

  “I do know how to dance,” she said. “You might’ve noticed that there are a few things I don’t do very well, because I’ve never had much practice, but I had dancing lessons practically before I even got all my permanent teeth.”

  “I never did,” Jake vowed solemnly.

  “Get your permanent teeth?”

  “Have dancing lessons. Don’t get too big for your britches, young’un,” he teased, and Priss felt a glow start in her toes and work its way up to her cheeks.

  “We could start now,” she suggested, but Jake shook his head.

  “Finish your breakfast. I’ve got some work to do for the next few hours. After supper tonight we’ll find you pair of steel-toed boots and we can try a little do-si-do-in’.”

  He gave her the kind of smile that left her feeling totally defenseless. Afraid to speak—afraid she’d say something stupid—Priss followed Jake to the front door and watched him move across the barren front yard in that lean, loose-jointed swagger that looked almost as if he were compensating for a limp.

  She wondered just what there was about him that affected her so strongly. Because something purely did.

  She wondered if he was like all the males her father had warned her against from the time she’d turned thirteen—after either her virtue or her money.

  Which might be a problem, because she had too much of the one and not enough of the other.

  Turning to go back inside, she caught sight of the dead tomato plant in the plastic container and frowned. A lack of interest in landscaping was one thing. Priss could understand how two men living alone, probably not earning a whole lot, might skimp on the frills, but keeping a dead plant around was just too much.