by Eden Connor
Jonah merely rolled his eyes.
As soon as he got his hook baited, his nephew moved away to sulk and fish in peace. The bass were biting, and they soon had a full bucket. Jonah disappeared to watch television while Colton cleaned and gutted the fat bass and Lila soon plopped a platter of crispy fried fish on the table along with slaw, home-cut fries, and hushpuppies.
Jonah complained about the lack of soda to drink, claiming he didn't like sweet tea. Lila silently replaced the tea with a glass of ice water. Colton fumed, glaring at the kid, who blithely ignored him. When he glanced at Lila, she appeared amused.
"Have any of the kids on the team invited you home with them yet?" she asked.
"Dustin did, for Saturday night, but he said we'd have to go to church Sunday, and that's bogus," Jonah answered. "I turned him down."
"His house, his rules," Lila said. "Might be worth it, what's an hour of squirming? You do it all day at school, after all."
Jonah had no answer, much to his uncle's relief and amusement.
"Do you go to church, Lila?" Colton asked, curious now.
"No, I commune with my Maker at the flea market on Sunday mornings. It's where I got my sanity back after six days of dealing with my husband and son. They went, though, and had lunch with my in-laws after. Pete found out right quick that a meal with his mother put me in a bad mood for the upcoming week."
"She's a bitch, huh?" Jonah asked.
Wordlessly, Lila got up and went to the sink while Colton cleared his throat and began. "Jonah, Lila told you that language was unacceptable. Apologize this instant."
"Make me," Jonah said, defiantly dropping his fork.
"My house, my rules," Lila said pleasantly, the fingers of her right hand finding the tender spot on Jonah's clavicle where the nerve ran across the bone. She pressed down as she held the bar of soap in front of his face. "Lick."
"Ow!" Jonah yelled, trying to pull away. "No way, let me go."
Lila's knuckles whitened. "Lick."
Colton returned Jonah's disbelieving look with a hard one, remaining silent, and suppressing a grin with difficulty as he continued to eat. The standoff soon ended with Jonah touching his tongue to the soap.
Lila handed him the glass of water. "Rinse, then go spit in the sink."
Jonah hung over her sink, spitting dramatically while muttering loudly about child abuse. When he finished, Lila offered him the receiver of the phone on the wall behind her. "I'll be glad to dial the number for Child Protective Services, Jonah. Where you used to live, I'm sure some fool would rush right over to take a report on the horror of how you got less soap in your mouth than you do while taking a good shower. But now you live here and I expect your report will end with me getting a pat on the back from the investigator. You're welcome to find out." Her blue eyes were the color of the steel barrel on Colton's shotgun as she stared Jonah down.
"Whatever, dude," the disgruntled teen eventually replied. "I'm not hungry now. I'll be down at the pond till you get ready to go."
"Is he failing Biology?" Lila asked as she replaced the receiver. "You might want to check with his teacher," she said, speaking to Colton.
Jonah drew up short and stared at her again, his hand on the knob of her back door. "Huh?"
Lila fixed him with another implacable gaze. "I hardly qualify as a 'dude'. If you find my name beyond your ability, ma'am will do just fine."
"Impressive," Colton finally offered, after Jonah stomped off.
She snickered as she picked up her fork. "Your dad never washed your mouth out with soap?"
"He did a lot worse, but I'd never do that to Jonah."
"There's a middle ground, you know," she pointed out. "The opposite end of the spectrum doesn't work either, from what I've seen. Mainly, good parenting is about being willing to stop what you are doing and accept nothing less than compliance."
Another parenting pearl, he thought, or four. "I guess Charlie never disrespected you, huh?" he asked.
It was her turn to be thoughtful. "After Pete was paralyzed, he went through a spell where he decided with his dad out of commission, he could take me, I guess you'd say. He was a bit older than Jonah is now and a whole lot bigger. He cut class, even stole something from a store. I showed up at the high school, wearing my worst, and walked him to that class like a baby every day for a week. I learned about that pressure point just below the neck from my mother as a small child, and I used it to get him into the store manager's office to give the stolen item back and apologize, and drove him there to stock shelves for free for a month of Saturdays. And he pulled the child abuse crap in the second grade. He didn't make the call either, by the way."
* * * *
The following afternoon when Jonah headed for the office, Colton stopped him. "Grab that push broom. Gravity will keep that office chair on the ground, but the parking lot won't sweep itself."
Jonah blinked in disbelief. "You're kidding, right?"
Colton used every inch of his six-foot-four-inch frame to intimidate the kid as he stared down at him. He figured he knew how he looked and hated himself for it. But after a night spent wrestling with Lila's message and the way Jonah had responded to her methods, he figured out he'd been giving the kid too much slack. "Do I look like I'm kidding? Our little honeymoon is over, Jonah."
Eric and Daniel exchanged glances, broad grins breaking out as they watched their brother place the broom handle in Jonah's hands and compel him out the door.
"What changed your mind, C?" Daniel asked when Colton returned to the work area and bent over the car in his bay. Colton had dared them to so much as raise their voices to the kid, believing he'd run away like their mother and sister.
"I had an epiphany when I watched Lila wash his mouth out with soap," he explained. "She never raised her voice, but he called her ma'am voluntarily when we left."
"Figures she'd pick something that old-fashioned," Eric spluttered as Daniel brayed. "Guess it's still popular with the geriatric crowd, huh?"
"The hands-off rule doesn't apply to your dumb ass," Colton said steadily, stalking across the distance between them to stand eye-to-eye with his brother, grabbing a handful of Eric's shirt. "The old age jokes are over, Eric. I don't give a fuck what you think. But I'm through letting them roll off my back. Disrespect her again and I'll kick your ass."
Eric stared down at Colton's fist, then looked up, disbelief etched on his face. "You want to fight over some chick you're banging? You gotta be kidding."
For the second time in five minutes, Colton uttered the words and issued an invitation to confront or conform as he shoved Eric into the workbench behind him. "Do I look like I'm kidding?"
Eric straightened, glaring balefully at Colton. "I just don't get why you're so into her."
"What fucking difference does it make to you if I'm into Lila or not? I don't remember you ever giving a damn who I was seeing before, so why are you being such a prick now? I've been polite to every dumb twat in town because you were seeing them, so you can just put up and shut up too."
* * * *
Looks like he had more than one epiphany, Daniel thought, watching with amusement as Eric's eyes registered shock and Colton's body radiated menace. Never once had those two come to blows over a woman, but they'd all three beat on each other enough to know the outcome would be a toss-up. Yet Colton was always the last to fight, being the most even-tempered of the bunch, and he and Sarah had had the biggest aversion to their father's iron-fisted rule.
"You two gonna yap, scrap, or work?" he inquired gruffly as the standoff continued, wondering how far Colton planned to push things, relieved when Colton turned his back on his brother and returned to his own bay. He'd been concerned when Colton insisted on being the one to take custody of Jonah, because he was the youngest, but since none of them had any experience being a parent and Colton had at least spent some time in Los Angeles with Sarah and knew the kid better than him and Eric, he'd agreed. If not for Colton's determination to take Jonah, Dan fig
ured he'd be the one shouldering the huge responsibility, and he was grateful for Lila's help with the kid.
He turned his gaze on Eric. Other than the fact that Lila was a bit older than Colton, it didn't make any sense to him why Eric was so dead set against them being together. If their age difference didn't matter to Lila or to Colton, it damn sure didn't matter to Dan. Colton was happy. Happier than he'd been before Sarah had been murdered and he'd taken on the kid to raise. So happy that Dan envied him. E had a wall up as big as the one around China, to stop anyone from getting close. Maybe he couldn't see the benefit to settling down with any one woman.
Dan knew he had a protective wall up as well. But Eric was protecting himself while Dan had far different reasons for not getting involved with another woman.
But he could recall what it felt like to be in love, and he wished Colton and Lila the best. She had worked wonders with Jonah. He recalled the grin on the kid's face when he ran out on the ball field the night before. He'd never seen the Jonah smile like that. While Eric seemed to be overlooking the fact that Jonah wouldn't even be playing if not for Lila, Daniel wasn't.
He grinned as he picked up a fresh spark plug, his thoughts turning to Pete as he threaded it into place. Being with Lila is a lot like being the kite tail of a tornado, Pete had declared. Solid, dependable Colton was as good a choice as any Dan figured, assuming Lila wanted a new tail to balance her.
Chapter Seventeen
It was mid-morning when Lila hurried out of the busy flea market. She'd been there since before dawn, but the only prizes today had been the fresh baked bread and produce, yet she'd lingered longer than she should have, since Colton was coming for again for "lunch." She planned to offer him juicy sandwiches made from the fragrant Italian loaf and heirloom tomatoes in her bag, but the food was just an excuse for them to get horizontal. Her cheeks burned a bit as she thought he'd likely take a pass on lunch and go directly to snacking on her body. She grinned at a passing stranger as she pictured Colton with her juices glazing his chin.
Her smug thrill was wiped away by the rolling sound of thunder and the fat raindrops that began pelting the dusty gravel lot under her sandaled feet. Her heart began to race for a different reason as she scanned the darkening sky and calculated she was twelve miles from home. The angry clouds were parked in the sky directly between where she was and where she needed to go. The tall oak trees at the edge of the lot were showing the silver sides of their leaves, warning her this was going to be a bad storm, one she could either wait out right here or drive through.
Pete would have made fun of her rising panic. He'd never understood that the blank moments when you couldn't see anything terrified her, and she'd never believed he could see as well as he claimed to, either. Driving too fast was dangerous, but slowing down was equally so, thanks to the idiots like Pete, who drove too fast.
If not for the argument she'd had with Colton the evening before, she'd probably have sat in her truck until the storm passed. But the memory of the look on his face when she'd refused to come stay the night with him, once more citing his need to set a good example for Jonah, made her head for the interstate. Her sense of dread about driving in the rain did not outweigh the heavy knowledge of how easily he could replace her, so she buckled up, and braced herself for the ordeal ahead.
After tossing and turning all night, she'd made her first-ever call to him that didn't involve a vehicle repair or a baseball game, inviting him over for lunch again today, a peace offering he seemed to accept. She couldn't stand him up.
She tried to focus on her impending tryst as she drove into the sheet of gray, but the image of his face as he looked whenever he first slid into her was soon pushed aside as her small truck fishtailed, nearly sliding into the semi rushing past her. The rig's huge tires dumped gallons more water for her inadequate wipers to move before she could see. The three seconds of blindness felt like three years, and a knot of tension coiled under her shoulder blade, tightening with every sudden dim flash of brake lights and each angry sound of another driver's horn.
Her tight, sweaty grip on the wheel made her knuckles hurt, and as driver after driver rushed around her, she became so tense that her knees ached. Cold perspiration lined her nape, and no matter how hard she swallowed, she couldn't seem to generate enough spit to force the knot in her throat to go down. The jackhammer in her chest made it hard to breathe as she slowly made her way down the stretch of interstate and onto the curving secondary roads.
Lila had never felt more like forty-one, or less like sex in the afternoon, when she finally turned onto her street, but as she passed the front of her house and saw Colton's tall silhouette pacing between the lit windows of her dining room, tears of relief stung her eyes. Her front door flew open as she steered around his truck onto the grass and came to a shaky stop under the low canopy of wild cherry trees.
She had barely put the truck into park before he was at her side, opening her door and pulling her into his arms. His scent seemed sharp in the rain-fresh air, surrounding her with as much comfort as his strong arms as they encircled her.
"I was worried about you," he muttered into her hair. "The garage got a wrecker call for a bad smash-up on the road just outside the flea market. I know how much you hate driving in the rain, too." His large, warm hands rubbed a circle on her lower back and moved up her spine as she clung to him. "You're shaking like a leaf, Lila. Poor baby, was it that bad?"
"I need to replace my wiper blades," she blurted, hoping the rain would camouflage the tears of relief sliding across her cheeks. It was silly to cry now, when her ordeal was over.
Silently he lifted her off her feet. Moving quickly through the increasing downpour, he strode into the house and headed straight for the big rocking chair that was the only item left in the dining room she'd converted into a bedroom for Pete after his accident. Arranging her on his lap as if she was a doll, he didn't seem to care about filling the silence with small talk she wasn't capable of making. He expertly pressed the strong fingers of one hand into the tight knots of her spine as the other stroked her bare thigh and arm in a manner more comforting than seductive. Lila allowed her eyes to drift closed as he rocked, enjoying the massage and the feel of his lips on her forehead. The storm still raged, but now she felt secure rather than scared as the raindrops pelting the windows paired with the sound of his heartbeat and blended into some crazy, comforting chorus of relief that started playing in her head.
She woke in her living room, surprised to see darkness outlining the lace over her windows. Stretching like a contented cat, Lila smiled at the realization she must have fallen asleep in Colton's lap. Her smile grew bigger as she stepped into the kitchen and spied the neat way he'd arranged the tomatoes along the edge of the counter and placed the partial loaf of fresh bread alongside. He'd made his own sandwich, and his self-sufficiency pleased her. When she opened the refrigerator door, the rest of her produce was there to greet her. She'd forgotten her purchases in her anxiety over the storm, but Colton had tended to their welfare as surely as he'd tended to hers.
The note he'd tucked under the edge of the clay pot that held her orchid said, "Did you know you're beautiful when you sleep?" His penmanship was as nice as the undeserved compliment.
And later that evening, when he called her after Jonah had gone to bed, begging her to come to him, this time she said yes. Flipping back her covers and casting aside the book she'd been reading, she slid only into her sandals before she hurried out into the spring evening, feeling about twenty again as she drove through the spring starlight to meet her lover.
* * * *
Colton stepped out onto his front porch as Lila's truck turned into his driveway, snorting softly at the way she cut her lights to keep them from strafing Jonah's windows. He had no idea why she was so uptight at the thought the kid might see proof that their relationship was physical. From talking to the boy he knew his sister had allowed more than one lover to stay the night, and their presence was something Jonah se
emed to accept as a fact of life. After chewing on her refusals, he felt that this was another step she was finding it hard to take and figured it had little to do with Jonah. Pulling the door closed quietly, his bare chest expanded as he drew in a big breath of the sultry night air, letting it out slowly as he cautioned himself yet again not to rush her into things she wasn't ready for.
He leaped off the porch as she slid out of her truck and the full moon overhead revealed long legs bare to the hip. She looked so gorgeous in the moonlight with her hair loose and free that he swallowed hard as he held out his hand to her. Unquestioning, she slipped her hand into his and he led her around the side of the house. The potent scent of sweet red honeysuckle and fragrant Confederate jasmine floated toward them on the breeze as they descended the stone steps he'd cut into the hillside and she caught her first glimpse of the top of the pergola he'd built beside the creek as a sort of a monument to his missing mother. Maybe later he'd tell her how many times Daniel tucked him in bed, telling the story of how his mother taught Colton how to suck the nectar from the throat of a wild honeysuckle the day before she'd disappeared, or how it had hurt him to see Sarah cry when the jasmine their mom had planted on the side of the farmhouse they'd grown up in had simply not bloomed the spring when he'd been thirteen and Sarah twelve.
Above the chirruping cicadas, he heard her soft gasp and she tugged on his arm. "You built this."
It was a statement of wonder, not a question, and his heart picked up a beat at the crazy notion that she might understand who he was in a way that few people did. These thoughts had him as excited as the realization that she'd come to him straight from her bed, still dressed in her nightgown, even if he did have a second's thought about how badly she drove and how that might appear if she'd wrecked.
Colton succumbed to the temptation of the long column of her throat above the low vee of her nightgown as she tipped her head back to stare up at the fretwork of floral stars and living trumpets his green thumb had produced.
