She was afflicted with something, though, and it was connected straight to Molly Popp.
Fighting back anger at the bizarre turn his life had taken, he glanced at the kids crammed into the van. They were cute and all looked to be below school age. What was this woman thinking?
“Oh, don’t worry about them.” She waved at the kids. “They’re not mine. I run a day care over in Ranger. You’re our field trip.” She clapped her hands together and gazed up at him as if he was the best thing since the zoo! “Kids,” she hollered shrilly, “say hello to Bob.”
Bob looked from the woman to the kids. What kind of woman was she to bring kids on such a far-fetched quest? At least they were clean and looked happy, waving at him from four different windows.
“Do their parents know—”
“Oh Bob, fun-ny! Certainly they do.” She whacked him on the arm, her eyes doing a jig as she tilted her chin up at him. “Do you think I’d take those babies out without parental consent?” She chuckled and stepped close to him. He stepped back. “It’s not like I came here to meet some stranger. I came to meet you. And everyone knows what a great guy you are. We’ve all been following along breathlessly, waiting to see if some lucky girl was gonna come along and capture your heart. And well, then Molly wrote that you were really, really wanting a wife. Pining away for one…” She sighed.
One eye was starting to blink faster than the other.
Bob wanted to run, but he wasn’t feeling well enough.
She patted his arm again, and he noticed her fingernails were longer than his toes.
“It was actually one of my kid’s moms who first suggested that I should just stop all that daydreaming I was doing, since I was the only single gal in the bunch of us, and like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle I should just do it. Go for it—you. She said, and I quote, ‘Jana Diane Cravats, you need to just hop in the van and make that short, little seventy-mile trip out there and see if you and Bob connect.’ Of course at first I said no. I couldn’t do such a thing. But then everyone started encouragin’ me. And so as you can ver-ify, here I am.”
She was here all right. Bob took a step back, glancing over his shoulder, estimating the paces between him and his truck. Why had he parked so far away? “I’m sorry, miss. Real sorry. But there’s been a terrible mistake.” Spinning, he had taken two strides toward safety when the loopy woman sprang in front of him, thrusting a pink plastic-wrapped package at him.
“Here. I baked you a buttermilk pound cake. I don’t want to brag, but I bake the best cakes around.” She forced the cake on him, waving her hand at the purple card taped to the center. “I know this is all kooky. Especially since you’re shy and all.” Her eyes started up again. “But, that’s my name and phone number inside the card, along with a couple of pictures of me. I wouldn’t want you to confuse me with someone else.”
Someone else? Who else? Bob didn’t see that happening in a million years. For Molly’s sake, there better not be any others to get this one confused with!
The unmistakable roar of a motorcycle racing down his country road drowned out the rest of Jana Diane’s words. She whirled around to see the motorcycle and almost fell off her shoes.
Stuck holding the pound cake, he gaped as the sparkling machine growled to a halt five feet from him. This did not look good. A woman in leather slowly removed her helmet, loosing a cascade of golden hair to swing free as she slung her fringe-clad leg over the bike and stood up. Watching her stride toward him, Bob got a sick feeling. In her right hand she carried a black paper gift bag with yellow polka dots and yellow fuzzy fur lining the top. With her muscular build and the ominous look of her getup, the bag was about as out of place as it would have been if Arnold Schwarzenegger had been carrying it.
A sinking feeling in his gut, Bob again gauged the distance left between him and his truck.
“Bob baby! I’d recognize you anywhere,” she boomed. And before he could make his move, she launched herself at him—just took a flying leap straight at him!
The buzzer on the oven sounded and not a moment too soon. Molly was starving. Poking her pencil behind her ear, she compared the notes on her yellow legal pad to the copy on her laptop, then pressed the save button, relieved to take a break. She’d forced herself to put words on paper, refusing to give in to the notion that she had writer’s block. Determined to prove she could move past worrying about Bob, she’d relaxed her mind with her last-resort nonwriting activity.
Her efforts had paid off and she’d spent the past two hours hunched over the computer typing like a mad-woman. But, she loved lasagna, and within seconds of the buzzer sounding, she’d slid her mitts on and lifted the spicy dish from the oven. She was about to put the store-bought garlic bread in the oven when someone started pounding on her front door. Glancing at her disaster of a kitchen, she tugged the mitts off and tossed them onto the counter, and hurried to the door. The last time someone had banged on her door like this, Lilly Wells was having her baby downstairs in Miss Adela’s living quarters. Molly could still see the sheer terror on Cort Wells’s face as he yelled for help. She was at least glad there couldn’t be a replay of that night happening—no one she knew of was expecting a baby. Her readers had loved the article she’d written, though. As a matter of fact, she’d freelanced several fun and enlightening magazine pieces from that encounter. It had been a very profitable experience for her.
Swinging the door open now, she was shocked. Bob Jacobs was the last person she expected to see standing there. “Bob,” she gasped, stepping back and reaching for the chain at her neck. The sudden thudding of her heart and the rush of heat to her face was immediate. Willing her nerves to settle back down, she studied him.
He stood with one hand stretched above his head, gripping the doorjamb, his weight leaning heavy on one hip, his other hand in midair about to come down and do more damage to her door. The distraught flash in his eyes wasn’t a look she’d ever seen before.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, backing up as he stormed inside and kicked the door shut with his boot.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?!” he tore his Stetson off his head, gripping it tightly with both hands. His hair was disheveled and she noticed something red smudged on his cheek. “Do you know that I had people—women!—at my house. Kids. Yes kids. She had a van full of them. And cakes. There was cake.”
He was so distraught that he was rambling. His navy eyes were almost black with anger—as they seemed to be a lot lately—and his eyebrows were crinkled together. Even though the man had backed her into a corner, literally, she had the overwhelming urge to smooth the stress right out of those eyebrows.
“What’s wrong with you, Molly?”
“Me?” She was afraid to ask.
He halted his pacing and took a step back from her, looking shell-shocked. “You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?”
His question was quiet, miserable. He blinked and, to her chagrin, she was again caught off guard by how devastatingly good-looking he was. Even distraught. Distraught—the man was upset and she was noticing how handsome he was! What was wrong with her?
“Don’t smile.”
Was she smiling? How could she be smiling when he was obviously broken up about something?
“There’s nothing to smile about,” he growled. “Women are coming to my house bringing me cakes.”
“Excuse me. Say that again please.” All traces of a smile were wiped away with the mention of cakes.
“Reporters! You heard me.”
The way he said the word was far from complimentary.
“All reporters care about is getting their stories out. Who cares about the people who get messed up because of them?”
Molly covered her face with her hand, then rubbed it hard across her eyes. “The woman in the minivan,” she groaned. Looking up, she met his accusing glare. “The one full of kids?”
“Yeah, you saw her?”
She choked on air and dropped her hand back to tug on the
chain. “Well, I almost got run over by her. I mean she was obviously in a hurry to see you and she was zooming though town like, well, anyway…she came to your house?”
“Her and her day care.”
“You mean those weren’t all her kids?”
“Nope.” He rocked back on his boot heels. “I was the field trip. Did you get that? I was the field trip!” He glared at her and held up a finger in salute. “With parental consent.”
The words were miserable sounding, and he looked angry and befuddled at the same time. And to Molly’s shame and surprise she wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him. To push the lock of hair out of his eye…okay, hold it. You are backed into a corner, he’s upset with you and you are thinking about comforting him. Yeah, right. Like he would want you to. Wake up, Molly. The man has a less-than-good attitude when it comes to reporters—especially you!
She snapped out of the daydream, straightening to her full five-eight and squaring her shoulders. “So, she brought you cake.”
His expression shifted to blank disbelief. “And Motorcycle Tammy brought me lemon squares, in a fuzzy bag.” He shook his head as if trying to get the picture out of his mind.
The motorcycle! Molly groaned inwardly. “Oh no! I saw her, too. They actually came to your house?” She hadn’t ever thought this far in advance. Mule Hollow folks had hosted several functions and invited women to come and participate. As she had, they’d envisioned women moving here and settling. They hadn’t envisioned stalkers. Or realized that giving out people’s addresses might not be the smartest thing to do. But it was a small town, after all.
“Yeah, they came to my house, or at least my gate. Thankfully they didn’t cross the cattle guard like someone I know.”
Nope, in her wildest dreams she hadn’t thought the women would come acting crazy. What had she done? So many things ran through Molly’s mind. Had she put Bob in jeopardy? Strange women were coming to his house. Cassie was one thing, but Molly had overlooked the seriousness of her actions. “Bob, I promise, I never meant to cause trouble for you.” She laid her palm on his forearm, feeling the sinewy muscles tense beneath her fingers. He inhaled slowly, the cotton of his red shirt stretching across his work-toned chest as he visibly reined in his turmoil.
“Look,” he said at last. “I know you didn’t mean anything bad to happen. I’ve been driving around for the last couple of hours trying to fight off this anger but I couldn’t. I even worked on my barn for a while trying not to blow up like this at you. But Molly…”
His troubled gaze dropped to her hand then returned to her face. Silence wedged between them and Molly waited for him to speak again. It was apparent that words were still forthcoming.
“Those women practically got into a fight over me. The motorcycle woman even did a little shaky kind of dance thing so I would remember how well all her fringed parts worked.” His expression was glum. “And that was after she launched herself at me like I was an ice-cream cone or something. Do you know how hard I had to work to make her turn me loose? The only reason she did was because the day-care lady got jealous and distracted her. I’m telling you, Molly, they’re kooks. And the worst part of it is the crazy day-care lady had encouragement from all the mothers of the kids she keeps! Can you believe that?”
Molly dropped her hand from his arm and waved weakly toward the kitchen. She knew he was searching for the right words, trying not to let his temper get the best of him. One of Bob Jacobs’s strong points—and he had many—was his normally calm, almost innocent charm. Not really shy, more like he usually thought things out before saying something he would regret. She had somehow found the buttons that pushed him to his limit. And for that she was sorry. Thinking how hard he’d tried not to come here and vent at her she felt she owed him something.
“I baked lasagna,” she blurted out, wanting to calm him, to ease the anger he was fighting to control. “I know it feeds an army and you know how it is when you live alone…” She’d said she was sorry—maybe he would accept a token of that remorse. “Would…would you like to join me?”
Why was she inviting him for dinner? He was going to turn her down flat. No way would he say yes to the woman who had single-handedly turned his perfect life upside down. She deserved the startled look he gave her. But he deserved so much more than the way she’d treated him that she pushed forward. More certain than before that she wanted him to stay.
“Really, please stay. Honestly, I’m not great in the kitchen, but I’ve been told I make decent lasagna. Dinner is the least I can do to say I’m sorry for causing you all this trouble.”
And she really was sorry.
He thumped his hat on his hip, studying her for a minute…no doubt wondering what had possessed her to think he would ever consider such an offer from her. Molly bit her lip and prepared for rejection.
“Okay.”
She blinked. Twice. Molly fought off the fluttery feeling rolling over her and rubbed her hands on the front of her blue jeans to steady herself. “Good. Very good. Here let me take your hat.” She was breathless as she reached for his hat. Their fingers met and she froze for a moment. “I’ll…just hang it over here and you can get it on your way out.” She fumbled the hat, tearing it from his fingers. Smiling weakly, he met her gaze, and for the briefest second she thought she saw something in his eyes…then he let go and turned toward the window.
“Great view.”
“I enjoy it.” She couldn’t move—she had imagined the spark of interest. Sure there had once been interest between them, but they were the proverbial two ships going separate directions. She’d put a lid on that attraction not long after moving here. She hadn’t wanted anything standing in the way when the time came for her to move on. She’d made it clear to him that her career took priority in her life. It was the only fair thing to do.
Once she’d put her priorities out there, it had been like a breaker blowout for him. The man had visibly shut down all interest on a personal level. It had been instant and firm.
It hadn’t stopped her curiosity though, and when someone mentioned once that his dad had been a reporter, she’d been shocked to realize his dad was Ted Jacobs. He’d been a freelancer whose work had appeared in prestigious magazines and newspapers for nearly thirty years. Molly had long admired his work—the man had had a knack for penetrating high-voltage situations. He’d lived on the edge of danger throughout his nearly thirty-year career, writing stories that touched lives and taught lessons in humanity at the same time. Molly completely respected him.
Studying Bob’s back, she wondered what life had been like growing up with a famous father like that. It was none of her business, so she tried to cap her curiosity as she placed his hat on the small table beside the door and focused on feeding him. Taking a deep breath, she moved to the kitchen and placed the garlic bread into the oven to warm.
Grateful that he’d moved the topic onto something less volatile between them, she went with it. “Since I was the first renter in the building, I was able to choose the best view. It’s nice to look out there and see past the town’s roofline to the horizon. The sunsets are spectacular.”
“I bet,” he said, coming to the doorway. “Can I help—whoa. What happened here?”
Molly glanced at the sink full of bowls and the counter covered in flour. Of all days for him to come to her apartment. She sighed.
“I take cooking classes sometimes.”
His eyebrows knit together again, in curiosity this time. “Where?”
Molly bit her lip and rocked back on her heels. “On TV. I pick one of the shows on a cooking channel and I try something. On days I’m thinking out article kinks, I bake bread. It relaxes me.”
“Ahh, so that explains the counters and this.”
He reached out and brushed her cheek with his thumb. Molly hiccuped and immediately swung toward the faucet to get a glass of water to hide the surprise on her face. She hadn’t had hiccups in years, but that wasn’t what had surprised her.
“So you made the bread. Cool.”
She finished gulping the water and holding her breath at the same time. “No. It’s store-bought bread.”
When she turned around, breathing normal again, his gaze was roaming the room. “So did you eat all the homemade bread?”
Why couldn’t he have come over after she’d cleaned up her mess? Sure, he was looking for Suzy Homemaker and she wasn’t her—and she didn’t care to be her—but did he have to find out that even if she’d wanted to be, she still wouldn’t be anywhere close to being Suzy?
What did it matter? “I can’t bake bread. I try. I make huge messes and I try at least once a month, whether I’m having trouble with an article or not. But I can’t bake bread. The bread doesn’t take it personally since I can’t cook much else, either.” There the cat was out of the bag. Why she cared that she was no good at something she had no desire to be good at confused her, and always had.
“I didn’t take you as the kind of woman who wanted to be in the kitchen.” He had that baffled sound in his voice.
“Well, actually, that’s a gray area with me. I don’t have a clue if I do or don’t.”
He chuckled, and it sounded wonderful to Molly’s ears. Bob always had been one to laugh easily and lately she’d taken that away. Standing beside him in her tiny kitchen, her ears warmed suddenly and her stomach rolled again.
“Um, do you still want to help?” she asked, needing to change the subject.
“Sure.”
“Then grab the place mats out of that drawer there—” she pointed behind him “—and the flatware there.” She pointed to the drawer above the other one. “I’ll get the glasses. Is iced tea okay with you?”
“That’s my drink of choice.”
“Sweet or unsweet?”
“The sweeter the better. But I’ll drink it either way.”
“You’re in luck. I learned to make tea from my mom and it’s as sweet as it can get without being syrup.”
Dream a Little Dream Page 6
