by Kaitlyn Rice
For days now he’d only been able to think about Abby. He’d nearly made a catastrophic mistake. Again.
He’d managed to stop himself in the nick of time, so he shouldn’t be feeling so out of sorts. He’d done the right thing. It was just that the thing he’d wanted to do kept barging into his thoughts, making him miss sleep and sabotaging his attempts to work.
Paula’s visit hadn’t done any good at all. In a couple of weeks, she’d gone from being an interesting companion to being someone he had no interest in ever seeing again.
He needed to plan another date, with someone else. This time he would return to Kansas City. If Diane and Zuzu were still upset with him, there were usually plenty of willing women in the bars. An evening with one of them should solve his problem.
He took a gulp of coffee, winced at its bitterness and reread what he’d saved last night. Scowling, he read it again. He seemed to have missed a few crucial elements. He’d obviously been tired out when he’d written it. The whole thing was pure garbage. Fingering the cursor to the middle of the screen, he deleted most of last night’s work.
The phone’s ring jangled his nerves and interrupted what little concentration he could muster. It was a repeat client needing help with a glitch that she’d been trying to straighten out for weeks. Jack spent a half hour talking the young woman through the problem, and hung up.
Picking up his mug, he walked back out to the kitchen and flung its contents down the sink.
It didn’t make sense.
He’d been single forever, and had lived alone since Brian got married four years ago. Jack had been here with Abby and the twins for less than a month. But somehow, being alone in the silent old house made him lonely. He missed the babies.
He missed Abby.
He wandered over to the French doors to look out at her flowers. As usual, life was thriving out there. Abby had a knack for taking care of things.
Plants. Babies. Probably men, if she let herself.
He admired her energy, and her honesty, and it bugged him that he’d confused her last night. He’d seen it in her eyes when they were on the landing. It had taken everything he had to walk away from her, but she wasn’t the kind of woman he could dally with. She needed more than he could offer.
Besides, she hadn’t given him reason to believe she’d be interested in more than a platonic roommate. He knew all the signs of a woman inclined toward romance—he’d been studying them for years.
Women on the prowl behaved differently from Abby. They dropped hints, fiddled with their hair and looked at him from under fluttering lashes.
With Abby, those signs were missing.
Except for a couple of returned kisses and a misplaced moan here and there, she dealt with him in the same brisk manner that she dealt with everything else. She didn’t flirt, fiddle or fuss. Even a dim man could figure out that she wasn’t asking for more.
He plodded back to his office and sat in front of his computer, doubting that he’d get much done on his program.
His mind wasn’t clicking along at its normal pace. The only thing he could see right now was Abby’s somber gaze, cast upon him as if he’d done something terrible.
Maybe he just needed a break. Back home in Kansas City, he’d call a buddy and go play handball, or maybe take a lady friend out for a lunch date. But what did a man do to work off a foggy-brained morning when he was in the middle of nowhere?
Ignoring the pile of paperwork next to his computer, he changed into shorts and running shoes, crammed his cap on his head and headed out the front door. The crisp warm clash of sun and north wind sharpened his senses, at once cooling his face and toasting his limbs.
Fully awake now, he raced away from the farmhouse, only slowing when he neared the edge of the property and realized he could hear the vibrating songs of a pondful of frogs.
He veered off toward the sound, and circled once around the pond’s perimeter. Slanted light glinted across the choppy waves, catching his attention. It soothed his thoughts and brightened his mood.
He’d never had a dad around to take him fishing, but it sounded like fun. He made a mental note to stock the pond with fish and buy a couple of fishing poles. He and Wyatt could learn to fish together.
The idea of sharing a lifetime of discoveries with the boy pleased him. Jack wanted to be the dad he himself had never had.
When he remembered that his year at the farm would be nearly finished by spring, the morning’s gloom settled back around him. He couldn’t fish with Wyatt here because the farm essentially belonged to Abby.
And rightfully so. She loved the place—even that creaky old house. She would take care of it. But surely she would allow him to visit with Wyatt. A boy would learn a lot from spending time in a place where there was plenty of dirt to dig around in.
Jack traveled a stretch at a steady jog before he saw Abby’s truck emerge through the gates. As soon as he saw it, he gave a robust wave and made an immediate turn toward the house. Although he’d already jogged at least a mile, he sprinted home, glad beyond reason that she and the babies were returning.
He reached the garage just as she was getting out of her truck. “Hey,” he hollered. “Let me help with the twins.”
She gave a quick nod as she reached in the back seat for Rosie. Jack jogged around to the other side and discovered that Wyatt had been lulled to sleep by the ride. Releasing the straps, Jack pulled the warm baby against his chest.
Wyatt gave a soft little sigh, snuggling down. Jack ran his hand gently along the back of the baby’s silky brown curls, feeling an emotion so strong it could only be described as love.
It hadn’t taken long for that attachment to grow, and he looked across at Abby, understanding her need to keep the boy with her.
But she wasn’t looking at the babies. She was looking at him and biting her lip. “I assume you found my note,” she said as they carried the babies inside the house.
“Yes, I did. You must have gotten up pretty early.”
She shrugged. “Rosie and Wyatt slept through until six, so we all just got up then.”
He walked up the stairs alongside her, allowing her to place Rosie in her crib and then take Wyatt to put him down, too. Following her back downstairs, he stood in the middle of the kitchen, which managed to be cheerful despite its size, and waited as she trotted back out to the truck and returned with a plastic grocery sack.
Abby’s emotions were usually so evident that he knew at a glance when she was happy or sad. Now she was so carefully composed he couldn’t read her, but the tooth marks on her bottom lip implied a worry she wasn’t expressing.
He knew it had to do with him.
“I do intend to help in the mornings,” he assured her. “Guess it’s just taking me awhile to adjust to the changes.”
Abby began to remove items from her bag. “I’m completely willing to do it all alone, remember?”
He frowned, watching her fill her arms with garden supplies and retreat toward a separate pantry that stood near the door to the greenhouse.
He picked up a box of bone meal and followed her. “Of course I remember,” he said as he handed her the box. “I’m sorry about the other night in the nursery, too. That was a mistake.”
“I didn’t stop you, did I?” she said immediately, looking up from under her lashes with reproachful eyes.
The sun filtered in through the greenhouse windows, hitting her face with full force. He nearly gasped in surprise. Her honey-brown eyes were gorgeous in the light, and she had the lightest spattering of freckles all over her face. Her skin was beautifully flushed and seemed to glow with good health.
He wondered if she was as freckled and glowing all over, and decided just as quickly not to pursue that thought. “No, you didn’t,” he murmured. “But you barely had time to react, Abby. I overstepped my bounds.”
She turned back to the cupboard, moving boxes and bottles around to fit in the new supplies. “Despite what you must think, I’m a normal wom
an. I can get turned on, just like you. It didn’t mean a thing.”
She snapped the cupboard door closed and stalked away.
But as she left the kitchen, she said, “You’re right about us getting out, though. I have a date Saturday night.”
SO, THE RECLUSIVE ABBY had a date. Maybe he was a good influence on her, after all. He should be happy for her.
But the news plucked at Jack’s nerves all week long.
He spent a lot of time in his room working. Most days, he ate a stack of buttered toast in his room. For breakfast, lunch and dinner. A few times, he drove four miles into town to eat his evening meal at a local diner, leaving Abby and the twins to manage without his company.
He even took an afternoon off to go buy that new car, but as he drove it back to the farmhouse, he knew most of the thrill had been coaxing a bit of spontaneous fun from Abby.
She seemed to be avoiding him, too.
She spent more time upstairs, and would leave terse notes that requested he watch the twins for an hour or two, while she took flowers to market or tended to the trees or greenhouse.
At night, when one of the babies cried, he waited downstairs. He stared at the ceiling and worked through his current program. And forced himself to stay away.
Usually, she had the baby calmed within minutes. His help simply wasn’t required.
By Thursday, he knew it was time to head for the city. A client had called, needing on-site instruction, and he’d jumped at the chance to escape. He’d arranged a help session for that very weekend, and told Abby that he had to go on an important business trip that would require several days away from the farm.
When he’d offered to pay for a sitter to help her manage alone, she had only shrugged, eyes snapping, and said that her mother and Sharon would each be glad to baby-sit anytime at all, absolutely free.
He supposed this new distance was more normal in a roommate situation. The fact that he didn’t enjoy it as much was just something more to deal with. So what if he was attracted to the wrong woman? He knew how to cope with something like that. He just needed to find someone more appropriate to engage his attention.
This weekend should provide the perfect opportunity.
He and Abby managed to remain civil until Friday morning—but just barely. By that time they were shooting covert missiles at one another with a regularity that had him wondering why he’d ever found her intriguing at all.
Her shrewish behavior was the perfect complement to his brattiness, except her usual sarcasm had taken on a sharper edge that no longer seemed cute. Since he no longer felt like teasing her out of it, the tension was mounting.
As he packed for the weekend, he felt relieved to be leaving. He needed to get to the city and let off steam.
He thought he might have put a permanent dent in his forehead from frowning in the past few days, and his nerves were wound so tight he thought he might explode.
Before he left, he cornered Abby in the greenhouse. She was watering the plants, looking as serene as he’d ever seen her. “Abby, I’m leaving,” he announced from the doorway. “I’ll be back late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.”
She looked up from her plants and smiled indulgently, as if he were an obedient child. “I hope things go well with your client,” she said before turning her attention back to her flowers. With the twins off visiting her parents, Abby must be anticipating a few hours of complete freedom.
Whatever the case, that polite coolness was worse than her most cutting comment. “Oh, but I won’t just be helping my clients,” he sniped. “My nights are free to do as I please.”
She glanced up again. The only way he knew his dart had hit the target was from the tiny wrinkle in her brow. “Okay, have a fruitful trip,” she said, a little more sharply.
He wasn’t satisfied with the knowledge that he’d won, and he still didn’t leave. He lingered inside the doorway, watching her. Wondering why he wasn’t diving for the door as fast as the class troublemaker on the last day of school.
“And you have fun on your date with, uh—what was your banker’s name?”
Now Abby seemed truly startled. Her face colored prettily and she stammered, “Duke—er, Delbert. Um, Duke Delbertson. Kind of an unusual name—I think he’s Swedish.”
Duke Delbertson—that was a weighty name. It conjured up images of some blond John Wayne type. This banker must be a big guy. Maybe Abby was blushing because she had a crush on this lumbering mass of a man.
Jack’s eyelid twitched. “Oh,” he said coolly. “I hope you have a good time. We can compare notes when I get back.”
“Wouldn’t that be a hoot?” she said, looking completely horrified. Then she swished past him on her way out of the greenhouse, leaving him standing alone among her plants.
He strode out in turn and went straight to his brand-new car, which was packed and waiting in the garage. After all, he was a busy man with a full weekend planned; he might as well get under way.
He began the hour-long drive to Kansas City, intending to check into his hotel room first, then spend the remainder of the day tutoring his clients on the use of a new business package.
After hours, however, his options were wide open, and he had the weekend all mapped out. He intended to return to the craziest days of his bachelorhood, partying to an extreme he hadn’t indulged in in several years.
He’d call every woman in his book, and the first one who said yes would be wined and dined by a crazed man. Maybe he could play a freckle-faced vixen right out of his mind.
ABBY FIDDLED WITH her bowl of cold blueberry buckle, wondering idly if the twins were asleep by now. She had resisted the urge to call home for the entire hour that she’d been gone, but she hadn’t been able to keep her mind on her date at all.
In truth, she hadn’t spent every minute thinking about the twins, although they were in her thoughts often. She knew they were fine with her mother. More often, Abby was thinking about Jack. Imagining that his weekend of romance was more successful than hers.
Every once in a while she looked across the table at her companion to make a cursory check on the conversation. He’d spent at least five minutes discussing the government’s economic shortsightedness, and he didn’t seem ready to break off his speech anytime soon.
If she’d known the banker had been regarding her with an interest in business rather than romance, she wouldn’t have gone into the bank last Tuesday with the sole intention of scaring up a date. Right now, in fact, her blatant pursuit of this man’s attention compared in stupidity only to moving in with Jack last month.
Things weren’t going well in either case.
“Abigail, did you hear what I asked?” said her companion, whose name she had forgotten sometime between him asking her out and her agreeing to come.
She just knew it started with D. For dull.
She looked up with a start, and recognized that frowning expression, even if she hardly knew the face. He’d asked her something. Finally.
“What was the question?”
His eyes rolled upward, as if he found her to be outrageously slow. “I asked if you’ve developed a five-year business plan for your farm.”
“Oh, I have goals, but I haven’t put a pen to paper yet. It hasn’t been all that long.”
“Would you mind sharing your thoughts?” he asked, with curiosity honing his already sharp features.
“Actually, I do mind,” she answered. “I didn’t know we were coming out to dinner to talk business. I’d rather not.”
His interest deflated as fast as a balloon in a cactus garden. Sitting back in his chair, he asked, “What do you want to talk about, Abigail?”
Why a rational woman would spend her first date in months thinking about her impossibly off-limits roommate instead of her completely harmless companion.
“Well, what do you do for fun?” she asked.
The banker’s eyes seemed to vibrate in their sockets. “Fun?”
She sighed and looked
at her watch, trying to decide whether it was too soon to go home. “Do you have a hobby?”
He stared at her, straightening up in his chair after a moment and announcing, “I trade commodities.”
She stared back. “For fun?”
He took a deep breath, seeming ready to launch into another Duke-Delbert-Don-or-Dwayne lecture series. “Yes, and other than a few ups and downs, it’s been lucrative.”
“I see,” she said through her teeth.
When he began an exhaustive chronicle of his portfolio, she knew an escape was in order. She didn’t waste time trying to figure out a good excuse. She was ready to start digging her way out of this date immediately.
“Um…D-Drake?” she interrupted. “I must have forgotten to tell you, but I need to get home to feed the babies.”
“Feed the babies? Can’t your mother do that?”
“Well, not the way I feed them,” she said, tugging at the lapel of her jacket.
His brows formed a perfect V over his eyes, and he shook his head.
She bit her lip at the lie she was about to tell. Then she said in a hushed tone, “You know…the natural way.”
The banker jumped halfway out of his chair and then plopped back down. Cupping a hand beside his mustache, he stared at her chest and whispered, “You’re breast feeding? But the babies aren’t yours.”
She shrugged, and offered a tiny wink. “Anything’s possible if you want it bad enough.”
“Amazing,” he said, already retreating from the lady who’d brazenly flirted with him in the lobby of the biggest commercial lending bank in Topeka.
He picked up the bill, pulling a calculator out of his jacket pocket to double-check the amounts. Then he called the waitress over, suddenly quite receptive to the idea of taking his wacky date home.
Abby didn’t bother trying to make conversation as he drove her back out to the farm, and she was fairly certain he’d never ask her out again.
Her fib had ensured that fact. She considered that a good thing, since she had no intention of ever going out with him again. Even if she never had another date, she wouldn’t suffer through the D-man’s speeches.
