Unexpected Family (10 page)

CHAPTER TEN

“I
S
HE
RESPONDING
TO
HIS
time with Lucy?” Dr. Gilman asked at their Saturday appointment.

“Well, he hasn’t stolen a car this week,” Jeremiah joked.

“What’s he doing there, with her?”

“Gardening. Which makes sense. He used to do that with his mom all the time. She always said he was more farmer than rancher.”

“And that connection to his mother seems to be working?”

“He’s more…I don’t know…quiet and intense at times, but it’s better than the constant fireworks. All and all, things are looking up.”

“And the only change in your life is Lucy?”

“Just Lucy.” He tried, honest to God, he tried to keep the smile out of his voice, off his face, but he couldn’t.

“You like her,” Dr. Gilman asked. She had pink flowers in a little cup beside her chair. Her daughter had picked them for her, that’s what Dr. Gilman had said, and for some reason Jeremiah couldn’t stop staring at them. Almost all the petals were off one and the other was bent.

“Sure.” He shrugged, trying to be nonchalant when he felt oddly like jumping on a couch like Tom Cruise.

Dr. Gilman smiled slightly and wrote something down in her notebook, her long feather earrings brushing her cheeks.

“Come on,” he groaned. “What are you writing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying, I know you’re writing down ‘the patient seems to be interested in the neighbor.’”

“Would that be wrong?”

He stopped.
No. No. It wouldn’t be wrong. Exactly.

“It wouldn’t be right, though, would it?”

Her brow furrowed and she crossed her legs as she leaned over her knee. Like he was utterly fascinating. It used to put him off, the way she reacted to him, as if he were so important, or so interesting. Now he liked it. Lord knows he was rarely interesting or important these days.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because of the boys.” He couldn’t quite believe she needed to ask that question. Wasn’t it obvious?

“You think it’s going to bother the boys if their uncle has a relationship with a woman. Don’t you think it would be odder if you didn’t?”

“I don’t want any more upheaval. What if we date and it doesn’t work out?”

She sighed. “How long has it been since you’ve been on a date?”

Eight months, three weeks and a couple of days. He wasn’t much of a dater but that was the last time he’d had sex so that’s what he was going to count.

“You’re entitled to a life, you know,” Dr. Gilman said.

“Tell that to the boys.”

“You tell that to the boys.” She put down her notebook. “Get out of here.”

“What?” He glanced up at the clock. “We have twenty more minutes.”

“Right, but you know what you need more than me, right now? A beer. At a bar. With other adults. Perhaps you could call Lucy.”

“But the boys—”

“Are safe at home with their grandparents.”

“You trying to skip out on our appointment?”

“No. I’m trying to get you to see that your life isn’t over. It’s just different.”

She stood and reluctantly, slightly belligerently, he stood, too. “I better not get charged for this,” he grumbled, grabbing his hat from the rack.

“I’ll see to it myself,” she said, and slowly walked him to the door. Crazily, he wanted to ask her how. How was he supposed to go to a bar? Alone? What was he supposed to say? The King of Small Talk had a case of the nerves.

“It’ll come to you,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “It’s like riding a bike.” She patted his shoulder, all but pushing him out the door.

An hour later he stepped into the Sunset Bar, took one look at all the backs and hats and the people in conversation and realized this was no longer his scene.

He used to pride himself on the fact that there wasn’t a bar in the world he couldn’t call home. And now the first bar he ever drank in was totally foreign to him.

I should go,
he thought. Head on home and maybe spend some time with Ben and Cynthia. See why no one ever picked flowers for him. He had one foot back out the door, when the bartender spotted him over some guy’s hat.

“Jeremiah!” Joey cried, lifting a hand. “We haven’t seen you around here in a long time.”

Two men turned toward him and with a huge sigh of relief he recognized both of them.

“Hey there, Joey,” he said, walking into the bar and picking a stool next to the men he knew.

“What can I get you?” Joey asked.

“A Bud.”

“How you been keeping?” Joey asked, popping the top off a bottle and sliding it across the wood toward him. Jeremiah caught it like the beer-catching pro he used to be.

“Busy,” Jeremiah answered, “you know.”

“Three kids will do that to you,” the quiet man next to him said.

“Phil, good to see you,” Jeremiah said. Phil ran the feed shop, and twice a week they talked about weather. It wasn’t much of a relationship, but right now Jeremiah clung to it like a lifeboat. Shaking hands like they were old friends.

“Our youngest just started sleeping through the night,” Phil said, “and Mary’s talking about having another one… .”

Jeremiah shuddered but the man on the other side of Phil smiled, splitting his wild Grizzly Adam’s beard.

“Dr. Puese,” Jeremiah said, leaning forward to shake the big-animal vet’s hand. “What’s got you out at a bar on a Saturday night?”

“Susan’s got book club. I learned it’s best to skedaddle or I get an earful about things I got no business hearing about. Those girls don’t talk about books.” He arched a bushy eyebrow before taking a sip from his bottle. “Worse than a locker room, I swear.”

Jeremiah laughed and eased back on his stool. His shoulders adopting the international beer-drinking posture. His elbows finding that sweet spot at the edge of the bar, where the wood had been worn into divots by a hundred other elbows.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to me, Jeremiah Stone?” At the far end of the bar, the person reading the newspaper lowered the paper. And sitting there, like a teenage dream in a clingy black shirt with red lipstick and glittering eyes, was Lucy Alatore.

And suddenly this night was looking a whole lot better.

* * *

J
EREMIAH
SPUN
TOWARD
HER
, his back to the men he sat beside.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

She tried to breathe normally, but it was as if her skin got tighter just by his attention.

Everything just seemed sharper with him around. As if there was an edge of excitement to the mundane. As if there was a chance that this could be the most thrilling night of her life.

She’d always sensed this about him, but tonight it was turned way up. No wonder Reese came up here to spend his money; Lucy would do the same thing if she had any money.

Such was the power of Jeremiah Stone.

His eyes touched Lucy’s face, the lipstick she’d put on because she thought she looked so tired and worn without it. The black shirt that her mother said was going to give men the wrong impression, and from the look in Jeremiah’s eye as he traced the neckline with his gaze, she’d have to give the point to her mother.

Jeremiah was getting an impression all right, but Lucy couldn’t say if it was wrong.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, and she laughed, because he’d meant her to, because he was so charming that such a cheesy line got new life coming from his mouth.

“Waiting for you to get so drunk you pay me money to drive you home.” She lifted the cup of coffee she’d been nursing all night to her lips and took a sip. Terrible. Really, really awful coffee. If this taxi thing was going to work out, Joey was going to have to invest in some decent coffee. Maybe clean the machine out for the first time this decade.

“You’re still doing this?”

“A woman’s got to work.” She tried to sound as if she believed in this taxi thing. But she knew it was ridiculous. She knew it was a bizarre downward turn for her. It was one thing to run Patty and the girls to the Snip and Curl for their hair appointments, but hanging out here waiting for drunk cowboys was a new low.

But she could not sit at that ranch tonight, doing nothing. Counting the money she owed people, praying the condo sold well enough to clear her out of half her debt.

Watching her mother knit.

It was insane. And this…this ridiculous taxi business was her only alternative.

“You’re going to drive drunk cowboys home wearing that?”

“You sound like my mother.” She leaned back, confident in not only what she’d worn, but in the fact that she could handle a drunk cowboy. She’d been doing it for a number of years. Drunk men were sort of a specialty of hers. A product of Walter.

“Well, your mother is a smart woman.” He stood up from his seat, all smooth charm gone as he towered over her. “You want to drive people around, fine—you can drive my boys all you like. I’ll pay you. But this…” He jerked his thumb behind him at the crowd of men and women behind him. “This is asking for trouble.”

“You know, Jeremiah,” she said, her temper pricked by his high-handedness. “I am a grown woman.”

“Yeah, a beautiful, sexy grown woman who shouldn’t be alone in a car with half the men in here, even when they’re sober.”

The beautiful sexy thing she’d seen in his eyes when he looked at her, in his lips when they’d kissed. But it was sort of shocking to hear him say it. An electric current charged through her, waking her body up in a painful rush.

“You sure you want to talk about this?” she deflected. “I’d hate for it to get too deep and you break into hives.”

“If I do just tell me what color your underwear is.”

It was the devil, the devil in her, the devil in his eyes, the devil that didn’t understand what she was doing wasting her time with a taxi service. The devil made her lean forward, close enough to smell him, spicy and manly and clean. “What underwear?” she whispered.

His laughter boomed through the bar, turning everyone’s head. “You are a wicked, wicked woman, Lucy Alatore.”

She leaned back, satisfied and giddy with the power of the attraction between them. It was dangerous, she knew that, but…well, it was fun.

“So, this taxi business?”

“You won’t let go of this, will you?”

His grin was pure sex. Knowledgeable, wild sex. This was going to be fun.

“I’m working on some commitment issues.”

“Really? Me, too.”

“I knew we were alike.”

“I think I have the opposite commitment issue as you.” She folded the paper with a sharp crack.

“What exactly are you saying?” he asked, pretending to be wounded.

“I’ve done one job and one job only my entire life. It’s been jewelry and design since I was a teenager—over twenty years, Jeremiah.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, most people would love to have a calling. Hell, if I could still ride I’d be in the rodeo.”

“But I failed at that calling. Or it failed me, I don’t know. I just know it’s time for me to do something different.”

“What does that have to do with commitment? Or us?”

She leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand, looking him square in his beautiful eyes. “How many woman have you slept with?”

“No way.” He shook his head. “I will never tell you.”

“Because you’re embarrassed?”

“No. I mean, it’s not that many. Everyone thinks because a man knows how to talk to a woman he’s slept with half the population.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I haven’t.”

“I’ve slept with three men.”

He gaped at her. Shook his head as if he’d been punched in the ear. “Now, I’ve had a lot of sex with those men, but it’s only been three. I’m thirty-six years old.”

“You want to cat around a little? Sow some wild oats? Because if you’re taking applications—”

“Cat around? Who says that?”

He shrugged. “Desperate men.”

She stared at him, close enough to see the flecks of black in his brilliant blue eyes. Close enough to smell him, to taste him if she was bold enough to lean forward to press her lips to his. And she was plenty bold, but she wasn’t ready for that. She wanted more of this delicious possibility that seemed to surround Jeremiah Stone. She wanted more of the buildup, the ecstatic expectation. “When have you ever been desperate, Jeremiah?”

He touched her arm, just the tips of his fingers against the fragile skin at her wrist, and the night detonated around her; lust and excitement laced the air she breathed, filtered through her clothes to touch her skin with sparks.

“I have never been as desperate as I am right now.”

Enough,
she thought, and leaned forward to kiss him.

Lucy was situated right beside the hallway leading back to the bathrooms and one of the last standing pay phones in the world. A cowboy stepped out of the hallway into the bar, adjusting his zipper and belt buckle, shattering their little bubble of intimacy.

Jeremiah dropped her wrist just as the cowboy weaved toward them and Lucy had the suspicion she was looking at her first customer for the night.

“Hey.” Drunk Cowboy smiled lewdly. “You that woman giving guys a ride home?”

The way he said it was slightly skeevy, a little too close to ugly innuendo, but before she could say anything, Jeremiah was up and off his stool.

“Walk on by.” Jeremiah stepped close to the man in a way that was only aggressive.

“Just asking the woman a question about her business practices.” The guy laughed and she quickly leaned between the two men, smiling at the drunk cowboy.

“If Joey says you’ve had too much to drink to drive home, I can give you a ride. My rates double, though, if you’re an asshole.”

Drunk Cowboy was offended. “Are you calling me an asshole?”

“Not at all. But my friend might, so I’d keep going, just to be safe.”

Drunk Cowboy scowled at her and at Jeremiah, who bristled. The former rodeo champ saddled with his dead sister’s three children was a bad kind of powder keg and he didn’t need this kind of drama.

The man walked by and Jeremiah gaped at her. “You’re kidding with this, right?”