Baby Makes a Match Read online

  Hilda nodded toward the table, saying, “You can thank your wife for that.”

  Surprised, Chandler leaned sideways a bit to look around Hilda, who was almost as wide as she was tall. Bethany sat at the table in baggy denim shorts and a blue sleeveless top, her face freshly scrubbed and heartbreakingly beautiful. As she tilted her pretty head, smiling shyly, her dark, sleek hair swung lushly about her slender shoulders. Chandler’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Good morning.”

  “Morning,” he managed.

  “You’re too quick,” Hilda told him, plunking the pan of biscuits onto a hot pad in the center of the table. “The missus here was going to bring you breakfast in bed.”

  Chandler froze, stunned to think of his pregnant wife serving him breakfast in bed. Hilda trundled off to take up a red enamel tray from the enormous metal worktable that took up a significant amount of floor space in the cavernous room. Carrying the tray to the table, she placed it in front of the chair across from Bethany’s then forked up two tall, flaky biscuits.

  “Tray was all ready,” she said. “It was just waiting on this. You saved her the trip.”

  Hilda jerked her head, all but ordering Chandler to sit. He walked over and sat, deeply touched, and surveyed the contents of the tray: butter and Hilda’s famous cinnamon fig preserves, cantaloupe and a cup of fragrant black coffee, plus those two high biscuits. His mouth watered.

  “Y’all didn’t have to go to so much trouble,” he said, reaching for the butter knife.

  “No trouble on my part,” Hilda pointed out, waddling off toward the stove.

  Chandler looked at Bethany. “Thank you, especially for the coffee. But you shouldn’t be serving anyone breakfast in bed.”

  “The dumbwaiter comes up right outside our door,” Bethany reminded him quietly, looking down at her own empty plate. She reached for a tall glass of milk beside it. “It’s just that you looked so tired last night, and I…” She let the sentence dwindle away with a glance.

  “She has an ulterior motive,” Hilda announced loudly. “She wants to go with you today.”

  Chandler felt his eyebrows jump toward his hairline as Bethany tucked her chin, her cheeks pinkening. His pleasure at the request dismayed him. All the more reason, he told himself, to maintain some distance between the two of them. Pity he couldn’t seem to do it. At least he managed to keep his tone level and noncommittal as he went about breaking open the hot biscuits. “That so? Not much of interest going on with me today. Thought I’d clean the horse stalls and trailer.”

  Bethany reached for the pan and transferred a biscuit to her own plate, keeping her gaze carefully averted. “I don’t mind. I like it out at Dovey’s place.”

  “Awful hot outside.”

  “I won’t melt.”

  Chandler buttered his biscuits and slathered them with fig jelly, trying to marshal his defenses. “Wouldn’t be much for you to do.”

  She looked up, hope softening her breathtaking blue eyes. “I can hold a water hose, you know.”

  Chandler tried to bolster his objections. “Horses can be dangerous. Given your condition, do you think it’s wise to take such a chance?”

  “Cindy’s around horses all day every day,” she argued gently.

  He couldn’t refute that. Besides, he had absolutely no defense against that pleading tone. He had no defenses against her. In truth, he didn’t even know why he bothered resisting. She charmed him, had since he’d first laid eyes on her perched there on that stool in the diner. He gave up.

  “Okay, come along, then.”

  Bethany beamed as brightly as if he’d given her a big, shiny diamond, which he’d have liked very much to do. Fat chance of that. Even if he could have afforded it, he doubted that Bethany would have taken it. She’d probably be happier with her freedom.

  “I’ll pack you a picnic lunch,” Hilda announced, not even bothering to pretend that she hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  “That’s wonderful!” Bethany exclaimed, spreading her smile around the room, from Chandler to Hilda and back again. “Thank you.”

  Still beaming, she smeared jam on half a biscuit and stuffed it into her mouth. Chandler shook his head. Who’d have thought watching a woman smile and eat a biscuit could be so fascinating?

  He downed his own biscuits in two bites each, then reached for three more. Bethany finished a second biscuit and started to rise, saying she would help Hilda make their lunch, at which point Hilda pointed a butcher knife at her and ordered, “Sit yourself down and finish your milk and fruit, missy. You’re growing a babe there.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Obviously tickled, Bethany shared a smile with Chandler and dutifully gobbled up her melon before gulping down her milk. Finished, she dabbed daintily at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and sedately rose.

  She looked ridiculously gorgeous in her ragged, knee-length denim shorts, form-fitting blue sleeveless top and tall red boots. Chandler remembered the way the baby had moved beneath his hand last night, and it was all he could do not to pull Bethany onto his lap and cradle them both. He knew that it was insane to take her with him. Keeping his distance would most assuredly be the safer, wiser course, but it was beyond him to deny her this or anything else she seemed to want. If only she wanted him.

  Oh, Lord, help me, he prayed silently as he finished his breakfast and she went to help Hilda put up their lunch. I’m finding that my father was right all along. I’m not a very wise man.

  Worse, he wasn’t even sure that he wanted the wisdom that he so obviously lacked, for he had the sad suspicion that it would come at the price of a shattered heart.

  “Can I ask you something?” Bethany said, sitting sideways on a saddle atop a low rack in the back of his pickup truck.

  Chandler smiled to himself. She’d been asking questions all morning, while he forked out and swept the stalls, spread new bedding and fed, watered and groomed the horses. She’d helped in small ways, passing him pitchfork or broom, brushes or combs, pulling bedding from the bales. He’d made sure that he kept himself between her and the horses, but she couldn’t resist reaching around him to dispense pats and rubs. Neither he nor the horses minded a bit.

  He’d asked her if she’d ever thought about riding, and she’d replied that she’d always wanted to learn but had never had the chance. He’d blurted that he would teach her after the baby came, and she’d clapped her hands in glee. Praying that he’d have the chance to follow through, he spread an old blanket over the tailgate and bed of his truck, which he’d backed into the barn earlier.

  His stomach growled like a surly wolf. Perching on the edge of the tailgate, he twisted around to reach into the cooler that Hilda had packed for them. After rummaging about for a moment, he came up with an apple and a bottle of water.

  “Ask away,” he said, biting into the apple.

  “Don’t you ever worry about getting hurt?”

  He lowered the apple, the bottle of water in his other fist. “No, not really.”

  “Not even when you’re leaping off a horse to grab a full-grown steer by the horns?”

  “I don’t leap,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s sort of a slide out of the saddle.”

  “Leap, slide, whatever. It’s a full-grown animal and it has horns!”

  He pushed back his hat with the cap end of the water bottle, touched that she seemed concerned for him. “Look, everyone gets hurt at some point. That’s rodeo. That’s sports in general. I couldn’t compete at all if I wasn’t willing to risk injury. That said, I do everything I can to protect myself, which is why I practice all the time, why I keep my gear in tip-top shape, why I concentrate and constantly work on my technique.” He tapped the bottle against his knee and told her what he hadn’t told anyone else, “That’s why the last thing I do before I enter the arena is pray.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a praying man when we first met,” she commented gently.

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know. But it’s always been the
case. I—I guess I just thought I couldn’t show my faith, that it made me…I don’t know, less tough, maybe.” He shook his head at his own stupidity. “And to be perfectly honest, I guess it has to do with my dad, too. You know, that PK thing.”

  “PK?”

  “Preacher’s kid.”

  “Ah. Yes, I can see that. I actually think that’s part of the problem on your dad’s end, too. He’s a minister, so his kids should do more noble things than everyone else’s.”

  Chandler sent her a surprised look. “You figured that out, did you?”

  She shrugged and said, “Frankly, I think he’s a little hurt that none of his children followed him into the ministry. I mean, he says and, I’m sure, believes that everyone has to be true to his or her own calling, but it would be a natural thing to secretly hope that someone would take up the mantle, so to speak.”

  Suddenly Chandler remembered talking with Drew about their sons one day roping together. He’d thought then how cool it would be if his son should follow in his footsteps. Why hadn’t he realized that his own father might feel the same?

  “Oh, wow,” Chandler said. “I never thought of that. And he never said anything.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Bethany remarked. “He’d see it as putting himself in God’s place. He always says everyone is called to something, but that we must be sure it’s God’s voice we hear and not our own or someone else’s.”

  Chandler nodded at that. He’d heard the same all his life, and he’d always firmly believed that he was meant to rodeo, at least for now. Later, he hoped to be able to concentrate on raising and training horses. He’d tried to explain that to his father, but Hub hadn’t understood.

  “You’re talking about occupation,” he would say. “I’m talking about ministry. What is your ministry?”

  Now, suddenly, Chandler wondered the same thing himself. If God meant him to compete in rodeo, and Chandler believed that He did, then what was the purpose? Where was his ministry in that?

  He thought of Drew’s openness about his own faith, and it hit Chandler that for years now his focus had been on winning and, if he were honest, rubbing his father’s nose in it, not in living for God. Had he been half as out there as Drew, no telling who he might have encouraged or influenced. He might even have made a difference in Pat Kreger’s life.

  Sharply stung, Chandler bowed his head right then and there, without so much as a word of explanation to Bethany, and silently told God how sorry he was and how wrong he’d been.

  “I want to be the man that You would have me be, Lord. I want to be the husband, the father, the son, the brother, even the cowboy that You would have me be. So no more ignoring Your plans in favor of my own, no more living for that next win. Now I just want to live for You.”

  That, he suddenly realized, meant doing something he had thus far avoided. He had admit to his father what had happened with Kreger and apologize for all those times he’d refused to listen. Only then could he really start getting right with God.

  He looked up to find Bethany kneeling in front of him, concern drawing a line between her eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked gently.

  He cleared his throat. “Getting there.”

  She tilted her head as if thinking that through. He smiled, feeling lighter, brighter, and lifted the half-eaten apple.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  She sat back on her heels. “I am, actually.”

  “Let’s dig in.”

  She shifted around and reached into the cooler, coming up with chicken salad sandwiches, hardboiled eggs and crunchy slices of peppered cucumber, along with a wealth of tasty accompaniments. They feasted, rhapsodizing about the food.

  It seemed to Chandler as if they were pretending to be what they wanted the world to think them to be, the average married couple, and he wondered what might have happened if they’d met the way people normally met. Would they have fallen in love and married? He doubted that he’d have done more than look her over, think her extremely attractive and turn away, intent on the next contest, never knowing what he’d lost. He was glad, heartbreakingly glad, that he hadn’t missed knowing her, even if it was bound to end for him in disappointment and pain. Not that he had any right to ask more of her.

  The woman was giving him a son, for pity’s sake, literally giving him a son! He felt like an ungrateful fool for wanting more from her.

  But he did.

  Oh, he did.

  Even so, he would humbly accept God’s will for his life, whatever it might be. That lesson, at least, he had finally learned.

  Chapter Eleven

  The newlyweds returned to the house late Monday afternoon filthy and exhausted. Magnolia regretted calling them into the parlor, but like her sisters, she had been eager to know if their outing together had gone well. Unfortunately it was impossible to tell under all that grime.

  “Would you like tea, dears?” she asked, waving a hand at the tray on the table.

  “Uh, no,” Chandler replied, wiping perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. He glanced at Bethany, adding, “not for me, anyway.”

  The sisters were under no illusions about this marriage. They didn’t know the details of Chandler and Bethany’s relationship, but not even Odelia bought the notion that Chandler had actually fathered Bethany’s baby. The aunts knew their nephew better than that and couldn’t understand how his own father did not. She supposed it had to do with the dynamics of the parent-and-child relationship. Whatever the truth of Chandler and Bethany’s situation, it was clear to all three of his aunts that Chandler had married Bethany for other reasons, reasons that had to do with that oily attorney Haddon.

  Odelia insisted that Chandler had somehow rescued Bethany from “a fate worse than death.” Magnolia scoffed, but secretly she wasn’t sure that Odelia was entirely wrong.

  Regardless of the reasons for the marriage, however, it was evident to all of them that things were not quite as they should be between the young couple. Carol had reported that they slept in separate bedrooms, and neither seemed particularly overjoyed with their situation. It was good to see them spending time together, though, even if the results were rather, well, fragrant. In fact, if she was not mistaken, Odelia was pinching her nose behind her hanky.

  “No tea for me, either,” Bethany said, holding out her hands to display streaks of dirt on her forearms. “All I want is a shower.”

  “Obi-usly, ewe two hab been busy,” Odelia said from behind her hanky.

  “You noticed,” Chandler quipped. “We were cleaning the horse trailer. It was dirtier than I thought. Boots are clean, anyway. We hit them with the water hose. Otherwise, I think I have more stable than skin on me right now. So, see you later, if that’s okay.”

  “Go, go,” Hypatia said with a chuckle.

  They went out into the foyer and up the stairs, taking their odor with them.

  Odelia lowered her handkerchief, the tip of her nose bright pink in contrast to the bright orange pantsuit that she wore, complete with earrings of fake, orange-slice candies. “I thought they went on a picnic,” she said petulantly.

  “Hilda only said that she’d packed them a picnic lunch,” Magnolia pointed out.

  “Well, picnic or cleaning a horse trailer, whatever they were doing, they were doing it together,” Hypatia said.

  Odelia brightened. “That’s true.”

  “It doesn’t mean that we don’t still have praying to do,” Magnolia warned.

  Hypatia sighed. “I fear you’re right. The marriage may have come before the romance in this case.”

  “Let’s hope the baby doesn’t, too,” Odelia muttered.

  Magnolia gasped. It was the most perceptive thing she’d heard her sister say yet.

  “Thanks for taking me with you today,” Bethany said. The day had been joy and agony for her, joy because they had worked together like a team and agony because she wanted so much more with him, so much that she feared she would never have.

  �
�Thanks for the help,” he returned. He climbed the stairs a step behind her, as if to catch her should she fall. Of course, that could be wishful thinking on her part. He might just be too tired to keep up. The man had worked like a Trojan today.

  “I didn’t do much.”

  “You did enough.”

  She smiled. “It was fun.”

  “Well, if that’s your idea of fun,” he drawled, “I’d hate to see your idea of hard work.”

  She laughed. He was the one who had worked hard, and she believed wholeheartedly that he’d enjoyed every minute of it.

  Something, however, had changed after their conversation about his dad. She wasn’t sure what, really, but she knew that Chandler seemed both more relaxed and more pensive afterward. He’d scrubbed the horse trailer with silent doggedness, yet she’d sensed that he was somewhat distracted.

  Once in the suite they went their separate ways.

  Bethany took a long, hot shower, dried her hair and managed a little nap before dinner. Chandler came to the table freshly scrubbed but very quiet. Even the aunties noticed.

  “Chandler, dear,” Hypatia asked at one point, “are you well?”

  “Getting there,” he replied with an absent smile.

  It was the same answer that he’d given Bethany earlier in the day, and she could only wonder what exactly that meant. He disappeared into his room as soon as they returned to the suite after dinner, and she didn’t see him again until the morning. Even then he seemed preoccupied, so she was surprised when, instead of dropping her off, he parked the truck and got out to walk up to the door of the Single Parent Ministry building with her.

  It didn’t end there, though. Not only did he open the door for her, he followed her inside. Glancing back warily, she carried her handbag to the reception desk and dropped it into a drawer. Chandler, meanwhile, stood watching…and waiting, it seemed.

  Calling out a cheery “Good morning!” Hub appeared from the hallway. He froze when he saw Chandler there.