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  Holt held up a hand, palm out, in concession. “That wasn’t criticism. It was surprise.”

  She ducked her head, saying in a small voice, “You don’t think I pray? Maybe you don’t think I ought to.”

  “Of course I think you ought to pray,” he told her. “I think everyone ought to pray. Fact is, I was praying for help the very minute you first walked in the front door.”

  She looked as astounded as he felt, her spine going ramrod straight, lips parting. Then she laughed, falling backward. “You don’t say?”

  Holt couldn’t suppress a grin. “Hey, that’s my line.”

  She studied him for a long moment, her pale head tilting to one side, before she abruptly sat up, declaring, “That’s why you gave me the job, isn’t it?”

  He wondered how careful he ought to be in answering, then decided not very. She was too bright not to have tumbled to his misgivings already. “That was a big part of it,” he told her. “In this family, we believe in the power of prayer, so when I asked for help and then I looked up to find you standing there hoping for work, well, how do I argue with that?”

  Her gray eyes lost their focus for a moment as she thought that over, then sharpened again as she asked, “You said that was part of it. What’s the other part?”

  “Hap. He loves this place, believes he’s called to it, but he can’t keep it going alone, and I was at the end of my rope trying to help him.”

  She nodded, gaze averted. “I’m grateful no matter why you did it.”

  He thought she might say more, but when she didn’t, he did, just to keep the conversation going. “So where’d you learn to pray?” he asked.

  She shrugged and picked at a thread on the toe of her sock, which showed dazzlingly white against the dark bed cover. “My great-aunt was a praying woman.”

  “Not in church then,” he said as much to himself as her.

  She shot him a sharp glance, and then she lifted a shoulder. “My parents didn’t like church. I guess they figured they’d have to clean up their act if they went to church.”

  “And your husband?” He didn’t know why he’d asked; it just seemed important.

  “Wouldn’t even talk about it. His whole family thinks that church is just a scheme to get money out of them.”

  “Ah. I know those folks.” Holt slipped his hands into his pockets. “They’re the same ones who think the government ought to take care of the poor without bothering them about it.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d met the…my in-laws.”

  “Can’t say as I care to neither,” he said, shaking his head.

  “My sentiments exactly. The farther they are from me and Ace, the better I like it.”

  Holt’s radar pinged. So she disliked her in-laws, did she? “I figured Charlotte would feel that way about Ty’s family,” he said conversationally, “but slay me if they don’t fall all over themselves to please her. Could be because Ty’s different since he met her, or different since he met the Lord.”

  “So he confessed, did he?” Cara Jane asked, face drawn into a woeful expression.

  “Confessed?”

  Her expression suddenly blanked. “His sins.”

  “Oh, I can testify to that,” Holt told her happily. “I was there.”

  She seemed to wilt a bit, and it occurred to him that she must be tired. “I’ll go and let you get some rest yourself.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered, uncoiling her legs to get up and trail him to the door, “for everything.”

  “Carrying Ace over isn’t anything,” he said dismissively.

  “It is,” she insisted, “but I was thinking more about the help you’ve been giving me these past few days.”

  “That’s no big deal, either,” he told her magnanimously. “I just thought I should help out around here.”

  “I have to wonder why, though,” she said just as he opened the door. The chill that flushed over him had less to do with the frosty temperatures than the cold edge of her voice. “It’s not like I’m going to steal the curtains off the windows, you know.”

  He turned around in the open doorway, the hair on the back of his neck ruffling. “I never said you would.” But he’d thought it a possibility, and she knew it.

  Something flashed over her face, anger definitely, perhaps even hurt. “You,” she said, “can be such a rat.” Before he could even digest that, she put a hand in the middle of his chest and shoved. He reeled backward through the doorway, which she stepped into, blocking any re-entry. “You can tend to your own business from now on,” she snapped. “I don’t need your help anymore.” With that, she shut the door.

  He came within an inch of kicking it, but with Ace sleeping in the other room, he restrained himself. Confounded woman! She deserved his distrust, and he’d helped her in spite of it. He’d be boiled in oil before he helped her out again.

  Halfway across the tarmac, he realized that was exactly what she wanted, him out of her way. He stopped and looked back at her door.

  That woman read him like a book. He knew that she lied; she knew that he knew it.

  It was even more than that, though, and he’d be foolish not to admit it. Something sparked between them.

  For some surely stupid reason, that made him grin. By rights he ought to be appalled and plotting how to keep his distance while still somehow ferreting out her secrets, but that wasn’t going to happen. He’d be here tomorrow, whether she liked it or not, and maybe, just maybe, that electric spark which so unsettled the both of them would eventually set off an explosion big enough that he’d finally learn what secrets she held so close.

  Beyond that, he dared not even speculate.

  Chapter Eight

  “I s that an order?” Cara asked, keeping her tone light. She leaned slightly sideways, her hands linked together around Ace’s waist to help balance his weight as he straddled her hip.

  After almost a full week of working with Holt each afternoon, despite her every attempt to persuade him otherwise, she’d come to realize that his bark was definitely worse than his bite and that perhaps he did not actively dislike her, after all. That did not mean that he trusted her or that she could afford to trust him, and considering how much she was coming to actually like him, it seemed as necessary as ever for her to keep her distance. Yet here he stood on a chilly Saturday night, expecting to take her to dinner. She felt duty-bound to try to get out of it.

  “No, it’s not an order,” he answered flippantly. “I don’t give the orders around here, but that’s not the point.”

  Cara rolled her eyes. “What is the point?”

  “For one thing, you haven’t been off this property since you got here.”

  “That’s not true. I went to church last Sunday and to the park the Sunday before that, and last night I walked over to Booker’s Store to buy diapers.”

  “You know that doesn’t count,” he retorted. “You need to get out, and you need to eat tonight, too, don’t you? I certainly do.” He pressed a hand to the center of his forest-green shirt, his eyes glowing deep olive in the muted light cast by the fixture outside her room.

  “I can eat here. I’ve got food in the fridge.” Bologna and yogurt.

  “You’re not really going to make me eat alone, are you?” he wheedled. “I don’t like eating alone, and you won’t like seeing the look of disappointment on Hap’s face when he finds out you refused to take your turn for a Saturday night out.”

  She grimaced at that, instantly capitulating. “Not fair.”

  Holt laughed and stepped into the room as she turned and carried Ace deeper into the warmth. “Granddad has a way of worming into your affections, doesn’t he?”

  Cara nodded, resigned. “I mean, really, who could not like Hap Jefford?”

  Holt gently pushed the door closed. “You’ll get no argument from me on that score. Grandma always said the goodness of the Lord shines through him.”

  Cara thought about that, aware of a wistful envy, which she p
ushed away at once. Wishing did no good. She’d learned that years, decades, ago.

  “Now,” Holt said, clapping his hands together, “what do you need? Coats? Diaper bag? A little arm-twisting?”

  She laughed because he was being so charming and his usual high-handed self at the same time, a very dangerous combination. Oh, why hadn’t she pled a headache or some other illness? But she knew the answer to that. Her lies were already eating her alive; she just couldn’t bear another.

  “Come on,” he coaxed, “the Watermelon Patch is waiting.”

  The Watermelon Patch, she’d learned, was the local catfish restaurant. Justus called it a “dive,” but even he vowed that better food could not be found around these parts. She acknowledged, if only to herself, a certain desire to see the place. Besides, she never won when it came to Holt. It irritated her, but the man always seemed to get his way. Maybe because she really didn’t have the heart to fight him. Shying away from the thought, she waved a hand toward the dresser and the small satchel atop it.

  “Um, I’d better stick an extra diaper into the bag.” She looked down at her jeans and rumpled T-shirt. “And change my clothes.”

  “Naw, you’re fine,” Holt insisted, grabbing up the diaper bag.

  She brought her free hand to her hip and gave him a blatant once-over. “I don’t see you going out in your work clothes.”

  He set down the diaper bag and lifted both hands in surrender. “Okay. All right. Fine. Change, by all means. I’ll watch Ace.”

  Miffed despite getting her way for once, she snatched her car keys from the bedside table and tossed them at him. He trapped them with both hands in midair.

  “Move the car seat instead.”

  He tipped his hat, lips quirking. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It goes in the backseat,” she lectured, “and make sure it’s anchored properly.”

  “I’m on it.” This time he pushed his hat down more firmly on his head. “Any other orders before I go?”

  She just rolled her eyes at him. He went out the door grinning. She couldn’t keep a smile from breaking out on her own face—until she remembered that she had nothing suitable to wear.

  Holt had the child safety seat securely anchored in the center of the back bench of his double-cab pickup inside of five minutes and spent the next ten pacing back and forth beside the truck while his stomach rumbled.

  Spinning Cara Jane’s keys around on his index finger, he had to wonder why she never drove her car. Not only had she walked to church last Sunday—in sandals, no less—she’d admitted just minutes ago to having walked all the way over to Booker’s Grocery west of downtown to buy diapers.

  It had been spitting rain last night in near freezing temperatures, and thinking of her and Ace out on foot in that weather made the hair stand up on the back of Holt’s neck. No matter what route she might have taken, at least half a block of it lacked a sidewalk, which meant she’d have had to walk on the narrow shoulder of the street, carrying Ace. All it would have taken was one careless driver, or even a good driver with a slick tire, and they could have had a catastrophe too horrible to contemplate.

  The door opened and Cara Jane walked through it, Ace on her hip and the diaper bag hanging from her shoulder by the strap. Holt nearly swallowed his tongue.

  She wore slim, pink pants, cropped at mid-calf, with a purple tank top, those flirty purple sandals and her denim jacket. With her hair tied back with a purple scarf and narrow gold hoops dangling from her earlobes, she looked like she’d just walked off a movie screen. It struck him suddenly how tan she was. Even now, in the dead of winter, her skin glowed pale gold.

  At some point in her not-too-distant past, Holt mused, Cara Jane must have spent time in a tanning bed. He supposed that in the rainy northwest a tanning bed might not be such a bad idea to keep the doldrums at bay. Still, something about that scenario struck him as patently un-Cara Jane.

  The notion flitted right out of his head as she strode toward him. She looked so good that just keeping a stupid grin off his face required all of his concentration. As she neared the truck with Ace, Holt dashed over and opened the back door for her. Then, realizing that she’d have to climb up inside to lift Ace into his seat, Holt promptly took over that chore, only to learn that buckling a kid into a safety seat required a degree in puzzle solving, especially when said child objected.

  Cara Jane marched around the rear end of the truck, dropped the bag onto the floorboard and climbed up into the backseat on the other side to show him how it was done. While holding Ace in the seat with her forearm, she got the harness over his plump little shoulders, fit two pieces of metal together with one hand, positioned the latch with the other and somehow connected all three.

  As soon as he heard that telltale click, Ace stopped struggling and settled down.

  “Now you’re cooperative,” Holt teased, nipping the end of the boy’s nose with the knuckles of two fingers. Ace favored him with a broad grin. “Whoa! Is that a tooth breaking his gums?”

  “It is,” Cara Jane confirmed in an I-told-you-so voice. She started backing out of the truck cab. Seeing how difficult that could be in those tall shoes, Holt jumped down and jogged around to help her, but she hit the ground just as he got there. She stumbled, her shoulder bumping him in the chest.

  “Oops.” He automatically closed his arms around her, steadying them both.

  Instant awareness shot through him and apparently her, too, because they practically repelled each other, bouncing apart as if they’d both been hit with cattle prods. They each sought refuge in pretense, her smoothing her hair, him repositioning his hat.

  Their aplomb somewhat restored, they both turned toward the truck, only to reach for the door handle in the same instant. The thing might have been electrified so quickly did they yank their hands back.

  Finally, reaching wide around her, Holt gingerly opened the door and stepped back, hovering uncertainly until she’d climbed up into the front seat. He made his way around to the driver’s side, where he paused long enough to close his eyes and blow out a steeling breath before getting this undoubtedly ill-advised venture under way.

  Cara looked around at the ramshackle building, marveling that it hadn’t fallen down around their heads already. A “dive,” indeed. This place—which actually did sit in the midst of a currently barren watermelon patch about a half mile outside town—had been cobbled together with incongruent bits and pieces, some metal, some wood, some cement, some plastic. Nothing matched, not even the shingles on the roof.

  The rough floors waved unevenly across heights varying by inches. Tables and chairs had been crammed into every available square inch of space, each and every one of them occupied.

  The waitress, a hard-looking bottle blonde named Joanie, stuck their small party at a wobbly table that sat dead center of the passage between the two dining rooms, one of which contained an old-fashioned glass counter where the proprietor collected payment. Traffic had to squeeze by them, but at least the spot came with a high chair.

  Ace loved the busy, humming place. He banged on the table with both hands, thrilled that he could make it tip, unless Holt, who sat across from him and on Cara’s right, leaned on it with his elbows. He indulged Ace by keeping his hands in his lap. Cara’s concern hinged more on her son’s safety than his pleasure, however.

  “I only see the one exit,” she pointed out, leaning close to Holt in an effort not to be overheard, if one could be overheard in all this din. People talked and laughed, clinking their dinnerware and shouting across the crowded room at one another.

  “That’s because there is only one exit,” he said in a false whisper.

  “But what if there’s a fire?” she muttered, an event that looked not only possible but entirely likely to Cara, given the smoke that belched from the stack pipe outside and the number of people crammed into the building.

  Holt spread his hands, grinning at her. “Then there would be lots of exits. Cara Jane, Ace could punch his way throug
h that wall right there.” She had to admit Holt had a point. “Besides,” he went on, “half the windows in the building would fall right out if you so much as tapped on them.”

  Someone behind her chuckled and exclaimed, “It’s not a matter of if a fire breaks out, little lady, it’s a matter of when. That’s why they serve the drinks in these big old jugs.”

  “That’s right,” Joanie concurred, plunking down quart jars of iced tea. “In case of a fire, you just put it out your own selves with these.”

  The room bubbled with laughter. The locals obviously didn’t worry overmuch about building or fire codes. Cara consoled herself with the idea that this place had been around for over thirty years, or so Hap’s friends had said.

  Joanie dried her hands on the seat of her skintight jeans. “How many?”

  Cara looked up at the waitress in confusion. The woman had drawn her shortish hair into a ponytail so tight that it slanted her eyes. “How many what?”

  “Pieces of fish.”

  “I’ll have four,” Holt announced.

  “Not you,” Joanie said, swatting a hand sideways. “I know how many you want. You always have the maximum.”

  “And then he eats everything else that’s leftover in the building,” someone who obviously knew Holt well put in.

  Holt sighed loudly while everyone else laughed at his expense, but Cara could tell that he didn’t really mind. He sat among friends here.

  Joanie looked at Cara expectantly.

  “How big are the pieces?” Cara asked.

  “You’re teeny. I’ll just bring you two,” Joanie decided, looking her over.

  “Three,” Holt countermanded. “I’ll eat the extra.”

  Joanie cut her heavily lined eyes at him. “You sure you don’t want to just go the limit on both plates?”