Sweet Tea at Sunrise

by Sherryl Woods

  Sarah chuckled. “Really? On whom?”

  “Her kids. It seems I need to pass muster before they’ll let her stay on in the guest house, just yards from my evil clutches.”

  “They’re wise to be cautious,” she said.

  “Hey, I’m a good guy.”

  “Mostly,” she conceded. “But I meant in general. After all, a lot of men who made the kind of offer you made would have an ulterior motive.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “I actually believe that.”

  “So, you’ll help? You’ll come to dinner?”

  She made a show of hesitating, even though she already knew she’d wind up giving in. What he wanted to do for Liz was a really sweet thing. “I hate to take time away from the kids on the weekend,” she said.

  “Let Walter step up. It would be a refreshing change.”

  She frowned at his sarcasm. “Why do you dislike him so much? You really don’t even know him.”

  “I’ve seen the aftereffects of what he did to you,” he said flatly. “Never mind. I don’t want to get sidetracked by that discussion. It’s a couple of hours. If you don’t want to do it for me, think about Liz. This matters to her. She really wants to stay on here, and this is the only way she can do that. She needs our support to pull it off.”

  When he put it that way, how could she say no? “Okay, I’ll do it. Just don’t start acting all territorial and weird on me. I’ll call you on it.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, though the twinkle in his eyes belied his solemn tone.

  She frowned at him. “I mean it, Travis, don’t try taking advantage of the situation.”

  He sketched an exaggerated cross across his chest. “You have my word,” he told her.

  So far his word had been good enough. In fact, it suddenly occurred to her that when push came to shove, Travis was more reliable than many of the men she knew. It came as an eye-opening revelation that despite all the flip words and iffy reputation, he truly was someone she could count on. She’d have to give that some thought one of these days, preferably when she wasn’t feeling particularly vulnerable.

  It was probably for the best, too, if she didn’t do it while they were half-pretending to be a couple. She might be tempted to start believing in the illusion.

  Mary Vaughn knew that the sale of Liz Johnson’s house to Travis depended on what happened at this Sunday dinner she’d pulled together, but for the life of her she couldn’t entirely figure out the dynamics.

  For one thing, Sarah Price was supposedly with Travis in some capacity that wasn’t entirely clear. Liz Johnson’s children, most of whom had been in school with Mary Vaughn and Sonny, seemed to be regarding Travis with distrust and each other with barely banked hostility.

  “This is fun,” Sonny muttered under his breath when an awkward silence had dragged on a little too long. “Why are we here again?”

  “Because if this goes smoothly, I’m going to get to close the deal for the house this afternoon. I have the paperwork in the car.”

  “Is it going smoothly?” he asked. “Because you sure couldn’t prove it by me.”

  Mary Vaughn shrugged. “Me, either, to be honest, but it’s too soon to throw in the towel.”

  “What we obviously need is some excitement to break the tension,” Sonny said.

  In the car business, Sonny was an expert at making jovial chit-chat. Mary Vaughn nudged him. “Talk to Charlie. See if you can get him to relax instead of sitting there scowling at Travis.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Sonny said.

  He’d barely turned in his chair when Mary Vaughn gasped and clutched her stomach.

  “Sonny!” she said urgently, her voice tight with anxiety.

  He turned back, took one look at her and turned pale. “Is it the baby?”

  Unable to speak, she nodded, terrified by the cramping sensation in her stomach. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t good.

  Sonny was on his feet at once. “Folks, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us. Mary Vaughn’s not feeling well. I need to get her to the hospital.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she explained. “I’m so sorry to spoil the dinner. Liz, thank you for including us.” The polite words were barely out of her mouth when she gasped again as what felt like a powerful contraction hit her.

  She looked toward Sonny for reassurance. He scooped her into his arms at once. “Stay calm, sweetheart. I’ll have you at the hospital in no time.”

  Travis immediately came around the table. “I’ll drive you,” he told Sonny. “You need to sit in back with Mary Vaughn and keep her calm.”

  Sarah was right beside him. “Take Sonny’s car. It’s an SUV. It’ll be more comfortable than your convertible,” she told Travis. “I’ll follow in your car, so you’ll have a way to get back home later.”

  Mary Vaughn hated being in the center of so much commotion, but her fear was greater than her embarrassment. “Please hurry,” she whispered. “I can’t lose this baby. I just can’t.” Even though she was only nearing the end of her first trimester, she’d started envisioning her life with this new baby to raise. Sonny was counting on it even more than she was.

  “You’re not going to,” Liz assured her, her voice calm, her expression comforting as she gave Mary Vaughn’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

  But even with Liz’s reassuring words echoing in her head, it wasn’t until Sonny had settled her in the backseat with her head in his lap that Mary Vaughn began to calm down. Travis was driving at a speed that probably would have made her dizzy had she known what it was. All that mattered, though, was that they reached the emergency room in record time.

  Sonny carried her inside, barking orders at nurses, orderlies and doctors until she was in a cubicle with half a dozen people dancing attendance. Only then did she see the panic in his eyes.

  Even so, he clung to her hand and kept reassuring her that it was going to be okay. His soothing tone belied the anxiety she could read in his expression.

  Finally a nurse took him gently by the shoulder and guided him from the area. “Let us do our jobs. She’s in good hands.”

  Mary Vaughn barely heard the buzz all around her, but the pain eventually stopped and she felt herself relaxing. Gazing into the doctor’s eyes, she finally had the nerve to ask the question that had been on her mind since that first awful pain had struck.

  “Am I going to lose the baby?”

  “Not if I can help it,” he assured her. “What happened today wasn’t unusual, but at your age this is a high risk pregnancy. Add in the fact that your blood pressure’s running quite high and you’re already at risk for preeclampsia. I’m going to recommend bed rest to see if we can control the blood pressure.”

  Bed rest didn’t sound so bad, especially if it meant the baby would be okay. “For how long?”

  “That depends. It could be a few days or a few weeks, or it could be for the remainder of your pregnancy. We don’t want to take chances.”

  Mary Vaughn just stared at him. She couldn’t imagine being confined to bed for a day, much less six months. Worse, though, was the thought of not carrying this precious baby to term.

  “Let’s get your husband back in here and talk about what needs to happen next,” he said.

  Sonny listened intently to everything the doctor said, then nodded. “Not a problem.”

  “Six months,” she said, overwhelmed by the thought. “How will I manage?”

  “We don’t know for sure if it will need to be that long,” the doctor reminded her. “Let’s take this one day at a time and see where we are in a few days.”

  Sonny gave her an encouraging smile. “And if it turns out to be longer than a few days, Rory Sue will stay home with you. I’ve already called her. She’s on her way.”

  “We can’t ask her to sit around the house all day taking care of me,” Mary Vaughn protested.

  “Yes, we can,” Sonny said flatly. “And she’ll help you out with your real estate business, just the
way you planned, so you won’t be fretting about that.”

  “But she needs training,” Mary Vaughn objected. “She’s not qualified to work on her own.”

  “Which is why she’ll do the legwork and you’ll close the deals from home,” he said. “We’ll make this work, sweetheart. Nothing is going to happen to you or our baby. That’s a promise.”

  He sounded so confident that she finally let herself relax. If Sonny made a promise, she could count on it. Resting her hand protectively on her stomach, she finally fell asleep knowing she and her baby were in good hands.

  After the unexpected commotion at Liz’s dinner on Sunday and the rush to the hospital, Travis and Sarah had driven home in silence. Only when they were a few miles from her house did he turn to her.

  “That was something, wasn’t it?” he said, still shaken. “Do you think the baby will be all right?”

  “Sonny says the doctor is very hopeful,” Sarah responded. “I didn’t even realize Mary Vaughn was pregnant.”

  “She’d mentioned it to me when I started house-hunting. She’s so excited about it. I’d hate to see something happen.”

  “Bed rest, especially if it turns out to be for the duration of her pregnancy, is going to make her crazy,” Sarah said. “I can’t even imagine such a thing, and I’m not half as hyper as Mary Vaughn. You were very good to jump in like that and offer to drive. Sonny, for all of his determination to stay calm for her sake, looked like he was about two seconds from coming unglued.”

  Travis nodded. “I know. No way could I take a chance he’d wrap the car around a tree trying to race her to the hospital. If it had been up to me, though, I’d have called an ambulance.”

  “With a volunteer squad, it can take too long. Unless it’s an accident or somebody’s critical, we have a tendency to just head for the hospital on our own.”

  “But at least the EMTs would know what to do.”

  “Stop fretting over it,” Sarah told him. “Everything went just fine, thanks to you and Sonny.”

  “I think we need to campaign on the air for a full-time rescue squad,” Travis persisted. “I don’t ever want to be in a position like this again.”

  “Go for it,” she encouraged. “But you might want to discuss the budget realities with Tom so you don’t wind up pitting yourself against your cousin.”

  He nodded. “Good point.” He turned and met her gaze. “I’m going to stop by Liz’s and fill her in. Want to come, or should I drop you off?”

  She glanced at her watch. “I should get home,” she said.

  He pulled to a stop in front of her house a few minutes later. “I’m glad you were there today, for all of it. Thanks.”

  She smiled. “It was definitely an interesting afternoon. I hope everything works out the way you want it to for the house.”

  Travis nodded. He should have let her go then, but instead he found himself reaching out and putting a hand on her arm.

  “Sarah?”

  Startled, she met his gaze. Before she could do or say something that would stop him, he leaned across the console and kissed her, just a quick brush of his lips over hers.

  “Thanks again,” he murmured, resisting the idea of kissing her again, resisting the need that was humming through him.

  “Sure,” she said, obviously disconcerted.

  She left the car slowly, so slowly that he wondered if she wanted him to ask her to stay. As she walked toward the house, he saw her lift her hand and touch her fingers to her lips. It was a fleeting gesture, so brief he easily might have missed it, but it told him everything he needed to know. Her feelings for him were growing, just as his were for her.

  And one of these days they were going to have to do something about them…if they dared.

  For the better part of a month after Mary Vaughn’s trip to the hospital and Travis’s tender kiss, Sarah was more skittish than ever around the station. She knew with a hundred percent certainty that she was in serious danger of falling for a man who was all wrong for her.

  If she’d only been dealing with her own emotions, she might have been able to keep things in check, but Travis seemed to have sensed some kind of shift as well. He’d been asking her out just about daily. Regular as clockwork, he’d linger around the studio while she was on the air, then suggest lunch or a walk to get ice cream or a cool drink at Sullivan’s. Not even the fact that she’d turned him down every single time seemed to daunt him.

  When she brought Tommy out for T-ball at the urging of Jeanette and discovered that Travis was coaching the team, she almost turned right around and walked away from the field. Travis caught her before she could reach her car.

  His eyes locked with hers, he asked, “Running away, as usual, sugar?”

  Sarah bristled. “Of course not.”

  “Then why’d you leave without signing Tommy up to play?”

  Tommy regarded Travis with curiosity. “Play ball?”

  Travis nodded. “Yep, that’s what we’re going to do. Every Saturday.”

  Tommy turned his precious little face up to look at her. “Can I, Mommy? Please?”

  Just as Travis had clearly anticipated, there was no way she could say no now. “Of course you can play,” she told her son, saving her scowl for Travis. He returned it with a perfectly innocent expression.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look,” she said sourly. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

  “Giving your son a chance to spend some time outdoors with kids his own age learning to play a game?”

  “Manipulating me to spend more time around you,” she corrected, then conceded grudgingly, “And that other stuff, too, I suppose.”

  As they strolled back toward the field, Tommy spotted another boy from their block. “Mommy, can I go? I wanna play with Jimmy.”

  Since they were only a few feet away, she let him go, even though it left her alone with Travis.

  When she would have walked off and left him, he caught her hand. “Hold on a sec. Mind telling me why I make you so nervous? I could have sworn we were making progress.”

  “Progress toward what?”

  “Building some kind of a relationship,” he said.

  Her gaze narrowed. “We can’t have a relationship.”

  “Because?”

  She scrambled for a believable excuse. “Because we work together. You’re my boss. I don’t think we should muddy the waters by having any kind of personal relationship. Didn’t we establish all this months ago when I first came to work for you?”

  “That’s all very politically correct,” Travis agreed with a twinkle in his eyes. “Helen must have coached you. Only problem is, you’re fibbing. I scared you to death long before I hired you. Why? Be honest with me.”

  Sarah took a deep breath and blurted out the truth. “Because you’re just playing a game with me. You’re no more interested in me than Brad Pitt is.”

  Travis lifted a brow. “You know Brad Pitt?”

  “Stop it. You know what I mean. I won’t let you make a fool of me.”

  “You mean the way your ex-husband did?” he asked quietly. “That’s what this is really about. You still believe no man could possibly find you attractive or want to be with you. I think we both know that I am attracted and that I do want to be with you, so please don’t compare me to him.”

  “You’re nothing like Walter,” she admitted. For one thing, Travis only said nice things about her. Even when there was something she didn’t know, he didn’t demean her because of it. Still, she knew her own limitations. Walter had drilled them into her head, and not even his recent apology had taken away the sting of those hurtful words.

  “Do you trust me?” Travis asked, his gaze intense.

  She hesitated, then conceded, “Yes.”

  “Then why can’t you believe that when I ask you out it’s because I really want to spend time with you?”

  He sounded so sincere. She wanted desperately to believe what he was saying, but she couldn’t shake the memory of a
ll the times Walter had made her feel self-conscious or inept or fat. Why would this man who could have any woman, a man who’d dated supermodels, for goodness’ sakes, be interested in her?

  When she didn’t answer immediately, Travis regarded her with regret. “Walter really did a number on you, didn’t he? Even though you defend him now and claim he’s been on good behavior since he moved here, you can’t forget the past.”

  She could hardly deny it. “I’ve been working really hard to get my act together,” she began, only to have Travis cut her off.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your act, dammit! Get it through your head that the guy is a jerk. Or, if you insist, he was a jerk!”

  “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t right about a lot of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m overweight. I’m disorganized. I struggle every single day to do the right things with my kids.”

  As she spoke, Travis’s expression grew increasingly incredulous. “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You’re beautiful. You may not be model-thin, but what man really wants that? I want someone with curves in my arms. And I know for a fact how organized you are. Your shows are scheduled well ahead of time. Your desk is neat as a pin. You even keep me on track at the station with those little Post-it reminders about calls I’m supposed to make. To be honest, I don’t think the place could run without you. As for your kids, they seem perfectly healthy, happy and normal to me.”

  She wanted to tell him that looks were deceiving, but a part of her wanted to soak in all that praise like a sponge that had been left too long without water. “Is that really how you see me?”

  “It’s not just how I see you,” he declared. “It’s the truth. Surely your friends have told you all that.”

  “Sure, but I figured they were biased. Maybe you are, too.”

  He laughed. “I’m not biased. I’m infatuated, and one of these days, if you’ll actually go out on a date with me, I’ll prove it to you.” He stroked a callused finger along her cheek. “But right this second I have a whole bunch of impatient kids over there with the attention span of gnats. I need to get to work.”

  Resisting the urge to put her hand over the spot he’d touched on her cheek, she nodded. “Go.”