by Diana Palmer
“Too bad,” she murmured. “She missed out on a whole day here reinstating them. Shame.”
Jobe looked worried. “I didn’t encourage her to do that. I know it looks bad…”
She moved toward him, her clear eyes steady and bright. “I’ve seen Missy in action,” she said. “I’m not jealous. Well, not much,” she murmured.
He chuckled. “A little?”
She shrugged. “Microscopic.”
He bent his head and kissed her slowly. “Do you like Chinese food?”
“I love it,” she whispered.
“Good. Get your purse and let’s go.”
“But Ted’s files…!”
“They can wait until you’ve eaten. Aren’t you hungry?”
“Ravenous.”
“All right, then. Come on!”
He caught her hand and held it all the way to the black pickup he drove. He put her inside and buckled her in, watching her possessively the whole time.
“Pickup trucks make good bait for catching women,” he murmured dryly. “Look what I caught.” He bent his head and kissed her.
She traced his upper lip. “Works both ways,” she whispered, and kissed him back.
“What the hell…!” Ted exclaimed as he drew up beside them and got out of his car. “What are you doing? What about my herd records?”
“We’re hungry,” Jobe explained. “Want to get Coreen and the baby and eat Chinese?”
Ted let out a rough sigh. “I hate Chinese.” He glanced from his flushed sister to his smug ranch foreman. “But I guess you have to eat sooner or later. Oh, get out of here,” he muttered. “The records can wait a while.”
“Thanks, Ted.” Sandy grinned at him.
He grinned back. “Problem solved?” he asked.
“Just beginning,” Jobe replied before she could. “But we’re no sissies, are we?”
“Not us,” Sandy agreed.
They waved at Ted and drove away.
* * *
For the next few days, life took on a dreamlike quality for Sandy. She didn’t go back to Victoria, opting to take a week off—the vacation time she’d never used.
She and Jobe were inseparable, to Missy’s irritation. They went riding and one day, he took her to Turner’s Lake nearby. It was a popular fishing hole, where customers paid a fee to throw their lines into a lake stocked with game fish.
“Isn’t this fun?” he asked, slapping at a mosquito as he adjusted the tension in his line.
She was sitting beside him with her bare feet dangling off the pier. “Heavenly,” she agreed, and meant it. She hadn’t been fishing since childhood. It was peaceful here, even with other fishermen scattered around, and being with Jobe was sheer joy.
“I’ve never taken a woman fishing before,” he mused, glancing at her from under his bibbed cap. He drew up one long, blue-jeaned leg. “You’re pretty good at it.”
She glanced at the two fish on her string and the three on his. “Well, I’m a fish behind,” she remarked.
“Oh, you’re doing fine. It looks better if you let the man catch more fish.”
She tossed her pole aside and, laughing, threw herself across him to the ground.
“You chauvinist pig,” she murmured.
He linked his arms at her back and grinned up at her, his blond hair disheveled, his hat in the grass. “You might as well get used to it,” he reminded her. “I’m consistent as all hell.”
“I noticed.” She sighed and bent to put her mouth softly over his hard lips.
He held her there, savoring the taste of her in the early afternoon heat. A mosquito stabbed into his wrist and he never noticed.
She felt a surge of joy like an explosion deep in her body and sighed as he turned her in the long grass and his powerful leg eased between both of hers. His mouth became suddenly demanding. She felt her lips part as her heart rocketed under her rib cage. His searching hand found her breast and seconds later, so did his hungry mouth.
She cried out softly.
It wasn’t a protest, but it brought him to his senses. He lifted his head, grimacing as he realized where they were.
“Sorry,” he murmured, helping her up with a rueful smile. “We came here to fish. I forgot.”
“So did I.”
He chuckled. “Maybe you’d better wear this, just so people don’t get the wrong idea when we do things like that.”
He tossed a small, gray velvet-covered box into her hands. “Go on,” he coaxed. “Open it.”
She hesitated, because she had a pretty good idea what it was. A question came with it, and he was going to expect an answer pretty quickly. She looked up into his eyes and knew what the answer would be. There was, after all, only one possible.
Her hands fumbled and she opened the box. Her gasp was audible. “You pig!”
She closed the box over the cartoon character lapel pin and threw it at him. “How could you?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, it’s the wrong box! Here!”
He had to stop laughing before he could dig the right one out of his pocket. “That was for my little cousin…tomorrow’s her birthday. Here. This is yours.”
He put it into her fingers and pulled it open. His eyes never left her face.
“It isn’t the Hope diamond,” he said quietly, watching her look at the small diamond engagement ring. “But the sentiment that goes with it is every bit as large. I love you. I want to share my life with you.”
She felt the tears rushing down her cheeks, leaving hot, wet tracks behind them. The ring blurred. The way he put the proposal was shattering. Until that moment, it had never occurred to her that he might love her.
She looked up, seeing him through a mist.
“Don’t you want it?” he asked solemnly. “Am I totally mistaken about what you feel for me?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “I love you. I just didn’t know that you loved me.”
“Blind as a bat,” he mused, although relief was in his voice. He took out the ring and slid it on her finger. “If I’d loved you less, I never would have picked on you. We only hurt the ones we love. Don’t you listen to old sayings?”
“You must love me terribly…”
“Do shut up…”
He kissed her again, much more possessively this time, and eased her down into the grass, regardless of chiggers and mosquitoes and yellow flies and possible snakes. She didn’t notice the wildlife population being potentially crushed beneath her. Every sense was caught up in the feel of Jobe’s hard mouth on her lips, his caressing hands on her body.
“I like kids,” he whispered.
“So do I.”
“Good thing,” he murmured hungrily, “because I have in mind buying us a big ranch one day, and we’ll need lots of kids to help us manage it.”
She chuckled. “What about my job?”
“What about it?” he murmured. “Although you might try to spend less time on the road, later on.”
She looked at him possessively. “You don’t mind if I work?”
He shook his head. “That’s up to you, sweetheart. I can support you. Not the way you’ve been supported,” he said firmly, “but adequately.”
She put a finger against his mouth. “I’ll settle for whatever we can earn together. Our kids can inherit my trust.”
His expression lightened. “You’d do that?”
“I know how proud you are, Jobe,” she confessed. “I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’m used to working for my living. In fact, I like it. If we can build something worthwhile together, with our own hands, I’d much rather have it than all the money in the world.”
“I didn’t give you enough credit,” he murmured.
“I didn’t give you enough, either,” she said. “I thought you only wanted me.”
“I do,” he said quietly. “Very much.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know you loved me.” She searched his lean face lovingly. “It means the world.”
/> “To me, too,” he whispered, and bent again. “God, Sandy, don’t make me wait too long.” His arms became demanding. “I want you with me all the time. We’ll have the foreman’s house, and you can plant all the flowers you like, and cook for…me…”
He lifted his head and grimaced. “Oh, my God, we’ll starve,” he said, so plaintively that she burst out laughing.
She nuzzled her smiling face into his throat. “Don’t you worry, my darling, I’ve already enrolled in a cooking course at one of the schools in Victoria. I’m not cordon-bleu, but I can produce an unburned steak and scalloped potatoes anytime you like.”
“Can you, really?” He rested his weight on his elbows and looked down into her eyes lazily. “I can make a cake.”
“You can?”
“A pound cake, nothing fancy.” He traced her eyebrows. “I guess we won’t starve, after all. Although,” he added wickedly, “I don’t think we’ll spend much time worrying about food the first week we’re married.”
She touched his mouth. “Are we going to wait until then?” she asked without meeting his eyes.
He stiffened. “Of course we are!” he said shortly. “Good Lord, woman, you aren’t trying to seduce me, are you?”
Her eyebrows arched. “Who, me?”
“Good thing,” he murmured, “because I’m not that sort of man. I plan to wear a white suit at our wedding…”
She hit him. “I can just see that!”
“I am,” he repeated.
“Because you’re a virgin,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.
He didn’t smile.
Her eyes widened. “You’re thirty-six!”
He still didn’t smile.
Her heart jumped into her throat. “You have got to be kidding!”
“You came along at a traumatic time in my life,” he recalled lazily, fitting her small hand to his big one. He grinned at her. “I fell head over heels in love with you the day we met, and I never wanted anyone else.” He shrugged. “I guess we start even, don’t we, honey?”
She drew him down to her and kissed him with all her heart. Tears burned her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”
“You will,” he said with a wistful sigh. “I expect we’ll fumble a bit at first. But it comes naturally for birds and things, so I guess it will for us, too.”
She laughed through her tears. “Of course it will! Oh, Jobe…!”
The sound of footsteps finally broke them apart. Jobe looked up at a big, bearlike man in a bibbed cap carrying a fishing rod.
“I never even caught a fish,” the big man said gruffly, “and your spinning rods are on a tour of the lake. Some people have all the damned luck.”
He stomped off. Jobe sat up with a dazed Sandy, and they watched the progress of their rods across the lake.
“I guess we might as well go home, unless you want to swim out after them,” Jobe offered.
She shook her head. “Not in that water,” she said dryly.
“I see what you mean.” He retrieved their strings of fish and they wandered back to the truck, pausing just long enough to kiss each other on the way.
* * *
The wedding was arranged by a gleeful Coreen. As much as she hated to, Sandy had to leave Jobe long enough to get some work done in Victoria.
Her boss, Mr. Cranson, gave them a crystal bowl for a wedding gift, and her coworkers went in together to buy a set of dishes and some flatware. Coreen and Ted gave them towels and sheets and small appliances. They’d have enough to start housekeeping, at least, and the bathroom in the foreman’s house was being remodeled by Ted as another small gift.
Missy hadn’t said a word about the wedding. But Sandy was uneasy, just the same, because she knew how possessive and vengeful the woman was. It wasn’t like Missy to waltz off without a word when she’d lost a man she had her heart set on.
Sure enough, the last day Sandy was to spend in the apartment in Victoria, there was a knock on the door.
Expecting Jobe, she was surprised to find a tearful Missy on her doorstep. The tears were real, too.
“Come in,” Sandy invited.
“Thanks.” Missy sniffed, holding a handkerchief to her eyes. “I’m so sorry to come here and bother you at a time like this,” she confessed, blowing her nose noisily, “but there are things you simply have to know before you marry him.”
“Sit down.”
Missy perched herself on the sofa. “I’m really sorry.”
“You said that,” Sandy reminded her.
Missy cleared her throat. She contrived to look tragic. “Well, it’s like this,” she began. She took a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”
Sandy’s eyebrows rose. She smiled. “Congratulations.”
Missy looked taken aback. “You don’t understand. It’s Jobe’s.”
Sandy searched the other woman’s face. For one instant—of which she was very ashamed—she let herself imagine that it could be true. Then she measured Missy’s word against Jobe’s and all her doubts went away at once.
“Do tell me all about it. Do you want some iced tea?” Sandy offered, and went to get it.
“You’re taking this very well,” Missy said, shocked.
“I suppose I am. Come on. Tell me all about it.”
“He seduced me,” Missy said, sobbing.
“You poor thing,” Sandy commiserated. “The louse!”
Missy’s eyes widened. “You believe me?”
“Of course I do,” Sandy lied. “I’m so sorry for you. The pig. How could he do such a thing to such a sweet girl?”
Missy sipped her iced tea and peered at Sandy, trying not to grin. This was going better than she’d ever dreamed it would.
“He said he loved me,” Missy continued. “He took me out to eat and then we parked on this lonely, deserted road. He started kissing me and one thing led to another, and…it just happened.”
“And naturally, you aren’t on the Pill?”
Missy glanced at her. “How…how did you know?”
“Well, if you’re pregnant…”
“Oh. Right. Yes. Well, I’m about six weeks along,” she added. “At least, I think I am. I haven’t been to the doctor. But I’m sure it couldn’t be anything else. And you know, Jobe will surely marry me if there’s a baby on the way, what with Jacobsville being such a small town, and my reputation, and his reputation.”
“Of course,” Sandy agreed readily.
Missy put down her tea. “You do understand that he can’t marry both of us?”
Sandy smiled. “Certainly, I do.”
“Well…then what are you going to do?”
“I’m going right down to Jacobsville with you to tell him what I think of him,” Sandy said flatly. She got to her feet. “Let’s go.”
Missy’s indrawn breath was audible.
“Come on!”
She got up. “Right now?” she exclaimed.
“Right now. You’ve got your car, haven’t you?”
“Y…yes.”
“You can follow me. I’ll just get my purse…”
They went out the door together. Sandy was enjoying herself. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Jobe’s face. It would be something to tell their grandchildren. It would also show Missy exactly where she stood.
“Two birds with one stone,” Sandy said to herself as she led the way down the highway to Jacobsville.
* * *
Missy parked near the front door, but she was slow to get out of her car. Jobe’s black pickup was parked nearby. He was probably in the office, cursing the computer, Sandy mused.
She led the way into the house, with Missy dragging behind, and went right into the office.
Jobe was sitting on the edge of the desk, talking on the phone. He looked up and saw the two women, and ended his conversation.
“This is a surprise,” he said.
Sandy smiled. “I’ll bet it is. Uh, Missy has something to say. Go ahead, dear,” she coaxed the other woman, waving a hand in her direction. S
he sat down in the nearest chair and prepared to be amused.
Missy cleared her throat. She was flushed as she looked from Sandy to Jobe.
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted out.
Jobe looked hunted. His eyes went immediately to Sandy, and he scowled, as if he was daring her to believe what any normal person would at the moment.
She didn’t crack a smile. She did arch an eyebrow, and the twinkle in her eyes grew more noticeable.
“I said, I’m pregnant!” Missy returned. She folded her arms over her chest and smiled smugly at Jobe. “What are you going to do about it? I’ve already told her,” she added, nodding toward Sandy.
“What did she say?” Jobe asked curiously.
“She understood that you’re going to have to marry me.”
Jobe’s lip curled up. “We’ll call the newspapers and the television people, too,” he mused. “You’re going to make history if I’m the father of your child.”
She looked uneasy. “I don’t understand.”
He picked up the telephone. “Of course, I’m certain that the real father of this child will be eager to learn about it. I’ll set you up with an appointment this very afternoon at Coltrain’s clinic. They can take a blood sample to check if you are pregnant and then when the baby is born they can do a DNA test. That will rule me out immediately as the father.”
Missy’s face went red. “They…they can’t do that sort of thing!”
“Sure they can,” he said. “Coltrain has a lab in Houston do his important work. You’d be amazed at what a test will reveal these days. And if you’re pregnant, you should be seen at once.” He held on to the receiver. “Betty? This is Jobe Dodd. I want you to set up an appointment today for…”
“No!” Missy cried.
She rushed forward and hung up the receiver at once, panting for breath. “No, I…uh, I don’t want to do that!”
“Why not?” Sandy asked. “I’d think a pregnancy test would be the first thing on your mind right now.”
Missy looked hunted. She stared at Jobe, who had his arms folded across his chest. He wasn’t smiling.
He glanced at Sandy. “While we’re on the subject,” he began, “I’d like to know right now if you believe her,” he added, nodding toward a frozen Missy.