He put one final touch into polishing her faucet then folded the dish towel he’d used, set it on the counter and swept an arm in the direction of her living room so she would lead the way.
Nina did, going to sit on one end of her couch, facing the center of it with her feet tucked under her.
Dallas sat more toward the center, angled in her direction and stretching a long arm across the top of the back cushion to more or less face her. “I can’t believe I forgot dessert,” he lamented for the third time since he’d realized his oversight.
“I’m glad you did—I’m stuffed and you’ve already spoiled me rotten.”
“Someone should,” he said.
“Oh, absolutely. I’m all for it,” she joked.
“I’m serious.”
She could tell that he was, too—it was reflected in his expression. But he was so ruggedly gorgeous; the stern, stoic lines on his face only accentuated it and made Nina smile.
Undaunted, he went on anyway. “You should have some help this late in the game and then a lot more once you bring the baby home. Aren’t there parts of doing this on your own that are a little tough on you?”
Nina shrugged. “My family helps where they can, and I know I can always call if I need more.”
“That’s not the same as having a husband or the father of the baby to lean on day-to-day.”
“Having a husband or the father of the baby around wouldn’t guarantee that I’d have someone to help,” Nina insisted. “I know for a fact that Leo wouldn’t have, even if the baby was his.”
The lines on Dallas’s face deepened into a frown. “Like I said during the blizzard, I knew Leo, but just as a guy who worked for us here and there. I didn’t really know him. You thought he was a waste of time...”
“My time with him was wasted,” she amended. “After four years of somedays that never came.”
“Somedays?”
“Whenever I’d ask if we were headed for marriage, for having a family, he’d say, ‘Sure, someday...’”
“But he was just leading you on?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to believe that he at least thought he meant it when he said it. Otherwise it sort of makes me a dumb sap for having believed him, and it’s bad enough that I came away from that whole time with him feeling like...I don’t know, like his minion...”
That made Dallas smile. “His minion?”
“Well, I did pretty much do his bidding.”
“Ohh, that doesn’t sound good.”
“Leo was ten years older and that put me at a disadvantage. Especially the longer we were together. Leo was a creature of habit... I guess maybe we all tend toward that, but he loved to say he was set in his ways, that he needed his routines, that he’d been doing things the way he’d been doing them for years and years and couldn’t change, that because I was so much younger I could be more flexible—”
“He’s about the same age I am,” Dallas said defensively, as if the other man’s point of view didn’t make sense to him.
But to Nina the fact that Dallas and Leo were about the same age was still noteworthy and she reminded herself not to lose sight of that.
“I have never said I’m set in my ways,” Dallas claimed.
“But I’m sure you have habits, routines, things you’ve been doing the way you want to do them for years and years,” Nina pushed.
“Sure, but like you just said, everybody does,” Dallas countered.
“And everybody wants them to be adapted to, and with Leo, our age difference meant that—”
“He got his way and you didn’t.”
“Yes,” Nina confirmed because that was what it had boiled down to.
“And you attribute that to him being a lot older than you are...”
“I loved him, and it just did seem easier for me to adapt to him. To him it was a big deal if we ate where and what and when he wanted to eat because if we didn’t he didn’t feel well. If I pushed him to do something I wanted to do, and he didn’t enjoy it, he was cranky, he complained, and I didn’t end up enjoying it, either. If he wanted to stay in and I made him go out there was yawning and moaning, and there was no telling where he might fall asleep—he actually did that in his chair at the table during a dinner party with one of my friends—”
“Wow. He really made sure it was all on his terms. So you just, what? Put whatever you wanted—or needed—on the back burner?”
“For the most part it wasn’t a big deal to me—for me—to adapt. Especially when he just...couldn’t. And I kept telling myself that it was all only small stuff, anyway. If he came home from work tired and I didn’t...well, I was a lot younger, I had more energy, more stamina, I figured when I was ten years older I’d probably feel the same way—”
“So you took care of him.”
“And I tried not to pressure him. It wasn’t as if I could force him to be younger and have more energy or stamina. Or if he had to eat what and when he had to eat, so what? But I made it clear that I wanted to get married, to have kids—”
“And that was where the somedays came in.”
“Right.”
“And when you pushed for that? Is that what ended the relationship?”
“I suppose you could say that was when my age became an issue. When I reached the time when I’d planned to start a family I told him so—”
“But someday still hadn’t come for him?”
“No, he finally didn’t just put me off—I suppose I should give him credit for that. He said that the more he thought about, the more he thought he just wasn’t cut out for marriage and kids. He loved me and all—that’s what he said—and it wasn’t me. He said that he was perfectly happy going on the way we had been. But marriage and family just weren’t for him.”
“Did he think you might accept that?” Dallas asked, as if he thought the other guy was deluded.
“There was a part of him that seemed to...I don’t know...hold out hope for it, maybe. Because he tried to talk me into going on the way we had been. But I wouldn’t.” Nina stated the simple fact. “It was one thing to eat a hamburger at five when I might have wanted pizza at seven, or to watch an action movie when I would rather have seen the romantic comedy. But when it came to getting married, to having a baby... Well, that was my life we were talking about.”
“It was time to draw the line,” Dallas concluded, his tone compassionate and sympathetic, making it clear that he understood that it hadn’t been as easy for her as it might sound.
“Yes,” Nina confirmed quietly, more emotion creeping into her voice than she’d allowed before. But it hadn’t been easy to accept that someday was never going to come with Leo. That she could either have Leo or the life she’d always wanted, but that she couldn’t have them both. That those four years had been squandered with him.
It hadn’t been easy to open her eyes and realize that she had to make a choice between postponing the family she wanted until she found someone else—all the while running the risk that she might not find someone else—or having that family on her own. Without anyone to help out with the day-to-day or to pamper her the way Dallas had tonight...
“So, that was it?” Dallas asked, interrupting her thoughts both with his words and by raising his hand from the top of the sofa back and using an index finger to gently follow the curve of the side of her face. “You ended it with Leo?”
“I did.”
“I’m thinking that he might not have taken it too well, since he left town—which is a really big change for someone set in his ways.”
“My ending things actually did seem to shock him.”
Dallas’s smile was lazy and kind. “Well, you had set a precedent of giving him his way.”
“I know. I had. I guess I just thought that we’d eventually end up on the same p
age—”
“That someday would come.”
“Right. That, given time, he’d want to marry me. He’d want to have kids with me. Instead, the longer things went on and the older he’d gotten, the further he’d also gotten away from marriage and wanting to become a father.” She shrugged again. “I didn’t really see until then just how much the age difference put us at different places in our lives, which was a much bigger thing than just not being on the same page. For Leo, the ship had just sailed on a time to get married and start having kids, and I couldn’t change that—”
“Any more than you could give him more energy or stamina.”
Nina shrugged yet again. “Age does make a difference. Look at you and me—you have three kids. You’re done with the baby stuff, you’re on to the kids-in-school stuff. I haven’t even changed my first diaper and you’re probably thinking that you’re glad never to change another one.”
Dallas chuckled but didn’t deny it.
Which cemented Nina’s feelings that she had to be very careful not to get in too deep with yet another man at a stage of life different than her own.
“So no. If this was Leo’s baby? I’d still be having to adapt to Leo,” Nina concluded, ending where they’d begun this conversation.
“Yeah, but I’m still not sure that, with Leo, that wasn’t as much an age issue as a personality issue,” Dallas postulated.
“Sure, that had to be a part of it, too—lots of people, men and women, don’t get married or start families until they’re in their thirties. Or later. But still...”
But still she also knew that a big age difference couldn’t be discounted, that more years brought with them more baggage and deeper roots—like Dallas’s own long-term history with his ex-wife and the scars left by the end of it, and the children who also now had to be a factor. Or her own child who would become a consideration she hadn’t had before.
“But still, age is an issue,” Dallas finished for her when she stalled. “Getting married and having kids at her age made Laurel feel as if she’d missed out on too much. Age plays a role, in one way or another, with us all, whether we like it or not.”
“It just does...”
“And so for you and Leo, that was it? You ended things with him at a time when you wanted to start your family and you just went for it.” He nodded in the direction of her bulging middle.
“Yep,” she confirmed.
“On your own...”
“Yep.”
He nodded his head slowly, acceptingly, without any indication of disapproval that she could see.
Then he said, “That takes a lot of courage. I gotta say, I admire it. And you’re one hell of a lesson to me.”
Nina laughed. “Are you telling me that the young pup is teaching the old dog new tricks?” she teased good-naturedly.
“Yeah,” he said, laughing, too. “Watching you has been like a kick in the pants. I’ve been wallowing for the past year and here you are—you had your own disappointment and disillusionment, and you picked yourself up and went right on. Seeing it is letting me know that it’s time for me to walk off my own disappointments and disillusionments. To stop letting them hold me back. To move on.”
He was still running his index finger along the side of her face in a featherlight stroke that was soothing and arousing at once, sending something glittery all through her to make talking about Leo less depressing.
Then that finger reached the corner of her jawbone and slipped around it to come under her chin and tip it up.
And it wasn’t only his life he was moving on with, because he moved on to kissing her...
At first Nina was taken off guard, and she thought again that he must not have hated the fact that she’d kissed him the night before.
Then all she could think about was the kiss that was happening at that moment.
A genuine kiss that lingered long enough for her to relish it.
And, oh, did she...
His lips were wonderful—soft and warm and lush. They were parted just slightly and his head swayed like a palm frond in a tropical breeze. The whole thing seemed to pick her up and carry her away to something so much nicer than what they’d been talking about, answering the yearning in her that she’d felt since he’d first kissed her during the blizzard. The yearning that had only been worse since the night before. The yearning that she didn’t want to have but couldn’t seem to stop no matter how hard she tried.
The yearning that wasn’t at all stifled when that kiss came to an end a moment later.
She opened her eyes to Dallas’s handsome face hovering just above hers, those same lips in one of his single-sided smiles, his gray-blue eyes studying her as if he liked what he saw.
“To moving on,” he toasted in a deep, gravelly voice.
“To moving on,” Nina seconded, feeling dazed and just wanting him to kiss her again.
But he didn’t. He took a deep breath that expanded his barrel chest and sighed with what sounded like resignation.
Then he said, “I’d better go. I have to be home when my folks bring the boys back.”
Nina raised her chin higher in concession to that.
“But tomorrow night is the Candlelight Walk,” he continued. “I’m gonna make sure that the boys experience every bit of Christmas festivity there is from now until the big day, so I told them we could go. I’d like it if you’d come with us—and I have a plan for getting you down Main Street since I wouldn’t make you walk it.”
All of Rust Creek Falls was invited to light a candle at one end of Main Street and parade with those candles to the opposite end where a bonfire was to be lit, carols were to be sung and refreshments would be served. It seemed as if the community had grown so much closer since the flood, and the city council had organized the walk as a method of bringing everyone together as the family of Rust Creek Falls before each separate family began their own private celebrations.
“You have a plan to get me down Main Street,” Nina reiterated. “You don’t think I can walk? You think I need a crane?”
He grinned, standing and making a show of helping her to her feet.
“It’s a surprise,” he said, rather than answering her accusation and affront.
“What if I say no?” she challenged as he put on his coat and they headed for her back door.
“Then you’ll ruin the surprise.”
There was that little bit of cockiness about him that was too delicious for her to resist.
“So don’t say no,” he added at the door with a challenge of his own.
Nina considered that his kiss and the continuing yearning for another one might be clouding her judgment.
But he had her intrigued.
And her own family had already decided to forego the walk because her parents and two of her brothers were helping out in the store all day tomorrow and wanted to just go home after closing, so she hadn’t planned to go, either.
Only now she could.
With Dallas...
“Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin a surprise,” she finally conceded.
“Great! The candle lighting is at seven, so I’ll be here about fifteen minutes before that.”
“Crane and all?”
“Crane and all,” he said, taking his turn at teasing her.
Then, with his hands in his coat pockets he leaned forward and kissed her again—a kiss as good as the earlier one had been—before he said, “Thanks for today.”
Nina laughed. “You did me the favor by driving and helping out with the deliveries, then you made me dinner and cleaned the whole mess. Thank you!”
“I’m just glad I got to spend today and tonight with you. You’re my inspiration, remember?” he added.
“Ah, that’s right. Because I’m so inspirational,” she joked.
His smoky-blue eyes delved deeply into hers. “More than you know,” he seemed to confide.
Then he kissed her once more—barely, the way she’d kissed him the previous night—and went out into the cold.
And once Nina had closed the door behind him she stayed where she was, wrapping her arms around her pregnant belly, basking in the warm feelings that Dallas Traub had left her with.
Chapter Seven
With only three days until Christmas, and Sunday the last weekend day before the holiday, Nina knew the store would be swamped. She and all of her staff and extra holiday personnel were scheduled, and she’d also asked her parents to come in.
Todd and Laura Crawford were semiretired, handling primarily behind-the-scenes business for the store now—ordering merchandise and doing the bookkeeping. But for Nina and the holiday they’d agreed to work the floor.
Nina expected them to arrive just before the store opened. She didn’t expect them to arrive just as she was sitting down to breakfast.
“Have you eaten? I can scramble a few more eggs and make extra toast,” she offered as they took off their coats.
“We ate,” her mother answered, but both of her parents accepted glasses of orange juice as they sat at her small kitchen table and encouraged her to eat while her food was hot.
“We came early because we wanted to talk to you,” her mother added as Nina put butter and jelly on her toast. “We’ve been hearing a lot about you and Dallas Traub.”
“What’s going on with that?” her father demanded.
“I’ve seen him a few times since the blizzard. He’s helped out with the Santa’s Workshop things—”
“From what we’re hearing it sounds more like you’re dating him,” her mother accused, clearly not happy with the idea.
“I wouldn’t say we were dating.” Nina balked at that term herself, despite the fact that the evening at the snow castle and the plan for the Candlelight Walk couldn’t really be called anything else. “But we are—” she wasn’t sure how to describe what they were and settled on “—friends, I guess.”
“You’re friends with a Traub?” her mother said as if even that was repugnant.
THE MAVERICK'S CHRISTMAS BABY Page 10