Patience shrugged, knowing all she really wanted was answers to all her questions. But that was something she was not likely to get. “Surprise me,” she said indifferently.
Without telling her what the end result was going to be, Josh got out a package of bacon, a bowl of fruit, milk, eggs, flour, oil, baking powder and salt. “Just sit and keep me company,” he said, waving at a chair. “I’ll do everything.”
Patience watched him layer bacon strips in a skillet and place it on the stove.
“You’re still a little jumpy, restless tonight,” he noticed.
Patience looked in the utility room, where Tweedles and her kittens were comfortably ensconced, then out the window above the sink. The wind was whipping up something fierce. The scent of impending rain hung in the air. In the distance, she thought she saw some lightning flash. The coming storm fitted her mood exactly. She turned back to him, feeling more disgruntled than ever with their situation and the fact they were supposed to be married in less than nineteen hours. It hadn’t helped that her brother Cody had visited a short while ago and was having problems in the romance department himself.
“I guess I am a little moody,” Patience said finally, turning away. She didn’t want him to see everything she was thinking and feeling right now. It made her far too vulnerable.
Josh came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He fitted himself intimately against her and nuzzled the top of her head. “Is it because we might have made a baby this evening?”
Patience bit her lip as thunder rolled in the sky overhead. “I admit I’m a little worried about it.” She turned around to face him, wanting him to understand this much. “I’ve never behaved so recklessly in my life. Except—” She stopped and couldn’t go on.
“With Alec?” he said, barely seeming to breathe as he waited for her reply.
Patience flattened her hands on the broad width of his shoulders, aware she had never felt more entranced by a man, or more confused. She wanted to be with Josh, and she didn’t. The bottom line was it really bothered her that he just flat refused to tell her everything about himself. “I don’t know what got into me tonight.”
His pewter eyes darkened the way they always did when he was about to kiss her. “Passion, maybe?” he said softly.
Patience jerked in a breath and pushed out of the warm circle of his arms. This was all beginning to feel too comfortable to her, and common sense told her it shouldn’t. Her pulse pounding, she walked to the far side of the kitchen. Still facing him, she leaned against the counter. “I feel like a fool, writing letters of advice to readers. Telling them to be practical, to be guided by common sense first and then their hearts. Only to find myself embarking on a wild, dangerous love affair with a man I barely know. A man my Uncle Max arranged for me to marry by providing an enormous dowry no man could resist.” Spelled out that way, the whole idea was ludicrous. He had to know it, too.
Josh put an arm on either side of her, caging her against the length of him, and leaned in close. “Is that what we’re having, Patience, a wild, dangerous love affair?”
Judging from the hot glimmer in his eyes, he liked the sound of that. “Maybe I should have said ‘tryst.’”
He brushed his lips down the curve of her neck, starting wildfires wherever he touched. “I think I like ‘love affair’ better.”
Patience closed her eyes, luxuriating in the feelings, even as she knew she couldn’t permit them to go on. “Whatever it was, Josh, it can’t happen again until we know each other a lot better.”
JOSH KNEW HE WAS WALKING a tightrope, that he must not reveal too much about himself. And yet he had to open up enough to let her know that she could trust him intimately in a way she never would have trusted Alec again. “Why not?” he asked her softly.
“Because it would be foolish of us to rush into this any more than we already have, and I’m not foolish,” Patience replied in a low, anguished voice. She bit her lower lip. “Because we barely know each other.”
And because, he thought, she felt vulnerable when she was with him. Too vulnerable for comfort. “That can be rectified,” he persuaded, still hoping they would make love again and again through the coming night.
Patience did not look as sure. “How can it be rectified?” she demanded emotionally.
He shrugged, and only because he knew that to make love to her now would be to lose her, he gently let her go. “I’ll tell you whatever it is you want to know, within the parameters we’ve already set up.”
She thought about that a moment. “All right,” she said finally, her blue eyes more serious and direct than he had ever seen them, “what was your early life like?”
Josh shrugged. “Kind of like yours, I guess. Rife with turmoil. My mom died when I was nine. My dad was not really into parenting, and as a result, he and I were never very close.”
“What did he do?”
Josh broke two eggs into a bowl. “He owned his own business. He had several stores, and he was always going from one location to another, overseeing operations.”
“He must have been pretty successful, then.”
Josh frowned as he measured out milk and oil and then added the eggs. These were difficult things for him to talk about, but because it was important to Patience, he forced himself to elaborate. “Money was never really an issue. Happiness was. He often indicated to me that he felt trapped. That he wished he hadn’t gone into business for himself. He wanted me to have more choices, more freedom, and he urged me to go far away to school, to spread my wings and not return to the South or the shackles that he had made for himself in trying to be independently successful in a dog-eat-dog world.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “He didn’t want you to take over his business?”
“No,” Josh said harshly, remembering that for a very long time he hadn’t understood that, either.
Patience washed an apple and a handful of grapes while Josh stirred the egg mixture. “Did you have any brothers or sisters?”
Josh shook his head. “It was just my dad and me.”
“Then there must have been some degree of closeness, if it was just the two of you.”
“I wish that had been the case,” Josh admitted as he measured baking powder, salt and flour into a bowl, relying on memory rather than any written recipe. “But my dad was a pretty moody guy. He was often depressed, and when he was he wouldn’t talk about it or let me help him. And he constantly impressed upon me that a single moment of weakness could ruin my whole life.”
Patience made a clucking sound as she got out some peaches and cantaloupe to add to the grapes and apple she had sliced into the bowl. “That does sound grim,” she sympathized.
“It often was.” Josh brought out an electric waffle iron he had spotted earlier, opened it and sprayed it with no-stick cooking spray. “I wish we could have fixed that somehow, but we never did, and when my dad died, we were still more or less estranged,” he related sadly. “Speaking to each other, but not close. Not the way I always wanted to be, the way I had once been to my mother.”
“I’ve never thought about it, but I guess I was lucky to have my brothers and Uncle Max when my parents died. It wasn’t the same without my parents, of course. It could never be the same. But we still were a family,” Patience finished passionately.
And for a woman like Patience, family was everything, Josh thought. “Max told me some stories from when you were kids.” He went to turn the sizzling bacon.
She smiled at the mention of Max, already looking a little embarrassed. “Such as…?”
Josh grinned, delighted to be able to tease her a little again. “The time Trace was trying to teach you how to cast a fishing rod, and he got so caught up in demonstrating the proper method and wouldn’t let you do it.”
Patience chuckled. “I got tired of waiting around and ended up knocking us both into the stream.”
Josh laughed. Her version matched Max’s exactly.
“What else?” Patie
nce prodded him on enthusiastically, while outside the rain began to come down in torrents against the side of the log cabin.
Figuring they would be up awhile, Josh put on some coffee, too. “He told me you used to read to Cody all the time when he was younger, that between the two of you you went through the entire Hardy Boys series. And all of the Nancy Drew books, too.”
“What can I say?” Patience added fresh pineapple to the bowl and stirred it gently. “We were both hooked on mysteries, and those books were very big at the time.”
“It must have been nice having siblings,” Josh said enviously as he plugged in the waffle iron. “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished for the same.”
Patience smiled, a little shyly, then was silent a moment, looking almost wistful again. “Do you want more than one child?” she asked softly.
Josh looked at Patience and knew she was the woman of his dreams. “I want a houseful of them,” he confided happily.
“Me, too.” Patience gave a soft, satisfied sigh. “Boys or girls?”
Josh shrugged and took her into his arms. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied, looking down at her as the storm raged overhead. “As long as I have a big, loving, rowdy family with the kind of deep and lasting love you McKendricks seem to have for each other, I’ll be happy.”
Patience toyed with a button on his shirt. He could feel the contentment flowing through her. It was enough to induce him to confide, “Mostly, I just want to be there for my kids, in the way my own dad wasn’t.” He pushed away the pain and the memories, tightening his hold on her and the present. The promise of the future loomed closer and more enticing than ever. “I want them to know they can come to me with any question and any problem and know I’ll be there for them, always.”
Patience looked up at him with shining eyes. “Sounds like we have the same view and standards when it comes to parenting.”
Yes, they did. “Which was maybe why Max paired us,” Josh mused out loud.
“Maybe.” Patience paused. “I just have one more question,” she said quietly, the troubled light coming back into her eyes again without warning. “Do you know anything about Alec’s childhood?”
FOR A MOMENT, Josh looked as if she had jabbed him in the gut, and she could have shot herself for asking. Yet she knew it was part of the mystery of Alec’s leaving her so inexplicably, and she had to understand that fully before she was going to be free to love again, the way Josh wanted her to love him.
He dropped his arms and moved away. “Alec never talked about that. To me or anyone else, at least not that I know of.”
His back to her, he removed the skillet from the stove and lifted the bacon out of the pan to drain.
Patience knew that was true. “You’re right, he didn’t,” she said, refusing to give up on her search for the truth. Hands folded in front of her, she continued watching Josh carefully. “I’ve always wondered why.”
Josh shrugged and wouldn’t look at her. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said at last.
To him, Patience thought, frustrated, it was a closed book. And maybe, she realized, that was the way it should be. She had loved Alec and loved him deeply. But if she was honest, she would have to admit that there had been problems from the very beginning of her relationship with Alec. He had never once opened up to her about his early life the way Josh just had. There’d been passion, but no true intimacy. And without that, what kind of a relationship, never mind marriage, would she and Alec have had? Certainly not a satisfying one.
Maybe everyone was right, Patience thought wearily. Maybe it was time for her to let go of the past, once and for all. Particularly since she bad a chance to have the child she had always wanted with Josh. And a love affair, too.
“You okay?” Josh asked finally.
Patience nodded. She turned her attention back to Josh’s cooking and saw he had poured batter into the waffle iron. She watched as he shut the lid and set the timer on it. “You really seem to know what you’re doing,” she said.
Josh grinned. “Breakfast is the one meal I really know how to cook. And eat.”
He wasn’t alone in that, Patience thought. Alec had also liked to eat eggs and pancakes at night. And he’d often had pizza for breakfast.
And that made her think about the very first time they’d gone anywhere together. It had been after class.
“WANT TO GET something to eat?” the sandy-haired young man with the serious expression and wire-rimmed glasses asked.
Patience smiled as she shifted the books in her arms a little closer to her chest. She had been hoping Alec Vaughn would notice her. She had hardly been able to concentrate during the entire freshman study session. He was so darn good-looking, but he hardly seemed to know it.
He fell into step beside her as they walked through the library doors and out into the brisk October evening. “I know it’s kind of late,” he continued a little shyly in his distinctive Southern drawl, “but there’s a coffee shop a couple blocks from here that’s open all night. So if you aren’t too sleepy, I’d be grateful for the company.”
“Sure. Sounds good. I could go for a cup of hot cocoa and some cinnamon toast,” Patience said, stepping a little closer to his tall, rangy frame.
“Me now, I could go for some Belgian waffles with maple butter, “Alec said softly. He shook his head at her in a teasing manner. “Can’t have waffles without maple butter….”
“I DON’T SUPPOSE there’s any maple butter in here,” Josh said, searching the refrigerator.
“What?” Patience asked, dragged from her memories back into the present. She couldn’t have heard right.
“Never mind. I can make some up.”
She watched, stunned, as Josh got out the butter and maple syrup. It was a coincidence, she told herself firmly. It had to be. But what if it wasn’t? What if she’d just been made the biggest fool of all? A chill of uneasiness slid down her spine and her insides twisted into knots.
“It’d be better if we had maple extract,” he said casually, “but this’ll do. All we have to do is add a little syrup to the butter and—” He paused, having picked up on the way she was staring at him. To her irritation, he obviously didn’t have a clue why.
“Patience? What’s wrong?”
Chapter Ten
Dear Patience,
What should I do with a rowdy, uncooperative beau?
Sincerely,
Ridden Roughshod in Rio
Dear Ridden Roughshod in Rio,
Every stallion needs to get used to the saddle sometime. Throw that bridle on and tame him, honey.
Patience
“Alec liked to eat pancakes or waffles with maple butter, especially late in the evening.”
“So what are you saying, Patience?” Josh sounded both shocked and appalled. “That now you want me not just to remind you of Alec but to actually be him?”
The way Josh said that made her feel ridiculous. She squared her shoulders and faced him defiantly. “No, of course not.”
“Then what is this about?” The dangerous glint was back in Josh’s eyes.
She hesitated a moment, not sure if she was imagining things or not, then decided to go for broke. “I just find it odd you have a passion for maple butter, too, that’s all,” she said coolly.
He shot her a sharp look. She knew that he wanted her to back off, which was exactly why she couldn’t. Because like it or not, Alec and Josh did share an ability to kiss her senseless, and she had never, in her entire life, met anyone else who could do that to her. So there had to be some tie there. Something along the lines of whatever it was that Holly Diehl had been hinting at earlier. Maybe the two men were related. Physically related. Brothers or cousins, perhaps?
“And odder still that we both seemed enamored of you?” Josh guessed after a moment, having picked up on her suspiciousness.
Patience worked to quell her racing pulse. “Maybe,” she flung back, and found the more excited and upset she got, the calmer he was.
“Only there’s a difference.” Josh removed the first batch of waffles from the iron and slid them onto a plate.
Patience watched him add a second layer of batter to the iron and shut the lid with the ease of someone who had spent years cooking for himself. “Really, what?”
Josh wiped his hands on a towel, turned toward her and took her into his arms. His mouth curved briefly as he looked down at her. “I won’t be standing you up at the altar tomorrow. When it’s time for us to get married, I’ll be there.”
Patience laid a hand on his chest, creating as much distance as she could between them. She knew if he kissed her again she would be tempted just to forget everything. “I haven’t definitely decided to go through with it myself yet,” she warned.
Unperturbed by her announcement, he stroked his hand down her face. She could tell by the darkening of his eyes he was thinking about the incredibly passionate way they had made love earlier. “But you want to, don’t you?” he stated softly.
Patience hauled in a shaky breath. She wanted to approach this engagement and wedding of theirs with the kind of gut-level practicality and common sense she had not exercised in her previous engagement to Alec. “Wanting something and actually doing it are two different things.” How well she knew that! “I want to honor my Uncle Max’s wishes and I want a baby, a family, to make my life complete. But I also know I will never be happy with less than the complete package, and I can’t and won’t get married just for the sake of getting married.”
“Or just to have a child,” he qualified.
Patience nodded slowly. “If nothing else, the past thirty hours have shown me I have to have it all.”
“I’m willing to try to achieve that, if you are.”
Against all common sense, Patience was tempted. And she knew she shouldn’t be. “Part of me even thinks I should run now,” she admitted with gut-wrenching honesty.
The Ranch Stud Page 16