Lone Star Rising. Darlene Graham
pumpkin-shaped midsection.
But when he looked once more at her hideous hair, she gave him a level gaze and patted it. “It’s easy, you know. I just stick a fork in the toaster and I’m done.”
The corner of his mouth lifted a little then, but he didn’t actually smile. His expression said he was here on serious business. Oh, Lord help me, Robbie thought. She was in no mood for this. But a bad feeling in her gut told her this was some kind of follow-up visit about the fire.
“May I come in?” The way he said it was almost apologetic. Zack, she remembered from high school, had always been famously polite.
“Sure.” The door of the old house Robbie had recently moved into creaked like something out of a horror movie as she opened it wider for him.
Robbie imagined a grossly pregnant widow was so not supposed to think thoughts like, Damn, that man is hot. But boy, was he ever. Deep-set black eyes, bronze complexion, heavy black hair. As he ambled past she couldn’t help a quick glance at his muscular backside, and she caught a whiff of the most delicious aftershave she’d ever smelled.
As for herself, Robbie imagined the oniony odor of the home fries over at the Hungry Aggie mixed with the lingering aroma of the spaghetti sauce she’d made for the boys was enough to make any man retch.
She had seen Zack at the diner several times this past week with a couple of his firefighter buddies. Booth six. She suspected those big tips under the saltshaker were from him. Was that out of guilt? Pity? Robbie figured she was the one who should be feeling the guilt. It was her pleas, her screams that drove this man into that burning barn. Her hysteria could have cost him his life, and it had certainly done nothing to save Danny’s.
These were her jumbled thoughts as Zack walked past her. That she was a mess, and that his shoulders were to die for. That his whole physique, in fact, was most impressive. He positively dwarfed her, even now, when she was fatter than a cow. Her guess was he spent a lot of time pumping iron over at that fire station.
No sooner had he stepped foot in her house than there came a scary crash from the kitchen. It sounded like glass breaking, followed by a stunningly abnormal silence, followed by the dogs’ wild barking, followed by the high-pitched changeling voice of Robbie’s twelve-year-old. “Now look what you’ve done!” he screamed. “Mom’s gonna kill you!”
“Shut the hell up!” That clever retort came from Robbie’s eight-year-old, who recently acquired that delightful word, along with some others she didn’t want to hear in her house. If Danny were alive he’d box his son’s ears for talking that way.
The pandemonium that followed—three boys yelling and two dogs barking—made Robbie wince.
“Would you excuse me?” she said sweetly to Zack. “Oh—” She turned back to him. “Please. Come on in. That is, if you think you can stand it.”
This time the corners of Zack’s mouth tipped up into a full-fledged grin.
ZACK TRUEBLOOD followed Robbie Tellchick down a narrow corridor that ran parallel to the stairway and ended at a high-ceilinged kitchen at the back of the house. He watched her tangled thatch of hair bounce around on the crown of her head, and wondered if this was the new style or something. Curls upon curls upon curls, and his guess was that none of it had seen a comb today.
She had always been a true redhead, he recalled. He remembered how pretty her hair was in high school, strands of spun copper mixed with streaks of blond. The rest of her looked equally disheveled. What was with the perpetual overalls? She even wore them at the diner, as if she didn’t care what anybody thought of her.
The last time he’d been to her home she’d looked even frumpier, if that were possible, standing in the shadows behind the screened door of her mudporch out on the farm, cinched up in a faded pink bathrobe that looked to have seen better days. She’d grown even rounder, too. Was the poor woman having twins? He dared not let his eyes travel down to her gently swishing backside. Wouldn’t that be some kind of sin against nature, to check out a pregnant woman’s behind? He guessed it was those deviling memories of how cute her bottom had been in high school that made his eyes flick down there anyway.
He immediately wished they hadn’t.
Despite the deterioration of her looks, he had found himself as drawn to Robbie Tellchick as ever. What was it about her? Her cheery determination to please even the grumpiest customer? Her laugh? Surely that. He could pick up the sound of it from all the way across the diner. Was it the way she’d taken hold with her boys, valiantly trying to be both mother and father? He’d seen her at a T-ball game last summer, pregnant and hot, but cheering on her youngest with all her might. And now here Zack was, about to add to her problems.
Whatever his fascination with the woman, he didn’t have long to dwell on it, or his guilt, because two mutts came hurtling out of the kitchen and bumped into Robbie’s legs, knocking her off balance and backward into Zack.
“Whoa!” Zack said as the dogs shot out the open front door while Zack grabbed for Robbie in several awkward places as she stumbled against him. He’d never felt anything so soft! All women were soft and, yes, he delighted in that softness, but this was a kind of softness that was unearthly, so buoyant as to be angelic, almost as if she herself were the baby. She pushed off of him like he was a brick wall and yelled, “Those dang dogs!”
Then she barreled onward into the kitchen.
The three Tellchick boys froze like little statues when they saw Zack coming up behind her. He hoped it wasn’t because their young minds were flashing back to the one and only time they’d seen him before. But Zack had been in full firefighting regalia that night—turnouts, helmet, asbestos mask. Covered in black soot. Eyebrows and hair singed to brittle little filaments of scorched beige. Surely they didn’t recognize him, standing here in a clean and pressed day uniform. He hoped they didn’t connect him with his failure in the event that had shattered their young lives. He wondered if their mother had told them who Zack Trueblood was—the man who hadn’t saved their father.
“Get away from that glass!” the mother shrieked.
And who could blame her? The kitchen was dim—illuminated only by a single bulb over the sink—but Zack could see shards of glass spread in a glittering array on the windowsill. In the sink, on the counter, the floor. Zack was already looking for a light switch…and for blood. “Everybody okay, fellas?” He found the switch and flipped it. No result.
They nodded mutely, these three cute kids, all obviously stamped from the same mold. Wiry and muscular the way their dad had once been, handsome and even-featured like their mother, but each distinct in coloring. Two redheads and a lone brunette. The big one looked like one giant freckle. His hands dripped suds, and he clutched a dish rag as if he were strangling it. The middle one, nearly as dark-haired as Zack, had turned white as a sheet. The younger one had the kind of red hair that was so pale as to be almost blond. He stood hunch-shouldered like a scared little squirrel. For one second, Zack tried to remember what it felt like to be a boy, to find yourself in trouble with a stressed-out single mother. Didn’t he have plenty of experience in this situation?
“What happened?” Robbie demanded as she charged forward.
“He did it!” the two younger ones said simultaneously, pointing at each other.
The older boy stepped up, careful of the glass. “Mom, these two hawnyawks were playing baseball instead of drying the dishes.”
Zack had to smile. He hadn’t heard anyone use the word hawnyawk since his grandfather died.
“Baseball?” Robbie’s reddish mop of hair bobbled as her raised palms indicated the smallish room. “In the kitchen?”
“Not real baseball,” the littlest one protested. “Mark had a golf ball and I was hittin’ at it with the broomstick.”
“We wasn’t hurtin’ anything, Mom,” the middle one said. His little face was painfully sincere. “Until stupid here forgot how to bunt.”
“I’m