“You’re not going to tell
him
that, are you?”
Tucker sputtered out a surprised laugh. After a moment, though, he squeezed her fingers
reassuringly. “I’ll leave that detail to you.”
Her shoulders deflated, and she nearly fainted once again.
“Oh! Before I forget. Here. This is for you.”
Tucker yanked an all-too-familiar-looking document from his back pocket and tried to hand it to her.
B.J. backed away from the deed as if it had lice.
Then she lifted her eyes. “I can’t take anything for marrying Grady.”
Lips parting in dawning realization, Tucker
glanced down at his hand and then tried to shove it at her again. “Well, look at it as a wedding present then.”
She shook her head. “I can’t take it,” she
whispered.
Tucker looked distinctly uncomfortable as he continued to hold out his hand. “B.J., honestly. I don’t want your plane.”
He glanced in horror at her Cessna, and B.J.
finally grinned. “I’ll tell you what,” she relented.
“How about I make the same payments to you I was making to the bank and buy it back?”
“That would work,” he said, his shoulders
sagging as tension eased out of them. “That would work just fine.”
“And about the prenuptial agreement,” B.J.
started. “I don’t mind letting Grady have everything that’s already his. But the baby—”
“I’ll have a new agreement worked up by the end of the week,” Tucker said.
This time it was B.J. who was relieved. “Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. Thinking that was all the business they had to discuss, B.J. shifted when Grady’s dad 210
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merely stared at her a moment longer.
“I, uh, came to give you something else too,” he finally said. She frowned just as he added, “This,”
and enfolded her into a huge hug. Too bowled over to resist the fatherly embrace, she just stood there like an idiot with her arms hanging down limply at her sides.
“Thank you,” he said into her hair, “thank you so much for bringing my boy back.”
Confused, she pulled away and looked up at
him. He smiled, his eyes damp with emotion. “I never thought we’d see the old Grady again. He was so lost. But when he came into work this morning…”
For a second he looked too choked to speak.
Then he broke into another brilliant grin. “He was smiling. You made him smile.”
Emotions engulfing her, B.J. covered her mouth with her hands and burst into tears.
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B.J. didn’t want to blame it on Tucker’s visit, but after he left, something inside her shifted. After locking herself in the bathroom until she’d stopped bawling and the red blotchiness left her face, she emerged a different woman entirely, humming as she returned to her plane.
Leroy paused to send her a strange look.
“What?” she asked as she moved by.
“You okay?” he asked, wrinkling his face and sending her the strangest expression.
She frowned. “Sure. Why?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. You’re just acting awfully...girly all of the sudden.”
B.J. rolled her eyes and turned away. “Well, thank God I’m a girl then.”
She knew he continued to watch her, but she
kept ignoring him. After a moment, he said, “Them pregnancy hormones are really messing with you, ain’t they?”
When she glanced his way, he actually looked concerned, like there might really be something medically wrong with his sister.
“Shut up,” she muttered and flipped him the
bird. His face cleared, and his shoulders slumped in relief, but he sent his own dirty hand-signal back in return. Then he turned and strode off. She could’ve sworn she heard him say, “Thank God,” as he
walked away.
B.J. stared after him for a moment, absolutely stunned. Her butt-headed brother had actually been 212
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worried about her. The sudden softness she felt for him shocked her even more.
Hell, maybe there
was
something wrong with her. If there was, she knew exactly what the source was. One Grady Jace Rawlings. If she’d acted a little too feminine today, it was purely his fault. The guy made her emotions go haywire.
She was in love with him, and that scared the piss out of her. Suddenly, she wanted to make this marriage thing work...not just work. She wanted to make it succeed. She wanted it to be permanent, and she wanted to be as important to him as...well, hell, as important as Amy had been.
Sobering, she straightened.
There was no way she’d find equal footing with Amy. No freaking way. But her heart still wished it...and B.J. couldn’t ignore the yearning. Thinking up ways to get him to feel at least half as much for her as he’d felt for his first wife, B.J. put in a discreet call to her new girl buddy, Jo Ellen.
If anyone knew how to be feminine and win over a man’s heart, it would be Grady’s utterly feminine sister.
****
Now, she knelt in the flower garden, muttering under her breath about all the freaking weeds. After visiting with Jo Ellen and then stopping by a boutique on the way home for a new nighty, she’d called Rudy for gardening advice.
Rudy gave her very strict instructions on
weeding, what to pull and what not to pull. So there she kneeled, down on her hands and knees, sweating in the dirt. As she worked relentlessly, a very small, very green grass snake slithered across her hand.
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B.J. screamed and jumped to her feet, immediately scrambling from the flowerbed. In her mind’s eye, the reptile was ten feet long. She could almost hear the twitching rattle of its tail and feel the white-hot venom from its fangs as it bit her right under the arm. Grady flew out the front door. “What’s wrong?”
he said, bounding off the porch, his eyes wide with concern.
B.J. didn’t think. She just leapt, landing in his surprised arms and nearly crawling up his leg she clung to him so tight.
“B.J.?” Grady took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her back so he could look her up and down, probably for blood. “What’s wrong?”
Reality finally returned, and she could only shake her head and move out of his concerned grasp.
“Nothing. I’m fine.” Yet she scanned the grass frantically as she spoke.
“You screamed,” he insisted.
“I did not.” But as soon as she spoke, she bit her lip, realizing screaming was a girly thing, and that was exactly what she’d been trying to accomplish.
Grady looked at her strangely. “I heard you
scream.”
“I do not...scream,” she stated firmly. Okay, so, in some ways she’d always be a tomboy, because no way on God’s green earth would she admit to
screaming. “I might’ve let out a sound of surprise.
But your goddamn wrong if you think I screamed.”
Grady gaped a moment. Then he sputtered out a laugh and shook his head. “All right then,” he revised. “I heard your
sound of surprise
. So, what surprised you?”
B.J. mumbled about the snake, and Grady
moved closer.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I said I saw a damn snake, okay?” she
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practically shouted. It was humiliating. She, B.J.
Gilmore—Rawlings—hated snakes.
Grady fell back a startled step. “You’re afraid of snakes?”
“Hell, no,” she growled and then snorted,
appalled he would even suggest the idea, even though her hand had already raised to cover the spot under her arm where her snakebite scar remained.
“I just don’t like them.”
He grinned, clearly amused, and she ground her molars. But damn it, she didn’t want to be feminine weak; she wanted to be feminine strong.
“It’s okay to be afraid of snakes, you know.”
“I am
not
afraid.” Her voice vibrated with irritation...and humiliation.
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Sorry. Honest mistake.”
At her glare, he tried to stop smiling, but it didn’t work, and his lips quirked up at the corner.
She folded her arms over her chest and let her eyes narrow.
Shaking his head, he seemed to relent. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Really. Just tell me which way he went, and I’ll see if I can get him out of here.”
“I didn’t see which way he went,” she answered, looking at him as if he was insane. “The damn thing slithered right over my hand, and I was out of there.”
Making a sudden gagging sound, she stared
down at her fingers in horror. “Oh, God. I need to wash my hand.”
As she raced inside, she heard Grady’s laughter follow her.
“Bastard,” she muttered, dashing to the sink.
Grabbing up the dish soap, she poured half the bottle over her fingers and commenced to scrubbing the skin raw.
****
Linda Kage
Still chuckling, Grady shook his head again. For a full-blown tomboy, the woman had a healthy set of lungs on her. He hadn’t heard such a high-pitched scream since Caine had put a spider in his sister Emma Leigh’s hair when she was ten.
The prospect made him feel a little lighter. B.J.
was such an independent, self-sufficient woman, he liked knowing she’d actually need him for something every once in a while. Hey, maybe if he was lucky, she’d “dislike” spiders too, and he’d get to play hero even more often.
Searching the ground for a long black slithering object, he thought back to B.J. at breakfast. She was definitely something else. One minute, she could be a seductive vixen, driving him out of his mind with what she could do with her mouth. Then she was shrieking her head off over snakes, only to switch back into the ultimate tomboy a second later, acting too tough to be scared of anything.
He enjoyed the mix. He enjoyed B.J. The woman was a breath of fresh air. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed companionship until she’d
crowded her way into his life. But he liked having her around. And he liked catching her unaware when she paused in a room to look down at her still flat stomach in wonder, like she couldn’t believe there was a little human in there.
Amy had talked constantly about her pregnancy, how her body was changing and what she was
thinking. But B.J. remained quiet, hardly ever mentioning the fact she was carrying.
He found himself wanting to know what was
going on her mind when she laid a protective hand on her stomach and stood there lost in thought. He wanted to know what her body was going through and what emotions she was experiencing, because he had a sneaking suspicion the baby secretly delighted her.
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Still lost in thought, he almost missed
movement out of the corner of his eye. Jerking around, he watched something slither across the lawn away from the flowers. Surprised such a small thing had made her let out such a big scream, he picked the snake up by the back of its head. It was hardly even a foot long.
He laughed. She was afraid of this little worm of a thing? It didn’t seem possible. But as the front door opened and she appeared in the doorway, he lifted it to show her. She pulled to an immediate stop. “Found it,” he called.
“Good,” she said. “So...go kill it.”
He frowned. “I’m not going to kill it. Snakes are good to have around. They eat mice.”
“I don’t have a problem with mice. The mice can stay.”
He was half-tempted to tease her about being so scared. He probably would’ve if he didn’t fear getting a black eye for his trouble.
“I’ll just carry it off then,” he relented, grinning.
B.J. folded her arms across her chest. “Do
whatever you want. I’m going to start supper.”
“You don’t want to finish weeding?” he couldn’t help but ask.
After sending him a dirty look, she spun around and slammed her way back inside.
He took off across the yard, chuckling. After finding the snake a new home, he returned to the flower garden. It was only half weeded. Deciding to take up where she’d left off, he knelt in the dirt and pulled at a dead plant. It’d been nearly three years since he’d done this.
Amy had possessed a black thumb. She’d killed everything she’d ever tried to plant. After a while, Grady had banned her from gardening all together, claiming she was a hazard to the flowers. He’d been 217
Linda Kage
the one to keep the plants nice because his wife liked how they looked. But after she’d died, he’d forgotten about them for a good year, too distraught to bother with flowers. When he finally noticed all the weeds, he didn’t see the point in repairing them because there was no one to grow them for.
But if B.J. wanted flowers, he’d grow her
flowers.
****
you were a woman, you’d be in half mourning right now?”
Grady paused as he entered the bedroom.
“Excuse me?”
Lying with the covers tucked up to her armpits and a load of pillows propping up her back, B.J.
lifted the paperback in her hand.
“It’s right here.” She pointed to the passage in front of her. “The first year is called deep mourning.
You seclude yourself in your home, cover the windows with crepe and wear all black.”
When he merely blinked as if she’d just read the words in a foreign language, she continued. “The second year is second mourning, and you can take the crepe off the windows. The third year is half mourning, and you can wear gray and lavender and mauve.”
She glanced up and watched him unbutton the
gray shirt he was wearing. As her eyebrows lifted with a see-what-I mean look, he shook his head with an amused lift of his lips. “What in the world are you reading?”
Holding her place with a finger, B.J. turned the spine and read aloud. “It’s called
The Trouble With
Bluestockings
. It’s the first in a series. Jo Ellen lent it to me. And you know what, for a sappy romance, it’s not half bad. There are some great sex scenes in here.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m learning lots 218