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Authors: Victoria Pade

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BOOK: Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch
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“I better buy my faucet and get going,” was the only answer she could think to give.
“I'll supply the candles,” he tempted.
“Really, I have to go now,” she insisted, keeping one eye on the room's entrance for her fellow church member.
“You know what I'd like as much as you comin' over to use my tub, if it becomes my tub?”
“What?” she asked, still on the lookout for the salesman.
“I'd like it if you'd stop tryin' so hard to run from me, little rabbit.”
“I'm not running. I really have to go,” she lied for the third time.
He just stared at her as if he knew it. For a moment, anyway. Then he said, “Okay. Go.”
So why wouldn't her feet move?
She stood rooted to the spot, watching him, struck by how terrifically handsome he was, how terrifically appealing, how terrifically sexy, wanting to climb back in the bathtub with him. Fellow church member or no fellow church member lurking just outside.
But in the end she couldn't do it.
“See you around,” she said lamely instead.
“Sure.”
She finally persuaded her feet to move. But before she'd gotten more than a few steps away, Cal's deep voice stopped her.
“How about we watch the sunrise together sometime soon? I know the perfect place for it.”
So maybe she hadn't bored him to death the previous night. Or just now, either.
“I'd like that,” she heard herself say before she'd given any thought to the wisdom in it.
Then she wondered if that perfect place to watch the sunrise was from his bed, thinking that perhaps she should add that she'd only like to watch it with him if it was from some respectable spot.
But somehow that seemed presumptuous even if his tone of voice was full of insinuation.
Not to mention that she wasn't altogether sure she wanted to put on that restriction....
“Happy faucet huntin', Abby Abby,” he said then, rather than making a firm date.
“Thanks. Enjoy your bathtub.”
“Without you? Don't know if that's possible,” he said on a sigh.
Incorrigible. He was definitely incorrigible.
And she liked it way too much.
 
ABBY WAS DREAMING that there was a woodpecker in her room.
Tap, tap, tap.
She could hear it, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't see it.
Tap, tap, tap.
She also couldn't figure out how it had gotten into her room.
Tap, tap, tap.
Or maybe it wasn't in her room. Maybe it was pecking from outside. On her window...
She came awake slowly until she realized the pecking wasn't coming from a woodpecker inside or outside her room, that it was someone knocking on her window. Then she bolted the rest of the way out of sleep with a rush of pure adrenaline, sitting up in bed.
Somebody was knocking on her window!
Her bedroom—like all the rest in the house—was on the second floor. But being in the rear, it had its own outside door onto the wide sunporch that ran the length of the back side. There were a dozen wooden steps that rose up from the yard to the porch, but no one came calling from there. Especially not in the middle of the night. Or even at 4:43 in the morning, which was what her bedside clock said was the time.
The lacy white curtains on her window were pulled but they had a tendency to part about an inch at the center rather than meeting directly. And through that inch she could see that there was a person standing out there, and that was where the soft tapping was coming from and not from the woodpecker of her dream.
She got out of bed and grabbed a bathrobe even though her nightgown, with its high neck and thick cotton fabric, didn't reveal anything. Still, she didn't go to the window until the robe was in place and buttoned from the floor-length hem to the round collar.
She couldn't really see enough of the window knocker to recognize more than that he was a man, but deep down she knew who it was anyway.
Cal.
Who else would have the audacity to come knocking on her bedroom window so early in the morning? No one she knew. And Clangton didn't have any criminal element to be wary of. Besides, burglars didn't patiently stand outside and knock before coming in.
Her heartbeat picked up speed as she finally crossed the room and pulled the curtains open.
It was Cal, all right. Grinning at her and waving as if he were in a parade.
He mouthed, “Open the window,” and Abby didn't hesitate to oblige.
“What are you doing out there?” she asked, only then wondering how she must look—her hair a sleep-ruffled mess, no makeup, probably pillow creases on her face. And all while he didn't seem to have been to bed yet because he was wearing the same clothes he'd had on in the hardware store, his hair carelessly finger combed and his face clean shaved enough to make her think he'd spruced himself up not long before.
“I've been workin' on blueprints of my house all night instead of sleepin'. My eyes were blurrin' but I'm still not tired, so I thought I'd see if you'd come watch the sunrise with me. You said you would, remember?”
“You didn't say when.”
“So what about now? I have coffee. And beer nuts—the breakfast of champions,” he added as if the coffee and beer nuts were sure lures.
“Beer nuts?”
“Nothin' open around here this time of day, and that's all I could get from the machine outside of the gas station. But the coffee's fresh ground and fresh made.”
Abby stared out at him, wondering how he could be so charming, so appealing, so sexy even at that hour, without any sleep. But he was. And just out of a deep slumber of her own, her resistance was low. Not that it was ever too high when it came to this guy.
“You don't have to work, do you?” he asked.
“No, this is my late morning.”
“Then what do you say?”
No was what she should say, she told herself. This was crazy. It wasn't even five o'clock in the morning. And sneaking out her bedroom to go off and watch the sunrise with a man who'd just been peeking in her window was not something Abby Stanton did.
But at that moment she didn't really care about anything but the illicit excitement of doing something she wouldn't ordinarily do. With Cal.
“Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”
His grin broadened on only one side. “I'll be waitin' downstairs.”
The clock on her nightstand said 5:00 a.m. on the dot when Abby slipped out of the porch door to follow Cal.
She'd applied just a dab of mascara and blush, and brushed her hair but left it free around her face and shoulders rather than waste the time doing more with it.
She'd thrown on a pair of jeans she'd had since high school, and the first blouse she found in the closet—a plain white button-down-collar oxford. Then she'd brushed her teeth as she slipped her feet into a pair of penny loafers, applied a hint of lip gloss and away she went, still surprised at the fact that she was actually doing this.
Cal was sitting on the second step from the bottom and he stood as she went down to him.
Watching her come, he smiled again. “I wasn't sure whether you'd go through with this or just call the sheriff to haul me away.”
“There are laws against window peeking, you know,” she said just to give him a hard time. “My sisters would shoot you if they knew you'd looked in at them while they were sleeping to figure out which room was mine—that is how you figured out which room was mine, isn't it?”
“It is. But yours was the first window I tried.” He leaned toward her and confided, “Don't ever underestimate my luck.”
Or anything else about him, Abby thought, but she didn't say it.
He held his arm out for her to lead the way around the house to the curb in front where his car was parked, but once they'd reached it he made sure he was there ahead of her to open the passenger's door for her. It struck her that the small courtesy he always performed was something her former fiancé—who would probably be considered the more civilized of the two men—had never shown her.
“So where are we going?” she asked when Cal was behind the wheel and easing the Corvette away from her house.
“It's a surprise,” he said.
He drove through town at a leisurely pace, with his right arm stretched across her seat back, seeming to enjoy the sight of a sleeping Clangton.
“What was it like growin' up here?” he asked, almost as if he envied the fact that she had.
“It was nice. Ordinary, though, I guess. We went to school, to the movies on Saturday, to church on Sunday. In the summers we swam in Palmer Lake. In the winters we waited for it to freeze over so we could ice-skate on it. Or we went sledding down Harris Hill. There weren't a lot of restrictions because there weren't a lot of dangers and everybody pretty much knew everybody else, so parents weren't paranoid.”
“Were you born here?”
“Mm-hmm. We're the fourth generation in Clangton. My parents are the first not to spend their whole life here.”
“Have you ever lived anywhere else?”
“I went to college in Fort Collins. But then I just came back here. I like it.”
He nodded his head slowly. “Me, too.”
“How did you pick Clangton to finally settle down in?”
“I'd been in and out of Colorado plenty of times. Liked it. Liked the seasons changing. The people—” He shot her a meaningful glance. “So when I decided to buy property I went to Denver and hooked up with an old friend—”
“Cissy Carlisle's cousin.” The playboy.
“Word travels fast,” he guessed with a sideways glance at her.
“Don't ever doubt it.”
“Anyhow, Cissy's cousin set me up with Cissy, who showed me the Peterson place, and there was just somethin' about it and Clangton that said home to me. I told you I trust my instincts. So here I am.”
There seemed to be an underlying message in that last part, but Abby didn't know what it was any more than she'd been sure what he might have been alluding to with his question about whether to invest in the tub or something else the previous afternoon in the hardware store. And she didn't have time to find out because just then he turned onto the road that led to his house.
“Your place is the best spot for watching the sunrise?” And what was she going to do if he said watching it from his bed was what he had in mind?
“Yep,” was all he answered as he stopped in front of the house and switched off the engine.
“I don't know about this....”
“You gettin' scared on me again?”
“No, I'm not scared. It's just that—”
He pressed a finger to her lips to halt the words. “Just wait and see.”
He got out of the car and came around for her, taking her hand to offer help she didn't need and keeping hold of it once he had.
But rather than guiding her toward his house the way she'd been expecting him to, he veered to the left and headed in the direction of the big white barn that ran at a forty-five-degree angle to the house.
They went through the open great doors that cast what little moonglow lit the way. But darkness didn't seem to bother Cal, who took her confidently to a homemade wooden ladder not far from the barn's entrance.
“Climb up,” he said.
“Into the loft?”
“Into the loft.”
She hesitated only a split second before doing just that, rising into the scent of freshly cut hay and cool country air.
The hay doors at the far end stood open, too, spilling more moon- and starlight onto a blanket spread over a cushion of hay. A thermos and two mugs were nearby, as was the promised bag of beer nuts.
It could well have been a scene for seduction.
Or nothing more than what he said it was—the perfect place to watch the sunrise since the loft offered a clear view to the east, over the house and the rest of the outbuildings. With Cal it was hard to tell. But by then she was inclined to think that it was all just very sweet. That this man was very sweet, no matter what kind of a reputation had followed him here.
He'd trailed her up the ladder and now pointed toward the blanket to let her know that was their destination.
“When did you do this?” she asked as she crossed to it.
“Just before goin' to kidnap you.”
BOOK: Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch
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