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Amy drew a deep, bolstering breath. She dropped the grocery sacks in the grass and struggled to keep her emotions under control.
“I can see that,” she said with a great deal more patience than she actually felt. “Why?”
Teddy straightened slowly. As he faced her, his superior height seemed more pronounced than ever. “Because you only get two channels out here with a rabbit-ear antenna, and there’s no cable this far out in the country.” Ignoring her irritation, he picked up the instructions and scanned them briefly.
Amy stomped closer and glared at him. “I don’t need more channels.”
He put the paper down, laconic as ever, and picked up a wire. “There’s the rub, darlin’.” He paused to give her a long, telling look. “I do.”
Darlin’! When did he call her “darlin’”? Teddy called his girlfriends that. Never her.
Aware it was all she could do not to kick him in the shin, Amy doubled back and picked up her groceries. “For what?”
Teddy mugged comically, as if the answer to that were obvious. “Football play-offs. The Super Bowl. Not to mention the Dallas Stars or the Mavericks.”
Fortunately, he had satellite at his ranch. “I don’t watch hockey, Teddy. Or basketball, either.” And she detested football!
His teeth flashed white in an infuriating smile. She was pretty sure he knew he was irritating the heck out of her and was determined to keep right on doing it. “That’s the beauty of it,” he told her in a soft, sexy voice that did funny things to her insides. He tapped her on the chest. “You don’t have to.”
Now, that was debatable, Amy thought, given the tiny space in her travel-trailer.
“I’ll hear it,” she complained.
Teddy shrugged his broad shoulders. “If it bothers you,” he said, looking no closer to backing down than she was, “I’ll get headphones for the TV.”
“Or just watch at your place,” Amy suggested with a sweetness meant to set his teeth on edge.
His attention focused more on his task than on her, Teddy attached the wire to the dish. “I’d be glad to do that,” he responded amiably, “if you’d come to your senses and agree to let us live at the Silverado one hundred percent of the time.”
So that was what this was about!
Amy exhaled loudly. “I explained why it wouldn’t be good to do that.”
“Actually—” his expression mirrored her exasperation “—you didn’t. But I’ll let that one pass for now. In the meantime,” he said, looking around with male satisfaction, his lips twitching upward into a smile, “thanks to my work here, I’ve got many more channels for us both to watch. And,” he added, “another surprise inside, too.”
With the deeply inbred courtesy of a Texas gentleman, he walked ahead to hold the door.
Amy stubbornly stayed right where she was. She wasn’t sure she wanted any more “surprises,” if they were of the ilk that he was assuming the role of head of the household and taking over her life.
“What else did you do?” she demanded.
Teddy came back down the steps and removed the grocery sacks—which were getting heavier by the minute—from her hands.
“Why are you so wary all of a sudden?” he asked, beginning to look a little irked, too.
Amy huffed. “Why are you so…bossy…suddenly?”
A frown etched deep grooves on either side of his sensual lips. “I’m not bossy.”
Hah! She begged to differ. “It looks like you’re trying to take over here.”
He shook off her displeasure and nudged her toward the stoop. “You’ll feel better when you have a hot meal.”
Amy only wished she could sit down and eat dinner and watch some TV. Not sports. But maybe something else she didn’t get, like the Home and Garden or the Cooking channel.
Unfortunately, she had cookies to bake. “That’s going to have to wait,” she warned, getting weary just thinking about it.
“Not necessarily,” Teddy replied smugly.
Before she could formulate a response, a high-pitched beeping began inside her trailer.
“What the…?” Amy said, dread springing up inside her as she recognized the sound. “That’s my smoke alarm!”
Looking equally stunned and on edge, Teddy dropped her grocery sacks. Together, they raced for the door. Teddy got there first and swung it open. Choking swirls of dark gray smoke poured out.
“What in the world…?” Amy swore, waving the smoke away so she could see. She hadn’t left anything on that she knew of.
Only Teddy seemed to have a clue how this could be happening.
“Stay there…” He pushed her back and entered the trailer ahead of her.
He charged past the sofa and table, straight to the tiny galley kitchen. Muttering a string of words that weren’t fit for polite company, he jerked open the miniscule oven door. More smoke poured out, along with a noxious smell.
Grabbing a pair of mitts, he pulled a charred black pie pan from the oven and set it on top of the stove.
Amy grabbed a chair, climbed on top of it and yanked the smoke alarm from the wall. Blessed silence followed.
Teddy leaned across the kitchen sink to open a window. Then another. While Amy could only stare at the ruins in mounting disbelief.
OKAY. THIS WAS DEFINITELY NOT going the way he had planned, Teddy thought, staring into Amy’s brown eyes. But then, so far nothing about their hasty marriage was meeting expectations.
Which didn’t mean he couldn’t set things to right. Eventually.
He watched her pick up an aluminum cookie sheet and wave smoke toward the open window with big imperious motions that only seemed to underscore what a moron she thought he was.
Glad she wasn’t crying—crying would have made things worse—he explained calmly, “I wanted to surprise you.”
Her expression remaining unreadable, Amy frowned at the foot of countertop she had on either side of her two-burner stove. “You’ve done that, all right.”
Okay, she was mad. But she had a right to be. Figuring she might as well get it all out, he prodded her deliberately, “Now what’s wrong?”
Amy looked at him as if to say, You even have to ask? Then she pointed at the carcass of the rotisserie chicken on the cutting board, the empty containers of cream and chicken broth, and the sack of frozen vegetables, before turning to the place where he’d unrolled the refrigerated pie dough.
He shrugged off the messy countertop, not sure why that should be so grating. “I clean up after I eat,” he explained mildly, knowing it was the only time-efficient way to proceed. “That way I only have to do it once.”
“Clearly,” she said, as if to a four-year-old.
Wishing she didn’t look so hot and bothered and totally hypercritical, he grabbed the kitchen wastebasket and began piling things into the plastic sack inside of it. He hadn’t expected Amy to be the kind of wife who would be on his case about mundane things. Or really, anything. Not that she didn’t have a right to be ticked off over the ruined meal. He was disappointed about that, too…and hungry, to boot.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her run both her hands through her short blond hair, rumpling the wind-tossed strands even more. Her cute-as-a-pixie features were tinged an emotional pink. He had the oddest desire to take her in his arms and hold her till the tension in her slender body dissipated. Not that he imagined she would warm to such an action, either.
Teddy exhaled his frustration. “I don’t know what happened to the chicken pot pie.” He checked the oven’s temperature dial. It was right where it should be. “I’ve made it dozens of times. I’ve never burned it. Never.” Stymied, he looked inside the oven.
Worse than the charred black remains sitting on the stovetop was the mess it had left inside the stove. The pie had obviously boiled over and burned a horrendous black mess on the bottom of her oven.
“You should have asked me first,” Amy said dully, running her hands through her hair yet again. Abruptly, her anger faded and she looked like she was going to start crying.
Feeling worse than ever for the screwup, Teddy finished dumping things into the trash and looked around for a dishrag. “I was trying to make up for last night. I know that was an inauspicious start to our marriage, at best.”
“It’s nothing compared to this.” Two tears slid down Amy’s cheeks. Her body limp with the weariness that came from a long day at work, she sagged against the opposite wall.
The need to protect her pouring through him, Teddy held up a reassuring hand. “I’ll clean this up. Though I still don’t know why our dinner burned.”
Amy rubbed the moisture from her face and seemed to pull herself together, every bit as suddenly as she had started to fall apart. She took a deep breath that lifted the soft swell of her full breasts. “My oven doesn’t calibrate properly, Teddy.” She looked him in the eye. “It heats one hundred and fifty degrees above whatever the dial indicates.”
“So three hundred fifty degrees was…?”
“Five hundred degrees.”
Teddy swore. “No wonder it burned.” He was lucky he hadn’t set the whole place on fire while blithely installing a satellite dish she didn’t seem to want any more than his company.
Spine stiff, Amy walked back outside and retrieved her groceries. Knowing a change of scene would help, Teddy suggested, “We could forget cooking and go out to dinner.”
Again, Amy shook her head, discounting both his invitation and his help. “I don’t have time. I have to bake twelve dozen cookies tonight.”
Taking charge, Teddy replied, “Then you’re going to have to do it at my place.”
AMY WOULD HAVE LIKED TO turn down Teddy’s offer. She couldn’t. She had to honor her commitment to the organizers of the cookie swap. So for the second night in a row, she packed a bag, got in her pickup truck and drove to the Silverado while Teddy stayed behind to finish the satellite dish and clean up.
Once at his place, she couldn’t help but compare his abode to hers. At just under fifteen hundred square feet, his one-story, sand-colored brick ranch house was roughly three times the square footage of her trailer.
Dark-brown shutters adorned the windows and a covered porch lent shelter to the solid oak front door. The exterior landscaping was sparse, leaving the impression that the person who lived here hadn’t gone to much trouble to add plants or trees, although the lawn was thick and well maintained.
Inside the abode was a different story.
Over the ten years Teddy had resided in the 1980s home, he had slowly but surely redone it, ripping out carpet and putting wide-plank oak flooring throughout. The main area of the house was completely open, revealing a state-of-the-art kitchen with a six-burner stove and double ovens, microwave and sub-zero refrigerator. Cushiony leather stools lined the long granite counter. A long wooden table with Windsor chairs sat next to the bay window overlooking the back patio.
Toward the front of the house, a great room with cathedral ceiling sported a huge beige stone fireplace and mantel. A comfortable sectional sofa that seated seven fronted a big wooden coffee table. An entertainment center featuring a digital stereo and large-screen plasma TV was flanked by book-filled shelves on either side.
To the rear of the house, there was a master bedroom, complete with king-size bed. He had knocked out one of the bedrooms in order to expand the master bath into a beautiful, luxurious retreat, complete with marble counters and double sinks, glass-walled shower and whirlpool soaking tub.
An office and another half bath completed the abode.
The house was decorated primarily in the same beige and brown of the outside of the ranch house. It was definitely a bachelor’s lair. In many ways as unsuited for a family as her own tiny one-person trailer, a fact that weighed heavily on her as she rummaged through his kitchen, looking for everything she needed.
Yet they had to live somewhere, until they figured out how—and where—they were going to expand their living quarters into something suitable for the both of them and any children they had.
That being the case, if she were smart, Amy thought as she slid the butter into the microwave to soften, she would simply move her things over here and be done with it. Make life simpler for both of them.
So why couldn’t she do that?
What really had her keeping one foot out the door?
“SMELLS GREAT IN HERE,” Teddy said, two hours later. He walked in, take-out pizza and a big bottle of Amy’s favorite diet cola in hand.
Pleased his earlier irritation with her had faded as surely as hers with him, she smiled. “It’s the gingerbread cookies.”
He set their dinner down and closed the distance between them, the familiar kindness in his green eyes. Relief filtered through her, as intense and all-consuming as her earlier anger.
“About earlier—” he said in a deeply apologetic voice that sent shivers over her skin.
Amy swallowed. It was ridiculous, how happy and relieved she was to see him, to realize their “marriage” wasn’t over before it had even begun.
Aware her pulse was jumping, she looked into his eyes. “I’m really sorry, Teddy. I don’t know what got into me. All I know is I overreacted.”
“Not really.” He took both her hands in his and squeezed them, in the familiar way of an old friend. “I made one heck of a mess in your kitchen. And I installed a satellite dish without your permission—which I’ll take out tomorrow if you want.”
Amy’d had enough time to think while she worked in his kitchen. If this was going to work, she realized that she had to be willing to give some ground, too. She couldn’t expect Teddy to make all the sacrifices and adjustments while she kept her life exactly the same.
“No.” She tilted her face up to his and looked into his eyes. “You’re right. If you’re going to be spending time there, too, you need to be comfortable, Teddy.”
She could live with televised sports if it meant she could have the family and children she had always wanted.
She just wasn’t quite sure how she was going to live with him.
Before they’d said their I do’s, when they had just been friends, sex—or the possibility of it—had never been an issue with them. Now it seemed to hang in the air at every turn.
Making her realize what a “catch” he was.
Handsome, athletic, kind and generous to a fault. It didn’t take much imagination to realize he would be a handful in bed.
If they ever got to bed…
Oblivious to the amorous nature of her thoughts, he let go of her hands, and went to the cupboard to get two plates. “You’ll be happy to know the oven and kitchen at your place are spic and span, the burnt smell is gone, and the smoke alarm is back in working order.”
“Thanks.” Aware how small even his spacious kitchen seemed with the two of them in it, Amy flushed self-consciously. “I should have warned you about the oven.” She filled two glasses with ice, grabbed the soda and met him at the table.
He reached out to help her with her chair. “You would’ve had you known I was planning to cook.”
They exchanged awkward smiles and sat down opposite each other. Amy couldn’t help but feel the tension reverberating between them. Taking in the way his gaze drifted, however briefly, to her breasts, before moving back to her face, it dawned on her that she was not the only one thinking about sex.
“Things have to get better,” Amy said hopefully.
He agreed with an amused lift of his brow. “Can’t get much worse than they’ve been thus far,” he drawled.
More silence fell, slightly more comfortable this time.
Amy studied his face. “What’s happening to us?” she whispered, resting her chin on her upturned palm. “We’ve been friends forever and it’s never been this…”
