Karen Templeton - Staking His Claim

“Yeah, well,” she puffed back, “I’ve never felt this much like a female before.”

Along about this time, Cal happened to notice her behind had filled out some with the pregnancy, too. Not a lot, and not so’s anybody but him would notice, probably, but there it was, jiggling away in front of him as she strode, and while one part of him was pretty ticked at her behavior—he liked kids, but not ones his own age—she looked so damned silly and cute and sexy, hoofing it away like this, that, well, something crazy just bubbled up inside him and made him want to kiss her.

So he did.

After he caught her, that is.

She was too shocked to protest. At least, that’s what he was working with. Oh, there was a little mmphh on her part when their lips met, but he chalked that up to the surprise element.

Oh, yeah, she was a natural talent, all right. And she tasted like barbecue sauce and fresh peach cobbler, which Cal decided right then and there pretty much summed up his definition of heaven. Except he could have done without the mmphhs, which were definitely increasing in their intensity.

The fists beating on his shoulders weren’t doing much for the mood, either.

He let her go, grinning down at her.

She was not grinning back.

“And you did that why?” she said.

No way was he telling her about the bigger-butt revelation.

“Because I felt like it. And I had fun. Well, I would have had fun if you’d cooperated more—”

She burst into tears and sank onto the ground.

Cal squatted beside her. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

That got the head-shaking, air-batting routine, then a series of sobbed syllables not even remotely related to the English language. Figuring she probably wasn’t going anywhere in the next few seconds, Cal went back to the truck and retrieved two or three tissues from the smashed box in the glove department, then returned to where she was still sitting and handed them to her. When she was drier and—he presumed—more coherent, he said, “You wanna run that one by me again?”

A few rattly sighs, a few more eye wipes, and at last she said, “You are such an idiot.”

At that he figured he might as well join her in the dirt and weeds.

“You mean that in general?” he said as his backside touched down. “Or you got something specific in mind?”

“At the risk of this going straight to your head, if not elsewhere—” she looked pointedly at the elsewhere in question “—my being hot for you isn’t the issue here.”

“It’s…not.”

She smacked him in the arm, honked into one of the tissues, then gave one of those oh-God-deliver-me-from-the-clueless sighs. “You didn’t exactly have to talk me into your bed a couple months ago. If you recall.”

He squelched the laugh just in time. “Yeah, I seem to remember a certain…eagerness on your part. But I figured that was…”

“What? You figured that was what?”

“That you were still hurtin’ after that guy dumped you, is all,” he said gently, refusing to look at her. “And maybe you were looking for someone to boost your self-confidence back up a notch or two.”

Silence. Then: “I was a little…bruised, it’s true. But more because I was duped than dumped. Andrew and I broke up because our visions of marriage—or rather, his vision of what he expected of a wife—didn’t mesh. What pissed me off was that he didn’t bother to tell me this until after we were engaged. And I felt, I don’t know…betrayed as much as anything, I guess.”

“About what?”

She yanked a poor defenseless weed out of the ground, then shifted to sit cross-legged, making lines in the dust with the weed as they talked. “We were really compatible on so many levels. Similar tastes, similar viewpoints, similar personalities.” Her shoulders hitched. “He was…comfortable. After some of the so-called men I’d gone out with, it was a pleasure being with someone I never had to second-guess. Or so I thought.” Her mouth hitched up into a rueful smile. “When he proposed, my first thought was, No more stupid dates! No more worrying about making an impression!”

Cal frowned. “Oh, yeah, that sounds like a real good reason to marry somebody.”

“Trust me, after what I’d been through, it was a damn good reason. Anyway, I figured our lives wouldn’t change all that much after we got married, that we’d just be a typical professional New York couple. But it turned out…”

The weed snapped in two; she tossed it away and squinted into the sun. “He didn’t love me, I know he didn’t, but he still wanted more from me than I could possibly give. Looking back, I think he didn’t want kids because the competition would’ve made him crazy, because Andrew wanted to be my world. For me to love him in a way I knew I never could. In a way I know I’ll never be able to love anybody.”

Cal waited out the stab of pain before he asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded surprised, like she hadn’t expected him to challenge her. “Just the way I’m wired, I guess.”

“I see.” His insides churning, he focused on a clump of late-season wildflowers shivering in the breeze. “So…you’d rather be alone?”

She seemed to think about this for a second. “I’ve been on my own for a long time and I’ve learned to enjoy my own company. But I’m not a recluse. I wouldn’t have agreed to marry Andrew otherwise. I have nothing against male companionship. Or sex,” she said with a tilted smile. “I can even love, in my own way. Just not the way the rest of the population loves. Or wants to be loved.”

Cal wondered if she heard the sadness in her voice. Oh, she undoubtedly thought she was being…well, whatever people who came to conclusions like that were. Upfront? Resigned? Something. Frankly, Cal thought she was several sandwiches short of a picnic.

The thing was, though, it didn’t matter what he thought, did it? Because it was what she believed that mattered. It was like what Ryan said about attitude affecting a person’s health—people who expected to get sick generally did far more often than people who didn’t think about it too hard. So Cal could sit here and tell Dawn she was full of it until the cows came home, but as long as she was convinced she couldn’t love like a normal person, he’d be wasting his breath.

“So,” she was saying, “about that night. You were flirting, and I’ll admit I was still feeling a little off balance, and from everything I’d heard, I figured I probably wouldn’t regret going to bed with you.”

His eyes snapped to hers. “From everything you’d heard?”

“Hey. Women talk, too. And unlike men, we don’t embellish. Granted, my information was a little out-of-date, but…”

She shrugged. Cal looked back out across the road. A couple of trucks passed. Everybody waved. Cal figured Ruby’s would be buzzing to beat the band by tomorrow.

“In any case, I wasn’t pushing you away just now because I didn’t want to be kissed, but because kissing you is like opening a can of Pringles. Sour cream and onion. Or nacho cheese, in a pinch. If I start, I can’t stop until I’ve eaten the whole damn can.”

“So…what you’re saying is, all those rumors you heard about me…?”

“Weren’t rumors. Which is one of those good-news/bad-news kinds of things. Wanting to have sex with you isn’t the issue. But it would totally ball things up. And I think things are plenty balled up enough already, don’t you? And dammit, I’d kill for a can of Pringles right now.”

After a couple of tense seconds, during which Cal mentally beat back enough testosterone to fuel the sex drive of every man in the state, he stood, then extended his hand to pull Dawn to her feet. “C’mon. Here’s one problem I can solve.”