Dixie Browning - The Baby Notion

“Is it very far?” Suddenly she was bone tired.

“Few more miles.” He’d been saying that ever since they passed the last stop sign on the way out of town. “The garage has probably picked up your car by now.” He’d called right after he’d checked the hotel and motel.

“Where exactly did you say it was?”

“Your car?”

“Your home.”

“Oh. The Bar Nothing. It’s up the road about half a dozen more miles.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Is that what I call what?”

“Your home. The Bar Nothing?” Priss knew she was chattering, she couldn’t help it. She always chattered when she was nervous.

Clint Black Eastwood shot her a cool glance. “That’s what it says over the main gate.”

She twisted the bangles on her arm. Her mother would have called them gaudy. Her mother thought anything more colorful than basic black, worn with pearls and a touch of gold, was gaudy, which was why Priss had sort of gone overboard after her mother died. It had driven her father wild.

She stared at the big booted foot on the accelerator and wondered if Jake thought she was gaudy. She wondered if he thought she was sexy. Goodness knows she tried to be, not that it had ever done her much good. Her father had ruined her chances with the entire male population of New Hope, first with threats, then with promises.

According to her mother, who had never gotten over her Virginia-hood, the people of New Hope, Texas, “Simply aren’t our kind of people. “

Later on, after her mother had died, her father had told her during one of their rare conversations that the only reason anyone would take up with her was because of who she was.

Priss had come to hate who she was.

According to Horace Taylor Barrington, that went double for any man who showed any interest in her. Money-grubbers, every last one of them. When the time came for her to marry, he would find her a husband from among the right people.

Her parents had had a way of speaking in italics. Or maybe she only remembered them that way.

Jake slowed down as they approached a long, potholed driveway. There were pastures on both sides, some brown, some green. Off in the distance, Priss could see several horses, an enormous barn and a circular pen.

Priss didn’t know very much about pastures. She knew even less about horses, although at school back east she had let on that she did. Virginia was big on horses, and on learning that she was from Texas, everyone had taken it for granted that she’d grown up riding. One thing she’d inherited from both her parents was pride and a real disinclination to admit her shortcomings, although she was working on it. So first she’d pretended a disdain for eastern saddles, then a bad back. After a while, no one had bothered her about riding.

The arched sign over the entrance said in block letters, The Bar Nothing. “It’s not very original, is it?” she observed, wanting to take him down a notch for reasons she didn’t even try to understand.

“Not particularly. You got a problem with it?”

Squirming under the focus of those steady gray eyes, Priss felt guilty at her meanness. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a nice name. I guess what I meant is that the whole idea is sort of silly. Naming houses and land and all. I mean, it’s really kind of pretentious, don’t you think?”

“Reckon I’m just a pretentious sort of guy.”

Priss winced as gravel bounced up and struck the underside of the fenders, sounding like a barrage of hail. He drove too fast, but then, so did she. “I don’t think you are,” she said earnestly. Unclipping her seat belt, she turned toward him, tucking her knee up on the bench seat. “Pretentious, that is. In fact, I think you’re really pretty ordinary.” That didn’t sound right, either. “What I mean is, you don’t look as if you care how you look—I mean—”

The glance he sent her was almost pitying. “Why don’t you just kick back and relax, sugar? Once we get there you’ll want to check the place out, get settled in, maybe make a few more phone calls to let folks know where you’re staying.”

“By now, Miss Agnes probably has me visiting the White House.”

Jake chuckled. Priss sighed, stared through the bugspattered windshield, and wondered who she could call.

Faith, probably. Faith had introduced them, after allmercy, had it only been a few hours ago?

Faith was the only one who understood why Priss shopped in Dallas instead of New Hope. Priss had always shopped in Dallas simply because that’s where her mother had taken her to shop. After her mother had died, Priss had overheard someone saying that the Barringtons had always thought they were too good to spend their money in a little town like New Hope, so naturally, after that she’d been too self-conscious to shop at home except for Faith’s place and a few incidentals.

As they pulled up beside an unpainted frame house set among a scattering of outbuildings, all of which were in far better condition than the house itself, she wondered what her parents would say if they could see her now, riding in a battered pickup that sported duct tape on the seats and a dented door, being driven by a common wrangler who wore sweaty work clothes and dusty, worn-out boots.

They’d say he was not her kind of people.

And they’d be absolutely right. Jake Spencer wasn’t anybody’s kind of people, he was one of a kind. A kind that was totally alien to a woman who was still too embarrassed to buy Cosmopolitan off a newsstand, who until recently had thought the Kama Sutra was a book of poetry, and who had yet to see her first adult movie.

“Welcome to the Bar Nothing,” he drawled, making it sound like a salacious threat.

Or maybe a promise.

Then he grinned, and Priss told herself she was just being silly. The fire, coming right on top of her disastrous visit to the sperm bank that morning, had simply thrown her imagination into overdrive.

She tried to think of something nice to say about his ugly house, but there wasn’t a whole lot to be said. There weren’t even any flowers or shrubs to soften the stark outlines. “It, um, it looks solid.”

“Ye-ep.” He dropped the keys in his shirt pocket, probably, she thought, embarrassed, because there was no room in his blue jeans. Without even looking, she knew precisely where they were frayed the most. The knees, the seat and the—

It was all she could do to keep her gaze away from his lap.

Oh, for mercy’s sake, Pricilla Joan, grow up!

“What I mean is, it looks okay, but some shrubbery and flower beds would be nice. The shutters could stand a coat of paint, too, but then, I suppose they’re more for protection against the weather than for show.”

When he didn’t reply, she slid him a sidelong glance. Were his lips twitching at the corners, or was that her imagination? She tried to think of anything she had said that could possibly be construed as funny.

Jake reached across her and opened her door, causing her to suck in her breath sharply. “Come on inside and we’ll get you settled. I need to ride out for a couple of hours. How’re you feeling, still pretty wobbly?”

She was so pale every freckle on her face stood out like cayenne pepper on a fried egg. “Not at all wobbly,” she said, and he gave her full marks for grit. Walking across the barren yard under a stingy spattering of rain, he attempted to pull her against his side again, telling himself it was because she looked like she could use the support.

She stopped him cold. “I don’t like being touched.”

Jake’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Is that a fact?” he drawled, thinking back to all the times in the past few hours when she’d burrowed against his side like a mouse trying to get into a corncrib.