A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father: A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father

But he’d caught the baby before she landed on her noggin, setting her in the curve of his arm like it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t exactly go all goo-goo-ga-ga over her, giving her what seemed to Tess a cautious smile, but he seemed comfortable enough holding her, so she let it go.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, looking back at the cabinets, “easiest thing would be to just rip ’em all out, replace ’em with standard stock from Lowe’s or Home Depot or someplace. Heckuva lot cheaper, too.”

“They won’t look cheap?”

“Nah, they’ll look fine. And we can do granite veneer on the counters, looks great, but for, like, a quarter of the cost of solid.” He looked around. “Ditch the wallpaper, paint the walls, maybe do some tiling on the backsplash if you want…” He looked over, a slight smile tilting his lips. “I can get you an estimate by late tomorrow. How’s that?”

“Um, sure, that’s great—”

“Okay, pumpkin, back to your mama,” he said, handing the baby over and returning to the living room. “So, Miguel. Show how me what you taught the dog.”

It was pitiful, the way the kid lit up. Pitiful and totally understandable. “Okay!” he said, bending over and patting his thighs. “C’mere, Blue! C’mere, boy!” The dog’s bat ears half-lowered, he looked back at Eli as if to say, Do I gotta? At Eli’s nod, the thing sighed and plodded over to Micky. “Now sit!” When the dog sat, Miguel looked at Eli, beaming. “Told you!”

Smiling, Tess glanced back at Eli just in time to catch an achy expression on his face that stopped her smile cold, even as the man chuckled. “Let’s see if it works for me. Come, Blue.” The dog literally rolled his eyes, heaved himself to his feet and plodded back to Eli. “Sit, Blue. Well, look at that—you’re a good teacher, Miguel! Okay,” he said, gathering up his things. “I gotta git, but you two be good for your mama, y’hear?” Then he boot-scooted his fine self out of there, Blue trotting along behind.

Bizarre.

And all the way home, as Miguel yammered about how cool Eli was, the whole dog-sitting incident bugged. Yeah, Eli’d done and said all the right things, but Tess couldn’t shake the feeling something was off. Not that he didn’t like kids, or even that he didn’t know what to do with them, but…

But like there was a story there he wasn’t telling.

And if she was smart, she’d let it stay untold.

Situated in what used to be an old A-frame house far enough from the center of town to be discreet, but not so far as to inconvenience anybody, the Lone Star Bar was about as threatening as a toothless hound dog. And almost as comical. Even with most of the original walls ripped out, the inside was hardly big enough for a decent-size bar, let alone the handful of tables and chairs and the requisite pool table squeezed into the back corner. Oh, and the six-foot-square “stage” set up for karaoke night. Ramon Viera, the owner, used to joke the place was so small he didn’t dare hire chesty waitresses for fear they’d put somebody’s eye out. But if, like Eli, you just wanted someplace to de-stress for a few minutes, there was no place better.

Ramon’s bushy eyebrows barely lifted when Eli slid onto one of the dozen barstools. “Hey, Eli…haven’t seen you in forever,” he said over Reba McIntyre’s warbling on the jukebox, the clacking of billiard balls, some gal’s high-pitched laugh. “Everything okay?”

Hell, no. Not by a long shot. And all it’d taken was the feel of Tess’s little girl in his arms, the yearning in a six-year-old boy’s eyes, for everything he’d worked so hard to put behind him to come roaring back up in his face, just like that.

“What? I can’t stop in for old times’ sake?”

Ramon shrugged. And grinned. Took a lot more than a cranky carpenter to offend the old bartender. “What’ll it be?”

“Whatever’s on tap,” Eli said, tossing a couple bucks on the pock-marked bar when Ramon placed the filled glass in front of him, only to nearly choke on a cloud of perfume pungent enough to spray crops with.

“Well, hello, stranger,” Suze Jenkins said, sliding up onto the seat beside him. “How ’bout buying a girl a drink?”

Oh, Lord. They’d gone out exactly once, probably five years ago, although Eli couldn’t for the life of him remember why. What he did remember was that a) nothing had happened, and b) Suze had been right pissed about that. That despite his calling the next day to say he was sorry, but it didn’t seem right to leave her dangling when he knew nothing was gonna blossom between them—which had seemed the decent thing to do, if you asked him—she’d been harder to shake than a burr off a long-furred dog. And although she eventually let go, she still occasionally popped up, just seeing if the wind had changed.

“Not sure that’s a good idea,” Eli now said, taking a sip of his beer, eyes straight ahead.

“Chicken.”

Finally, he looked at Tess’s business partner, seeing exactly what he’d seen then—a pretty woman in a low-cut sweater with desperation issues as strong as her perfume. “Just not in the mood for misinterpretations, that’s all.”

“Oh, come on…after all this time? Don’t make me laugh.” She signaled to Ramon, ordered a whiskey and soda. “Heard you might be doing some work on the Coyote Trail house,” she said after Ramon set her drink in front of her.

Eli frowned. “How’d you find that out?”

“Candy might have mentioned it…oh, crap,” she said as she knocked her purse off the counter, adding, “No, that’s okay, I’ll get it,” when she bent over, a move that bathed her ample cleavage in a deep, neon-red glow.

“Nothing’s set in stone yet,” Eli muttered, looking away. “Not until I submit my bid to the Harrises.”

Once more upright, Suze fluffed her streaky bangs and took a sip of her drink. “And good luck with that. Tightwads.”

Unaccountably irritated, Eli said, “Tess already got ’em to agree to a budget of about twenty grand. Long as I come in under that, we’re good.”

“Even so…” Suze dunked her swizzle stick between her ice cubes. “How Tess thinks she can move that place is beyond me. Especially by Christmas? No way. I mean, if I couldn’t make it happen, nobody can.”

“And maybe you shouldn’t be so sure about that,” Eli said, glancing toward the door just as his younger brother Noah came through it. Thinking, Thank You, Lord, Eli muttered his excuses, leaving another couple of bills on the counter to cover Suze’s drink before grabbing his beer and crossing to meet his brother.

“Talk about your perfect timing,” he said in a low voice.

Noah chuckled. “Yeah, you might want to watch out for that one.” He settled into a wooden chair at a hubcap-size table, tossing his cowboy hat on it and ruffling his short, light brown hair. “She’s like Super Glue.”

“The new and improved formula,” Eli said, dropping into the other chair and shoving the hat aside to make room for his beer, wondering what it was about the west that made so many men who’d never gone near a cow don the duds. Himself included. Then he realized what Noah’d said. “You and Suze…?”

“Couple years ago. In my ‘older woman’ phase. Waaiit a minute…you, too?”

“Woman’s got one hell of a gravitational pull,” Eli said on a rough sigh. “Wasn’t serious, though. Least, not on my part.”

Leaning back, his brother barked out a laugh. “When have you ever been serious? About anybody?”

“Look who’s talking,” Eli said, smoothly shifting the conversation away from himself. Away from the memories being around Tess had provoked, about a period in his life his younger brothers didn’t know about, when Eli thought he’d finally gotten a handle on serious and responsible, only to discover he didn’t know jack.

Oblivious, Noah grinned, then crossed his arms. “Actually, I’m glad I ran into you. Since I’ve been meaning to call anyway.”

“We see each other every damn day, what—?”

“It’s about Silas. Mom’s about to drive him nuts.”

“Mom drives all of us nuts, it’s what she does,” Eli said with an indulgent smile. “What about this time?”

“From what I could tell, she’s seriously on his case about how he needs to move past Lori, start looking around for a new mother for the boys, how it’s too hard, him raising two babies on his own.” Noah grimaced. “You know how she gets.”

Didn’t he just? However…“The boys aren’t babies anymore. Tad’s, what? Three now?”

“And Ollie’s in kindergarten, I know. But far as Mom’s concerned, long as they have baby teeth, they’re still babies. And there’s something unnatural about men raising babies by themselves.”

“Silas is a big boy. I imagine he can handle Mom just fine.”

“He also doesn’t want to hurt her feelings, not after how bad Dad and her felt when his marriage bit the dust. No, I’m serious,” he added when Eli shook his head. “Silas told me he went to pick up the boys the other day, and Sally Perkins was there.”

Swallowing, Eli set down his beer. “From church, Sally Perkins?”

“The very one. Now you know that’s just twelve kinds of wrong. So I thought maybe you and me could, I don’t know, run interference or something.”

“No.”

“Bro. Sally Perkins.”

Yeah, Mom must be getting pretty desperate if she was flinging Sally Perkins at his brother. And Mom desperate was not a pretty picture. “Okay, fine,” Eli said on a released breath. “I’ll think of something. But if Si finds out, you do realize he’ll kill us, right?”

“Can’t be worse than the torture he inflicted on us when we were younger,” Noah said, and Eli chuckled. Hard to remember their geeky brother’s hellion phase. Minute he had his first kid it was like he became a new person. A better person, Eli thought with a trace of bitterness. Man, what was up with the past being all up in his face tonight?

“Does Dad know?” he asked. “About Mom?”

His younger brother shook his head. “If he does, he’s probably on her side. You know how they always go on about wanting us to have what they’ve had. But it’s even worse for Silas, with the two boys and all. Why she can’t see he’s okay, I have no idea.”

“Okay, tell you what,” Eli said as Noah’s cell phone rang. “If the opportunity arises, I’ll broach the subject with Dad. Although like you say, they’re usually on the same side about everything, so don’t expect any miracles.”

Although, frankly, he thought as his brother answered the call, what he’d say to his father, he had no idea. Not that he’d wish his mother’s well-intentioned nagging—let alone Sally Perkins—on anybody, but the fact was Silas was anything but “okay.” Something about all the mornings he’d come in to do the accounts—late—looking like hell warmed over because one kid or the other had been up sick half the night, or just that frazzled look from trying to keep the several dozen plates he had going at any one time from all crashing down on his head.

The thing was, much as it killed Eli to admit it, Mom rarely meddled without cause. Good cause. And the second thing was, call him old-fashioned, but in this case maybe she was right, even if her modus operandi could use a little tweaking. Not that Eli didn’t know plenty of single parents who did a bang-up job of raising their kids on their own, but in his brother’s case, the strain was definitely showing.

Just like it was with Tess, he thought with a spurt of annoyance. And something like sympathy. Maybe that’s what was bugging him about her—the way she seemed so determined to show everybody how much she had her act together when it was patently obvious she was coming apart at the seams. To him, anyway. Oh, sure, if anybody could keep a hundred plates up in the air at once, it would be Tess, but that’d been one helluva meltdown she’d had that night. Pretty good indication things weren’t nearly as okay in Tessville as she wanted everyone to believe.

And why Eli cared, he had no idea. Proving to her he’d grown up was one thing. But this insane urge to take care of her? After what he’d been through? No damn way—

“Yo, Eli…where’d you go, guy?”

Took him a second for his brother’s face to come into focus.

“Just thinking about the bid I need to be working on,” Eli said, swallowing the last of his beer and getting to his feet.

“Bid? What bid?”

“Charley’s house is back on the market. Needs some updating. Dad’s busy, so I signed on.”

“No kidding? Fred and Gilly sellin’ the place on their own?”

“No. Tess Montoya’s the agent.”

Noah frowned. “Didn’t you used to—?”

“Shut up,” Eli grunted, his brother’s evil laugh following him as he wormed his way through the noisy crowd to get the hell out of there.

Chapter Six

Kisses duly dispensed—how long, Tess wondered, before Miguel called a halt to that?—she sat in the drop-off zone in front of the elementary school, leaning farther and farther over to watch her little boy run off to join his classmates on the playground, until some doofus behind her leaned on his horn.

Okay, so maybe I’m just a smidgen overprotective, she thought as she pulled away, Julia singing one of her tuneless creations behind her. Tess suddenly had a vision of her baby with a nose ring and pink hair up on a stage somewhere surrounded by drugged-out rockers and nearly had a heart attack.

“Birdies, Mama! Look!” the little girl cried as they passed a naked ash tree studded with big, black, scary-looking crows. One of them cawed; Julia cawed right back, then giggled, and Tess relaxed, deciding she probably had a few years yet to worry about her daughter’s induction into the dark side. Right now, her major concern was getting the kid to her babysitter’s so Tess and Eli could trek to Home Depot to choose cabinets and paint and such.

Yeah, she was so looking forward to that. Sitting next to him in the confined space of somebody’s vehicle. For a half hour. Each way. Smelling him. Hearing him—

Please, God, just don’t let him chuckle, ’kay? Thanks.

It’d been a week since the Harrises approved Eli’s bid, bless their miserly souls, wrenching from Tess a promise she’d do an open house the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Never mind that open houses right before Christmas were pretty much nonstarters. Because people were, you know, doing Christmas shopping and putting up trees and wrapping presents and who the hell went house shopping in December?

Not that she used those exact words.

And anyway, these days grasping at straws was better than grasping at nothing. Maybe.

At least the demolition phase was moving along nicely. And quickly. Eli had found worker bees from God knew where—cousins and brothers and uncles of the guys who worked in the shop, she gathered—and lo and behold, the ’60s were vanishing right before her eyes. Now all the gutted kitchen needed was new cabinets and counters to make it all purdy—not to mention inhabitable—and they’d be good to go. But since the Harrises had entrusted Tess with all the design decisions—as in, as long as the project came in on time and under budget, they didn’t give a rat’s booty what it looked like—Eli insisted Tess go with him to help choose.

Hence her rumbly tummy.

She pulled up in front of the tidy little ranch-style house where Carmen Alvarado, Evangelista’s niece and Tess’s part-time babysitter, lived. One of her own toddlers straddling her hip, the smiling, slightly pudgy young woman opened her door, calling to Julia in Spanish before Tess had fully untangled her from her car seat. It wasn’t that the area locals couldn’t speak English—most of them did, as well or better than their gringo counterparts. But if English was a pair of dress shoes worn only in company, Spanish was that favorite pair of slippers you put on as soon as you got home.

Except for Tess, whose mother had refused to let her speak Spanish growing up, or even to take it in school, a quirk—the nicest word Tess could think of—that had always made Tess feel like part of her was missing.

Julia wriggled free as soon as the car door slammed shut, running up to her sitter, babbling about birds. “Vi parajos, Carmen! Muchos parajos! En arbol!”

“Usted hizo? Cool! Ahora dé a su mama un beso, sweetie!”

And wouldn’t that frost Julia’s grandmother? Tess thought as she and her daughter exchanged a dozen kisses before the little girl gleefully stomped up the few steps into the uber-babyproofed house filled with toys and dolls and books and healthy snacks…and no TV.

Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t think too hard about Carmen’s extraordinary child-care skills. “I should be back no later than two,” she said, and the young woman smiled.

“No problem. Since she takes her nap from one to three, take your time.”

As she was saying.

Twenty minutes later, some radio talk show—en espanol, natch—spilled through the half-open front door when Tess arrived at the house. Devoid of the rotting blue window trim, the house now looked like that old woman without any makeup at all, mouth and eyes agape in shock. Inside, the noise was as thick as the dust—bursts of laughter, the pow! pow! pow! of a nail gun, that radio show.

“Hello!” she yelled over the din, even as she took in the remarkable progress Eli and his elves had already made. Sure, it looked like a bomb had gone off, but you can’t re-do until you un-do. Not only that, but the pow-pow-powing was due to the brand-new shelving going into the living room, replacing the sorry, warped built-ins.

One of the workers noticed her and nodded, grinning. “Buscando Mr. Eli?”

“Yeah. Is he here?”

“In the back. He’ll be out in a minute.” He loaded another nail into the gun, then gestured with it toward the new shelves. “You like?”

“Very much,” Tess said. “They look terrific.”

“Gracias, senora.”

“De nada. I’m sorry…what’s your name?”

“Teo,” Eli answered, coming into the room. Smiling. Making Tess’s lungs seize up. “Teo Martinez.” He nodded toward both the gray-haired man and the younger one on the other side of the shelves. “And his son, Luis. I was damn lucky they were both available. Couldn’t ask for a better crew.”

“No, it’s us who are grateful, Mr. Garrett. With the economy the way it is?” He did the in-the-tank gesture with his thumb. “Not so easy, finding construction work these days.” Turning back to the shelves, he lined up the nail gun and let ’er rip. Pow. He glanced over his shoulder at Tess while reloading. “Las’ month was the firs’ time in twenty-five years I have to go on unemployment. Luis, he’s been laid off, what? Three, four times in the last year. With a wife and son to support, he’s thinking, maybe he should join the army or the marines—”

“It’s just an option, Pop,” the younger man said as Tess’s lungs seized again, for an entirely different reason.

“An’ I tell you—” pow “—wait a little while, see if things pick up. An’ see?” He tossed a grin in Eli’s direction. “They did.”

Tess’s gaze slid to Eli, exchanging an apologetic glance with the younger Martinez, and Tess guessed that this job was at best only a reprieve. The younger man shrugged—It’s okay, man, I’m cool—then bestowed a beautiful smile on Tess that broke her heart.

At that moment, Eli wasn’t sure what was tearing him up more—Luis’s bravado or the obvious turmoil that bravado provoked in Tess. Because even though she was smiling and commending Luis for wanting to serve his country, Eli could tell the conversation was bringing a whole lot of junk to the surface…even if he couldn’t immediately identify what that junk was.

“Looks great, guys,” Eli said to the two workers, then steered Tess into the gutted kitchen. “You okay?”

Caution flashed in her eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe because the minute Luis brought up the military you looked like a brick had fallen on your head?”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Watching the young man, she breathed out a sigh. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Same age as Ricky when he first went in,” she said, more to herself than Eli. “Teo said there’s a kid?”

“Yeah. A little boy. Just turned one a couple weeks ago.” When Tess sucked in a breath, Eli said, “Tess? What is it?”

After several seconds, she shook her head. “Nothing. You ready to go?”

“Sure,” Eli said slowly, grabbing a leather baseball jacket off the counter’s skeleton and shrugging into it. He fished his car keys out of his pants pocket, then patted his other pockets, sighing. “Okay, I’m an idiot, I must’ve left my wallet at the shop.”

“It’s okay, we can take my car. I just gassed up, anyway.”

“That’s fine, but I need the company credit card. Which is in my wallet—”

“Wait—you’ve been driving without your license?”

“Yeah. From the shop to here. And since I wasn’t giving the sheriff any reason to pull me over, you can wipe that oh-my-God-you-didn’t look off your face. But you mind if we swing by the shop on our way out of town?”

“Not at all,” Tess said. Looking highly amused.

He told the guys they’d be back in a couple of hours, then followed Tess outside and to her car, not realizing until his hand landed on the driver door handle what he was doing. As he trooped around to the passenger side, grumbling, Tess laughed. It wasn’t the old Tess laugh—the laugh that used to drive him crazy, in a good way—but then, this wasn’t the old Tess.

“It must be killing you,” she said as they both got in, “letting me drive. You couldn’t stand it…” The key in the ignition, her eyes darted to his. “Before.”

“What can I say? I’ve evolved.” Shoulder belt latched, Eli leaned back, watching her. “At least, on the surface.” When she gave him a puzzled look, he shrugged. “It’s not like letting a woman drive threatens my masculinity or something. But to tell you the truth…sitting on this side of the car? I hate it. If I’m in a vehicle, I want to be the one driving. The one making the decisions that could mean the difference between me being alive at the end of the trip or not.” At her silence, he glanced over. “Just bein’ honest.”

Her mouth twitching, she glanced at him. “Can’t very well take offence since I feel exactly the same way.”

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“You think this means we have control issues?”

“Oh, I know we do,” he said. Then grinned. “Especially you.”

She didn’t grin back. Although she didn’t try smacking him with her purse, either. So he’d count that as a draw. “How on earth I’ll ever teach the kids to drive, though, I have no idea.”

“This is why God made driver’s ed. And you need to turn right up ahead—”

“I know where I’m going, Eli. Sheesh.”

But at least she was smiling.

When they got to the shop, Eli said, “You may as well come in. This might take a while.”

“You don’t know where your wallet is?”

“Sure I do. It’s in there. Somewhere.”

Rolling her eyes, she got out of the car and followed him inside. Jose glanced up from the table saw, nodding to Tess as she followed Eli back to his workspace. “Wow,” she said when she noticed the headboard. “That’s amazing. Who’s it for?”

“A client who canceled his order.”

“Idiot,” she muttered, then walked over to get a closer work. “Thea told me you’d gone into furniture making, but I had no idea you were this talented. No, seriously, I’m impressed. And I don’t impress easily.” Now there’s a shock, Eli thought as she added, “What’re you going to do with it?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” Eli muttered, pawing through the crap on his workbench.

“Wait a minute…I’d planned on staging the house anyway—if you haven’t sold the bed by the first open house, could I borrow it?”

Eli looked over. “You serious?”

“Absolutely. I’ve still got the old queen mattress and box-springs in my garage from when I changed out the master bedroom…” She shut her eyes for a second, then said, “And I’m sure I can rustle up a comforter and some pillows. And who knows, maybe somebody will buy it. So how about it?”