Yep. Still just as sexy as the last time she’d checked.
“What are you guys doing in Illinois?” Jack didn’t sound mad, per se, but he also didn’t sound happy.
“There was a town I wanted to visit.” Even to her own ears, it sounded like she deserved a one-way ticket to the loony bin.
Jack was silent for a beat before responding with a sigh. “Okay. And then what? You’re going to stay with your brother in California?”
“That’s the plan.” Sara knew she probably owed him more of an explanation, but this was not the time or place. “Can I call you later? The kids are asleep, and I don’t want to wake them.”
“Yeah. I was planning on coming out to Arizona to see them this week, to introduce them to Valentina. Would it be all right if I picked them up from where you are and kept them for a couple of days? I was thinking I could take them to Chicago to visit my brother.”
“Sure. Just let me know when you’ll be here.”
As Sara hung up the phone, she was already thinking about what she’d need to do to get the kids ready for their time with their dad and his fiancée. She was making a list of clothes and instructions she’d need to send with them when the low rumble of Austin’s baritone voice cut through her inner thoughts like a hot knife through butter.
“So, is Valentina the stair mom?”
She smiled at her son’s creative spin on stepmom. “Uh huh.”
“Do you like her?”
“I haven’t met her, but I’m sure she’s great.” She had no doubt that if Jack was willing to take the dreaded plunge again, the woman he’d met was worth it.
“Wow, that’s…impressive.”
“What is?”
Austin lifted one shoulder as they both continued to speak in whispered voices. “Just that you’re so cool about the fact your ex is getting remarried. I’ve seen things get really ugly in divorces.”
“Oh, it’s not like that. Jack is a good guy. A great guy, actually. We just…we weren’t right together.” Sara knew that as an outsider looking in, their situation might seem odd. “I really do want him to be happy, and she seems to make him happy.”
“Damn,” Austin said under his breath. He pulled up to a spot up on a bluff that looked out over the little town of Whisper Lake but kept the car running.
Sara felt his stare on her and she turned to find his gorgeous green eyes searching her face. “What?” she breathed.
“I just can’t figure out if you’re really that perfect.”
Letting out a forced puff-of-air laugh Sara shot back, “Trust me, I am not perfect.”
He looked unconvinced. “I don’t know. From what I see, all evidence points pretty damn close to perfection.”
“You just don’t know me,” she assured him and stared into his tempting emerald-green eyes.
But for some reason, she really wished that he did. And that even then, he’d still look at her with the same awe that he was now. Like she was perfect.
***
Austin tightened hisfingers around the steering wheel. He was doing everything he could not to lean over the center console and kiss Sara until she knew exactly how perfect he thought she was. It was actually surprising him how difficult it was to resist doing just that with her baby blues staring up at him like he was the answer to all of her prayers. Her gaze was filled with an intriguing, captivating, and logic-defying mixture of innocence, trust, strength, vulnerability, and need.
His mind was racing as he tried to make sense of it all. This woman was an enigma of epic proportions. She was full of contradictions he could not reconcile.
The two little people asleep in the back were evidence this wasn’t her first trip to the rodeo, yet she exuded a naiveté he just couldn’t quite place the origin of.
She radiated an independent, self-contained, and take-charge demeanor, yet she’d let him take the lead more than once.
The intelligence evident in the gleam of her eye questioned everything around her, yet somehow, when she looked at him, it was with a total faith and complete trust he knew there was no way he could’ve earned in the twelve hours they’d known each other.
The need…well, that was the only one he could actually wrap his brain around. If she felt even a tenth of what he did, that would explain the spark of desire he detected in her beautiful eyes.