He groaned inwardly and Kate cleared her throat behind her cloth napkin.
When the meal was over and everyone had pushed their plates away, Kate offered to help his mother clear the table.
"No, you stay out here and keep your grandfather company," Grace insisted. "Rob will help me."
Rob was leaving for Seattle in the morning, and he figured his mother wanted to talk in private about his trip.
"What's going on between you and Kate?" she asked instead.
"What?" He looked at her and set the plates in the sink. He hadn't seen that one coming, but he wasn't all that surprised.
"Don't play games." She placed a serving dish on the counter, then reached into a cabinet and pulled out a can of decaffeinated coffee. "I see the way you look at her."
"How do I look at her?"
"Like she's special to you."
He opened a drawer and took out several plastic bowls with lids. "I like her."
"You look at her like you more than like her."
He spooned red potatoes into a bowl and didn't comment.
"You weren't fooling me. I know you were playing footsies with her under the table."
Actually, his feet hadn't been that close to her, but his hand had been on her thigh most of the evening. Nothing sexual, just touching her. He shrugged. "So, I like her a lot."
"You're thirty-six." She filled the carafe with water then said, "In three weeks you'll be thirty-seven."
"And next year I'll be thirty-eight. What's your point?" he asked even though he knew.
"Just that Kate's a nice girl. Maybe someone you could get serious about." She paused, and he didn't have to wait long for the rest. "Maybe marry."
"Maybe not. I've done that, and I sucked at it."
"You got married because Louisa was pregnant."
"Doesn't mean that I didn't love her." He looked at his mother and asked, "Where's the pie?" Subject closed.
There was nothing that could mess up a good thing like talk of marriage. Thank God Kate wasn't pushing him in that direction. She never asked where he was going or when she would see him again. She didn't get jealous when he talked to other women or paranoid when he had to work late and couldn't see her. She didn't get all girly and want to talk about their "relationship."
As far as he was concerned, that made their relationship just about perfect.
Rob's trip to Seattle turned into the trip from hell. Since his last visit, Amelia had decided to take up permanent residency in terrible-twos town, and she regularly threw fits like she was possessed. The first hint that she'd turned to the dark side happened the day he took her to play with his former teammate's, little girl, Taylor Lee. They'd only been at Bruce Fish's about half an hour when Amelia strong-armed Henry the Octopus from Taylor Lee, then whacked her in the head with it.
The fit at Fishy's was tame in comparison to the spectacular fit she threw his last night in town when he took her to the Old Spaghetti Factory. She was perfectly fine during dinner-well, as fine as a two-year-old could be-but on the way out, he told her she couldn't have the Lifesavers she knew he had in his pocket. She threw herself on the ground and beat her heels on the floor, and all he could do was watch, for fear that if he picked her up, she'd nail him in the nuts with her little pink boots.
His sweet baby girl had turned into a demon child, and to top it off, Louisa had clearly lost her mind, too. Just as he was leaving for his return trip, she mentioned that she and Amelia should come and stay with him in Gospel. Not permanently, just on the weekends.
During the summer months, business kept him from seeing as much of Amelia as he'd have liked, and he wasn't opposed to seeing more of her. But he didn't want Louisa staying with him. If she brought the subject up again, he'd give her the names of local real estate agents.
By the time his plane landed in Boise around noon, he was exhausted and not looking forward to the long drive to Gospel. An hour from town, he called Kate on his cell phone. She arrived fifteen minutes after he got home, and seeing her standing on his porch was like looking at sunshine.
The second the door shut behind her, she pushed him up against the hard wood. A surprised oomph left his chest, and she grabbed his wrists and pinned them above his head. The gold Rolex he'd been given when he'd signed with the Seattle Chinooks slammed into the door and dug into his skin. He didn't mind. "What are you planning?" he asked.
"An assault."
She kissed his neck, and the touch of her wet mouth sent shivers down his spine, working out the tension he'd felt for days. "Are you going to hurt me?"