He gestured toward her. “You’re crazy, do you know that?”
“I don’t know. I think you’re crazy. You expected your pregnant...whatever I am, to go sleeping on that threadbare mattress, using that dusty comforter. At least I cleaned everything for you.”
“I’m a big man,” he said. “My feet are going to hang off of that.”
“Well, I suggest you come up with a solution.”
“Or we share,” he said, his eyes going molten.
“No,” she said. “We cannot share, and I think you know that.” Except her voice had gone high, and her throat was dry. Because he was half-naked. Actually, he was all naked. Just with a towel covering the fact up.
Well, if you’re going to use that logic, then you’re really both naked, because your clothes are covering you up, and you’re just halfway to...
She shoved that to the side. “We are being adults. Or at least, one of us is.”
“You did all of this to bug me,” he said.
“Yes. I made you dinner to bug you.”
“Not the dinner, the tree and everything else. And you knowthat. So stop acting like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“Butter melts in my mouth just fine. On fresh delicious cornbread, which I made. So there.”
“You don’t want to start a war with me, Violet Donnelly.”
“Why not? What would happen? What is it that you fight for, Wolf Garrett? Perhaps I do want a war. So I can see where you stand.”
“I stand in the middle of my house, plenty pissed off that I’m being put in a kid bed.”
“Well, you were more than happy to put me in it. So now you see how it feels. And maybe you’ll be a little bit better about thinking of others. Now that you have to sleep a night on my mattress.”
“See you tomorrow.”
He walked down the hall and slammed the door behind him, and Violet sat there, and then a smile spread over her face.
She had lost a couple of the battles in the past few days, but she had just won a very petty war. And if she couldn’t stop herself from desiring his body, then she would take that. Yes, in the end, she would take that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“YOUWENTANDgot her?” He was sitting around the breakfast table at his brother’s house the next morning, taking on a hard stare from Hunter, Elsie, Sawyer and Evelyn, in equal parts. It was Elsie who had asked that scandalized-sounding question.
“I did,” he said.
“You hauled her up and threw her in the back of the pickup?” Hunter asked.
“Well,” Elsie said, looking at Hunter and then back to Wolf. “Did you?”
“She came of her own volition.”
“You’re going to be a father?” Sawyer asked.
The words sat uncomfortably in Wolf’s stomach. And he wanted to deny it. Wanted to reject it. What he wanted was to pretend that this wasn’t happening at all. But he couldn’t. Because Violet was in his house, she had stolen his bed and there was a Christmas tree in his damned living room.
And provided that everything went fine in the next couple of months, odds were, he was going to be a father.
He didn’t like that word. There was nothing good tied to it, not for him. He didn’t like parents. Not the entity or the word. Nothing. He hated every single thing about the idea of being involved in that kind of domestic life. He hated all of this. He just really did.
“I guess so,” Wolf said.