More Than She Expected

“What did you say his name was again?”

“Tyler. Noble.”

Gran’s forehead crinkled. “Noble, Noble...” She snapped her fingers. “One of Preston and Jeanne Noble’s kids?”

“I have no idea. Who are Preston and Jeanne Noble?”

“He’d just retired from the air force when I met them, oh, way back. Before you came to live with me, when Harold was still alive. Jeanne and I were both working on some fund-raiser or other, Harold and I had dinner with her and the Colonel one evening.” She laughed. “They spent the whole night talking about ‘their’ kids—they’d been fostering for a while by that point, but had adopted two or three as well, as I recall. Not as babies, either, as little kids. Wonderful people,” Gran said on a sigh. “Especially her. I would have loved to have kept up with them, but then Harold got sick and...” She shrugged. “So wouldn’t that be funny, if Tyler was one of theirs? I mean, he’s such a nice young man....”

“Which you could tell after, what, twenty seconds when you took him a sandwich?”

“You’d be surprised how much you can tell in twenty seconds,” she said, and what could Laurel say to that? “Especially when you get to be my age and can spot the BS within ten. And if he is one of the Colonel and Jeanne’s brood—”

“Gran. Honestly.”

“You could have at least invited him in to eat with us—”

“And I already told you, Ty said he only had a few hours to work. He has to go see a client later—”

“Oooh...Ty, is it?”

“For the love of Pete, Gran,” Laurel said, laughing. “Give it a rest.”

“But honey...it’s so hard, raising a child on your own—”

“You managed.”

“You weren’t a newborn. That would’ve killed me.”

“I somehow doubt that.” Laurel got up to rinse out her cup, taking care to avert her eyes from the glorious, slightly sweaty sight twenty feet past the window. After stealing the quickest peek. Long enough to see him bopping his head as he measured, she presumed in time to whatever music was coming through his earbuds. Inwardly sighing, she turned back to her grandmother. “But it’s not as if I’m a teenager, or penniless. Or homeless—”

“No. Just stubborn.”

“Gee. Can’t imagine who I got that from.”

Gran’s grimace bit into a face already deeply lined from too many summers spent on the shore when she was younger, and Laurel smiled. “Besides,” she said gently, “Tyler’s obviously younger than I am, and—”

“Oh, pish. Harold was six years younger than I was. No big deal.”

Laurel’s brows crashed. “I never knew that.”

“Yeah, well, neither did he. Because I lied about my age,” she said with a little “no biggee” flick of her hand. “It was easier to get away with back then. Nobody checked. And since I handled all the household stuff, he had no reason to ever find out. So thank God he went before I did, or that could have been really embarrassing. But anyway,” she said on a huff of air, “Harold could keep up with me, if you get my drift. Until he got sick, anyway. Until then, however—” she did a coy little shoulder wiggle “—ooh-là-là.”

“Except I’m not looking for ooh-là-là.”

“Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart,” Gran said, getting to her feet and collecting the pink quilted Kate Spade bag Laurel’d given her for her eightieth birthday and which she was now never seen without. Thing was getting a little dingy, truth be told. “Everyone’s looking for ooh-là-là.” She nodded pointedly at Laurel’s belly, the pooch still barely visible underneath her roomy—and fortuitously fashionable—top. “Even you, at one point. Obviously.”

“And look how late it is!” Laurel said, ushering her grandmother toward the door. “If you don’t leave now, you won’t make your movie!”

Fully aware of Laurel’s diversionary tactic, Gran chuckled. But at the front door, the older woman turned and grabbed Laurel’s hand. “I can’t help it...I worry about you, baby.” Behind her silver-framed glasses, her eyes filled. “I always have.”

“Then you need to stop,” Laurel said gently. “I’m not that eleven-year-old girl anymore. And believe it or not—” she cupped a hand over The Bump “—I’m happy. Really.”

“But not as happy as you could be.”

Laurel leaned over to kiss her grandmother’s cheek. “I’m fine. Really. Now go have fun with your gentleman friend and I’ll talk to you later.”

“You’re incorrigible, you know that?”

“I learned from the best.”

On another air-swat, Gran turned and descended the porch steps, still on her own steam but definitely more carefully these days. But there was nothing cautious about her sure handling of her brand-new Prius as she smartly steered away from the curb and down the street...even if the car’s stereo was loud enough to hear even with the windows up. Billie Holiday, sing your heart out.

Shaking her head, Laurel went back inside, where her laptop glared balefully from her coffee table. Swatting at it much like her grandmother had at her, she walked back into the kitchen. To...put the washed dishes away, that was it. And if her gaze happened to drift out the window...well. Gaze-drifting happened.

Her cell phone rang, startling the bejesus out of her.

“Hey,” Tyler said. “Your grandmother still there?”

“No, she just left—”

“Got a sec, then? Cause I need you to make a design decision.”

“Seriously?”

“You’re gonna see far more of this wall than I am, so get out here and tell me how you want this pattern to go.”

Laurel shoved her bare feet into a pair of leather flip-flops by the patio door, grabbed a bottle of tea out of the fridge, then went out onto the high-railed deck, mostly in shade this time of day thanks to the thirty-foot sycamore planted smack in the center of the yard. Next summer, she could put a portacrib out here, she thought with a little smile, where the wee one could nap while she wrote....

Tyler turned, grinning and sweaty and glistening, and she actually gulped. So wrong. Because, really, how old was this guy? Twenty-five, twenty-six...?

“Looking good,” she said, then blushed. “The trench, I mean.” Since that’s all there was, at this point. Still grinning, the goofball shook his head, clearly finding amusement in her discomfiture. She held up the tea. “Thirsty?”

“That looks amazing. Yes.”

Laurel skipped down the deck’s stairs—something she probably wouldn’t be able to do for much longer—and crossed the small yard, the cool, too-long grass tickling the sides of her feet. Since she still hadn’t mowed. But the idea that she could mow her own yard...the thought still made her a little giddy.

She handed Tyler the tea, watching the muscles in his damp neck stretch as he tilted his head back, rhythmically pulse as he swallowed. Suddenly not feeling too steady on her pins, she sank onto the bench of her grandmother’s old redwood picnic table a few feet away, grateful for the cool breeze meandering through the leaf-dappled sunlight. Tyler joined her to set the half-drunk tea on the table, then reached behind them for the tablet hidden underneath his rumpled, abandoned T-shirt, and Laurel thought, Whoa. Because, although the bloodhound sense of smell had diminished somewhat after the first trimester, thank God, after a couple hours spent working in the hot sun, the man’s pheromones were singing like the chorus in a Verdi opera.

And she did love her some Italian opera, boy.

“Man, that feels good,” he said, shutting his eyes for a moment as another breeze drifted through. Opening his eyes again, he picked up the T-shirt and swiped it across his chest, and Laurel nearly passed out.

“Nice yard,” he said. “Was it like this when you moved in?”

Yard, okay. That, she could talk about. “The bones were there, but it’d been badly neglected. And of course I moved in during the Winter That Would Not End. Every time I thought I’d get out and start puttering, it’d snow—”

Or she’d feel like the walking dead, tossing her cookies every morning.