Baby, You're Mine

She’d shaken the dust from home and town from her heels, diploma in hand, and, as far as he knew, never looked back. It had taken him hours to scrape off the crackled varnish and sand the table, to find the truth of the walnut. Every dusty, sweaty moment of sanding and stripping and scraping had been a pleasure. Compared to that, Phoebe’s tears didn’t mean diddly. That was a truth he needed to remember, too. He shrugged. “Just a piece of wood, that’s all,” he said, but his palm hesitated on the waxed surface.

“No.” Her voice was low and husky with those tears. Mirroring his own motion, her hand moved slowly against the shining surface. “Not just a piece of wood. Memories.” Her eyelashes fluttered, lifted, and for a moment he saw the tear-sparkle of her eyes.

“Piece of furniture. Needed repairing. That’s all.”

She turned toward him, almost as if she wanted to say something else, and her cheek caught the last ray of light from outside. He couldn’t look away from the play of light against her skin.

Her face was as smooth, as glossy as the table’s finish, as tempting to his touch. He’d learned the truth of that old wood, and he’d learned the truth of Phoebe. Like a butterfly, bright, fragile, she drifted here, there. Everywhere. As useless to expect that butterfly to last through the winter as to expect Phoebe Chapman McAllister to stay in Manatee Creek, to put down roots.

He lifted his hand carefully, his fingertips tingling as if he’d run them down a bare wire. Odd thoughts, this notion of Phoebe settling down, putting down roots. Tucking his palms under his armpits, he glanced at her with a scowl.

Her damp shirt clung to her like primer on drywall, every curve and bump outlined by the tangerine-colored, see-through cotton. He cleared his throat. He didn’t need to be thinking about Phoebe’s bumps and curves and how she looked like a juicy orange, all damp and glistening, waiting to be peeled. He tugged the bandanna from his head, wiped his hands and jammed the scarf into his pocket. “You and Frances Bird are wet. Y‘all want to get into some dry clothes?”

“I’m Bird. I told you already. Not Frances Bird.” Sitting on the stool she’d hauled to the table, Phoebe’s daughter beamed up at him. “Unless you’re real, real mad at me. Then everybody calls me Frances Bird.” She patty-caked her banana-coated hands together. Bits of pulp spurted onto the floor. “But I will not ever, ever, make you mad at me and I will stay out of your way while we are living with you and not be a bother at all and I will clear the table and pick up after myself. Okey doke?” She slapped her hands together for emphasis.

Banana shot onto his chin, dripped to his clean floor.

“Frances Bird. Get a paper towel.” Phoebe’s voice was stiff, but he heard the anxiety in it.

“See? I told you how it is. Now Mama’s mad at me.” Bird wrinkled her nose and sighed heavily.

He thought he heard Phoebe sigh too as he said, “Don’t bother, I’m fine. I’ll clean up later. After your mama and I have our conversation.”

“Right.” The quick look Phoebe threw her daughter carried a message he couldn’t quite decipher. Warning, sure. But something else there, too. The little girl settled back onto the stool, her brown eyes as big as paint-can lids. Phoebe shifted her feet, plucked at the drying fabric of her shorts where it stuck to her thighs. But she didn’t say anything more even as her daughter wiggled on the stool.

Wiping his chin thoughtfully with the tail of his shirt, he examined Phoebe, seeing now the disturbing details he’d missed earlier.

Like the purple circles under her eyes, the tiny lines at their corners. Like the strain in her posture. Familiar but different, this Phoebe. He didn’t quite know what to make of her, but he reckoned sooner or later she’d let him know what she wanted.

And sure as God made little green apples, Phoebe wanted something from him.

Her face was tense and her full bottom lip thinned with exasperation, but her eyes softened as she looked at her daughter. “Ah, Bird, sugar. I told you Murphy and I have to talk. We’ve landed on his doorstep without warning, I haven’t had a chance to explain and—”

“And we’re going to stay with him.” The stool went in one direction, Bird in another, as she clambered down. “You said Murphy won’t mind.”

Phoebe was going to have her hands full in a few years with that little dickens. Maybe he’d let the heart-to-heart with Phoebe wait a bit. Murphy let his shirttail fall. No rush to find out exactly what she had in mind. Yeah, she and her daughter were turning his evening upside down, but Bird tickled his funny bone, he was hungry, and he was mighty curious to see how Phoebe was going to try and soften him up. No reason he couldn’t let her play out her hand.

Taking his time, he smoothed his shirt down, and gave her a big grin.

Phoebe squinted at him.

“Taken to wearing glasses since I last saw you?”

She scowled, brown eyes darkening. “No, but I’m wondering why you’re smiling like the devil’s own son. You make me nervous when you smile like that, Murphy.”

“Do I, Phoebe? How...fascinatin’. Never known you to be the nervous type before.” He took a step toward her and noticed with interest that she didn’t move an inch, but her scowl sharpened as he tugged at the edge of her almost-dry shirt, let the back of his knuckle graze lightly against the heat of her belly.

She angled her chin at him, letting him know he was mighty close to some invisible line and daring him to step across it. “Stop this, Murphy. You’re irritating me. I told you not to.”

He let his knuckle slide once more against that velvet skin. “Did you now?”

“Back away, Murphy.” Brown eyes flared dark with temper and something else that made him lean into her, just that tiny bit closer, just to see what burned in those depths.

Phoebe had no idea how irritating he could be if he put his mind to it, and he was of a mind to irritate her, see what was behind her so-called spontaneous visit. Keeping his finger lightly wrapped in the brilliant cotton of her T-shirt, he asked, “So, you and Bird want to stay naturally air-conditioned or take a shower and change? Maybe stay for supper?”

“What are you up to, Murphy?”

He gave a tiny yank to the fabric. “Question is, sweetpea, what are you up to?”

This time he was positive he heard Phoebe sigh.

Chapter Two

The tickle of Murphy’s knuckles against her bare skin sent shivers down to Phoebe’s toes, and she inhaled with shock. She couldn’t help it, didn’t like it, didn’t want to reveal how much the mere touch of him affected her, but the brush of his hand on her skin was so unbearably welcome, so terrifyingly right, that she knew she’d made an enormous mistake in thinking she could live in Murphy’s house. Even for a week.

She couldn’t.

And then she shook her head, clearing the haze from her eyes, and looked, really looked at him.

With each tug of his finger in her shirt, her skin prickled and jumped, but she realized that his teasing smile was that of the boy she’d grown up with, not that of a man intent on flirting. Not the smile of a man with seduction on his mind.

Embarrassed to the roots of her hair at her foolishness—this was Murphy, for Pete’s sake—she smiled brightly, flipped her hair out of her eyes and told herself that she would manage somehow.

And she would keep a prudent, wary distance from Murphy Jones and his slow, easy grin that still turned her bones to pudding and her brain to mush. Heck, she could do that. She’d done it before. Now? It would be a snap, once she had a good night’s sleep. Heck, she had experience, age and desperation on her side.

She would control her own silly reaction to him.

And she could manage Murphy.

Of course she could, she thought dubiously as she saw the tiny movement at the corner of his mouth as she flipped her hair carelessly, her very carelessness a masterpiece of acting.

“Me? Up to something?” She whirled past him, plopped on a suitcase.

“Yeah, that’s the question.” His mouth twitched.

“Why, what a suspicious mind you have, Murphy.” She tossed him a grin, crossed her legs, and swung one leg up and down to the staccato rhythm pumping through her blood. “What with all your questions, a person might suspect you weren’t thrilled to have her drop in for company.” She slowed the gallop of her leg as his gaze followed its length, lingered along the top of her thigh, and moved on up to her face. It took all her effort not to yank at her suddenly too-short shorts.

“Don’t forget. I know you, Phoebe,” he said lightly. “And you’re hopping around like a kid crossing hot sand.”

“Don’t you forget you haven’t seen me in eight years. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” She stood up so abruptly that the suitcase wobbled, thumped flat on the floor. Her heart was beating like a snare drum, and she was afraid she’d say the wrong thing and there wouldn’t be a chance to salvage what she could from this situation that bordered on the disastrous. “People change, Murphy.”

“Do they, sweetpea?” His face was shadowed by one of the pans hanging from the ceiling.

“Of course. It’s called growing up. Maturing,” she said, making her tone as light as soap bubbles. “We all go through it. Even me.” She whirled away toward the door to the hall. “Anyway, I’ll take you up on your offer of food and a change of clothes. Bird and I are bone-tired. A shower will be nice.” Even knowing she was babbling, she couldn’t stop the avalanche of words. “You have hot water, right? Hey, even a cold shower would be a treat after this heat. Golly gee, I don’t know when I’ve felt this grubby and sticky, and I know you’re ready for a shower after working in the sun all day, and Bird—”

“Phoebe. I have hot water.”

Murphy’s amused burr of a voice slid down her spine, silenced her. Oh, Lord, she was making such a fool of herself. She inhaled and scooted a suitcase toward Bird. “Open up, baby, and pick out your sleeping duds.” Flipping open her own suitcase, trying her best to ignore Murphy’s attentive gaze that was destroying her confidence with every tick of the clock, Phoebe crouched down and rummaged through carefully packed shorts and underwear. She finally grabbed blindly at the next piece of clothing that met her frantic fingers, something red and, she discovered too late, skimpy. With her best teddy clutched in her shaking fingers, she tried to shut her suitcase.