Unexpectedly Expecting!

“How do you feel?”

She looked up and saw Stephen Remington walking toward her. He’d removed his blood-spattered coat along with his tie. Before she could answer, he touched her forehead, then reached for her wrist and took her pulse. What was more annoying than him touching her was the way her heartbeat seemed to flutter slightly at the contact. Okay, the man was a halfway decent doctor, she thought grudgingly. That didn’t give him the right to examine her.

“I’m fine,” she said, pulling free of his fingers and summoning a weak excuse for a glare. “Say thank you and move along.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But I’m not moving along. You haven’t had anything to eat today, and what you ate this morning is long gone.”

“In more ways than one,” she said, smiling in spite of herself.

“My point exactly. So let me express my gratitude in a practical way. Let me buy you dinner.” He pointed to the diner open at the end of the street. “I’ve sampled most of what they have on the menu. It’s not half-bad.”

She planted her hands on her hips. “Thanks for sharing that but you do realize that I was born in this town and that I’ve lived here all my life? Chances are I’ve eaten at the diner more times than you, so I don’t need your commentary on the menu.”

“Why are you so crabby? Must be low blood sugar. You need food.”

He put his hand on the small of her back and urged her forward. Amazingly enough…she let him.

Chapter Two

She had not been thinking, Nora thought in disgust as she and Stephen Remington were led to a booth at the rear of the Lone Star Café. Normally the diner was full for breakfast and lunch, but fairly empty for dinner. However, with half the town still not having electricity and the diner being on the “have” side, families had come in to get a home-cooked meal and to talk about the tornado. Which meant there were plenty of interested parties to watch her sit down across from the doc and to make whispered comments that just happened to drift across the entire restaurant.

She made sure she took the seat that put her back to the crowd so she wouldn’t have to watch their intrigued expressions. She sighed. There wasn’t much to do in Lone Star Canyon but talk about the neighbors. Despite a couple of spectacular exceptions, she’d managed to stay out of the limelight. Tonight that had changed.

“Why the heavy sigh?” Stephen asked as he picked up a menu. But rather than studying the list of offerings, he gazed at her, as if her answer was the most interesting thing he was bound to hear all day.

“People will talk,” she said shortly. She didn’t have to look at the menu. She ate here enough that she could practically recite it by heart.

“About the tornado? Why not? Things like that don’t happen all that often.”

She was willing to admit he was reasonably good-looking and he’d worked hard to save several lives. She’d heard that he was a nice man, not that she was interested or looking, but he had to be about as thick as a board.

“Not the storm,” she said, wishing Trixie would hurry and take their order, or even better, that she hadn’t agreed to dinner in the first place. “About me being here with you.”

“Oh.”

There was a wealth of meaning in that single syllable. She wasn’t sure what, but she didn’t like it.

“Yes, oh. I don’t want the entire town speculating about my personal life.”

“Because…” His voice trailed off.

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. She also spoke slowly so he could understand her meaning. “Because people might think we’re on a date.”

“I’ve heard that you don’t date much,” he admitted. “In fact I was informed that better men than me have tried and failed in that department.”

“I do not appreciate being spoken about behind my back.”

“As you weren’t in the room it would have been difficult to have the conversation in front of you.”

“You could have not had it at all.”

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I didn’t start it, someone else did. I simply participated.”

She pressed her lips together but didn’t respond. There was no point in talking about this any further. However, Stephen didn’t share her opinion.

“So what’s the big deal?” he asked. “How come you don’t go out much?”

“Miss Nora hates men,” a voice announced cheerfully.

Nora held in a groan. Her wish for Trixie to appear had been granted, but she was sure the timing couldn’t be worse.

Stephen turned his attention to the pretty forty-something waitress with big hair the color of fire. Trixie gave him a flirtatious wink.

“Nora here is our Himalayan mountain range. You can look all you want and on a clear day she seems real approachable, but if you try to conquer her, you’re gonna freeze to death.”

“Thank you for sharing, Trixie,” Nora said dryly.

“Just trying to help,” the waitress offered with a big smile. “The meat loaf is great tonight, as always. So’s the fried chicken. I’d pass on the fish. It sat out a bit while the tornado ripped through town.”

Stephen touched his menu. “Why don’t you give us a minute. In the meantime, Nora, what would you like to drink?”

“Coffee,” she said, wishing there was a way to walk out of the diner and never be heard from again. She could feel the heat flaring on her cheeks. It was like being sixteen again and confessing to a girlfriend that she had a crush on Bobby Jones. Unfortunately his little sister had been lurking around the corner and had run off to blab the news to the entire school. Nora had endured an entire week of singsong chants of “Nora loves Bobby.” The fact that the object of her desire had asked her to go to homecoming with him had only taken away part of the sting.

It’s not that she was interested in Stephen Remington, but she didn’t appreciate being compared to a mountain range that could freeze a man to death.

“I’ll have coffee, too,” he said.

When Trixie left there was a moment of silence between them. Nora searched frantically for a neutral topic. Anything that didn’t involve her romantic past. Unfortunately her mind was blank.

“I heard that there was some damage on several of the nearby ranches,” Stephen said casually. “You mentioned you’d spoken with your family. They’re fine, right?”

She was so grateful, she almost decided she liked him. Almost. “Yes. My mom said that except for my brother’s house being totaled, the damage was minor.” She thought about Jack’s small two-bedroom structure. “He’ll be able to rebuild fairly easily. The hands were all accounted for. She told me there was more damage at the neighboring Fitzgerald place. The fence line was knocked down, but the great patriarch Aaron won’t let anyone help repair it, which is typical.”

Stephen leaned forward. A lock of his sandy brown hair fell across his forehead, giving him an oddly appealing look. Innocently devious, like a little boy about to pull a prank.

“That’s right. You’re a Darby, aren’t you? One part of the infamous Darby-Fitzgerald feud.”

Trixie appeared with the coffee. Nora quickly ordered meat loaf while Stephen picked the fried chicken. When the waitress left, he shrugged. “I know food like that is bad for me, but it’s a weakness. I allow myself to have it a couple of times a month. I figured I’d earned it today.”

She thought about the lives he’d saved, how he’d stayed so calm, despite all the injuries. While she’d been busy barfing her guts out, he’d been fixing the problem.

He took the coffee mug in his strong-looking hands. “So tell me about the feud. Why did it start, and when? And why are the fences Aaron’s responsibility? They’re shared between the two families, aren’t they?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You want me to squeeze a hundred and forty years of history into a five-minute recap?”

“Something like that.”

She sipped her coffee, feeling the jolt of heat as it hit her stomach. Suddenly she was starving. “Explaining about the fence is a whole lot easier. The Darbys and Fitzgeralds have nearly twenty miles of shared fence. About sixty or seventy years ago the families were in court about one thing or another. They did that a lot back then. Anyway, the judge was so tired of always seeing them in his court that he broke the fence up into five-mile sections. Each family is responsible for ten miles. If they don’t keep it repaired, they’re fined ten percent of the previous years’ income.”