Not Another Bad Date

didn’t really think about his dead wife all that much.

“…why is your house practically a shrine to her?” Adele had asked the night before. Was his house like a shrine to Devon? Had he allowed his daughter’s grief and his own guilt over Devon’s death dictate how they would live in their home? Maybe. And maybe when Tiffany got back, they’d talk about taking the portrait down.

He walked down the hall to his bedroom and flipped on the light. This may come as a shock to you Zach Zemaitis, but not every woman in this world is lyin’ and dyin’ to birth your baby. Some of us actually find the thought horrifyin’. He smiled as he shucked his clothes, then moved to the bathroom. He’d overreacted. Clearly he had, but the condom breaking had thrown ice water on his amorous mood, chilled him to the marrow, and twisted his gut into a knot. When it came to birth control, he didn’t trust women. He only trusted himself. But did he think she was lying?

Zach turned on the shower and stepped inside. No, he didn’t think she was lying. Not only because until the night before, she’d been running from him instead of to him, but because he really didn’t believe Adele would lie about something so important.

He thought about the football game earlier that day. They’d eked out a win in the last four minutes of the game, and he knew he was partly to blame. He hadn’t been able to give the boys his full effort. His mind had been split between the playing field and Adele. While his tight end had been having difficulty running his pass patterns, Zach had been having difficulty keeping his mind in the game and off Adele. While he should have been watching the tight end more closely to make sure he was getting his hands up at the snap, he’d been wondering what Adele was doing with her hands and calculating the distance back to Cedar Creek.

He’d been distracted. Impatient to win and get back to Adele. That had never happened to him before. He’d always been able to wrap his head around the game and leave his personal life off the field. Nothing ever affected his game. Especially not a woman.

Perhaps it was because he’d gone without sex for three years that he was having a hard time concentrating on anything but seeing Adele again. Of pulling her up against his chest and getting her naked. His team had noticed, and Joe had even commented on it.

“Is something wrong, Z?” he’d asked, as they’d walked from the locker room after half. “You seem distracted.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he’d assured his defensive coach, and had done a little better during the second half of the game.

He asked 110 percent of his boys, and they deserved no less from him. He needed to put the brakes on his relationship with Adele; to slow things down before it really got him in trouble. That wasn’t going to be a problem since she’d kicked him out of her house and told him not to show up on her porch again.

Sure, he’d been wrong to get crazy and accuse her of lying, but a broken condom made him crazy. There was a one-in-a-hundred chance that she’d get pregnant, but he didn’t like those odds. Then again, maybe the broken condom was just one more distraction that he didn’t need. He had one more game to win before the state championship next month, and he needed to concentrate all his energy on bringing home the trophy.

Adele was beautiful, and he’d like to get to know her all over again. He’d like to get reacquainted outside of bed and reconnect a lot more in bed, but the last thing he needed was a woman distracting him. Especially one who touched him in hard places with soft hands and made him want to forget about everything but being with her.

Ignoring Adele completely wasn’t an option. One, because he didn’t want to, and two because it was impossible. He’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked, but he did need to slow things down. At least until after State.

He thought of the look in her eyes as she’d slammed the door in his face. State was a few weeks away, and she might need that time to cool off.

Chapter 13

“Aunt Adele, do you know the square root of sixteen?”

She thought a moment as she buttered a piece of toast. “I think it’s four.” She looked over at Kendra, who was doing her homework at the kitchen table. It had been a long time since she’d had to figure out the square root of anything. “Or maybe it’s thirty-two.” She cut the toast and put it on a plate next to scrambled eggs. “No it’s four. Maybe.”

“Never mind,” Kendra said through a sigh, and pulled a calculator from her backpack. She punched in a few numbers and wrote on a lined piece of paper.

“What is it?”

“Four.”

Kendra had been in a blue mood for three days since her return from the dance competition on Sunday. The team had come in third, and she’d come in tenth on her solo routine.

“I couldn’t concentrate,” she’d said. “I was worried Momma would have the baby, and I’d be gone.”

“Tenth out of all the other girls from all the other teams isn’t so bad,” Adele had told her, but it was like talking to a wall. “Look, all you can do is your best on any given day. If it isn’t good enough, then try to do better next time.”

“That’s what Momma told me.”

“Your momma’s a wise woman,” Adele heard herself say, and was shocked.

“Tiffany says she’ll help me with my attack movements.”

“That’s sweet of her. Is she going to help you here?” Adele hadn’t seen Zach since the night she’d pushed him out her front door, and that was just fine with her. She was busy and didn’t have time in her life for a man who freaked out like that over a broken condom, especially after she’d explained to him that the failure rate of her birth control was 1 percent.

“Probably her house since it’s so much bigger.” Kendra punched a few more numbers into her calculator.

“I’ll drop you off after school and pick you up at five,” Adele said as she slid the plate in front of her niece. “I’d really appreciate it if you could be outside waiting for me.”

“Why?”

Because Tiffany’s daddy is a jerk, who thinks women are dying to have his baby. “We just have a lot to do.”

“Okay.”

After Adele dropped Kendra at school, she jogged her usual five miles, then took a bouquet of star lilies to Sherilyn. The flowers smelled wonderful, looked gorgeous, and were sure to cheer up her sister.

When Adele walked into the room, Sherilyn wasn’t there, and for a few terrifying seconds, she thought they might have taken her to delivery. Across the room, the toilet flushed, and the door to the bathroom swung open. Sherilyn shuffled toward the bed, her pink nightgown wrinkled, her hair in a scraggly ponytail, dark circles beneath her eyes.

“I thought something had happened to you.” Adele put a hand on her racing heart. “I about had heart failure.”

Sherilyn grabbed some old roses from a vase sitting beside the sink and threw them away. “I’m so bored, I’d welcome the excitement of a little heart failure just to liven things up.” She rinsed the vase and filled it with water.

“Bad night?” Adele took the lilies to the sink and stuck them in the vase.

Sherilyn pulled them back out, and trimmed the stems. “I had insomnia again. I don’t think I slept at all.”

“Isn’t there anything you can take?”

“No.” Sherilyn stuck one lily, then another in the vase. “I even watched the Flavor of Love marathon on VH1. Season one and two. I thought that would put me to sleep.”

Adele was fairly certain Flavor of Love was on Kendra’s banned television list and could not have been more shocked if Sherilyn had said she’d been watching a Chucky marathon.

“Instead of making me tired, I had to stay awake to see which ‘fake ass bitch’ got booted and who got a clock.”