Caleb's Bride. Wendy Warren

with wry amusement. “Tonight would be good, yes.”

      Before she could respond, Ben passed her a bowl of rice pilaf, and her father boomed, “So, Caleb, what are you doing for a living?” Frank eyed the navy suit and well-groomed hands of the man who had been his hired hand on numerous occasions. “You don’t look like a farmer.”

      Because the comment held more than a whiff of disappointment, Gabby’s brothers snickered. “All right!” approved Dylan, leaning forward to peer at his brothers. “Eric, Ben, we may be off the hook. Dad can hassle Caleb now about his career.”

      “I don’t hassle you,” grumbled Frank. “You boys have fine jobs. But this farm is in your family, and someone ought to work it when I’m gone. Too many independent farmers are being run out of business these days.” He did a double take into the bowl Caleb passed him and sniffed. “What is this?”

      “Rice,” Gabby offered.

      “It’s brown.”

      “It’s good for you,” Nancy scolded from the opposite end of the table, her plump arms supporting a platter of steaming corn on the cob. “Eat it.” She confided to Lesley in a loud whisper, “The doctor says he needs more fiber, but he refuses to eat oat bran.”

      Lesley nodded back. “Fiber. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” Catching Gabby’s eye, she winked. “Just like men.”

      “Thanks, honey,” Eric murmured.

      Gabby smiled weakly, accepting a large, heavy ceramic bowl of homegrown string beans from Ben on her left. As she struggled to balance the dish while forking up vegetables, Caleb pulled the bowl from her hands and held it so she could serve herself more easily. “Atta girl,” he commended in a whisper. “String beans are loaded with fiber.”

      Gabby glanced up to catch his wink, surprised by how much he was enjoying himself. His forehead was relaxed. She recalled noticing on several occasions years ago that Cal’s brow was furrowed every time she saw him at school, but in her parents’ home, it smoothed out. Softened. He relaxed here.

      The fact that he’d lost touch with her family had surprised her years ago, and in some ways it still did.

      How worried her mother had been when Cal had dropped out of sight, choosing not to return from college to share either Thanksgiving or Christmas that first year, despite the fact that he’d spent the previous five holidays with the Coombses. Eventually, her parents had accepted that he’d moved on, had wanted to build a life of his own, probably, away from the community that had given him as much pain as pleasure.

      After their night together, he’d come to the house only that one miserable time; other than that, she and Cal had avoided each other like the plague the rest of the summer. Most of the time, Gabby was able to convince herself he’d walked away from that sultry July night unscathed, just a teenage boy with raging hormones and a gaffe under his belt. Whoops, shouldn’t have slept with the Coombses’ virgin daughter. Mustn’t let that happen again.

      No biggie.

      But sometimes she wondered whether he’d felt more guilt than she credited him with, and that was when she felt the weight of their secret. He hadn’t known she was a virgin, after all. Maybe he felt he’d betrayed her parents’ trust and hadn’t wanted to face them. Maybe he was so immensely sorry they’d…you know…that he’d run out of town. Ugh.

      The first few years after he’d left, she’d actually worried about him, despite trying not to think about him at all. Cal had always held himself apart from other people, especially at school, where he had been the quintessential tough-kid loner. Had he found people to belong to after he left for college? And, if not, was she the reason he had denied himself the comfort of a family to come home to?

      Not a pretty thought.

      She sneaked a peek at him. Strong jaw locked into position, he watched her family closely. Gabby remembered that about him now, how observant he had been, often studying his surroundings as if life were a documentary. What, she wondered now, had he been looking for?

      “So what is it you do, Caleb?” Frank tried again, reaching for the bowl of string beans and heaping them onto his plate next to a tiny serving of brown rice.

      “I’m a civil engineer,” Cal answered, turning his full attention to her father. “I attended graduate school in Illinois, interned with a company in Chicago then stayed on.”

      “Chicago.” Ben was mightily impressed. “I’ve heard it’s a great city. Hot women.” He waggled his brows at his mother, who pestered him constantly to mend his playboy ways and bring home “a nice girl, not someone in a skirt cut up to her yoo-hoo.”

      Frank was less impressed than his son with Caleb’s choice of venues. “Chicago? What do they grow there?”

      “Ideas, sir. I spent a lot of time on the thirtieth floor, thinking.”

      “Huh. We can use more engineers right here in Oregon, doing something to increase crop production for the small farmer while politicians sit on their keisters in Washington, D.C., thinking up new ways to plow us under—”

      “Dad….”

      “Frank.”

      “It isn’t Cal’s fault, after all.”