took back his beer, the intimacy of sharing with her setting him on edge. “Funny thing about this beer,” he said. “I got it from the kitchen on the way out here. Every time I go into that kitchen, I think about a certain pair of jeans you used to love.”
Shock slid over her face. “Don’t even go there, Caleb,” she warned fiercely.
Kent snorted. “Oh, yeah. Those damn jeans.”
“Don’t you go there either, Kent,” Shay warned. “Or I won’t set you up on that blind date with Anna you’ve been begging for.”
Bob chuckled. “Then I guess I’ll have to go there for all of us. Why in the world, my little Shay, did you put the jeans in the oven in the first place? Just make me understand. I’ve always wanted to understand.”
“I’ve answered this question a million times,” she said, her pretty, naturally pink lips pursed in frustration. “I was sixteen when I did that. Sixteen! I’m twenty-eight years old and, I might add, a licensed psychologist who counsels people about the trauma of bad memories. In case you didn’t know, Daddy, this is a bad memory.”
“The dryer was broken,” Caleb answered, when unnecessary guilt flashed on Bob’s face. No matter how upset Shay acted, she ate up the teasing. And he loved watching her cheeks flush, her eyes light up. “She needed her best jeans for a party.” He’d liked those jeans. Liked them too much, considering she’d been sixteen and he’d been nineteen, about to move into campus housing at the University of Texas. Too old for her. Not that he’d ever be the right age for her. But at the time, he’d been damn glad she wasn’t prancing around in those damn tight jeans anymore, inviting hound-dog teen boys to salivate.
Shay shot him a scorching look that wiped the smile from his face. He was pretty sure she would have smacked him otherwise.
Sharon sighed. “Men just don’t understand how important the perfect jeans are to a female,” she said, defending her daughter. “It really was a smart idea, using the oven. It was like a sauna drying room. I think it showed initiative and innovation.”
Exasperated, Bob’s eyes went wide. “Since when is burning down the kitchen called innovation?”
“How many experiments do you think Thomas Edison tried that went wrong?” Sharon countered protectively.
“What was she trying to create?” Bob replied. “The fastest way to destroy her parents’ house?”
“Maybe if you would have put them on warm, not broil, Shay-Shay,” Kent offered, sipping a beer. “Your va-voom might not have gone ka-boom.” He eyed Caleb. “What do you think, Caleb?”
“I didn’t put them on broil!” Shay spat, before Caleb could reply, as she shoved her hands on her hips. The towel fell to her waist, and Caleb gulped at the sight of her high, ample breasts, covered by nothing but thin slices of cloth. “I left them on warm when I went to shower. How was I to know they’d go up in flames?” She clutched the towel and waved a hand between Kent and Caleb. “And how is it that every time you two get together, I’m reduced from grown adult to defensive teenager?”
Kent grinned. “It’s a gift.”
She huffed. “I’ve got a gift for you, Kent,” she said. “And her name isn’t Anna.” Her gaze cut back to Caleb. “I know what you just did, and it won’t work. Two can play your game, Caleb Martin. You remember that.”
She turned on her heel, strutted back to the pool and then let go of the towel. It slid to the pavement, her pert, heart-shaped backside displayed for Caleb’s admiration. Caleb silently groaned. The only game he was going to play was the one called “cold shower.” Correction, by the time this party was over, the game would be called “long cold shower.”
2
CALEB HAD BEEN AWAY a long time, but the game of horseshoes as a family had endured. Caleb tipped back a beer as he watched Kent make a toss. There were a good seven or eight guys standing around playing. All family and friends. Some Caleb knew. Some…well, he’d been away a long time.
Bob let out a loud bark of laughter as Kent’s shot landed about as close to the target as Caleb was to pretending he didn’t know every move Shay made today. Until a few minutes ago, she’d been in the pool, supervising the kids and entertaining them. Sweet, adorable Shay, always generous with her time helping others.
He hadn’t been surprised on a visit home years before to discover Shay had started volunteering at her college counseling center, or that the work at the center had led to her changing her major from business to psychology. She’d always had a thing for taking in every stray animal in her path. Kind of like her family had been with him. They had done everything in their power to make him feel he was whole again after losing his parents, as if he belonged. The Army had given him a sense of belonging, but not a sense of family…the way the Whites had.
“Were you aiming for the driveway out front or what, Kent?” Bob asked, and Kent buried his face in his hands, cursing at his truly horrific shot. Kent never handled his beer well. And having been away, Caleb had missed just how true, and entertaining, that fact was. He’d missed a lot of things he’d pretended he didn’t miss, that he thought he could do without.
Bob’s comment snapped Caleb back to the moment.
Kent glowered and held his hands to his sides in challenge. “You gonna rag on me, too?”
“Nah, man,” Caleb said innocently. “I think you know how bad that shot was without me pointing it out.”
Rick Jensen, Kent’s buddy who’d joined them for the day, added, “You do give new meaning to the saying ‘Just Do It.’” As doctor for the University of Texas baseball team, Rick apparently subscribed to Kent’s habit of Nike phrase dropping.
“Don’t even go there, Rickster,” Kent said, grabbing his beer from the ground where he’d left it. “We both know you don’t know the meaning of ‘Just Do It,’ or you would have at least asked Shay out by now. We’d all like her to find a nice guy like you to take care of her, rather than some hound dog.”
Caleb wasn’t sure whose jaw dropped closest to the ground—Rick’s, Bob’s or his own. It was a pretty close race. “Damn it, Kent,” Rick muttered, looking pale despite his tanned skin and blond hair. “Why can’t you ever keep your mouth shut?”
“Shutting his mouth isn’t something he excels at,” Bob said dryly. “They didn’t even have to smack that boy’s ass when he was born to get him squealing.”
Shay and her love life shouldn’t matter to Caleb, so why was every nerve he owned standing on end? Hell, he could almost feel the hair on his arms lifting, his skin tingling.
“You keep waiting for a sign,” Kent continued to Rick, as if his father’s explanation were a license to continue. “There won’t be a sign. Shay’s a traditional kind of woman. She doesn’t flirt. She doesn’t come to you. You go to her. You have to get over these nerves.”
Rick didn’t look convinced, as he opened his mouth and then shut it.
Bob studied him and asked, “What seems to be bothering you, son?”
His question stiffened Caleb’s spine. Bob liked this guy Rick. Hell, Caleb liked Rick. No. Caleb hated Rick.
“She’s friendly,” Rick said after another moment of hesitation. “But not overly so. I don’t want everyone to feel uncomfortable if I’m around after she’s turned me down.” He laughed. “Or have Kent beat up my ass because I make her mad or something.”
There it was. Everything Caleb felt. Everything. So completely, so near exactness, that Caleb about fell over. And Rick didn’t call these people family. He had his own. The validation twisted inside him.
“For the record,” Kent said, “my sister’s a lady, but she don’t take no junk. She’ll beat your ass if you screw up. She doesn’t need me to