She clenched her hands into fists and resisted the urge to turn around and look Judd in the face, all defiant as if she might actually get her way in an argument with him. “Pardon me?” she bit out.
Suddenly, he was standing right behind her. She could feel the strength of him and did her best to keep it from seeping into her skin. Once the baby came, she wouldn’t have anyone’s strength to lean on but her own. No sense getting used to something she’d never actually had.
His hands were wrapping around her arms then, and she felt herself being lifted to standing as if she were a feather and not a five-foot-seven pregnant woman. “I said,” Judd repeated, turning her so that she had no choice but to look him in the eye, “are you just stupid, or are you trying to lose this baby?”
His eyes flashed that black fire, and Bess felt her shoulders relax as she realized his fear. It made overlooking his rudeness a little easier. She laid a protective hand on her stomach and sighed. “Your brother died for no good reason in a country I’d never even heard of before, and this baby is the only thing you and your mother will have to remember him by. Why would I do anything to hurt this little peanut or myself?”
He released her arms, but those eyes roamed over her from head to toe as if he still wasn’t sure she was all right. Finally, he asked in a deceptively soft voice. “For us to remember him, but not you?”
She refused to rise to that bait, stepping even farther away from him to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs. She ran her hands over the clean table top, flattening her palms against the cool wood and studying her nails. “You don’t talk about him,” she said in her own soft voice, sighing out the words to loosen the knot at the base of her spine. “He worshiped the ground you walked on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t sign up just to impress you. Agnes has told me all kinds of wonderful things about him since I’ve been here. Don’t you have any memories you’d like to share?”
A glass shattered against the far wall, causing Bess to flinch as if the next thing might be a fist to her head. Instead, the chair next to hers scraped against the floor and Judd collapsed into it, shoving his big hands through his hair and cradling his head. “You think I don’t know,” he said in a strained voice that startled her, “what Daniel would do to impress me? It never mattered how often or how much we praised him, he never felt good enough.”
Against her better judgment, she reached the inches across the space between them and laid a tentative hand on his arm. He turned his head in his hands to look at her. “He said you’d never find a girl as pretty as his to have as a wife,” she said, “so maybe he finally felt like he’d impress you after all.”
He sat up, placing one warm hand over hers. “Perhaps not as pretty,” he smirked.
“What’s going on here?” Agnes asked from the doorway, and Judd pulled back from Bess as if she burned.
“I got a little hot-tempered, I’m afraid,” Judd explained, rising to his full height and walking to the corner for the broom and dust bin to clean up the broken glass.
Agnes took the broom from his hand, making shooing motions toward him. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you have some work to do in that messy study of yours?”
Bess watched Judd leave the kitchen, taking her first full breath. “It’s my fault,” she told Agnes when she was sure he was out of ear shot. “I asked him about Daniel and upset him.”
Agnes threw away the swept-up glass, then joined Bess at the table. “We lost their father when Judd was just fifteen. He became more like a father to Daniel than a brother. There’s ten years between them, you know.”
“Why hasn’t Judd married?” Bess asked.
Agnes looked out the window toward the dog pens in her backyard zoo. “There was a woman once when he was 21. He even bought her a ring. But one day she just up and left. There’s never been another.”
“Why did she go?”
“He never said, and I never asked.”
“Secrets,” Bess whispered.
Agnes grinned. “Well, you didn’t think you had the market on them?”
Bess swallowed back a lump in her throat. “Some things are just best left buried.”
Agnes’ bony hand snaked into Bess’ palm and squeezed. “Only if you don’t bury important parts of yourself along with them, dear.” She stood. “I best get supper started. Judd will work up an appetite tamping down all those emotions you keep stirring up in him.”
Bess bit her lip. “I don’t mean to be contrary. He just seems to bring it out of me.”
“It’s good for him, Bess,” Agnes told her. “He was getting far too settled in his ways if you ask me.”
“I think he hates me,” Bess gave voice to her fear. “He’d be happier if I wasn’t here.”
Agnes gave her a shrewd look. “He’d be happier if you shared a little more of yourself. It would make him feel like you wanted to be a part of us. It would help him to understand why his baby brother chose you.”
Bess didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept her mouth shut and got up to help Agnes with the cooking. They prepared a supper of salmon patties, green beans, beets and homemade biscuits and then sat down with a subdued Judd to eat it. As they lingered over apple pie and coffee, Bess tried to get up the courage to share something about herself with her new in-laws. Funny, she thought, she had not thought herself a coward until she met up with the likes of Judd Taylor.
But, her struggles proved unnecessary when the phone began its tinny trill, and Judd answered it only to be called away on an emergency. She helped Agnes with the dishes and then excused herself to her bedroom, where she crawled under the covers for an early night still searching for a piece of her sordid past she might be willing to share with a man who made her want to be liked by a member of the opposite sex for the first time in a very long time indeed.
Bess was awake before the rooster crowed the next morning, feeling a tiny foot pressing against her side. The baby was beginning to move around more and more, making her think of the way Daniel was always fidgeting with something, never still. She was rubbing the slightly sore spot where the baby’s last kick had landed when she stepped into the kitchen and was startled by Judd’s arrival through the back door.
He had on the same clothes as the night before. His hair was matted against his scalp and pointing in crazy directions as if he had been running his hands through it. His usually pressed shirt was wrinkled and spotted with splatters of something dark like mud or blood. But mostly, she noticed that his eyes, usually blazing with life, were dull and listless.
He barely seemed to notice her presence, but shuffled to the counter to start coffee brewing, letting out a big yawn that stretched his jaws taut. Bess kept her distance lest she startle him and cleared her throat before speaking. He slid his eyes in her direction with as little motion as possible and barely nodded in acknowledgment of her.
“Let me do that,” she said, taking a step in his direction. “You look worn through.”
He pushed himself away from the counter and leaned against the wall instead, closing his eyes as he spoke. “Pile up on the highway,” he muttered. “Two dead, and a couple of kids orphaned by it to deal with. Some days, I really hate this job.”
Her hands gripped the coffee pot handle until her knuckles were white. “How old were they, the children?”
“Teenagers, out where they shouldn’t have been. Mom and dad had an argument in the car after having to make the trip to pick them up. They’re going to feel guilty for the rest of their lives. What a waste.”
He stopped talking, and Bess concentrated on the coffee, trying not to think about what Judd had just said. Flashes of that rainy night when she’d found Grandfather slumped over in the barn, his eyes open wide like a guppy, flooded her mind. The policeman on the scene had been a high school friend of her father’s. He kept patting Bess’ head and calling her a poor child. The social worker, a tall, beak-nosed woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, had shoved a rough finger onto Bess’ cheek to swipe away her tears and ordered Bess to stop crying, which was only for babies.
She shook herself to rid her mind of the memories and heard the deep, steady rhythm of Judd’s breath, as if he had fallen asleep standing up. His eyes popped open as she was looking at him, and he cocked his head. “What are you doing up at this hour?” he demanded.
She pointed toward the table. “Just be glad that I am. Have a seat, and I’ll make you some breakfast. I assume you didn’t plan on going straight to bed, since you started to make coffee?”
He nodded. “I just came home to change out of these,” he indicated his uniform. “The driver that caused the accidents last night was high as a kite on an as-yet-to-be-identified substance. I want to make sure he gets arraigned today.”
Bess studied him for a minute as he remained against the wall, the lines around his eyes, the shadow of hair across his chin where he needed to shave. “If you had a wife,” she told him, “she wouldn’t let you work this hard. It can’t be good for you.”
“I’m married to the job,” he shot back, levering off the wall and pulling himself to his full height.
She chuckled at the defiant set of his jaw. “And I’m sure the job is great comfort on cold winter nights.” And then because it suddenly seemed important that Judd didn’t have someone to look out for him besides his mother, she added, “Not all women run away, you know. Some of them stay.”
The words worked like an adrenaline shot. Judd’s eyes flashed fire and his hands curled into fists. “I’m going to get changed,” he said, ignoring her comment. “I’d take some scrambled eggs and bacon if you don’t mind.”
He was gone then, leaving Bess to prepare the breakfast. Her hands shook at the knowledge of her own temerity. If she wasn’t careful, Judd was going to think she wanted the job of taking care of him for the rest of his life.
The thought that maybe she did was what sent her hiding back in her bedroom with his breakfast on the table before he returned from changing his clothes. By the time she emerged to see about her own breakfast, Judd was long gone.
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