My Dearest Cal by Sherryl Woods Read Free Book Online Page A

“Spaghetti with the best sauce this side of Italy.”
    His expression brightened hopefully, like a kid promised chocolate chip cookies. “No kidding?”
    “I never kid about my sauce.”
    “No more nagging, at least through dinner?”
    “No nagging,” she conceded reluctantly.
    “You don’t expect any promises?”
    “No promises, except that you’ll do some honest soul-searching.”
    “You drive a hard bargain for such a little thing, but for a decent meal I think I just might promise you the moon.”
    “We’ll save that, in case you haven’t made up your mind by breakfast.”
    A killer grin spread across his face, the kind of grin that made female knees go weak and hearts pound. Her body responded with disgusting predictability as he warned, “Be careful, lady. You tell me you can make pancakes and easy-over eggs and it could take me months to give this problem the thoughtful consideration it deserves.”
    “Oh, no,” she said, laughing. “This offer has an expiration date, and it could change at any second if I suspect you’re not keeping your end of the deal.”
    “Are you married, Marilou Stockton?”
    She was startled by the question and by the fact that he’d leaned in close to ask it. She could smell the heady masculine scent of him and feel the tug of his body heat. “No,” she said, her voice suddenly whisper soft.
    He nodded in satisfaction, then grinned. “I didn’t think so.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’ve got a tongue that’s sharp enough to cut out a man’s heart.”
    “That’s a dangerous thing to say to a woman you’re expecting to cook your dinner.”
    “You won’t lace the food with arsenic.”
    “What makes you so sure?”
    “Then you’d never get me to Wyoming.” He was whistling cheerfully as he left the room, so cheerfully in fact that Marilou wondered if she hadn’t just played right into his hand. The amazing thing was that she didn’t seem to care if she had. She was beginning to enjoy the unexpected and thoroughly outrageous twists and turns the day had taken.
    * * *
    If Chaney was stunned to find Marilou in the kitchen and spaghetti with homemade sauce on the table, he kept it to himself, casting sly glances from her to his taciturn boss and back again. He attacked the dinner like a man who’d been starved, and whatever questions he had about the turn of events, he bit back, while Marilou was left with a whole string of questions herself.
    Why had Cal gone to such pains to vanish from his Palm Lane home? Why did he clam up so whenever the talk turned to family? What sort of secrets had his family kept from him? Or had he been abandoned? Maybe that was why this whole discussion about a long-lost grandmother made him prickly as an old bear startled out of its winter slumber.
    Whatever the case, she apparently wasn’t going to be allowed to satisfy her curiosity tonight. She’d promised to cut him some slack and she would. Not that he gave her much choice. His good humor had vanished sometime between her offer to cook and his return to the table. Aside from a few surreptitious glances in her direction, he ate silently, apparentlylost in his own thoughts. She could only hope they were about his grandmother. If his troubled expression was any indication, they had to be.
    The minute the meal was over, Cal muttered a grudging thanks and stalked off into the night again. Chaney, with one last speculative look at Marilou, traipsed after him. Marilou was left with a huge stack of dirty dishes. And when they were done and neither of the men had reappeared, she was left with figuring out where she might sleep.
    She found sheets that smelled of sunshine stacked in a closet in the upstairs hall. She grabbed a couple and began making up the bed in what appeared to be a vacant bedroom, as far from the master bedroom as she could get.
    She’d seen the size of the bed in his room. Just the sight of it had done funny things to her insides. She’d made things worse by