“Oh, no.” Lacey had gone pale. “I’ve made you doubt him.”
“Lacey—”
“This is my fault.” She shoved back her chair, stood up and waggled her hands frantically. “He’s finally met someone he can be happy with, and I have to go and screw it up.”
“This isn’t your fault.” Wendy jumped to her feet and grabbed Lacey’s hands before she could knock herself out with one of them. “If this is anyone’s fault, it’s his. He’s the one who’s emotionally unavailable.”
“No!” Lacey interrupted. “He’s totally available! I promise! He’s just…shy!”
Wendy paused, staring at Lacey with raised eyebrows. “Shy? You think Jonathon is shy?”
“Okay,” Lacey admitted. “Not shy. He just doesn’t talk about his feelings much.”
“Or at all.”
“But I know he has them. I know he does. He just doesn’t talk about them. I mean, not to you. But he does to Peyton,” Lacey blurted out, trying to be helpful.
And here she’d thought her eyebrows couldn’t go any higher. “He talks to Peyton? About his feelings?”
Sure, he was good with Peyton. Great with her as a matter of fact, but Wendy couldn’t actually imagine him pouring his heart out to her.
“Yes, he does!” Lacey’s words flew out in a garbled rush. “Last night, I woke up around one and I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, but before I got there, I heard him talking to Peyton. He was holding her on his lap and giving her a bottle and he told her that she was worth more to him than a hundred peppermint Pop Rocks.”
Lacey stopped, her eyes wide and hopeful. As if what she’d said was supposed to convince Wendy. Or make sense.
“Um…it is possible you were dreaming?”
“No. This definitely happened.”
“Jonathon told Peyton she was worth more to him than peppermint Pop Rocks?”
Lacey frowned. “I guess that’s strange, huh?”
“A little.” She didn’t think they even made peppermint Pop Rocks.
“Okay, maybe I heard wrong. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I snuck back to bed.”
Wendy dropped Lacey’s hands, her mind suddenly whirling. “Peppermint Pop Rocks” made no sense. But “government contracts” did. That sounded more like it.
Wendy fished her phone out of her back pocket and pulled up her mother’s number. After a few seconds of ringing, her mother answered. “Hey, Mom, are you at breakfast yet?” She rolled her eyes as her mother answered. “Yes, I know it’s early. I need to talk to Uncle Hank. Put him on. Right now.”
Eighteen
She ended the call after only a few minutes. It didn’t take long for her to verify what she already suspected. Then she made a beeline for the guest bedroom where they’d slept last night, dodging two kids jumping gleefully on a blow-up bed in the living room. Neither Jonathon nor Peyton were in the guest bedroom. But the door to the master bedroom was open, and when she glanced inside, she saw Peyton gurgling happily on the bed as Natalie, one of Jonathon’s teenage nieces, dangled a toy over her.
“Honey,” she asked, struggling to keep the simmering anger out of her voice. “Do you know where Jonathon is?” It was a struggle to keep her voice light.
The teenager looked up. “He asked me to watch Peyton while he took a shower.”
“Thanks.”
Wendy spun on her heel and stalked out into the hall to the bathroom. She gave the door a tap, and waited only until she heard him say, “Just a minute.” She slipped through the door without waiting for an invitation.
“What the—”
“We need to talk.”
She shut the door behind her, looking up just in time to see him grabbing a towel to cover himself. Behind him the shower was already on, pumping steam out into the room. Despite her anger, she felt her gaze clinging to the sight of his naked chest. Logically, after a week of sleeping in the same room with him, she should have started developing a Jonathon immunity. But instead, the sight of him affected her even more strongly. All that bare skin. Lightly tanned. The muscles that were defined, but not pronounced. The towel slung low across his waist as he tucked it in. It was all very, very…she drew in a slow breath…just very masculine. And distracting.
She forced her gaze up to his eyes, only to find him grinning at her. As if he could read every salacious thought in her head.
“Do you need something?” he asked in a low voice.
His arrogance brought her anger back to her in full force.
Yeah. She needed something. She needed to take his ego down a couple of notches. And then she needed some answers.