THE RANCHER'S PROMISE (Silhouette Romance) by Jodi O'Donnell

Author:Jodi O'Donnell [O'Donnell, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Supper at the Corbins’ was as tense an affair as Connor had endured in a long time, his visits with his father notwithstanding.

First of all, it was a surprise to find Lara’s mother, Pauline, was in town. Lara hadn’t said a word about her visit. Not that he and Lara relayed every detail of their lives to each other. But in the few weeks since they’d shared those intimate moments in her darkened bedroom, they’d fallen into a habit of touching base with each other every few days. To talk, if nothing else. To touch, if there was any way he could manage it.

He was trying to give her room, to take it slowly, as he’d promised. He sensed with Lara he was still on tenuous ground, where any moment she might withdraw. And run.

And never had she seemed more poised to flee than this evening. When he’d walked through the door, the look on her face could only have been described as pure panic. He took his cue and introduced himself to her mother as a friend of Griff’s only, although Griff apparently had no scruples about volunteering that Connor was also his boss—and Lara’s.

He’d have had to have been blind, however, not to catch the look of shock that sprang to Pauline Dearborn’s gentle gray eyes, so like her daughter’s, at hearing the Brody name, making the conversation he’d had last week with his father echo warningly in his head. And making the discouragement he always experienced at such moments multiply tenfold. Yet for Lara’s sake, he’d managed to act as if it didn’t affect him a whit.

Keeping up the charade was wearing on him, though, as Connor listened to Mrs. Corbin go on about the trial it had been to stitch a quilt for an upcoming raffle. Something about running out of a certain color of green thread and having to drive all the way into Houston twice to find a match.

He was brought out of his musings by Mrs. Dearborn’s soft voice. “I’d love to take a drive around town after supper and see some of the old places I used to know,” she said, her eyes shining with nostalgia. “Does Hawk Jacobs still run that old-fashioned Dairy Corner?”

“Sure does, Aunt Pauline,” Griff volunteered around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

Her eyes turned incandescent at his words, and Connor knew then where Lara had gotten both her gray eyes and her idealistic bent. “Remember how we’d walk down on a summer’s evening and get an ice cream, Lara?”

“Y-yes,” Lara virtually mumbled, her gaze fastened on her uneaten food.

Pauline didn’t seem to notice. “And I’d love to go by the old house. I wonder if whoever lives there would let us in for a look around?”

There was a short pause, then Lara said quietly, “The McDuffys live there. I…a few weeks ago I went there to treat their two granddaughters for strep throat.” She threw a quick, almost guilty glance his way. “Connor had learned they were sick one evening when he was at the Diamond Tap.

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