The Misconception by Gardner Darlene

Author:Gardner, Darlene [Gardner, Darlene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

As he’d proven many times in the wrestling ring, Jax was a cooperative kind of guy.

When he performed a leg drop, instead of crushing his prone opponent’s windpipe, he landed on his butt so his leg didn’t touch the other guy’s neck.

When he walloped another wrestler with a folding chair, he made sure to hit him across the beefiest part of the back, where it hurt the least.

He never, ever drove his opponent’s head into the mat when he had him in a bulldog headlock. He just made sure it looked that way.

His cooperative skills had never been put more to the test than after he discovered that, through no design of his own, Marietta was pregnant.

He could have kept on ranting and raving at her for duping him, but he hadn’t. He’d tried instead to comprehend her incomprehensible conception scheme. When that failed, he put the past behind him and focused on the best interests of their unborn baby. The truce, the marriage proposal, the move next door: They’d all been in the interest of cooperation.

He’d gone so far above and beyond the call of cooperation, it was scary. And now he’d moved into the realm of involvement, which is what he’d been engaging in when he’d sagely advised Marietta to leave Tracy alone. By doing so, he’d probably saved her relationship with her sister.

That’s why it irked the hell out of him that Marietta didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word cooperation. She’d fought him at every juncture and now. . . now she’d gone as silent as a mime.

Fourteen minutes into the fifteen-minute drive from Paddy’s Pub to their side-by-side townhouses, anybody would have thought she’d lost the ability to speak.

He’d tried everything to get her to open up, including jokes about Captain Hook having trouble telling time because his second hand kept falling off and nobody being sure which position the Invisible Man played on the football team. In response, he’d gotten nothing. Not a laugh. Not a chuckle. Not even a request to shut up.

By the time he pulled his Maserati curbside behind Tracy’s car in front of their townhouses, he was considering getting his crowbar out of his toolbox to pry open her teeth. Then the Red Sea of her mouth parted, and she spoke.

“Why didn’t you tell me at the bar that Tracy didn’t drive to Paddy’s Pub?” Marietta asked.

Since Marietta’s mind moved in strange ways, Jax was a little freaked out that he immediately grasped the implications of her question. He got out of the car, came around to the passenger’s side and opened the door while he considered how to answer. He could lie or play dumb, but that wasn’t his style. So he told her the truth.

“Because I thought you might not leave with me if I told you Ryan was going to give her a ride home,” he said.

His hand was outstretched to help her get out of the low-slung automobile, but she ignored it and got out herself.

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