“Just checking to see if you were listening, Edie. Maybe I ought to check your pulse, too. I bet it’s doing at least sixty miles per hour.”
She grabbed for Eden’s hand. Eden snatched it out of reach.
That was another sisterly inside joke. They liked to give their brother Jude fits by feigning rank ignorance about biology. Heartbeats were measured in miles per hour; lungs were called “those pumpy things”; they insisted actual drums shaped like tiny bongos were situated inside their ears, and so forth.
“It really seems unnecessary for an elementary school principal to look like that,” Eden said irritably.
“It certainly does,” Avalon soothed. “It’s very alarming. He hassomenerve.”
Eden scowled at her.
Truth be told, shewasgenuinely alarmed. She couldn’t ever recall feeling literally dumbstruck by a man’s beauty. Or awash in a riptide of what, let’s face it, was probably lust.
“It’s so cool! His stomach has squares. You could play checkers or tic-tac-toe on it!” Annelise observed cheerfully.
“He was a navy SEAL,” Avalon explained. She made it sound as if the six-pack abs were military issued, along with the uniform. “Mac was in the National Guard. They have meetings once a week with local vets. That’s how they became friends, apparently. I didn’t know they knew each other, I swear it.”
Eden didn’t hear her. She was thinking, why play checkers, when you could just trace each square with your tongue, the way she used to savor the sections of a chocolate bar to make it last longer. Why do that, when you could even, say, gently nibble that firm, warm, smooth skin, then drag your fingers along those lovely trenches drawn by muscles. Why do that when you could—
“How do you get squares on your stomach, Mom?”
“By eating all of your vegetables.”
Not even stomach squares interfered with the mom programming when it came to vegetables.
“Aw, man, it’salwaysvegetables,” Annelise said sadly.
“Yep, they are the key to pretty much everything,” Eden confirmed cheerily.
And then Gabe finally noticed them—how could he not? They were lined up there at the rail like spectators cheering on a winning horse, and surely the beam of their collective admiration was as powerful as a set of klieg lights.
He slowly lowered the ax to his side. Shaded his eyes. Revealing fluffy armpits and another vista of expanse of muscle. He was literally shaped like a wedge.
And he had shaded his eyes to gaze in Eden’s direction.
His spine abruptly straightened.
Instantly, something like invisible lightning snaked through the air between them.
It made Eden’s breath stop and the back of her neck and arms prickle when all the little hairs went erect, the way they did when she heard or saw something particularly beautiful or profoundly true.
She couldn’t move.
Then he unshaded his eyes and waved. Tentatively. She couldn’t see his expression, but his smile flashed bright as an ax blade.
After a stupefied delay, she lifted her own arm in greeting. Avalon and Annelise were already cheerfully waving.
She could have sworn his smile got just a little bigger and just a little more amused. He rested a hand on his hip and let the ax casually swing from one hand, and he regarded her like a buccaneer on a ship’s deck who’d fixed his sights on bounty.
Eden pivoted abruptly. “Leesy, let’s go help Auntie Avalon get dinner on the table.”
She had to make a conscious effort not to flick her hair as she walked away.
It felt a teensy regressive, the womenfolk bustling about the kitchen with tureens of steaming food, the menfolk, freshly showered and deodorized after a hard day’s labor out in the fields, showing up at the table and rubbing their hands together exclaiming, “Smells good!”
If it was regressive, then so were Gabe’s daydreams.
Not that they’d specifically involved the elusive-as-a-gazelle Eden Harwood fluffing plucked wildflowers she’d inserted into a vase then placing it in the middle of the table.