Now she was embarrassed. She’d said too much. “Oh, look, isn’t that Parker?” she asked abruptly, indicating a truck that stopped just a few parking spots down from theirs.
He got himself together, with an effort. He felt ashamed of himself for the way he’d reacted, but it was getting harder and harder not to reach for her and kiss her half to death. He had to fight his impulses in a way he’d never had to before. She was very young, and very green, and he didn’t want to scare her off. If he made a dead set at her, he might ruin everything. Time enough to lead up to that. He had to go slow. Slow! The engagement, he reminded himself, was just the first step. It would take time.
“Yes,” he said after a minute, following her gaze. “I think it is.”
“Oh, gosh, I’ve got to get back to work,” she exclaimed, looking at the cheap watch she’d bought along with her new clothes. “I’ll see you about six, yes?”
He nodded. “I’ll pick you up at the restaurant. Have a good day.”
“You, too.” She forced a smile that she didn’t feel and went across the street and back to work. She couldn’t understand why Butch had suddenly become so distant. Was he regretting the engagement? Had she pushed him into something he really didn’t want? Tonight, she told herself, they’d sit down and she’d find out. She was so fond of him. He’d been kind to her. She didn’t want to make him unhappy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Esther was doing well at her job. She enjoyed the local patrons, whom she was getting to know, and the infrequent out-of-town people who showed up at the restaurant. There were occasionally people from New York who came to Benton to see Mrs. Denton about the television show she wrote for. In fact, she learned that Cassie Denton had worked as a waitress at the Gray Dove before she married J. L.
Not that Esther asked the New York people questions, but she listened raptly when they talked about changes that would show up in the series later on.
“It’s so exciting!” she told Butch that night. “They say the bad guy is going to turn over a new leaf!”
He knew who the bad guy was. He had a wide-screen television, and he and Esther and Two-Toes never missed an episode of Warriors and Warlocks. “I like him, even if he is the bad guy,” he confessed while they were sipping second cups of coffee in the living room after a nice supper.
“So do I. It’s a great series. Well, it would be, if I could stop blushing,” she added, because there was bad language and nudity, a lot of nudity, in it.
“Think of it as free sex education,” he teased.
She averted her eyes. “It’s not, really, you know. Most of the women get used. The ones who don’t aren’t interested in having a home and a family, they just sort of sleep around.” Her blue eyes met his. “Is that really what it’s like, in modern society? I never mixed in it. I had a girlfriend once, my last year in boarding school. She’d slept with a lot of men and had an abortion. She thought having children was stupid. It would get in the way of her happiness.” She sighed wistfully. “I love children. I could never think of them as a liability. And if I got pregnant, I just couldn’t . . .” She stopped, shocked at what she was saying to him.
He just smiled. “I told you. I’m unshockable.”
“Oh.” She smiled shyly. “Okay.”
“All too often, an accident causes real issues between a man and a woman, especially if he wants a child and she doesn’t. It would be hard to shame a woman into giving up eighteen years of her life to raise a child she didn’t even want,” he added, but his eyes were suddenly sad.
She just looked at him. She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her. She could feel it.
He glanced at her and sighed. “My ex-fiancée and I had a few spontaneous episodes,” he said delicately. “She got pregnant.”
“She didn’t want it?” she asked delicately.
“No. She went to a clinic the minute she knew and told me afterwards.” His face was harder than stone.
She got up out of her chair and crawled into his lap, laying her blond head on his chest with one soft arm wrapped around him.