Dotty, Flossie, and Lucy had united to play matchmaker, then she wasn’t going to tell him.
“Oh, I see.” Tucker grinned. “So you noticed what they were doing, too?”
“I did.” She nodded.
“Well, honey, if it makes them happy and they make cobbler, then I don’t mind, do you?”
She smiled. “Then it is true. The way to your heart is through your stomach.”
“Today it is.” Tucker changed the subject. “Guess we’d better go on inside and do some laundry while we take our naps, right?”
Jolene got out of the car and bent against a cold wind sweeping down from the north. “Does it seem strange to you when we combine our clothes?”
“Yep.” He nodded. “But that’s because my tighty-whities haven’t been tossed in with a woman’s underbritches in a long time.”
She unlocked the door and led the way inside. “It’s been a long time since I was in a relationship that got to the stage where we did laundry together. Guess it’s a normal reaction, but it’s nice to save water.”
“Yes, it is.”
Sassy came out of the kitchen, rubbed around Tucker’s legs, and looked up at him with begging eyes.
Tucker set the cobbler on the cabinet and stooped down to pet her. “Sorry, darlin’. It’s people food. It’s not leftover steak, pizza, or even hamburger for you. We didn’t think to bring home a fried chicken leg. How about a handful of cat treats?”
Jolene watched him shake out the special treats from a plastic container and let Sassy eat them from his hand. One more good thing—Aunt Sugar said you could judge a man’s character by how animals and kids treated him. Dotty, Flossie, and Lucy weren’t children, but they sure liked him, and the way Sassy was trying to eat and purr at the same time didn’t leave any doubt about how much she loved him.
Jolene went straight to the utility room and put all the white things in the washing machine—his T-shirts, her white bikinis, and his tighty-whities. She adjusted the dials and poured in a capful of detergent. She had time for a thirty-minute power nap while that load ran, but she wasn’t sleepy like she usually was on Sunday afternoons.
When she turned, Tucker was gone but had left a few more treats on the china plate that Sassy ate from. The cat followed her into the living room and jumped up on the sofa.
Jolene found Tucker stretched out in the recliner, his arms crossed over his chest. She eased down on the end of the sofa and stared her fill. His head rested at the top of the chair, but his feet hung off the bottom. He’d removed his boots, and he had probably fallen asleep as soon as he pulled the lever to put up the footrest. His hands were calloused from hard work, and he really did need a haircut, but then, he would look pretty sexy with a little ponytail.
“Don’t go,” he muttered.
“Go where?” she stammered.
He opened one eye. “I was dreaming.”
“About?” she asked.
“Melanie.” His eye slid shut.
She picked up a throw pillow and tucked it under her head as she curled up on the sofa with Sassy right beside her. The way he said her name was so sad that Jolene’s heart ached for him. Would he ever get past the grieving process?
Chapter Thirteen
On Monday morning Jolene grabbed the broom and dustpan and started for the stairs, intending to clean up behind Tucker. Yet she hadn’t even gotten out of the kitchen when her phone rang. When she saw that it was Sugar, she propped the broom at the end of the breakfast bar in the kitchen and sat down in a chair.
“Aunt Sugar! Where are you this morning? Is Uncle Jasper feeling better? I’ve been worried about him.”
“He’s accepting it but not liking it, though we didn’t put any conditions on what we gave y’all. The place was Reuben’s to do with what he wanted. We’re just glad you didn’t sell out, too. And we’re still in Georgia, only now we’re on the east side of the state. We found this little resort that we really like,” she said.
“Speaking of selling, why didn’t y’all sell this place? It would have sure helped increase your nest egg, and you had to at least wonder what would happen with Reuben,” Jolene asked.
“Because,” Sugar answered, “we didn’t need more money, and Jasper was set on giving Reuben half the place. We had lots of late-night talks about it, but as you already know, I didn’t win.