Night Maneuvers - By Jillian Burns Page 0,21
I’m not hungry.” He took a swig of his beer and then couldn’t stop a grin.
Hughes swatted him hard with her long-handled BBQ spatula. “Git!”
“Ow!” He rubbed his arm. “You got grease on my best Hawaiian shirt!”
“That’ll be the least of your problems if you don’t get painting,” she threatened.
Mitch grinned, went back inside, and met Jackson and his new bride in the hallway. Seemed like they were getting more paint on each other than the walls. They broke apart once they caught sight of him.
Jackson cleared his throat and shot him a sheepish grin. “McCabe. How’s it going?”
“Apparently, I’m late.”
“Really? We hadn’t noticed.” Jackson reached over and patted his wife’s behind.
“Cole!” Jordan yelped and swatted his hand away, but she was smiling and snuggled up against the guy. Jackson lowered his head and began raining kisses all over her face.
Mitch was quickly approaching his breaking point. Any more lovey-dovey and he was outta there for good. “Please. Don’t mind me.”
The Jacksons barely noticed his departure.
Mitch took the paint can, tray and roller into the master bedroom and got to work. Or, at least, he meant to. Most of the furniture was shoved to the middle of the room, covered by a plastic sheet.
With a quick glance out the bedroom door first, he gingerly lifted the plastic and inspected the books stacked on Hughes’s bedside table. Damn. She’d punked him again. There were mostly aviator biographies, combat and war nonfictions, and a political humorist’s book, but no bare-chested men or couples clinching.
Good to know he at least knew her that well.
His gaze moved on to the top of a long dresser and he lifted the plastic. Framed photos of her family back in Texas. Her brothers and their wives and kids, her parents. And one of her as a teen on a horse. She wore a white cowboy hat, a white Western shirt with fringe along the yoke, and a huge grin as she held up an oversize gold belt buckle.
He knew she’d grown up on a ranch outside Amarillo, and he vaguely recalled she’d mentioned barrel racing in the rodeo as a kid. She must have been pretty good if she won the buckle.
She looked funny with long curly hair past her shoulders, but other than that she looked the same.
His ex had had a big, warm family, too. But that was where the similarities ended.
Would Hughes’s family like him? Luanne’s family had taken him in as one of their own. So much that Luanne had accused him of marrying her for her family, and not her. It wasn’t until this moment that he considered whether that might actually be true. Well, if it was, the relationships had ended with the divorce. After that, they’d treated him as if he had the plague.
He couldn’t blame them. They’d just been loyal to their daughter. Alex’s family would stick by her, too, he imagined. They looked like a close-knit bunch. “Snooping, McCabe?”
Mitch jumped and spun to face Hughes standing in the doorway. “Why’d you leave?”
“What?” Hughes’s brows crinkled.
He lifted the framed photo. “You had it so good. Why give all that up for combat and soldiers’ rations?”
She came into the room and took the frame from him, studying the picture. “Geez, was I ever that young?”
“You look happy, though.”
“Yeah, I was. Mostly. You know. Families can be difficult.”
“What’s difficult? Nice house. Two parents. You even had a horse.”
She put down the picture and pierced him with a penetrating gaze. “My mother wanted me to be like her. Little Suzy Homemaker.” She raised a brow and grimaced. “Can you see me wearing an apron and oven mitts, baking pies?”
“No.” He picked up the photo with her mom and dad and dropped onto the plastic-covered bed. “But at least your mom made a home for you.”
She shrugged. “That’s true. But at the time, all I saw was the drudgery. Cook and clean and wake up the next day and do it all over again. If I’d married some neighboring rancher like they all wanted, that’s what my life would’ve been.”
He nodded. Had his mother seen her life as drudgery? Living in that dilapidated trailer and having to take care of him? Was that why she’d drunk herself into a stupor every night?
“Your mom…it was bad, huh?” Hughes asked as if she’d read his thoughts.
He stood and returned the photo to the dresser, then picked up a stick and stirred the can of paint. “Oh, you know, I did okay.”
After a moment of Hughes