engagement charade tomorrow, anyway. She had already made that decision, and Alana Joy Carey never sat on a fence. Once she made a decision, she stuck with it.
Why, Lord, she looked up toward the high ceiling in the church, does everything have to be so complicated and confusing?
Your life has been simple and honest for twenty-nine years, girl. It wasn’t until you told that first little lie that things got complicated and confusing. Don’t blame God, or even ask Him a question like that. You know the answer all too well, the voice in her head scolded.
“Are you okay?” Pax asked. “You seem to be fighting with yourself today.”
“I am,” she admitted. “I can’t do all this pretending and lying anymore. I’m going to come clean with Daddy tomorrow.”
“No, you are not!” Pax said. “We’ve come this far, and it would break his heart to know that we’ve deceived him. It’s only two more weeks, and we’ll get through it together.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can not do,” she snapped.
“We’ll talk after dinner,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “We can’t argue in church with so many people around us.”
“Who’s arguing?” Iris asked.
“We’re trying to decide if we want the Sunday special or hamburgers,” Alana lied and then worried that she was getting entirely too smooth at not telling the truth.
“You can get a burger any day of the week, but you can only get chicken and dressin’ on Sunday,” Matt said. “But it’s up to you kids. Whatever you want, you can have it.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Alana smiled.
* * *
Pax had put a lot of time and energy into their ruse, plus he’d discovered that he really liked Alana—a lot—so he intended to do his dead level best to talk her out of coming clean. If the time ever came when they wanted to break up, they could get a divorce then. Folks would stand in line to say “I told you he’d never settle down,” or they might even say that Alana had only married him because her father was sick, and she didn’t want to be alone. Pax didn’t give a damn what rumors got spread about him on down the road. He wanted Matt to die a happy man, and if it took arguing with Alana until the cows came home to make that happen, he was up for the task.
“So what were you two kids really arguing about back there?” Matt asked when they were in Pax’s truck and headed toward the café. “Don’t try to lie to me about it, either. You know, you’ve never been able to pull the wool over my eyes, Alana Joy.”
She glanced over at Pax, and the fire in her eyes said that she wasn’t giving in to him or anyone else.
“Whether to have children when we first get married or wait a couple of years,” Pax answered.
Her brown eyes looked like they might shoot flames at him at any time.
“If you want my advice, don’t wait too long.” Matt buckled his seat belt. “You want to have the energy to raise your kids, and the older you get, the less energy you have. Plus, if you wait two or three years, you’ll be set in your ways and a baby kind of upsets things.”
“That’s exactly what I told Alana. If we want three or four kids, then we should have the first one pretty quick, and maybe one every eighteen months to two years after that. If we did that, we’d still be past fifty when the youngest one graduates high school.” Pax thought of that old saying about getting hung for a sheep as well as a lamb came to mind. Since he was spinning a yarn anyway, he thought, he might as well make it a big one.
“You two aren’t going to gang up on me.” Alana crossed her arms over her chest and gave Pax another dirty look.
“We aren’t, baby girl,” Matt chuckled. “What’re you naming the firstborn?”
“Something Joy if it’s a girl,” she answered.
“And maybe Thomas Matthew if it’s a boy,” Pax chimed in. He reached over and patted Alana on the shoulder. “If you want to wait a year to start our family, I’m good with that, darlin’. We could still be parents by the time we’re thirty.”
“Well, I can’t think of any better names.” Matt beamed. “Y’all need to make a decision and not fight about when to start. Just love each other and compromise. I know I’ve