Breaking the Rules (25 page)

“It’s really important.”

This time, real alarm sounded and he moved away, erecting defenses against whatever it was. In the instant it took to separate himself, put some space between them, he tried to imagine what could put that tone in her voice. Another man? Some glitch with the trial? A sudden desire to travel and see the world?

Her face gave no reassurance, either. She pulled the covers up around her, and her eyes were big with worry.

“Damn, Mattie, just tell me.”

She swallowed, brushed her hair off her forehead and said, “I’m going to have a baby.”

He gaped at her, not comprehending. Had she been carrying Brian’s child when he met her? No. He remembered that box of tampons she spilled. “A baby?”

She licked her lips. “Yes. I wasn’t going to tell you, because you made your position very clear. And I’m not asking anything of you, either.”

Zeke heard a roaring in his ears. “
My
child?”

“I didn’t think it was fair to not tell you. I kept thinking of the way you looked with that baby in the bar in Kismet, and it just seemed wrong not to tell you.”

He felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Urgently, he stood up and grabbed his robe. He tied it firmly. “You’re pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Mattie,” he said, and sank into a chair, covering his face. “A baby.”

“I’m sorry, Zeke.” She grabbed her clothes from the floor where they had fallen and started yanking them on. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

He looked up, startled. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll just go, um, back to my place. I’m living in town.”

He jumped up, one fear overriding the other. If she left again, he’d face all that bleak loneliness again. “No,” he said, grabbing her. “No.” He pulled her into his arms, holding her so she couldn’t go. “Don’t leave me again, Mattie. Please.”

“Oh, Zeke,” she said, flinging her arms around his neck. She burst into tears. “I never wanted to leave in the first place.”

He closed his eyes and held her close. “Don’t go,” he repeated in a whisper.

“No, Zeke. I won’t.” She held him. “I won’t.”

* * *

They sat by the fire in the living room, drinking hot chocolate and eating popcorn. Zeke held her as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to let go, and Mattie stayed close for the same reason. It seemed like a miracle.

After a time, he said quietly, “It scares me, Mattie, the baby.”

She lifted her head. “I know.”

“It’s been the one thing I most regretted, that I wasn’t gonna have any babies of my own.” His drawl seemed deeper, as it always did when references to his childhood emerged. “What if I’m like him, Mattie? What if that meanness is living in me somewhere?”

Mattie looked at him for a long moment, thinking of all the reasons she knew he wasn’t mean, not anywhere in him, not the tiniest portion. “This is a gift, Zeke, from heaven above. If a star fell in your lap, would you give it back to God and tell him you didn’t think you could handle it?”

He stroked her hair. “No.”

“You know what I think?” Mattie said, and touched his face. “I think you’re my reward for making it through. I think this baby is your reward for being so brave all those years.” She touched one of the small faded circle scars. “I think you deserve to have a baby of your own more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

He yanked her close, burying his head against her neck, but not before Mattie saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes. “You’re my reward, Miss Mary.”

In time, when he’d gained control, he lifted his head. “So you think you want to live with a man like me, huh? Up here in the wilderness without a toilet and no movie house for thirty miles?”

“Yes.”

“You think you’re going to enjoy a life of raising horses?”

“Yes.”

He took a breath. “And you think you want me to be the father of your children?”

She lifted her head, smiling. “Definitely.”

He nodded. “I think we oughta get married, then, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“We do have one small problem, Miss Mary,” he said in his gravelly voice.

“What?”

“You never told me your name. Is Mattie really short for Matilda?”

She laughed. “Will it change things?”

“It might. I don’t know about being married to a Matilda.”

“Look who’s talking,
Ezekiel
.”

“So it
is
Matilda.” He chuckled.

“It’s Madeline.”

He went still. “Really?”

“Rhetta Madeline O’Neal. Irish as they come.”

“Madeline was my sister’s name,” he said hoarsely, pressing his lips to her temple. “The one who died.”

Mattie leaned into him, pressing her cheek to his neck.

“If the baby is a girl, maybe we could call her Madeline, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Mattie didn’t bother to stop the tears. “That would be fine.”

He stroked her arm gently. “And what was your foster brother’s name? The one who taught you to play pool?”

“Jamie,” she whispered, hearing his acceptance of the child they’d made.

“That would be nice for a boy.”

“Very nice,” she agreed and let him gather her up close.

Silent, contented, they watched the fire flicker as snow fell from a peaceful mountain sky.

~~###~~

To Jaye Manus, a.k.a. Sherrill Lynn,
with many thanks for plotting help,
hand-holding and utterly unshakable good sense.
And to the good Dr. House,
dentist extraordinaire,
who made it possible for me to finish this book on time.

BARBARA SAMUEL O'NEAL

Barbara Samuel (also known as Barbara O’Neal) is the bestselling author of more than 40 books, and has won Romance Writers of America’s RITA award an astounding six times, and she has been a finalist 13 times. Her books have been published around the world, including France, Germany, Italy, and Australia/New Zealand, among others. One of her recent women’s fiction titles,
The Lost Recipe for Happiness
(written as Barbara O’Neal) went back to print eight times, and her book
How to Bake a Perfect Life
was a Target Club pick in 2011.

Whether set in the turbulent past or the even more challenging present, Barbara’s books feature strong women, families, dogs, food, and adventure—whether on the road or toward the heart.

Now living in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Barbara lives with her partner, Christopher Robin, an endurance athlete, along with her dog and cats. She is an avid gardner, hiker, photographer and traveler who loves to take off at dawn to hike a 14er or head to a faraway land. She loves to connect with readers and is very involved with them on the Internet.

You may read more about Barbara’s books at her main website, find her at her A Writer Afoot blog and on Facebook. She also blogs regularly at The Lipstick Chronicles.

Visit Barbara on the Web!

www.BarbaraSamuel.com
www.AWriterAfoot.com
www.BarbaraONeal.com

~~~

BONUS MATERIAL

Please enjoy excerpts of three of Barbara's other books:
How to Bake a Perfect Life
,
Jezebel's Blues
and
Walk in Beauty
. Additional books are listed at the end of the excerpts or click
HERE
to jump there.

Barbara is very active writing new books and converting her backlist into eBooks. To find the most up to date information, please visit her website.

HOW TO
BAKE A
PERFECT
LIFE

(Excerpt)

by

Barbara O'Neal

Published by Bantam Books (Jan 2011)

Excerpted from
How to Bake a Perfect Life
 by Barbara O'Neal. Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Samuel. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Step One

STARTER

Sourdough starter, or mother dough as it is known, is made from wild yeast living invisibly in the air. Each sponge is different, according to the location it is born, the weather, the time of its inception, and the ingredients used to create it. A mother dough can live for generations if properly tended, and will shift and grow and transform with time, ingredients, the habits of the tender.

The Boudin mother dough, used to create the famously sour San Francisco bread was already fifty years old when it was saved from the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 by Louise Boudin, who carried the mother dough to Golden Gate Park in a wooden bucket. There it was packed in ice and used to make bread daily until a new bakery could be built at its current location. The mother dough, now more than 150 years old, is stored in a vault, "like a wild beast," and bread is made from it every day.

CHAPTER ONE

W
hen the phone call that we have been dreading comes, my daughter and I are gathered around the center island of the Bread of Life kitchen. Sofia is leafing though a magazine, the slippery pages floating down languidly, one after the next.

I am experimenting with a new sourdough starter in an attempt to reproduce a black bread I tasted at a bakery in Denver a couple of weeks ago. This is not my own, treasured starter, handed down from my grandmother Adelaide's line, rumored to be over a hundred years old. That "mother dough", as it is called, has won my breads some fame and I guard it jealously.

This new starter has been brewing for nearly ten days. I began with boiled potatoes mashed in their water, then set aside in a warm spot. Once it began to brew and grow, I fed it daily with rye flour, a little whole wheat and malt sugar, and let it ferment.

On this languid May afternoon, I hold the jar up to examine it. The sponge is alive and sturdy, bubbling with cultures. A thick layer of dark brown hooch, the liquid alcohol generated by the dough, stands on top. When I pull loose wrap off the top of the bottle and stick my nose in, it is agreeably, deeply sour. I shake the starter, stick my little finger in, taste it. "Mmm. Perfect."

Sofia doesn't get as worked up over bread as I do, though she is a passable baker. She smiles, and her hand moves over her belly in a slow, warm way. Welcoming. It's her left hand, the one with the wedding set—diamond engagement ring, gold band. The baby is due in less than eight weeks. Her husband is in Afghanistan.

We have not heard from him in four days.

I remember when her small body was curled up beneath my ribs, when I thought I was going to give her away, when the feeling of her moving inside of me was both a terror and a wonder. If only I could keep her that safe now.

The bakery is closed for the day. Late afternoon sunshine slants in through the windows and boomerangs off the stainless steel so intensely that I have to keep moving around the big center island to keep it out of my eyes. The kneading machines are still as I stir together starter and molasses, water and oil and flour, until it's a thick mass I can turn out on to the table with a heavy splat. Plunging my hands into the dark sticky blob, I scatter the barest possible amounts of rye flour over it, kneading it in a little at a time. The rhythm is steady, smooth. It has given me enviable muscles in my arms.

"What do you want for your birthday?" Sofia asks, flipping a page.

"It's ages away!"

"Only a couple of months."

"Well, I guess as long as there are no black balloons, I'm good." Last year, my enormous family—at least those members who are still speaking to me — felt bound to present me with graveyard cakes and make jokes about crow's feet, which thanks to my grandmother Adelaide's cheekbones, I do not have.

"A person only has to suffer through one 40th birthday in a lifetime." Sofia turns a page. "How about this?" She holds up an ad for a lavish emerald necklace. "Good for your eyes."

"Tiffany. Perfect." At the moment, I'm so broke a bubble gum ring would be expensive, though of course Sofia doesn't know that the bakery is in trouble. "You can buy it for me when you're rich and famous."