Redwood Bend

you’re doing here? Exactly.”
“I told you. I’m trying to make amends for acting like an ass after having a very romantic fling with you. A fling that shouldn’t be finished anytime soon.”
“I don’t know how that’ll go over,” she said.
“You don’t have to tell him about the fling unless you want to. Know what I really wish, Katie?” he said. “I wish we could start over. I wish I could unsay a bunch of stuff and say some new things.”
Her hand slid over her stomach again and she said, “Too late, I’m afraid. I didn’t trust you too much before and I trust you a little less now.”
He had work to do here, he realized. Serious work, regaining her trust. “Can I see those articles again? The ones you saved?”
“Knock yourself out,” she said. “I’ll call Leslie at work. We can decide what to do with you two imbeciles.”
So while she headed for the phone, he headed for the trunk. And he listened to what she was saying.
“Well, he was on his way out here to apologize for being a jerk when Conner went after him, so now I’ve got this banged-up guy on my couch, trying to make amends…”
“Couch,” he muttered under his breath with a smile.
“Do you think that’s a good idea, getting them together? No, no of course not! Just the bare…you know…And let’s not push on that—that’s up to me! And tell Conner he’d better remember that! Yes, I told him he’s forgiven, but I don’t think I want to get mixed up with him again. But it’s still inexcusable for Conner to be beating him up like that! You should see his face! Oh, really?” she asked, then laughed.
Dylan turned and looked toward the kitchen.
“Apparently you did some damage, too,” she told Dylan. “Broke his nose.”
“Self-defense,” Dylan reminded her.
“Okay, we’ll do that later,” she said into the phone. “But you talk to him first—I don’t want a repeat of this insanity. And I definitely don’t want that happening in front of the boys.”
Dylan was multitasking. He read the articles and captions while he listened to Katie—there was a reason why he never looked at the tabloids. It was all such a bunch of crap. There was speculation about whether he’d be getting together romantically with Lindsey, his old costar. Now, that didn’t hurt him in any way, but what about her? She had a good marriage to a great guy and a couple of little kids. This kind of reporting was irresponsible and could create problems where there were none. There were plenty of seedy stories out there without victimizing her.
Katie and Leslie had moved on to the bear, the summer program the boys were in and Tom, the guy who was going to call Fish and Game. They started laughing about something to do with Conner’s nose.
Dylan read that he’d been living on his grandmother’s Montana estate and a snort escaped him. It was a four-bedroom, two-bath, thirty-five-year-old ranch-style house. It was perfectly nice; he’d had the kitchen remodeled about ten years ago and replaced some carpeting. There were some real nice hardwood floors and he had landscaped the backyard a few years ago, adding a big patio and grill he could use about three months of the year. But estate? It was around twenty-four hundred square feet of house and except for the yard surrounding the house, it was raw land in the valley that was Payne. There was a barn, a shed, a corral, a pasture. And there was Ham, doing his chores, letting himself into Dylan’s house to make a sandwich when he got hungry.
And damn, he wanted her there. Suddenly that’s what he wanted. To take Katie home with him.
Katie was talking about someone who lived on Leslie’s street—the girls, she called them. Apparently Katie had settled in and had girlfriends.
Dylan poked through the trunk. He lifted out a photo album and flipped through some pages. Baby pictures of the twins, from the first day to about three months, but the man in the pictures wasn’t their dad, it was their uncle. The next album he recognized as a wedding album and that got him a little wound up. Being a fairly typical man, he’d usually only look at wedding pictures if torture were the alternative. But he wanted to see Katie all dressed up and he wanted to see the guy who caught her.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling quietly. She was spectacular. She wore a strapless dress that fit her snugly to her hips and then did some billowing. No veil, just a lot of baby’s breath in her hair. She was so natural that way