“I’m sorry, ladies. I cannot concentrate on anything while I’m worrying about that girl. All I want is her happiness. And I’d like her happiness in a hurry, I admit it.”

“I’d like to get her married and out of here so we can get things back to normal,” Kate said.

“Things have never been normal around here,” Abby said.

“But I know that girl. I was married to her father,” Jess went on. “She needs a simple, steady, reliable man like John. Believe me, I know. That’s what her father needed—a stable, sensible, ordinary person who could keep track of that wonderful, wandering mind. Who would know that better than me?”

“Are we going to play bridge or what?”

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Leigh did a couple of weeks’ worth of serious reading and writing while the yard continued to develop into Jess’s idea of a backyard paradise. She always found a few minutes to spare to chat with John, and he became something of a fixture at their dinner table. Then he asked her to meet him again at their old haunt, the Steak House, and she found herself as giddy as a teenager over the prospect of more hugging and kissing. So this is why most teenagers couldn’t concentrate on their math, she thought. To Jess she said, “I might be late.”

“You like him, then?”

“I like him fine,” Leigh replied. I’m absolutely wacko, she thought.

He met her at the front door of the restaurant. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Do you feel safe enough to come to my house with me?”

“Are you going to behave yourself?” she asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. That’s up to you.”

She thought about it and decided that when she had first met him she was a fifteen-year-old emotionally, which meant she’d been thinking with her libido. Now she figured she was at least twenty years old emotionally and could add brains to her already breathless libido. She went.

John had a house in town that he’d been working on, part-time, for about three years. “I want you to see it. I want to show you how I think it’ll shape up over the years.”

“It’s lovely,” she said as they pulled up to the curb in front. It was quintessentially small-town, with its front porch and white picket fence. A family house, was her first thought. Her second thought was, there’s no one here but us, and my brain is going out the window. But fear began to run away as John talked about his house.