“This isn’t what I want! I put in my time as a family man before I was twenty-one, and I hated it.” He gazed around at the quiet yard. “I’ve worked my whole life to get away from all this.”

It hurt knowing something that meant everything to her was repugnant to him. “Was your childhood so terrible?”

He set his coffee mug on the step. “Not terrible, but you can’t imagine what it was like growing up without any privacy and being responsible for so many females.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’d work fifty, sixty hours a week as a bookkeeper. She had eight kids, and she couldn’t afford to turn down overtime. The girls ran rings around my grandmother, so most of the time it was just me. I couldn’t even leave after I graduated from high school. My grandmother was getting frail, and my mother still needed me, so I lived at home while I went to college.”

“Surely some of your sisters were old enough by that time to take charge of things.”

“They were old enough, but that didn’t mean they were reliable.”

Why should they have been, she thought, when their older brother had such a strong sense of responsibility?

The dog shifted closer to Mat’s feet. Mat rested his arms on his splayed thighs and let his hands drop between them. The dog nuzzled his fingers, but Mat didn’t seem to notice. “Look at me. In less than a week, I’ve acquired two kids, a pregnant woman I’m telling everyone is my wife, and a damned dog. If that isn’t bad enough, now I’m living in a house in Iowa.”

She smiled. “All you need is a station wagon and a mother-in-law.”

He moaned and sagged forward. “When I was on the phone earlier . . . I rented a Ford Explorer. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Explorer?”

“An SUV, today’s station wagon.”

She laughed.

His innate sense of humor surfaced, and he managed a pained smile.

“What about your job?” she asked. “Don’t you have to get back to work?”

“It’ll hold.”

There were some things that didn’t add up here. “Lucy tells me you drive a Mercedes. Nice car for a steelworker.”

It took a moment for him to respond. “I never said I was a steelworker. I told you I worked in a steel mill.”

“The difference being?”

“I’m management.”

“I see.” She slipped her hands between her thighs. “How long before you go back?”

“It takes two weeks to get the results.”

Hope flared inside her, only to fade as he went on. “I’ll probably fly back with them tomorrow night, maybe the next day. I guess it depends on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not leaving you alone.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard. That’s why I left in the first place.”