The baby’s head settled against his jaw. He glared at her. “Okay, here’s the way it is. I screwed up, all right? I admit it, so let’s put it behind both of us and move on.”

“Move on?” Cold as a flock of Presbyterians in an unheated church.

“Because, the thing is, it’s the future that counts.” Was it hot in here, or was it just him? “We need to look ahead and not behind us.”

Everything about the stare she leveled at him reeked of aristocratic disdain. He suddenly felt as if he were wearing a red satin bowling shirt and gulping down a kielbasa. It was time to cut to the chase.

“I need to know how you feel about me.”

“That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

Mat nodded. The baby tucked his head against his neck, and he would have given anything right then to go play with him instead of facing how bleak his own future was going to be if the ice queen living inside Nealy’s body kicked him out.

“Well . . . I’m very appreciative that you didn’t betray me in the articles you wrote.”

“Appreciative?”

“And I’m grateful that you’re trusting me with the girls.”

“You’re grateful?” This was a nightmare. He sank back down on the ancestral couch.

“Immensely.”

The grandfather clock ticked away in the corner. She didn’t seem to mind the silence that was stretching longer and longer.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

That ticked him off. She damn well had to have felt something more than that or she’d never have let him near all those hot, moist places he’d made his own.

He set his jaw. Shifted the baby to his other shoulder. “Think harder.”

She arched an eyebrow. Touched the pearls with her fingertips. “Nothing else springs to mind.”

He leaped up from the chair. “Well, something else springs to my mind! I love you, damn it! And if you don’t like it, that’s too damn bad.”

The baby gave a mew of displeasure. Nealy’s eyes shot open. “You love me?”

He waited for her lips to bloom in a smile, her eyes to soften. Instead, she looked as if she’d been hit by the first round of musket fire at Lexington.

Lunkhead! He slipped the baby under his arm and moved forward. “I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right. I just— Is it hot in here? Maybe your furnace isn’t working right. I could look at it.”

What was wrong with him? He’d lived around women for years. He understood their habits. Why was he falling apart when he most needed to keep himself together?