Free Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) by Nella Tyler Page A

go home by myself—I had made it a policy years before
not to go home with a woman after a bar date.
    I
could do it, but when I thought about it, I decided I didn’t want to. More than
anything, what I wanted was to relax at home, decompress, and watch TV. It was
probably incredibly boring of me to want that, but I didn’t really care right
then.
    The
memory of the sight of Autumn sitting on the porch popped into my head and my
hands almost slipped on the wheel. She’d been so beautiful, sitting there, and
I could just see myself sitting next to her. Maybe having a cup of coffee in
the morning, reading the paper, talking about the town gossip.
    I
shook my head as I pulled in at my driveway. That wasn’t a picture I should be
entertaining in my mind and I knew it. I’d promised Bob Nelson that I wouldn’t
fall in love with his daughter and that I wouldn’t get distracted by her if I
worked for him—I needed to honor that promise.
    I
climbed out of the cab of my truck and could feel the fatigue in all my
muscles. I’d gotten over the flu, but I was still not up to 100%. I definitely
shouldn’t be taking the first excuse to go out and party it up that presented
itself to me.
    As
I unlocked my front door and went into the kitchen to heat up something for
dinner, I thought about how kind it had been of Autumn to come by and make sure
that I was okay—and the soup she’d made had done just the trick.
    You need to find a way to get that
jar back to her—clean. I couldn’t just hand it over to her
in front of everyone. I’d seen Tuck teasing Autumn about having a crush on me,
and I definitely didn’t want to pour fuel on that particular fire.
    I
decided that I was going to spend the weekend getting my house in order. If I
wanted to see Ashley—or any woman—it wouldn’t do to have a messy, bachelor-type
place to bring them back to if it came to that.
    I
heated up a frozen dinner and grabbed myself a beer and thought about how
lonely I’d been the past few months. When I’d been working construction, that
hadn’t been so much of an issue—I’d had the crew at the job site to talk to and
I’d gone out a couple of times, which hadn’t been as good as I’d wanted it to
be, but had been enough to tide me over.
    But
I was starting to think that I really wanted something more than that—not just
a girlfriend, but someone to start a real life with.
    I
put the TV on and wondered what that would look like, while carefully keeping
any image of any particular woman out of my mind. I wanted someone I could come
home to at the end of the day and make dinner with. Steady sex would be a plus,
but I’d long since learned that I didn’t need sex every day to be happy.
    I
looked around my living room. It wasn’t a bad place, and I usually kept it
mostly neat, but having a woman living with me would—I knew from
experience—make things that much better. I finished up my meal and my beer and
headed for the shower to get cleaned up, trying to think of how I would go
about meeting such a woman without having to get involved with the bar scene.
    I
sighed and shook my head; there were only two women I saw on a normal basis who
weren’t at the bars, and one of them—Mrs. Nelson—was married, and too old for
me. The other was off-limits.
    I
decided to make it an early night so I could get started on cleaning as soon as
I got up the next morning, but I couldn’t quite get rid of the thought of
Autumn in my head.

 
    Chapter
Eleven
    Autumn

 
    After
the initial hustle of getting the new fields cleared and everything planted,
things began to slow down. Obviously, there’s never a situation where there’s
nothing at all to do on a farm, but Dad, Tuck, and Cade could ease up a bit on
the fields about a month into the growing season and get to work on other
things.
    Dad
told me more than once that he hadn’t realized just how much having an extra
pair of hands around the place would make things easier. The three guys