Free The Soldier's Baby Bargain by Beth Kery Page A

bureau later this afternoon.” He noticed Faith’s amazed expression. “But if you’d rather I worked on the closet instead, that’s fine, too.”
    “No, I just hadn’t expected that it all could be taken care of so quickly by one person. Are you sure? It seems like such a big job.”
    “Not if I have the right tools to do it with,” Ryan said. He caught her gaze and gave her a smile. He hoped she recognized it as an apology for pawing her earlier. Not that he’d considered it pawing, by any means. More like carnal worship, but he couldn’t really tell Faith that without making more of a fool of himself than he already had.
    “I’ll be back in less than an hour. How about if I bring us back some lunch, too?”
    “That’d be great.” She gave him a shaky smile, and he thought he might have been forgiven.
    He hoped so, anyway.
    * * *
    When he returned with the rented hand truck, he taped all the drawers together on the desk and moved it into the spare bedroom. Afterward, they took a break. He got everything ready for their lunch while Faith admired her newly fixed back door, complete with not just one, but two sturdy-looking brass locks. She opened it and gazed at the back yard. Topsy was almost immediately there, panting to get outside. Faith laughed and let the puppy run into the yard.
    “This is great. I used to have to take her out the front and go around the house to let her into the fenced-in area. Thank you for fixing it, Ryan,” she said, coming toward him and accepting the sandwich and salad he offered her, along with a carton of skim milk.
    “My pleasure,” Ryan said, watching Topsy through the window over the sink. She zipped from place to place, sniffing every bush and new bloom avidly. He laughed. Faith looked over and smiled. She really liked his deep, booming laugh. “She’s like a hyperactive bee out there sniffing those bushes,” he said.
    “I didn’t call her Topsy-Turvy for nothing,” Faith said wryly, setting out napkins and forks for them. “Are you a mind reader?” she asked a few seconds later as she sat at the breakfast nook and unwrapped her sandwich. “This is my favorite from the City Deli,” she said, grinning and picking up the vegetarian sandwich. “How did you know?”
    “I just asked the lady behind the counter if she knew you and what you liked. She did, apparently,” he said, watching her as she took a healthy bite.
    “That’s Celia,” Faith said after she’d swallowed. “One of the many advantages of living in a small town. The townsfolk know all your habits and secrets, both bad and good. I’ll bet Celia was very interested in getting you whatever you wanted,” she said with wry amusement before she took another bite. Celia was a kind, attractive woman in her late thirties who had never made a secret about her open admiration for the male of the species. Since Ryan was a prime example of that, she knew for a fact he’d been the target of Celia’s earthy flirtation. Jesse had certainly seemed to be the object of it whenever he came to Holland. Jesse had soaked up Celia’s attentions, Faith recalled.
    “I think Celia was more interested in the fact that I wanted to know exactly what you wanted,” Ryan said after he’d swallowed his first bite of his roast beef and Swiss.
    Faith gave him a surprised glance. She had to hand it to him. That was the perfect response to silence her vague uneasiness.
    As if she had a right to get miffed at the thought of him flirting with another woman, she thought, mentally rolling her eyes at herself. Jesse had really done a number on her, for her to get this paranoid.
    She forked her salad slowly, steeling herself for bringing up a potentially dicey topic when she and Ryan were getting along so well together.
    “Did you give any more thought about what you said last night...about moving to Michigan, I mean?”
    He nodded as he chewed, waiting until he swallowed. He took a swig of ice water. “Yeah, I did. I called my