In Shining Whatever (Three Magic Words Trilogy #2)(44)

"So?"

"What?" he asked.

"You ready to face the truth?"

"I already did, and I'm getting my half of your second chunk of this stuff."

She didn't ask anything more, because she wasn't so sure she was ready to face a blessed thing. Maw Maw said everything happened for a reason. She'd left Texas for a reason. She came to Louisiana for a reason. Now Hart was there for a reason. But what was it-other than to send her into more turmoil? Just when she thought she had the business of moving back to New Iberia and working at the force all figured out, she'd looked up from the vegetable garden to see Hart Ducaine. Now she didn't know what she wanted, and she was right back to where she'd been in Texas.

She and Hart had a battle of the forks for the last bite and ended up splitting it into two measly pieces, because neither of them would give it up. While she was sipping the last of her sweet tea, something Maw Maw said when she was determined to go into law enforcement came back to her mind.

"When you make the right decision," Maw Maw had said to Kate, "there will be no doubt, and your soul will rest easy. When it's not resting easy, that means you haven't made the right decision. It's not for your momma or your daddy or even me to decide, there. Your big life decisions are for you to decide. If you let someone else do it for you, it might not be right, and you'll get to be an old woman with regrets. Me, I have no regrets. I made my decisions, and my soul has rested easy."

Mais, Maw Maw, there is no bigger one than the one facing me. I love him, but I also love my job, and I can't have both. So what do I do?

As surely as if Jeannie Miller had been sitting on her shoulder, she heard the soft Cajun whisper, Make it so there are no regrets when you are ninety.

"What are you thinking about, Kate? You look like you just saw a ghost," Hart asked.

"Nothing," she snapped.

He put his palms up and frowned. "Hey, don't get mad at me. I was just asking."

She stood up. "You ready to go?"

He picked up the tab lying on the table and went to the front of the cafeteria to pay. Something had sure changed her mood in a matter of seconds. Maybe he should have conceded and let her have that last bite of cheesecake. Had he just failed some kind of Cajun test?

He paid the bill, surprised that it was under twenty dollars, and they stepped out into a humid, hot afternoon. Diagonally across the street was Bojangles, a seafood place that he made a mental note to bring Kate to later in the week. The name sounded familiar, but he supposed it was something he'd read in one of Burke's books.

Once inside the truck again, she turned on the air conditioning, and he sighed with relief. Texas might be hot in July, but it was never this humid.

"Little hot for you, is it?" she asked.

"Little bit. What was that all about back there?"

"I was thinking," she said.

"Well, don't do it anymore. It makes you mean"

"If you don't like it, go home."

"Are you spoiling for a fight?"

She thought about her reaction when she'd first realized he wasn't a dream. She didn't want to fight with him then, far from it. She pulled over to the side of the road right up next to the sugarcane, which had been planted out as far as possible. She turned around to face him and drank in the sight of his face, the scar that the bull left and the one the car wreck had given him. She reached up and touched his sharp jawline, moved forward enough that she could kiss him, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

The sparks dancing around in the cab of the hot truck made the outside humidity seem as dry as the Sahara Desert. He kissed back, tasting the remnants of sweet tea and praline cheesecake.

When she finally leaned back and looked him right in the eyes, she said, "That's what I've been spoiling for ever since you arrived. Why did you drive this far and not even kiss me like you meant it when you first got here?"

"I was afraid you'd slap me or your grandmother would kill me," he said.

She kissed him again. "Does that feel like a slap?"

"Rejection is the same if you're eighteen or thirty-three. I almost turned around in Dallas and went home. It took a lot of persuasion to make me keep going." He hugged her tightly.

She shivered. "From whom?"

"Fancy and Sophie. And I even called Theron."

She brushed a sweet kiss across his eyelids. "Why'd you call them and not me?"

"You wouldn't answer my calls, remember? For all I knew, you'd already found someone else."

"And if I had?"

"I was going to war with them," he said.

"Oh, really?" She settled back into the driver's seat and put the truck in gear.

"Is there something you need to tell me before this party thing tonight?" he asked, suddenly afraid of the answer.

"His name is Bubba Boudreaux. Common name down here. He danced with me and asked me to his place for breakfast. He makes a mean gumbo breakfast."

"And?" Hart asked.

He had no right to feel jealous or angry. He hadn't actually stepped up and asked Kate to marry him, had he? He'd only asked her to dinner; so if she wanted to go to Bubba's place and have breakfast, he had no right to be angry with her.

"And we talked a couple of hours. Then I went home. I told him I was straightening out some things in my life, and he said when I got them straight to come on back and we'd see what we could cook up."