One Good Man

“Maybe you should get married.”

Jodie had taken a sip of coffee and almost spewed it. “What?”

“Brittany needs a father figure.” Brynn said matter-of-factly. “And you could use a husband.”

“She has father figures. Her grandpa Nathan and her uncle Grant.”

“And you have?”

The perfect comeback. “I have my job. Just like you.”

“Touché.” Brynn chugged her coffee. “I’ll give you a hand Saturday, since I’ll be at the dorm raising anyway.”

“Want to ride with Brittany and me?”

“You’re taking Brit?”

“She’s been working Saturdays with Grant at the clinic. But he’s going to the dorm raising, too.” Jodie sighed. “I don’t dare leave her unsupervised for a full day. Who knows the trouble she’d get into.”

“I’d better take my own vehicle. And my radio. In case I get a call.”

“All work and no play—”

“Isn’t that the second verse of the song I just sang for you?”

Before Jodie could reply, Brynn downed the rest of her coffee.

“Gotta go,” she said. “See you around.”

Jodie followed and locked the door behind her. Her visit with Brynn had grounded her and brought her raging hormones under control. Her reaction to Jeff Davidson had been a fluke. Come Saturday, feeding a horde of hungry men and keeping an eye on Brittany, Jodie could play her ice maiden role again with no problem.

Piece of cake.

She climbed the stairs and ignored the niggling reminder that a piece of cake was the first step in falling off a years-long diet.

Chapter Two

On Saturday, Jodie crawled reluctantly out of her warm bed before dawn. She’d worked past midnight preparing subs, making potato salad, baking cookies and gathering paper goods. With Saturday’s forecast high in the upper fifties, she’d also started two Crock-Pots of chili. Groggy from too little sleep, she stowed the food and supplies in her minivan and awakened her daughter.

Brittany dressed, muttered complaints all the way to the car and instantly fell asleep in the front seat.

Jodie considered her dozing daughter with a tenderness that brought moisture to her eyes. It seemed only yesterday that Brittany, a tiny precious bundle with blond ringlets and a delightful baby gurgle, had required the child carrier in the back seat. Only weeks instead of years since Jodie had piled Brittany and her nine-year-old teammates into the van for soccer practices. What had turned her once loving and adorable daughter so rebellious, so bitter? Did adolescence with its hormonal fluctuations and resulting emotional roller coaster make all teens this difficult?

Or had Jodie, as Brittany so often implied, failed as a parent?

Failed? How could she not? She’d been a kid herself when Brittany was born.

Shoving that thought away before it ruined her whole day, she debated waking Brittany to share the breathtaking sunrise over the beautiful farming valley from which the town took its name.

Jodie drove the familiar route at a comfortable speed, and the van hugged the narrow highway that meandered alongside the Piedmont River, broad and tranquil in some spots, in others a torrent of white water over a boulder-strewn bed. Slanting, dawn sunlight glinted off the spring green of willows, oaks and maples, struggling toward full leaf in mid-May. On either side of the river, rolling pastures lush with high grass and freshly plowed acreage stretched toward the haze-draped mountains that surrounded the valley like the sides of a bowl.

Jodie rounded a curve and passed the veterinary clinic where Grant and his future father-in-law, Jim Stratton, worked as partners. Their trucks already stood in the parking lot, because the vets’ day began with the farmers’, long before dawn.

Brittany awakened, crossed her arms, and set her face in its customary scowl. “Why do I have to come? I had plans with my friends.”

Exactly why you’re with me, cupcake. Brittany’s current pals gave Jodie nightmares. “I need your help.”

“Who is this Jeff Davidson?”

“A friend of your uncle Grant.”

“Huh,” Brittany said with a snort of disdain. “I didn’t know Uncle Grant hung with lowlifes.”

Jodie cast her a sharp glance. “Who said Jeff’s a lowlife?”

“The whole town knows he was no good.”

“Jeff had a tough time growing up.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

Jodie silently counted to ten. Her daughter had become a travel agent for first-class guilt trips. “Jeff’s father, Hiram, was a lowlife, no doubt about it. Never held a job and stayed stinking drunk his entire adult life. He was locked up so often Chief Sawyer named a cell after him.”

Brittany studied her black-painted fingernails without comment.

Jodie couldn’t tell if the girl’s boredom was real or feigned. “Jeff’s mother died when he was a baby.”

“Who took care of him?”

Ah, a note of interest from the blasé Miss Brittany? Would wonders never cease?

“His drunken father,” Jodie said. “It’s a miracle Jeff survived. When he was old enough, his father forced him to make moonshine deliveries.”

“Moonshine? Yuck.” Brittany made a face.

Jodie hoped her daughter’s response wasn’t based on personal experience. “Hiram ran a still somewhere on the mountain behind their house.”

Like a camera flash, a memory flared of Jeff, long dark hair blowing in the wind, black leather jacket zipped to his chin, roaring through town on his Harley, its saddlebags filled with Mason jars of white lightning cushioned with moss. The boy had been arrogant. Solitary. Lonely. With a don’t-come-close-or-I’ll-break-you-in-two expression.

Brittany squirmed in her seat. “Will his father be at the farm today?”

“Hiram died a year ago.”

Brittany was silent for a moment. “Anybody my age coming?”

“Not today.”

Lordy, Jodie hoped not. She had enough trouble with Brittany’s current friends. She definitely didn’t want her daughter fraternizing with Jeff’s clients, kids within a hair’s breadth of going to jail for a long, long time.