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“And her eyes.”
“What about her hair and her eyes?”
“They’re exactly like yours, and when she answered the door, she blew her hair out of her eyes, just like you do. It was … It was adorable. It was like at first sight.”
“Oh.” Mary let herself melt over that, then resolutelyputitawaytowallowinagainlater.Therewas something else to find out about here. If he hadn’t been worried about meeting her mother, what had he been worried about or distracted about or whatever it was? “You weren’t worried one iota about this meet-the-mom dinner, were you?”
“Uh, not really.”
“Oh. If you weren’t all knotted up about meeting my mother, what have you been so tense about?”Van’s finger tapped on the steering wheel. “I haven’t been — ”
“Yes, you have.”
He said nothing, but his tapping grew louder. Mary reached out and covered his tapping hand.“I don’t know,” he gritted.
That sounded like the truth. Mary would have to figure it out.
Her figuring took a while, and the silence grew, except for the tapping Van resumed on the steering wheel.
Finally, though, she got it.
She threw back her head and laughed.
“It’s the van!” she hooted.
The dogs in the back of the van in question went on alert, ready to demolish any danger.
Mary would have doubled over with laughter if her seatbelt hadn’t caught her in the act. “You were so distracted you couldn’t even refuse a meet-the-mother dinner. You’re upset you’re now Van with the van. You’ve spent all these years dodging commitment, and now you’ve bought yourself a vanforthedogs.Doyousee?Somepartofyoudoes. You’ve made a commitment to a pair of love-sick dogs!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Operation Cyn Heats Up
V
AN CAME OVER THEnext day with a hammer-and-nails gleam in his eye. Whew! He must have decided to forgive her for that Van with a van crack. Or decided to forget it, which amounted to the same thing for a guy, although it never did for a girl.“I’m building a whelping box for Guinevere and her babies when they get here,” he announced.
“So you said on the phone.” Interesting. He was so pleased and proud he had to say it again in person. “Lancelot will be happy you’re taking such good care of his lady love.”
“I need to get this wood into your garage.”
Mary pitched in, marveling at the beauty of the perfect solid oak he had bought for his project. Marveling, too, at the commitment he was developing to both dogs. Van almost never remembered to call Lancelot his aunt’s dog any more, either.
If he could care this much about his four-legged friends, could it spread to two-legged lovers?
Don’t be ridiculous. Thinking that way held out hope, and that promised pain. What this attachment of his might do, though, was give her an early warning signal. When he started rejecting the dogs, he’d be well on the way to leaving her.
Shetoldherselftostoprightthere.Shedidn’twant tothinkaboutthat.Itwastimetochangethesubject, even if Van didn’t know there had been a subject to be changed.
“I think I figured out where we went wrong with the professor.” Mary steadied the other end of a plank Van was maneuvering into some place only he knew was the right one. “He was Cyn’s intellectual equal, although who could believe a man with two brain cells to rub together could be so boring? Not to mention inexcusably persistent. Not to mention how he tried to treat the dogs.”
Van loosed the special mini-burst of breath a man uses as a question mark when he has a tool in his hand and more in a box at his feet. The tool in his hand at the moment was a hammer. The tools in his box were near infinite in variety and number.
“The new candidate I have in mind is a singer,” Mary said. “He’s the biggest thing on the entertainment scene around here these days. I had tea with Cyn last week, and she said he asked her out a couple of years ago. She wasn’t interested in anyone at the time, but now … ”
This time Van’s grunt signaled agreement. “And I hear he’s gorgeous, sexy, charming — ”
This time Van’s wordless sound was closer to a bark of objection, or at least suspicious disapproval.
