Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

to El Paso. I brought my car." She stepped back, gave him a full once-over. Not bad for a white boy. "You'd need to bring a change of clothes. And pajamas. If you wear them."

He shoved both hands back through his hair, laced them on top of his head. "You want me to spend the night. With you. In El Paso."

She nodded, braced her hands on the window ledge and sat back. "Does that scare you?"

"Are you kidding? After last weekend? I don't think there's anything you can do to scare me."

Or so he thought. "Even telling your father I'm taking you away?"

That caused him to gulp, but then a wicked light lit up his eyes, and he grinned in that way he had. The way that reminded her exactly why she adored him as much as she did.

"You know," he began, "it'll go down easier if you let me drive your car."

"Is that so?" she asked with a laugh, thinking it might actually be worth crossing her fingers if doing so would bring this one back to her for good.

"Was that Spencer I just saw driving that Jaguar?" Jeanne asked, walking into the kitchen from the mudroom carrying groceries.

"It was." Yancey pushed back from the table where he'd been waiting and took the load from her arms. "You have more bags in the car?"

"Just this one," she said, shaking her head, frowning as he set the bag on the countertop, set the milk in the fridge. "Was that Candy he was with?"

"Yep."

"That's her car?"

"Uh-huh." He didn't mean to be abrupt. He just didn't want to talk about Candy or Spencer. Right now, the only person he wanted to spend the evening with was his wife— which would work to his favor if she wasn't worrying about the boy, he finally admitted, and took a deep breath. "She's taking him to El Paso for a night of dinner and dancing. I think she mentioned having reservations at Billy Crews."

Jeanne's hands went to her hips. Her eyebrows lifted. "And you let him go?"

"Sure." Damn but it was hard to keep a straight face when he knew what he knew. Or what he thought he knew. More secrets discovered when hauling the trash to the burn bin. And this was a secret he couldn't wait to share. "It'll do him good. He's been moping around way too much lately."

"Why shouldn't he mope?" his wife asked, carrying rice and vegetable oil to the pantry. "He's missed her."

Yancey dismissed the idea with a snort, stacking a block of cheddar and a block of mozzarella on a shelf in the fridge. "It hasn't even been a week."

Jeanne came behind him and moved the cheese to the lower drawer. "A week he's spent thinking he wouldn't be seeing her again."

"Which is damn stupid when you take into consideration the size of this town. Everybody sees everybody sometime." He folded the grocery bag, slid it into the narrow cabinet where Jeanne kept them. And then he took her by the hand and wouldn't let her go.

"Yancey!" she exclaimed, chuckling as he led her down the first-floor hallway to their bedroom. "What are you doing? It's the middle of the afternoon!"

It was, and he couldn't have cared less. Especially since he'd been waiting forever for her to get back from her errands. He never had been much good at holding in a surprise. He was amazed she had held in this one. Being married to the woman this long, he was usually much better at reading her.

He stopped at their bedroom doorway, turned and leaned his forearm on the door jamb while he waited. Her expectant gaze raised to meet his; she was frowning even as she smiled. "Yancey? What's going on?"

He indicated the doorknob with a twitch of his chin. "Go on in."

"I'm almost afraid to," she said with a bit of a laugh, but she did. She turned the knob, gave the door the shove she knew it needed. And then she gasped, both hands flying up to cover her mouth. "Oh, Yancey!"

He'd never been the romantic sort. One of those shortcomings that he just never seemed to be able to overcome. He loved his wife dearly. He couldn't imagine having lived his life without her around. But showing it in the way women wanted had never come naturally. He was a lug and he knew it. Which sure as hell didn't explain the way watching her now had him choking up like some old cow.

Jeanne walked to the foot of the bed and stopped. On her dresser, candles burned from the holiday candlesticks, the only ones he'd been able to find. The rose petals on the bed weren't as plentiful as he'd wanted.

But stripping all the flowers in the arbor behind the house hadn't seemed fair. She put so much work into tending the bushes. The same work she put into tending to their son, to their house, and to him.

He couldn't have been easy to live with, the job he had to do, the worries she had to have brooded about, whether her life would've been better in Dallas, whether he would keep his promise to love their son.

"Oh, Yancey. I love you, but this makes me want to ask you who died." She laughed nervously, walking over and placing her palms on his chest. "I love this. It's a wonderful surprise. But now you've got to tell me what's going on before I start imagining all manner of things."

So much for his attempts at romance, he mused with no small amount of self-deprecation. He took hold of his wife's hands, so small in mYown, so cool until he touched her, as if she needed him for warmth the same way he needed her to live.

"I thought maybe you had something you wanted to tell me?" he prompted, keeping her close while he rubbed her fingers, watching as she blinked away her frown of confusion and realization dawned.

She gasped. "You know? How could