He instantly lowered his head and eyed her with all due suspicion.
“In fact, if it wasn’t for your general lack of humor—”
“Well now, that’s the pot calling the kettle black,” he said. “You’re the don’t-talk-to-me, you-must-be-a-pervert girl.”
“That again?” She flicked her wrist dismissively. “I said I was sorry. You’re too sensitive. And you need to take some responsibility for your part in it.”
“My part?” he choked. She shrugged casually and gave him a pert little smile. She was teasing him. Jake shook his head. “You are one piece of work, Peanut.”
“Priceless art,” Robin said, and when Jake lifted a brow, she giggled.
Damn it if a smile didn’t spread across his lips. He didn’t think that was the direction he needed to be heading, so he changed the subject. “So . . . how’s your dad?”
Robin’s smile quickly faded. She shrugged, picked at a seam on the table. “I guess he’s okay. Mom says they are going to California to see a spiritualist. My mom is really into homeopathy and Eastern philosophies.”
“I knew a guy who had Lou Gehrig’s disease and chose Eastern treatment,” he offered.
Robin lifted a very hopeful gaze. “And?”
And he should have kept his mouth shut. Joe Powell had died. “He, ah . . . he did all right,” Jake lied, grateful that Grok chose that moment to come back with the drinks. Jake asked her about where she’d grown up. She told him how her parents left West Texas cotton farms behind for Dallas, and how her father had been a line-haul driver for years before branching out on his own and creating the shipping company that was, judging by her trappings, extremely successful.
By the time Grok brought the food, Robin was actually making Jake laugh with stories of her childhood. “We lived in a two-bedroom house next to the railroad,” she said as she carefully separated the two hot dogs to opposite ends of the plate. “We’d sneak out and go put pennies on the tracks so trains would smash them.” She picked one hotdog and opened the bun wide.
Interesting—Jake and his brothers had done the same thing, only with objects far more interesting than pennies. It was almost impossible to think of Robin living in the same kind of place, particularly as she scraped the cheese and relish from the dog. But there she was, going at it with gusto, as if it was a perfectly natural thing to do to a hotdog.
“My mom caught us one day when the train was barreling down the track,” she said, pausing in her task to lick her finger. “Needless to say, that was the end of that.” She pushed the discarded toppings to one side, then pushed the wienie from the bun, and proceeded to cut the hotdog into bite-sized pieces. Fascinated, Jake watched her destroy a perfectly good hotdog as he shoved three and four french fries into his mouth.
“She didn’t like what she called our ‘experiments,’” Robin said and forked a clean, bite-sized piece of wienie into her mouth.
“Ah. Reminds me of a similar experiment gone awry. My little brother, Todd, had a stuffed Bullwinkle that he dragged everywhere. My other brother, Ross, had this idea that if a train were to run over Bullwinkle, he’d just flatten out and spring right back to shape. Well, Bullwinkle did not spring right back to shape. There was cotton batting scattered from Houston down to the Gulf.”
“Ooh, poor Todd! What happened?”
Jake’s memory soured, but he forced a smile. “My dad whipped the dickens out of me and Ross.” In truth, the whipping had left horrible welts on them.
Robin smiled. “You have two brothers? I have two sisters. Where are you in the lineup?”
“The oldest.”
“Me, too!” she exclaimed with delight. “So what do your brothers do?”
This is where all similarities ended. Jake took a big bite of burger, chewed thoughtfully, pondering Robin’s reaction, then wondering why he cared. She had hired him to do a job, not father a child. He swallowed. “Ross was killed in a drunk-driving accident,” he said, omitting the small detail that Ross was the drunk driver. “And Todd is in prison.”
To her credit, Robin did not balk or faint or scream in terror. She said nothing, just picked at the last two bites of the hotdog. “Really?” she asked after a moment. “Maybe I know Todd.” She lifted her gaze; her blue eyes were shining with empathy. “Hardy har har.”
Jake smiled, grateful that she had tried.
“So what’s he in for?”
“Armed robbery.”
She nodded. “And how long has he been gone?”
A lifetime. “About three years now. He’s got another twelve to do. Maybe less if he can keep out of trouble.”
“And Ross? When did he die?”
Jake looked out the front window at the sunlight dappled on the hood of his truck and wondered just exactly when the spirit had left Ross. “Two years ago.”
“You must really miss him.”