Page 6 of 7 Days and 7 Nights

Yep. He’d miss her all right. He’d also miss the surge in listener response that resulted every time he ruffled her feathers on the air.

Chapter Three

JoBeth Namey sorted through the basket of dirty clothes on the laundry room floor. Tossing a detergent pod into the machine, she slowly began loading the contents of the basket into the washer one article at a time.

Dawg’s T-shirts were as industrial-sized as the man who wore them, and so were his boxers. JoBeth untangled a pair from his jeans, blushing as she remembered how urgently she’d tugged both off him the night before. A sigh escaped her at the memory of his lovemaking and the contentment she’d felt cradled in his arms afterward—a contentment that had disintegrated when she awoke to overhear him discussing her on the air with Matt Ransom.

JoBeth felt a fresh wave of humiliation and an equally unwelcome pang of despair. Earl Wayne Rollins, Jr. was not the first man she’d ever had a relationship with, but she’d assumed he’d be the last. She loved him, that was the hard, cold truth of it, and he kept saying he loved her. But the ticking of her biological clock had begun to drown out those words of love. She wanted... Lord, she wanted children and a family of her own. Not the empty keeping-up-appearances sort she’d grown up in, but the real thing fueled by real feelings and emotional commitment. Being forced to lobby for a marriage proposal made her feel unwanted, like an article of clothing destined for the clearance rack.

JoBeth dropped the lid on the washer and bent to pull a load of towels out of the dryer.

“JoBeth, you downstairs?”

Silently she pulled clothes out of the dryer and folded each item in turn, carefully separating hers and Dawg’s into neatly stacked piles.

Dawg came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her. His touch, as always, was surprisingly gentle for such a big man. “Mornin’, sweetheart.”

Normally she would have turned, gone up on tiptoe, and pressed her body up against the solid wall of Dawg Rollins’s chest, but today she kept her back to him.

“What’s wrong?” He nuzzled the back of her neck and locked his forearms together just under her collarbone. In a minute he’d be slipping his fingers under her pajama top and making her tingle all over again. “We don’t have anywhere we need to be just yet. Why don’t you come on back to bed?”

Holding her body rigid, she pulled away and turned to look up into the rugged angles of his face. He had a good ten inches on her and close to a hundred pounds, but she refused to feel small. Righteous indignation bubbled in her veins, and she enjoyed his start of surprise when she placed a hand in the center of his chest and pushed him

back a step.

“You have got more nerve than the whole state of Texas.”

Golden-gray stubble covered Dawg’s cheeks, and his blue eyes shone with good humor. He actually smiled.

“You went on the radio last night and told the whole of Atlanta that you don’t want to marry me.”

His smile fled.

“How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Well, now, I—”

“That was a rhetorical question, Dawg. You are not supposed to answer.”

“But, JoBeth, I—”

“I’m in love with you. And you keep saying you’re in love with me.”

“I am, JoBeth. You know I—"

“No.” She pointed a finger at him, cautioning him not to speak. “Don’t you dare say it right now. I’m tired of hearing words that go nowhere.”

“But JoBeth, honey...”

She stopped him with a look. “I’m forty-one, Dawg. I can’t keep hanging around

while you think this through. Who knows how many good eggs I have left?”

Dawg opened his mouth as if to speak, but now, when she yearned for a response, no words came out. They just faced each other in the overheated laundry room with the sounds of the washer and dryer underscoring the silence that stretched between them.

His blue eyes turned apologetic, and he looked almost as miserable as she felt. Realizing she was close to tears, she ducked under his arm and escaped upstairs. Yanking on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, JoBeth swiped at her eyes and reflected on the irony of her situation. Four years ago she’d walked away from a marriage proposal because she couldn’t settle for a man who didn’t make her pulse pound or her heart race.

Now she had more pulse-pounding and heart-racing than she could shake a stick at, but it looked like it would take an act of God to convince the man she loved to marry her.

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