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It was a good plan, but it fell apart as soon as he went back into the bedroom and saw her.
She’d just come awake; her eyes were sleepy-looking, her hair was mussed, and when she saw him, she smiled.
“Good morning,” she said softly.
Travis shook his head as he made his way to her.
“It isn’t,” he said solemnly, “because we haven’t yet performed a vital morning ritual.”
Her eyebrows rose. “What ritual?”
“This one,” he said, and he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she returned his kiss with such tenderness that he could have sworn he felt his heart swell.
* * *
They spent the morning reading the papers, eating omelets Jennie made after she’d opened the fridge, rolled her eyes and finally unearthed half a dozen eggs, what remained of a pint of cream, four English muffins, a stick of butter and the biggest find of all, a chunk of still-usable Gruyère to add to the eggs.
There was other stuff, too: a bunch of little white cardboard containers Travis thought might have contained leftover take-out Tex-Mex.
“Unless it’s take-out Chinese,” he said apologetically.
“Hard to tell, I guess.”
“Yuck,” she said, dumping the containers in the trash.
“Hey,” Travis said, his hand on his heart, “what can I tell you? Cooking isn’t my thing.”
Thankfully, it seemed that coffee was.
He had two pounds of Kona beans in the freezer, a grinder in the cupboard and a pot with more dials and buttons on it than Jennie had ever seen in her life.
She rolled her eyes again but admitted he got points for not completely destroying her faith in starting the day right.
Travis grinned, came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and lightly bit the nape of her neck.
“I thought what we did a little while ago definitely started the day right.”
“Behave yourself,” she said sternly, but she leaned back against him and tilted her head up for a kiss.
After breakfast, they showered again. His shower was big enough for a dozen people, she said, and he gave a mock growl, took her in his arms and said he’d fight off anybody foolish enough to try to share the shower with them because she belonged strictly to him.
He meant the words as a joke.
But once he’d said them, he stopped smiling. Jennie did, too.
“Strictly to me,” he said gruffly, and he made love to her against the glass wall, beneath the kiss of the warm spray.
* * *
He wanted to take her out.
Well, what he really wanted was to take her to bed, again, but he knew how much he’d love walking down a street with her beside him.
He thought about the things the women in his past had liked to do.
Did she want to go window-shopping? She wrinkled her nose. Stroll through a flea market? Another wrinkle of that cute little nose. How about a walk in the park? A drive?
She chewed on her lip.
“What?” he asked.
She hesitated. “I don’t suppose...I mean, I heard a couple of other T.A’s. talking...No. Never mind. It’s silly. A drive would be—”
“Nothing’s silly, if it’ll make you happy.” Travis took her hand and brought it to his lips. What did she want to do? Go to see some chick flick, probably. Well, fine. Not fun but he could surely survive—
“Six Flags,” she blurted.
For a second or two, he was lost.
“Six flags of what?” He blinked. “You mean, the amusement park?”
She nodded. Her eyes were round and bright.
“Could we?”
Travis grinned, put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a loud, smacking kiss.
“A woman after my own heart!”
* * *
“Oh, my,” Jennie kept saying, as they strolled through the park, hand in hand.
Everything made her squeal with delight. The grilled turkey legs. The funnel cakes. The giant hot dogs.
And the rides.
They drew her like a candy store drew kids.
“Can we watch?” she kept saying, and Travis would say sure, of course, and while she watched the rides and the riders, he watched her.
Was it possible this was all new for her?
“Honey?” he said as she stood, head tilted back, mouth forming a perfect “O,” her fingernails digging into his hand as terrified people shrieked and screamed with delight while plummeting earthward on a parachute ride, “haven’t you ever been to a place like this before?”
She shook her head, but her eyes stayed locked to the parachute tower.
“No.”
“Little parks only? Okay. Maybe there isn’t anything like this in New—”
“My parents didn’t approve of amusement parks.”
Her parents. The duo that had been upset because she hadn’t wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant.
“Well, how about local fairs? You know, Ferris wheels. Old-fashioned roller coasters.”
Jennie shook her head.
“Not those, either. My parents were very protective, remember?”
“Aha,” he said, trying to imagine how it must have been for her to grow up in such a closed-off world.
“They meant well,” she said quickly, because his “aha” had dripped with meaning. “But they were always, you know, careful I didn’t do anything that might be, you know, dangerous or, you know, risky, or—”
“What I know,” Travis said gently, drawing her into the curve of his arm, “is that they wanted to protect you.”
She nodded. “Exactly. But—but—”
“But,” he said, smiling, trying to make light of what she’d missed, “life is short.”
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly dark with something he couldn’t read.
“Yes. It is. And when I—when I realized that, I knew there were so many things I’d never done, that I wanted to know about...”
Like making love.
She didn’t say it.
He did.
And when he did, she nodded.
“I wanted to know about sex,” she said in a low voice. “But what I learned about was—was making love. And it wouldn’t have been making love if I hadn’t found—” Her words stumbled to a halt. “Oh, God! Travis. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Please, I swear, I’m not trying to—”
He took her in his arms and kissed her.
It was either that or say something he couldn’t imagine saying to a woman he’d met a week ago, something he’d never imagined saying to any woman ever, or at least not for maybe the next hundred years.
Something that made no sense, he told himself, but as she melted against him, he knew that nothing had made sense since the night she’d walked into that bar.
Nothing—except the sweet, sweet joy he felt, holding his Jennie in his arms.
* * *
After a while, he figured she was happy just looking at everything.
Logical.
For a girl who’d never so much as ridden a Ferris wheel, going on one of the park’s big rides would surely be daunting. That was fine with him. Just being together made the day perfect—and when he saw her staring at somebody munching on one of those enormous turkey legs, he figured he knew a way to make her smile.
“Lunch,” he said.
Jennie looked at him.
“You get your choice of gourmet treats, madam. A turkey leg. A hot dog—though you have to understand, they won’t do ’em with the sophisticated panache of the Wilde Brothers—”
She laughed.
A good sign, because she’d been very quiet for the last twenty or thirty minutes.
“Or fried chicken. A hamburger. Pretty much any non-PC, artery-cloggin’ goody your heart desires—”
“The roller coaster.”
“Huh?”
“The wooden one. Where we were a little while ago. The one called Judge Something-Or-Other.
” Her eyes were shining. “Can we ride it?”
Travis hesitated. “Honey. You sure you want to start with something like that? There are easier rides to—”
Jennie bounced on her toes. The last time he’d seen somebody do that, it had been his sister Lissa, aged three or four, pleading for him to let her ride his horse instead of her pony.
He hadn’t been able to say “no” then.
And he sure as hell couldn’t say it now.
* * *
She loved riding that roller coaster.
She screamed and shrieked, and laughed with such joy that he forgot he’d given up nonsense like amusement parks a long time ago and laughed along with her.
“Again,” she said when the ride ended.
They rode the coaster again.
And then they rode everything else, or damn near everything else, before Travis said, “Enough,” took her in his arms for probably the hundredth time that day, kissed her and said it was time they took a break, ate something, drank something while he told himself he was being, yes, protective, but not the way her parents had been.
But he understood how they’d felt.
Someone as good and sweet as Jennie deserved to be protected.
“Okay,” she said. And laughed. “Actually, I just realized—I’m starving! I could eat a horse!”
“Them’s fightin’ words, here in Texas,” Travis said solemnly.
They ate tacos. Fried chicken. One of those turkey legs.
“It’s from a brontosaurus, not a turkey,” Jennie said, chomping into it.
Travis watched her eat and tried not to smile.
“More?” he said politely, after she’d finished the leg.
