Page 43 of Her Defiant Warrior

“Perfect!” Jase yelled. “You did that exactly right. Now let’s do it again.”

“But it didn’t go far,” Amber complained.

“What were we trying for? A home run, or you connecting with the ball?” Jase teased.

Amber laughed. “You’re right. That was my first hit since T-ball.”

“Okay, let’s do ‘er again.”

Bonnie watched her daughter hit ball after ball. Even Lachlan came out of his batting cage so he could watch his sister. “Go Amber,” he yelled.

Bonnie didn’t think she’d ever grinned so widely.

I’m going to give Jase free haircuts for life!

* * *

Jase looked at the two kids in the back of his crew cab. They were passed out. When he looked over at Bonnie in the passenger seat, he realized she could use some sleep as well.

“How many hours a week do you work?” Jase asked quietly.

“Not too much,” Bonnie said.

Which meant she worked too much.

“How many is not too much? Can you quantify that?”

“When I’m solidly booked, probably sixty hours a week. A slow week is forty-five hours a week. After the kids started going to school all day, I started taking on more clients. I’d been saving for the house, so I had the down payment ready, but not the income level. After I took on the additional clients I qualified, so I became a homeowner,” she grinned.

“That’s fantastic.”

“Thank you.”

Jase could hear the bone-deep satisfaction in her voice. And she should be satisfied. He didn’t know many people, men or women, who could have twins at such a young age without her mom and dad to lean on, and no kind of help from the baby daddy or his parents and still make a success out of their life.

“I told you about my menagerie of a family. What about you? Any aunts, uncles, cousins?”

“My parents were both only children. I always dreamed about having a…” She trailed off.

“What? What’d you dream about?”

“Nothing. I’m just overtired.” He heard her fake a yawn as he pulled up in front of her house. He let it slide. After all, this was only the fourth time they’d been in one another’s presence, even though he felt like he’d known her a lot longer than that.

He pulled into the parking space in front of her house and turned off his truck, then looked over his shoulder at the two children. They’d been zonked out since two minutes after leaving the restaurant.

Bonnie pushed at her door.

“Baby, let me,” Jase whispered.

“Huh?”

“Open your door for you.”

This woke her up. Her eyes twinkled. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, opening the door at the restaurant is one thing, but coming around and opening my car door when I don’t have a broken arm is kind of a bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s how I was raised. It means a lot to me to do this kind of thing for a woman that I respect.”

She gave him her crooked smile with a flustered gaze. “All right,” she whispered. Jase could tell he had taken her by surprise.