Page 32 of Renewal After Dark

Duke was pissed off with himself by the time he slid into the driver’s side of his truck.

“Are you okay?”

He looked at her over the baby seat between them. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”

“You looked upset when you came out of the house.”

And she was observant, too. “Oh. No. I’m fine.”

“I really can walk into town. It’s no problem.”

“You shouldn’t walk with the baby on the roads out here.” He started the truck and threw it into Reverse. “People drive like lunatics on the curves. Someone takes out one of the stone walls at least once a year.”

“Well, I’ll have to walk since I don’t have a car.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you need to go.”

“You sound pissed.”

“I’m not. I swear. It’s not safe to walk out here.”

“You’ve already given me a place to live. Now you want to be my chauffeur, too?”

“Whatever you need. I’m happy to help you.”

“Why?”

He looked over at her, seeming stunned by the question. “Because that’s what people do for each other. They help when help is needed.”

“That hasn’t been my experience.”

“Maybe you’ve been hanging out with the wrong people.”

Her snort of laughter eased some of the tension that’d built up inside him as he tried to talk himself out of being attracted to her. “Ain’t that the truth?” She quickly added, “I have the best girlfriends, but we all have stories about other people, mostly men, that would make your hair curl.”

“My hair doesn’t curl easily.”

“We could make it happen.”

“It’s tough to be optimistic about the future when the past has been messy.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Took me a long time, a lot of years, to put the past where it belonged so it didn’t screw with my present every day anymore.”

She looked over at him. “How’d you do it?”

“I decided to focus only on what was right in front of me at that moment rather than putting it in the context of what’d happened before. Not sure that makes sense…”

“No, it does, but I still don’t seehowyou can just do that.”

“You make up your mind to look ahead, not back. There’s not one damned thing you can change about the past, but the future is yours to map out as you see fit.”

“That sounds great, buthow?”

“You wake up every day with a choice about how you want to live. Do you want to be mired in a past you can’t change or focused on a future that you direct?”

“You make it sound so simple.”

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