Love So Unexpected (The Lawson Brothers Book 6) by Marquita Valentine Page A

stay. Okay, so he’d admitted it in a backward kind of way, but she looked ready to bolt.
    He wasn’t sure why really, since she’d been the one to bring up his lack of attention to her. Honestly, he had been waiting on her to make the next move and invite him to do something. But now that he knew better ... the ball was in his court. If he wanted to spend time with her while she merely bided hers, then he’d have to be the one doing the pursuing. Fine with him.
    Only, he wasn’t sure if he could do it properly. Hell, he hadn’t done it when he’d met Iris. They clicked immediately and always seemed to find a way to be around one another. Then again, Iris had been as crazy about him as he was about her.
    “I think I need to go.”
    He wasn’t going to force her to stay. Maybe she wasn’t into him. Maybe the reason she’d gone out with him was because she was bored. Maybe—
    “But I want to make plans with you before I go into town.”
    He blinked at her. “Excuse me?”
    “Dinner plans. You said I could cook for you at your house,” she clarified, her smile turning only a little shy. Sofia wasn’t the shy type, and he liked that about her.
    “Yeah, I did.” His voice came out far gruffer than he intended. He cleared his throat. “How about tomorrow evening? Momma usually cooks after church, but I’ll tell her that—”
    “Don’t you dare tell that woman she can’t cook for her family,” Sofia all but shouted at him. “That’s how she shows her love.”
    Her fierce loyalty to his mother made his heart beat faster. “I know that, and I wasn’t going to tell her not to cook. Only to scale back a little. Sometimes she cooks for ten.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s okay.” She stood, wiping off her cute ass with the palms of her hands. “Where is your house?”
    “Up the road a ways.” For a second he panicked at the thought of having her all to himself. You want her all to yourself, remember? “What time should I pick you up?”
    “Depends on what time you want to eat,” she said with a saucy grin.
    “Six-thirty is good.”
    “Are you that habitual?”
    He shrugged a little. “I get in late and up early. Seems like a good time.”
    “Pick me up at three.” She walked away, still wearing his baseball cap. He liked how it looked on her, liked how her dark hair flowed out from under it. But what he liked most? The fact that he’d been the one to fix a problem for her, and not just her pretty hair getting in her face.
    It had given him pure pleasure to work on Old Blue for her. When he’d approached his dad about providing transportation for Sofia, David hadn’t batted an eye at his request. Just told him to make sure he filled up the tank when he was done. Of course, his mom had read more into it than she should have. He was merely doing something nice for a woman who was down on her luck. Nothing more than that.
    Or so he told himself.
    “Are you coming?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him. Beneath the afternoon sun, she looked like an angel. And angel with a killer body, but an angel nonetheless.
    His heart thumped against his chest. “Yup.”
    *
    L ater that day, Caleb decided to take Preston up on his standing offer of beer and darts at Whiskey Hollow The bar was a local watering hole, but in the past year, Preston swore things had gone more upscale with the new owners.
    In any case, Caleb hadn’t darkened the door of Whiskey Hollow in years, when his brothers had to literally drag his drunk tail out of there.
    So, it was only slightly embarrassing to walk inside, but it’d been over a decade since that night, and the place did look different.
    He looked around the bar, finding Preston near the back, playing darts by himself. For a guy with a supposed horn-dog reputation, his cousin was rarely in the company of women. He didn’t show up with them to family events, and they didn’t surround him tonight.
    The only reason, he supposed, that Preston could still have that moniker