The Texan's Tennessee Romance by Gina Wilkins Page B

to browse.”
    He set his cup down and then turned to face her on the couch while he swallowed another bite of the pie. He was fully aware that she didn’t want to answer questions about herself. He’d have to be blind to miss the signals. While she was perfectly amenable to congenial small talk, she had no intention of sharing too much of herself.
    He’d gone along with her obvious wishes during dinner. But now he was tempted to push his luck a little. Because Natalie Lofton intrigued him too much for him not to at least try to learn a little more about her. Preferably from her, rather than anyone else.
    “How long have you lived in Nashville?” That seemed an innocuous enough way to begin.
    She looked into her coffee cup. “Pretty much all my life.”
    “I’ve always lived within a few miles of Dallas, myself,” he confided. “I guess we have that in common. Not moving around a lot, I mean.”
    “I suppose so.”
    He suspected that she did not want to talk about careers, since she didn’t seem to have one at the moment. He wasn’t particularly interested in talking about his own, either. He would be hard-pressed to explain exactly what had led him to take an unpaid and inconveniently timed leave of absence.
    Family seemed like another relatively harmless topic. “Do your parents still live in Nashville?”
    “No. My mother and her husband live in Mississippi, and my dad lives in London.”
    He hadn’t realized that her parents were divorced. He knew his family was atypical, but divorce just didn’t happen in the Walker clan, so it hadn’t occurred to him. But she hadn’t sounded particularly bitter, so maybe that wasn’t a sensitive subject for her. “Your dad is Jewel’s brother, right?”
    “Yes. They were the closest in age of the five siblings.”
    “Five?”
    She nodded. “Only three are still living.”
    “So you come from a big family, too.”
    “You’d think so, but Tommy was Aunt Jewel’s only son, I’m Dad’s only offspring, one of my uncles never had children and the others had three kids between them, none of whom I know very well. I asked my dad once why his family wasn’t closer and he said he didn’t really know. They just drifted apart after their mother died when he and Aunt Jewel were still in school.”
    “But you’ve been close to your aunt.”
    “Yes. Not as close as I would have liked, since we live several hours apart, and I haven’t been able to make it to east Tennessee very often the last few years. But we’ve always had a special bond between us.”
    “I’m pretty close to my aunts, too,” he offered. “Especially Aunt Taylor—she’s married to my dad’s twin brother. Since I was almost always with their boys, Aaron and Andrew, she and my mom claim they pretty much co-mothered the three of us. The rest of the family called us the ‘terrible trio.’”
    That made her laugh, and he found himself mesmerized by a quick flash of dimples at the corners of her mouth. He hadn’t noticed those before—but he hadn’t seen her laugh that many times before. At the risk of sounding clichéd, he thought she really should do so more often.
    “I don’t know why that doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “Were you known as, um, accident-prone, perhaps?”
    He frowned at her. “Very funny.”
    “Sorry.” She set her empty pie plate back on the tray. “You said you and your twin cousins are the same age?”
    “Almost. Aaron and Andrew are a few months younger than I am. They’re twenty-five. I turned twenty-six in July.”
    She gave a little smile. “I’ll celebrate my thirtieth birthday this coming January.”
    Which confirmed his guess about her age. “So you’re, what? An Aquarius?”
    She waved a hand. “Capricorn, though I don’t really follow horoscopes.”
    “I’m a Leo. I have a cousin who’s recently gotten into that sort of thing. She’s pretty good with it. It’s amazing how accurate she can be with her charting and stuff.”
    His cousin