Page 31 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"For what?"

"My father interrogated you over macaroni and cheese."

He grinned. "Good mac and cheese."

"That is not the point."

"Made it easier."

I laughed out loud, and he caught the back of my neck in one hand and tipped my head up.

"Thank you for staying," I said.

"Told you." His thumb moved along my jaw. "I ain't playing with you."

He had said that exact sentence at my mother's table an hour earlier, and it had sounded like a man answering a question. Standing in the driveway with his hand on my neck, it sounded like something else entirely.

He kissed me, and I didn’t care one bit who was watching through that kitchen window.They were cleaning up when I came back in. Regina and Hamilton had already gone, and my mother was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up.

"He was polite," she said.

My father grunted.

"That's it?" I asked. "That's the whole review?"

"What you want me to say, Rue?"

"I want you to give him a chance."

He dried his hands on the towel and hung it on the oven door, and he took his time about it.

"I said I'd watch," he said, and went on down the hall.

I stood there in my mother's kitchen feeling like I had been handed something I was not sure how to hold.

"He looks at you like he means it," Mama said.

My heart did something ridiculous. "Means what?"

She gave me the look. The one she has been giving me since I was nine years old.

"You know exactly what."

I did know what she meant but Bobby Jo hadn’t said that part outloud. So, I guessed I’d just have to wait on him to do it.

Chapter 10

Rue

Nobody ever announced anything. There was no conversation where Bobby Jo asked me to be his girlfriend and I agreed. Truthfully, if he had asked, I wouldn’t have known what the hell to do with a boyfriend anyway.

t just became true. His truck had become a familiar sight in the pickup line on Thursdays, idling between minivans while he waited. My car crunched over the gravel at Maddox Concrete often enough that Cody barely glanced up anymore when I walked in. Regina and Hamilton had started saying the four of us so naturally, like we’d always been a unit. Sue Ellen had called me twice about a church rummage sale and once with no reason at all except to talk.

Which meant that by the second week of October, all of Irondale knew.

Patti Shoemaker cornered me in the workroom during my planning period, one hand resting on the copier lid while she looked at me like she’d been waiting all day to get me alone.

"I saw you at Kroger Saturday,” she leaned in a little to close for my liking, her cheeks with way to much rogue on them and red lipstick on her teeth.