Page 42 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"Bobby Jo!"

I ran my hand through my hair. "Mama is gonna lose her whole mind."

"BOBBY JO!"

I stopped.

She pointed at my chair. "Sit down, please."

I sat down and Rue came around and leaned against the front of the desk so she was looking down at me for once in her life.

"Are you happy?"

That one went in sideways. I’d been running the numbers on trucks and bedrooms for four straight minutes. Not one time had I stopped and asked myself the only question that mattered.

I looked at her. Then at that little plastic sticks sitting on my invoices. "Yeah."

She did not say anything.

"Scared shitless," I said. "But yeah."

Her face did something, and then she was crying, and I came up out of that chair so fast I about put it through the wall.

"Hey. Hey, what did I say? What'd I do?"

"Nothing." She was laughing and crying at the same time and doing neither one well. "You didn't do anything. That's the problem."

I pulled her in and she fit under my chin the way she always did, and she got two fistfuls of my shirt and held on. I stood in my own office in a building I built with my own name on it and held that woman while she shook.

After a minute my hand went down low on her back and then around to her stomach, flat against her, over the dress.

There was nothing there. Nothing at all.

But that was mine in there. That was ours.

For about ninety seconds, everything in my life was exactly right.

Then I opened my mouth.

"We're gonna figure it out," I said into her hair. "All of it. You ain't doing none of this by yourself, you hear me? I'll take care of you. I'll take care of the baby."

She was still against me.

"We'll get married."

She went stiff in my arms.

I didn’t catch it. I was already three steps down the road, thinking about whether the courthouse would be quicker and whether my mother would forgive me for it or hold it against me until the day she died.

Rue stepped back out of my arms. "What?"

"I said we'll get married."

"Why?"

I frowned at her. "Why?"

"Yes. Why."