Nicole averted her face. “Oh, please. Spare me the lecture about making the best of it.”

Teresa hesitated, then started the car. Maybe, determined that her children be as happy about the move as she’d been, she had been insensitive to Nicole’s misery. On one level, she understood it; on another, she didn’t at all. She hadn’t been as social a creature as her daughter was. At that age, she’d been absorbed in her books and her studies and her ambition for the future. She’d had friends of course, but she didn’t remember missing them all that much when she went off to college. Probably she wouldn’t have missed them any more if her family had moved.

And here she’d been accusing Nicole of being self-absorbed. Maybe, Teresa thought ruefully, she was the selfish one. She’d convinced herself that the kids would be better off in small-town America because this was what she wanted for herself. She still thought this was a better place to raise children—but maybe Nicole was already too formed by her environment to adjust. Maybe, along with the veterinary practice and the farmhouse, Teresa had bought her daughter unhappiness.

The thought was an unsettling one.

IT WAS STILL on her mind on Friday as she dressed for her date with Joe Hughes. Nicole hadn’t been happy to hear that her mother was going out with the logger and that she was condemned to baby-sit her little brother. It didn’t help when Teresa pointed out that Nicole would have been sitting home, anyway.

Realizing her mistake immediately, Teresa tried to amend it. “You haven’t picked up any baby-sitting clientele yet—”

“How can I? I don’t know anybody.”

“Why don’t I put up a notice for you at the clinic?”

Nicole lifted one finger and traced a dispirited circle in the air. “Wow.”

“Joe mentioned brothers and sisters. Maybe they have kids.”

“Mom.” Nicole waited until her mother turned to look at her. “I don’t care if I baby-sit. I don’t need the money. There’s nowhere to shop, remember? Nobody to shop with? Okay?”

Teresa gritted her teeth at the snotty tone, but decided to let it pass. This time.

She ended up wearing the outfit she’d bought in town that day with Nicole. If Joe showed up in a suit and tie, she’d whisk back into the bedroom and exchange the leggings for a calf-length gauzy skirt.

As it turned out, he wore jeans and a plaid sports shirt that echoed the extraordinary blue of his eyes. His eyes took in her appearance with one swift assessing glance and returned, obviously approving, to her face.

“Do you like Mexican food? I thought we’d go to La Hacienda here in town.”

“Love it,” she assured him, standing aside. “Joe, I’d like you to meet my kids. Nicole, Mark, come here.”

He shook hands solemnly with both, didn’t remark on Nicole’s teenage sulkiness and agreed with Mark that soccer was a popular sport in White Horse.

“One of my nieces plays select soccer,” Joe said. “She’s darn good. They go to tournaments all over the state.”

“That’d be cool.” Mark’s eyes were wide.

Briskly Teresa ended the preliminaries. “See you, guys. I don’t know what time I’ll be home.”

In the pickup, Joe said, “I feel a little guilty leaving them behind. I could feed them, too—”

“No!” she exclaimed, then saw his surprise and amusement. She made a face. “Nicole’s driving me nuts,” she admitted. “I need a break.” There was more, of course. The moment she’d answered the door, she’d remembered why she’d wanted so badly to go out with this man. The fantasies she’d indulged in this past week had not included her children.

“You ought to talk to Jess. Her oldest is, uh—” he obviously had to calculate “—twelve going on thirteen. She’s been a pain in the butt lately.”

“Maybe I will. Tell me, how many nieces and nephews do you have?”

“Uh…” More calculations. “Seven. Lee has four, Jess two and Rebecca one. Although she’s expecting another.”

“And you all live here in town?”

He offered her that heart-stopping grin. “Pretty overwhelming, huh?”

Had she sounded rude? She would have liked to see her own sisters and their families more often, but…

“My younger sister was so nosy,” she said. “Still is.”

“My mother is the nosy one.” His big shoulders moved. “I ignore her.”

Teresa could imagine that. His rock-solid steadiness was part of what attracted her, but it wouldn’t make him a flexible man. So to speak.

“You don’t have any kids?” She hoped her question sounded casual.

“Never been married.” The statement so carefully held no inflection it should have stopped her from commenting. It didn’t.

“You’re kidding.”

Joe shot her a glance. “Why’s that so surprising?”

“Because you’re, ah…” Fumbling for words, she settled for the truth. “You’re a hunk. I can’t believe some woman didn’t snap you up.”

“Like a tasty fly?” he asked wryly.

Teresa couldn’t resist it. She chanted, “There was a young woman who swallowed a fly…”

“And now she’ll die?” he concluded.

Of happiness, maybe, Teresa thought, but had the sense not to say.

“I guess the whole analogy is a little—” she grinned “—distasteful.”

He groaned. “Oh, God, a woman who likes puns.”

“Didn’t someone say it’s the highest form of humor?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the lowest?”

“You should have heard us in vet school,” Teresa said cheerfully. “We were bad.”

“Question is, are you hungry?”

She blinked and looked around. Heavens, they were parked in front of the restaurant. How long had they been here while she blathered?

“Starved,” she admitted. “A day of standing around always makes me think about food.”

He started to circle the truck, presumably to get the door for her; she didn’t wait. If he wanted a lady, he could look elsewhere. But all he said was, “Things no better at work?”

“Heck no.” Teresa sighed. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Over enchiladas, they did. She chattered on about her years of school; he merely shook his head when she asked if he’d gone to college.

“How’d you get started in logging?”

“Summer jobs,” he said easily. “By the time I got out of high school, I was already a cutter—I was the one who climbed the trees to top ’em, or take some limbs out. Pay was too good for me to bother looking around for any other line of work. My boss encouraged me to learn to cruise—that’s estimating what a stand of timber is worth, so you can make a realistic bid on it. I always had a head for math.” He shrugged. “Got some money put away, went into business for myself. Now I keep six other men working.”

“You’re a family of entrepreneurs.”

“Who wants to work for someone else?” His gaze was shrewd. “Isn’t that why you bought into a practice?”

She paused in the midst of cutting her enchilada. “I suppose so. Well, partly. It’s not the money-making side of being a vet that interests me. I wanted more responsibility. In Bellevue I worked at this big clinic with half a dozen vets. It was like I just put in my time—I didn’t make the overall decisions, which sometimes bothered me. For example, I thought our charges were too high. Especially for preventative medicine. I wanted us to keep neutering and vaccination costs to the very minimum. The partners smiled and told me I wasn’t looking at the big picture.”

“You’re an idealist.” The faintest of smiles lurked in his eyes.

Teresa wrinkled her nose. “I suppose so. But partly I was being selfish, too. I was bored. In vet school I especially enjoyed the large-animal work, and we didn’t do any of that where I worked. I was hoping for a mix.”

“Which you found.”

“In theory.”

“They’ll come around,” he said quietly.

“Damn straight they will.” She frowned at him. “I’m going to get every one of those farmers to admit I’m the best vet they’ve ever had!”

“You show ’em.” His smile seemed a bit rueful, and she wondered why.