"Besides," she quickly added, dropping her hand away, "it's just for a month."

"A month." He straightened and stared off into space. "A month," he repeated, the words sounding

more comfortable on his tongue. "Sure, I can do a month. How hard can it be?"

To: Katherine Bloom Chloe Sinclair From: Julia Boudreaux Subject: Good news I have everything arranged for Kate's next Getting Real segment, which is scheduled to air tomorrow morning. I met with the good people at Tumbleweed regarding the cowboy interview. I feel confident that our viewers will love the show.

xo, Julia To: Julia Boudreaux Katherine Bloom From: Chloe Sinclair Subject: Love?

I'm still not sure what the draw is of this segment. Kate surrounded by horses and bales of hay, talking with someone none of us has ever heard of? Sounds unappealing to me.

Chloe To: Chloe Sinclair Katherine Bloom From: Julia Boudreaux Subject: 0 ye ... of little faith. The appeal is who Kate will be talking to. The cowboy is a hottie. I felt it only good business to take the man out to dinner to ensure that he was capable of carrying on a decent conversation ... with Kate, of course. Though really, conversation isn't necessary. He's a true hunk.

xo,j p.s. He's not a bad kisser either.

To: Julia Boudreaux Katherine Bloom From: Chloe Sinclair Subject: Kissing?!!!

You took a man out for a business dinner and let him kiss you? Julia, really. Though if he really is that good looking and if we run some promos beforehand during the morning news, we can count on decent ratings. What is it about women that makes them susceptible to a well-proportioned cowboy?

Chloe, disgusted... okay, and a little intrigued. But only in the academic sense.

p.s. Kate, where are you?

To: Julia Boudreaux Chloe Sinclair From: Katherine Bloom Subject: I'm at home We've had a bit of a trauma here. We need to make the cowboy interview fast so I can get back to the house since Jesse will no doubt need help with his son.

Kate p.s. I received the ankle weights and workout shoes you got for Chloe and me. It's really sweet, Julia, but as I said when you mentioned getting them for all of us, I truly can't imagine wearing them.

Katherine C. Bloom News Anchor, KTEX TV West Texas To: Katherine Bloom Chloe Sinclair From: Julia Boudreaux Subject: Jesse has a son?!

Good God, what are you talking about?

JJJJJJ!.

p.s. Your loss if you don't wear the ankle weights... the ad guaranteed that they would give a girl a sexy little butt and great legs in no time if you wear them regularly. I've got mine on now.

To: Julia Boudreaux Chloe Sinclair From: Katherine Bloom Subject: Child It turns out our Jesse experienced at least one moment of unprotected sex in his lifetime. And now he has a twelve-year-old boy to prove it. Travis will be staying in my extra bedroom while his mother looks for a job.

K.

p.s. Sexy butt in no time? Perhaps will reconsider ankle weights...

To: Katherine Bloom Chloe Sinclair From: Julia Boudreaux Subject: Questionable motivation

Inviting the child to stay in the house? And Jesse's child at that. Seems to me there is more to your motivation than sheer cramped quarters. Careful, sugar. I don't want to see you get hurt, and while I was never very good at math, I can add and subtract. If the boy is twelve, my calculations put his conception at just about the same time you were proclaiming your undying love in the tree house.

xo, Julia Scarlett Boudreaux

Five.

Jesse and Travis sat at Katie's kitchen table, staring at the breakfast Jesse had made.

"Pop-Tarts," Travis stated in a thoughtful, considering voice as the morning sun rose in the distance.

Katie had already left for work, leaving the new father and son to make heads or tails of their first day

together.

"There's powdered sugar doughnuts, too," Jesse offered.

"A real health nut."

Jesse would have laughed if he hadn't been disconcerted about the fact that he had said those exact

words to Katie. Had it really been only twenty-four hours since then?

He had stayed up late last night, sitting at the tiny table in the guest cottage in shock.

Travis.

His son.

He still couldn't believe it.

He didn't want a son, at least at this point in his life.

And he definitely didn't know what to do with one. He also couldn't believe he had offered to take

care of him until Belinda got settled.

But it was the strangest feeling seeing this kid. Shock, yes, but something else, something that made everything else in his life seem less significant. Which he couldn't believe he would actually think. He was on the verge of winning the PGA Championship. He had the opportunity to truly make a name for himself in this game-as a golfer, not as some bad boy whom the media loved to talk about. Which meant he needed to practice. Concentrate. Focus. But all he could do was think about the fact that he had a son. And that made him think about his own father. A place he had no interest in going.

After his mother died, it had been just the three guys- Dad, Derek, and Jesse-each trying to find a way to deal with Janie Chapman's death. He had been ten, Derek eighteen, while their father lapsed into shock.

It had been six-year-old Katie who came to Jesse the night of the funeral, slipping into his house after all the people finally left and his dad and brother had gone to sleep. She'd had her stuffed bear crammed under her arm as she climbed up beside him.

"It's gonna be okay, Jesse," she had whispered, sticking her little arm underneath his neck as he stared up at the ceiling. It was the only time he let himself cry.

He had woken up at four in the morning, that damned bear clutched in his arm, Katie curled against his side, sleeping the sleep of the dead.

As quietly as he could, so he wouldn't wake his father, he had shaken her awake, taken her hand, and led her barefoot through the lattice archway to her house. It was 4:15 by then, and when he pushed through the back door to the kitchen, her mom was sitting at the table, crying. It wasn't a secret that Mary Beth's newest husband had just moved out.

Even at that age Jesse could tell Katie's mom would be considered a beautiful woman, fiery and wild. It was like men were drawn to her in spite of better sense.

"Hi, Jess," Mary Beth had said to him, wiping her eyes, before adding to Katie, "Hey, sleepyhead."

Just that, nothing else-no lectures, no outrage that he was bringing her daughter home at that hour.

She didn't even move to take Katie to her room. Instead, he was the one who tucked her into bed.

For years, Katie came and went from her house at all hours. More often than not, Jesse knew, Mary Beth was too self-absorbed, too caught up in concern over some man to notice when Katie was gone.

When he returned to the kitchen that early morning he shrugged, feeling awkward. "See ya."

"Jess?"

He stopped with his hand on the knob.

"I'm sorry about your mom. She loved you a lot."

His throat started to work again and his eyes burned. But he swallowed it back. No more crying.

"Thanks." He raced out the door, across the yard, slipping back into his own bed just before his dad got up to fix breakfast. Carlen Chapman didn't say much to his boys for months, a strange spiraling distance widening between them until Jesse felt like he was losing his father, too. But Carlen had kept his sons fed and clothed.

Food and clothes. Two things a parent had to provide for a child.

Jesse glanced at the plate of Pop-Tarts. "You need more to eat than that."

Travis stared at his new dad. Not exactly a new dad like the new stepdads some of the kids at school got. This guy had been his dad from the beginning, though no one had known it except his mom. So really, Travis reasoned, he was a new-to-him dad.

Jesse Chapman was really tall-please, please, please, let me get tall like him-and handsome in a movie star kind of way, not really a dad kind of way. In fact, his dad really didn't seem much like a dad at all.

Without so much as a What do you want to eat?, Jesse looked in the refrigerator, and Travis could tell he was surprised by what he saw. "Eggs," Jesse said.

"Yeah, Kate said we couldn't live on Pop-Tarts alone."

"You talked to her?"

"This morning before she left for work. She got up early and went to the grocery store."

"She must have gotten up real early."

"Yep, said she didn't want to leave us here without any food." He laughed. "She's really nice."

His dad looked out the window, and the guy kind of laughed, thinking of something that made him smile and shake his head at the same time. "Yeah," Jesse said, "she's nice." Then he got back to work on all that food.

Travis sat at the table, trying to decide if he should mention the fact that Kate had stopped at McDonald's and gotten him a Big Breakfast after she went to the store. She hadn't gotten anything for herself, only had some cereal and coffee, saying, "No more fat thighs for me." Which, Travis reasoned, must be why she left the house wearing ankle weights.

Travis decided not to tell Jesse about the Big Breakfast or the ankle weights.

"I saw you swimming this morning," Travis offered instead, dubiously eyeing the eggs going into a skillet. "You remind me of that swimmer lady on those old movies my mom likes to watch. Esther Williams."

All that got was one dark eyebrow raised kind of funny, like he wasn't all that happy about being compared to Esther.

"Not that you look like a girl," Travis added hastily. "I just mean you're a good swimmer. Like Tarzan. Yeah, Tarzan in the really old movies. Though you swim way better than him. You put your head in the water. Tarzan does that weird above the water thing, like he doesn't want to get his hair wet. Though why Tarzan would care about wet hair, I don't know. He's hanging out with Cheetah. Do you really think a monkey cares?"

Jesse looked at him like he was trying to figure out if he was supposed to answer that. It was the same kind of look that tons of people gave him when he talked.

"Do you watch a lot of old movies?" Jesse asked.

Talking! With his dad! "They're my mom's favorite. Did you know that?"

That got more silence, and it belatedly occurred to Travis that his dad probably didn't know a whole lot about his mom, because he almost hadn't recognized her. Which couldn't be great, since Travis knew all about how kids were made.

Jesse set a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast in front of him.

"Yum." He tried to sound enthusiastic about the mounds of food.

They ate in silence, until Jesse went all still and his head jerked up and he asked, "What do you usually

do during the summer?"

"Me? I hang out."

"Doing what?"