LITMIR.BIZ

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doubted it?” he asked.

      She sniffed indignantly. “I wouldn’t put it past Gwen to invent a husband just to defy me.” “I assure you, ma’am. I’m real.”

      “As for what kind of father you’ll be for my great-granddaughter, that we’ll have to see about.” Then her steely gaze narrowed with sharp perception and raked over Jonathon a second time. Finally she gave a little nod. “I’ve never had much use for overly handsome men. But then, neither has my Gwen, so I suppose there must be more to you than good looks.”

      He offered a wry smile. “I should hope so.”

      It was almost thirty minutes later when Wendy came down. The guarded look on her face as she walked through the door told him she’d heard them before entering the kitchen.

      She was greeted with hugs that lasted longer and more joyful tears than he would have expected, given the way she’d described the strained relationship she shared with her family. Throughout it all, she kept a careful eye on Peyton, who was currently being held by Wendy’s mother, as if Wendy expected that any moment the family might escape with the baby.

      “What are y’all doing here?” she asked when she was finally able to get a word in edgewise.

      He suppressed a smile. In five years, he’d never heard a hint of the Texas accent her family all sported. But three minutes in their company and she was slipping into y’alls.

      “Oh, honey,” her mother cooed, her voice all sugary sweet. “Of course we would come for your wedding. If we’d had enough warning, we would have been here.” She shook her head, tears brimming in her eyes. “I can’t believe I missed the wedding of my only daughter.”

      “I did tell you a week ago we were getting married. If you’d really wanted to come, you could have.”

      “But Big Hank had the jet in D.C.,” her mother bemoaned, “and we had to wait until he could fit the trip into his schedule.”

      Jonathon felt a pang of regret, but Wendy muttered, “I’m glad to know you found the idea of flying commercial more repugnant than the prospect of missing my wedding.”

      Tim’s head snapped up. “Young lady, you’ll speak respectfully to your mother.”

      “Or what?” Wendy asked, anger creeping into her voice. “You’ll cut off my allowance? The woman has missed almost every major event in my life since I was ten. And those that she showed up for, she criticized endlessly. I think she’ll live.”

      “Gwen—” her mother started to protest.

      Then Mema cleared her throat and both Wendy and her mother fell silent. Their heads swiveled to face her.

      “In the wake of our Bitsy’s recent and tragic death, it is time for you to put aside your past differences.” She stared them both down. Mother and daughter both dropped their gazes. “Now, the flight from Texas was long and I’d like to clean up before resting a bit before lunch.” She turned to Jonathon. “I assume all the bedrooms are on the second floor?”

      “They are,” he said, not sure what she was getting at.

      “Very well, then. I noticed an office just off the foyer. I’ll sleep there. I don’t do stairs well. Big Hank, please arrange for a bed to be delivered before evening. In the meantime, I’ll rest on the sofa there.”

      Jonathon watched in amazement as a senior U.S. senator practically leaped to help his mother out of the kitchen. A moment later, Wendy’s father had been sent out to the limo to instruct the driver where to bring the bags, and her mother had retreated to the nursery “to get reacquainted with her great-niece.”

      The second Jonathon and Wendy were all alone, she practically threw up her hands. “Why didn’t you come get me the second they arrived?”

      “You were dressing. I told them they could wait until you came down.”

      She tilted her head, studying him as if he were some foreign life form she’d never seen before. “You stood up to them?”

      Ah. So that’s what had her so puzzled. “Yes. I stood up to them. Do people not normally do that?”

      She gave a bemused chuckle. “No. People don’t normally do that.” Shaking her head, she started carrying coffee cups from the kitchen table to the sink. Almost under her breath, she said, “I once dated a guy whose parents were lifelong members of Greenpeace. He’d spent every summer since he was ten on boats protesting whaling in Japan. He’d marched on Washington forty-four times before he was twenty. He’d been a vegan since he was three. Within thirty minutes of meeting my family, he was eating barbeque and smoking cigars out on the back porch with Big Hank.” Shaking her head, she started rinsing out coffee cups and loading them into the dishwasher. “Within a week, he’d accepted a job working for my dad.”

      Jonathon studied the tense lines of her back. Her tone had been sad, but resigned. “The guy sounds like an idiot.”

      “No. He was very smart. The last I heard, Jed was VP of marketing for Morgan Oil. And Daddy would never promote anyone that high up who wasn’t brilliant.”

      Jonathon gently turned her away from the sink and tipped her chin up to look at him. “That’s not the kind of idiot I mean.”

      Her gaze met his, confusion in her eyes for a minute. Then her gaze cleared as she realized his meaning. Pink tinged her cheeks and pulled away from his touch. Tucking her hair back behind her ear she swallowed. “Thank you. For standing up to them, I mean. For everything.”

      “You’re welcome.”

      She gave a bitter laugh. “You say that now. But you don’t actually know what you’ve gotten yourself into.” She looked pointedly at the kitchen door through which her family had left not long before. “This nonsense with them sweeping down on us unannounced? Inviting themselves to stay here? Ordering a bed for Mema to sleep on? This is all just the beginning. It’ll only get worse.”

      “Of course it will,” he stated as blandly as he could. “You think I didn’t know that the second I opened the door?”

      “I… I don’t know. I guess… Most people don’t see them for what they are.”

      “Try to have a little faith in me,” he chided.

      “I’m just warning you. My dad and Uncle Hank will woo you with their good ol’ boy charm. And just when you think that you’re their buddy and they’re nothing more than simple roughnecks, they’ll use that keen intelligence of theirs to manipulate you. And if they can’t control you, they’ll try to squash you.”

      “Consider me warned.” He nodded. “Coming here was obviously a power play. They think they have the upper hand because they’ve chosen the time and location of the showdown. They’re trying to establish themselves as the decision makers in the relationship. What about your mother? She seems harmless enough.”

      “Um, no.” Wendy thought about it. Of all the family members, her relationship with her mother was the most complicated. There were times when she actually liked her mother. Of course, she loved all of them, but her mother she actually liked. But she’d never understood her. And her mother had her moments of being just as vicious as Uncle Hank. “In all those scuba-diving trips you take, you ever been in the water with a jellyfish?”

      “Several times. They sting like hell.”

      “Exactly. They look delicate and frail, but they have more than enough defenses. That’s my mother in a nutshell. She can play the victim, but she’s as smart as—” That’s when it hit her. “Oh, crap.”

      “What?”

      “The bedroom!” She leaped to her feet and dashed for the stairs.

      Jonathon snagged her arm on the way past. “What?”

      She whispered, just in case anyone was close enough to hear, “The guest bedroom. Where I

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