women of various ages. This time, he was telling his adoring fans the story of how he’d received the news of his first book making it to the New York Times bestseller list.
“At first I thought it was one of my friends, making a crank call and pulling my leg. So I hung up. After the person called back a second time, I placed my own call to my agent—and got the same person who very coldly informed me that my agent was in a meeting and she couldn’t be disturbed, but she’d asked him—turns out he was her assistant—to call me with the good news. He sounded very put out. I spent the next fifteen minutes apologizing to him—and then the next forty-eight hours celebrating,” he concluded with a grin.
It was clear that his audience was eager for another anecdote. But the moment he saw his mother approaching with Victoria, Brandon politely extricated himself from the tight circle of women, promising to return with another story “later.”
Crossing to his mother, who was clearly going somewhere, he asked, “What’s up?” He looked from his mother to his daughter, waiting for an answer.
“Brandon, it’s getting late. It might not be a school night, but Victoria and I are going home,” his mother announced.
He could remember when his mother could party not just all night long but several days running, as well. Back in those days, she’d been unharnessed energy and had given no indication of ever slowing down or growing tired.
Age was a bear, he thought with a touch of sadness. For form’s sake, because he knew she’d refuse to admit she was tired, he asked his mother, “Is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong. But it’s past Victoria’s bedtime and I don’t want her overdoing it,” Anastasia elaborated.
The excuse was paper-thin, but he saw no reason to let her know that he saw through it. In order to spare his mother’s pride, Brandon played along. He glanced over his shoulder at the circle of women he’d just left. They were still waiting for him. One of the women waved at him.
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger, he thought, whimsically calling to mind a famous catch phrase from a bygone era. “Maybe I should go, too,” he said to his mother.
Anastasia looked genuinely horrified. “No, no, you and Isabelle stay here,” she insisted, patting his hand. “Enjoy yourselves.”
“Isabelle’s not going with you?” Sexy or not, the woman was his mother’s physical therapist and as such should really be accompanying her, not him, Brandon thought.
“Why should she?” Anastasia asked, surprised that he would even suggest such a thing. “It only takes one of us to make sure Victoria goes to bed,” she said, draping an arm around the girl’s slender shoulders.
Brandon noticed that his daughter looked as if she wanted to protest but was prudent enough not to. Wise beyond her years, that girl, he thought with pride.
Digging into his pocket, he located his keys. Brandon took them out and held them out to his mother. He knew that her surgeon had just cleared her to drive yesterday. He assumed she was eager to get back behind the wheel again. Control was all important to his mother, it always had been. “Take my car, then.”
She pushed his hand—and the keys—back. “No need. Maura is taking us home,” she told him, referring to his agent. “She was planning on leaving early anyway.” Anastasia waved her hand vaguely. “Something about having to take an early phone call tomorrow. I don’t know,” she confessed. “I wasn’t really listening. You know how she can go on and on.”
His agent would just drop his mother off at the curb, never leaving her vehicle. He wasn’t sure if he was happy with that. “You’ll be all right, going home by yourself?” he questioned.
“I won’t be by myself,” Anastasia reminded him, then looked toward her granddaughter. “I have Victoria. What more could I ask for?”
Brandon smiled. There were indeed times when it felt as if Victoria was the adult and his mother, and occasionally, he supposed, he as well, were the children. His daughter was born with an old soul, which was fortunate for him because he wouldn’t have known what to do with a typical rebellious teenager.
Walking in at the tail end of the conversation, Isabelle joined Brandon and his family. “I should be going with you,” she told the actress.
That was exactly what Anastasia didn’t want. She wanted the two of them to be alone together—as alone as was possible in the middle of a packed reception.
“Nonsense, dear. This is the shank of the evening for you and you’re only young once—trust me on this.” The woman patted Isabelle’s cheek with her heavily ringed hand. “Enjoy yourself. Keep an eye out for Brandon and make sure some overendowed, eager fan doesn’t get it into her head to make off with him,” she requested. “He has trouble saying ‘no.’ To anyone except his poor mother.”
Brandon laughed. “There’s absolutely nothing ‘poor’ about you, Mother.”
Anastasia took it as her due. “Thank you, dear.” As she spoke, she looked around for Brandon’s agent. “Ah, there she is. Maura,” she called out, raising her arm and waving from side to side to catch the woman’s attention. “We’re ready to go.”
His agent, a short, sensible-looking woman wearing a blue sequined dress that transformed her squat torso into a walking blue flame, nodded.
“Then let’s go.” She put a hand to the small of each of their backs. “I’m parked in the first row,” she informed her charges as she herded them both off.
Now what? Isabelle wondered.
She looked after the departing actress, clearly torn between her sense of duty and a very strong streak of desire, a streak that insisted on growing with every breath she took.
“I really should go with her,” she murmured to Brandon.
“No, you shouldn’t,” he contradicted. She looked at him, puzzled. “It took me a while to get versed in Anastasia-speak but if she tells you she wants you to stay, then she wants you to stay. Really.”
Isabelle still had her doubts as she watched the two women and Victoria weave their way through the crowd and inch over to the front of the bookstore. “She’s leaving because she’s tired—”
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t accompany her,” he pointed out. “She’s using Victoria as an excuse to leave. This way, she can slip into bed without damaging her reputation as the queen of the all-nighters. If you go with her, she’ll be forced to stay up and pretend that she could have gone on all night—when she couldn’t.”
“That’s pretty convoluted.” But, she supposed, in an odd sort of way, that did make sense.
“So’s my mother,” he pointed out. “Trust me, it’s better this way. Besides, she’s just a little tired, it’s not like she’s going to need a blood transfusion once she’s home. There’s no real reason for you to go with her.” It occurred to Brandon, as he made the case for her to stay, that there could be another reason why Isabelle might be trying to leave. “Unless you don’t want to stay.”
“Not want to stay?” she echoed. How could he even think such a thing? Maybe this was old hat to Brandon but not to her. “I’m feeling a little like Cinderella at the
