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 slept last night.”
He continued to stare blankly at her. Seriously? Mr. Genius couldn’t figure this out?
She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Last night. On our wedding night. I slept in the guest bedroom.” She resisted the urge to bop him on the forehead. “And now my mother is upstairs with Peyton. And if she sees the guest bedroom, she’ll realize we didn’t sleep together last night.”
This time, she didn’t wait around to see if his sluggish brain had started working at normal speed. Instead, she pulled her arm from his hand and made a break for the stairs. He was hot on her heels as she took the stairs two at a time.
She stopped at the top, breathing rapidly through her mouth and she looked around for her parents. A long gallery hall ran from the top of the stairs to the guest room at the end. They’d have to pass the nursery to get there.
Crap, crap and double crap.
This was going to be tricky. She crept down the hall, praying that Jonathon would walk as softly. Or head back downstairs if he couldn’t.
She tiptoed right up to the doorway and pressed herself against the wall, listening. She heard the faint, steady creak, creak of a rocking chair.
If her mom was sitting in the chair rocking Peyton, there was a good chance Wendy could sneak past to the guest bedroom, make the bed and sneak out with anyone being the wiser. Or more importantly, becoming suspicious.
Slinking past the door, she heard two things that would have stopped her in her tracks if she hadn’t been in such a desperate hurry. The first was Jonathon’s heavy footfall behind her. The next was her father’s voice from within the nursery.
She glanced through the open door, but saw no one. Maybe they’d make it. But when she heard the rocking chair still, she grabbed Jonathon’s hand and made a dash for it.
If her parents heard them and followed, she and Jonathon would never have time to actually make the bed. Certainly not neatly enough to put her father off the scent.
And this wasn’t the day to leave up to fate.
Pulling Jonathon into the room after her, turning him so his back was to the door, she flashed him a wry smile. “Sorry about this.”
“About what?”
She only had an instant to appreciate how charming he looked with that bemused expression on his face before she launched herself at him. They both tumbled backward onto the bed in a tangle of arms and legs. He might have gasped with surprise. She didn’t have a chance to notice, as she pressed her mouth to his and kissed him.
The second Jonathon felt
