Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a difficult teenager. I’m sorry I never lived up to your expectations. But that has nothing to do with who I am now.”
“Doesn’t it?” Her mom swept up the carrots Wendy had been chopping and dumped them into the pot, lumpy, misshapen bits and all. She added a drizzle of oil in the pan and cranked up the heat. “You’ve rushed into this marriage with this man we’ve never even met—”
There was a note of censure in her voice that Wendy just couldn’t let pass. “This man that I’ve worked with for years. If you’ve never met him, it’s because you never came out to visit.”
Her mother planted both her hands on the counter between them and leaned forward. “Jonathon seems like a very nice man. But if you married him solely to annoy us then—”
“Oh, Marian, don’t be so suspicious.”
Wendy spun around toward the kitchen door to see her father and Jonathon standing just inside. She and her mother had been so intent on their own conversation that neither of them had heard them enter.
The two men had obviously come to an understanding about the argument upstairs. Her father had his arm slung over Jonathon’s shoulders as if they were old buddies. The smile on his face was downright smug.
Jonathon looked less comfortable. In fact, he rather looked like he’d swallowed something nasty. Slowly his gaze shifted from her mother to her. Obviously, he heard everything her mother said to her. And he didn’t like it.
“I’m sure,” Wendy’s father was saying, “that our little Gwen here has grown out of her rebellions.”
Jonathon swallowed the tight knot of dread in his throat. “Mrs. Morgan, I assure you—”
But Wendy’s mother sent both of them withering glares and he was smart enough to shut up when a woman wielding a butcher knife sent him a look like that.
Wendy pointed the tip of her own knife in her father’s direction. “You stay out of this.” For the first time in years she felt as though she and her mother were actually talking. She wasn’t about to let her father muck it up.
Turning her gaze back to her mother, she continued as if the men hadn’t entered at all. “I’m not a rebellious teenager anymore. I’m a grown woman. With a job I love. I may not have married the next political golden boy and I may not be VP of Twiddling My Thumbs at Morgan Oil, but I’m successful in my own right. And a lot of people would be proud to have me as their daughter.”
“It’s not that we’re not proud,” her mother began. “But—” “Of course there’s a but. There’s always a but.” Her mother ignored her interruption, slicing to the point of the matter as easily as she sliced through the joints in the chicken. “But you’ve always delighted in rebelling against your father at every turn. If I thought for a minute that marrying Jonathon and raising Peyton was truly what you wanted—”
“It is.”
“—and not just another one of your rebellions then I would support you wholeheartedly.”
Wendy threw up her hands. “Then support me!”
“But I know how you are. If Mema or Big Hank, let alone your daddy, announced that the sky is blue, the very next morning you’d run out and join a research committee to scientifically prove that it’s not.”
“You make me sound completely illogical.” Wendy shook her head as if she didn’t even know how to defend herself against her mother’s accusations. “It’s like you haven’t heard anything I just said.”
“Well, you tell me whether or not this is just rebellion.” Her mom propped her fists on her hips. “Everyone in this family thinks Hank Jr. and Helen should raise Peyton, except you. Do you have any logical reason why you’re so darned determined to raise this baby?”
Jonathon had had enough. He stepped away from her father. Pulling Wendy back against his chest, he said calmly, “I believe that’s the point, isn’t it? Everyone in the family except for Wendy. And Bitsy. Since Bitsy didn’t want her brother raising her daughter, shouldn’t that be enough for everyone?”
Marian snapped her mouth closed, narrowing her gaze and setting her jaw at a determined angle. He’d seen that look often enough on Wendy.
“You didn’t know Bitsy,” she said to him, obviously making an effort to moderate her tone. “Bitsy was never happy if she wasn’t stirring up trouble. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but has it occurred to either of you that naming Wendy guardian might just have been her way of creating conflict from beyond the grave?”
He felt Wendy pulling away from him, tensing to speak. He tugged her back soundly against him and said, “I may not have known Bitsy. But I know Wendy. I know she’s going to make a wonderful mother.”
Her mom studied him for a second, apparently searching for signs of his conviction. Finally, she nodded. “Hank Jr.'s wife, Helen, sees that baby as little more than a crawling, crying dollar sign. Peyton is a fast ticket to a bigger chunk of Mema’s estate. Helen will fight you for that baby.”
“Helen has three boys of her own that she’s done a crappy job raising,” Wendy pointed out. “If she hadn’t shipped those boys off to boarding school the second they were old enough to go, maybe I’d see things differently.”
“Just be prepared. Helen’s like a bulldog with a bone when money’s involved.”
“That may be true,” Jonathon said. “But Helen isn’t here now. And we have all weekend to convince Mema that we’ll be the best parents for Peyton.”
Her mother harrumphed. “Don’t think Helen hasn’t figured that out as well. Mark my words, girly, you might be glad we came to visit you here instead of waiting for you to come to us. This might be your only chance alone with Mema to convince her that you and Jonathon are the happy, loving couple you want us all to believe.”
There were few things that terrified Jonathon. He thought of himself as a reasonable and logical man. Irrational fears were for small children. Not adults.
At nineteen, he’d spent a solid hour in the dorm room of a buddy, holding the guy’s pet tarantula in his hand to get himself over his fear of spiders. At twenty-three, about the time he’d made his first million, he’d spent three weeks in Australia learning how to scuba dive. That trip had served the joint purpose of getting him over his irrational fear of sharks and his equally irrational fear that FMJ would go under if he wasn’t available 24/7.
He now took annual diving vacations. After the first, he’d stayed closer to home.
He was a man who faced his fears and conquered them.
Which didn’t entirely explain why at nearly midnight on Saturday, he was still sitting in the kitchen sipping twenty-year-old scotch with Wendy’s father and uncle. He’d been there for hours, listening to them tell stories about Texas politics and—as her father colorfully called it—“life in the oil patch.”
Her family was entertaining, to say the least. And that was the sole reason
