And Able (22 page)

Claire’s tension grew with every mile the SUV traveled away from the small municipal airport where Brett had landed his plane.

His parents lived about an hour and a half southwest of Savannah, on the outskirts of a small town named for one of Brett’s ancestors. She couldn’t even imagine. What must it have been like growing up as a member of the town’s founding family? Brett wasn’t a conformer, and she wondered if it had been hard for him.

He didn’t talk a lot about his family…all she really knew was that they were definitely a bunch of overachievers and he loved them.

But the prospect of meeting the rest of his family had her stomach in knots. It shouldn’t and she knew it shouldn’t. She and Brett weren’t a couple. Not really. He hadn’t even said anything about his marriage proposal since leaving Lincoln City.

This was probably the one and only time she would ever meet these people. So, his family’s opinion of her should not matter,
 
but it did
. She smoothed down her white t-shirt and the khaki cargo pants she’d worn to travel, wishing her wardrobe stretched to a pair of real slacks.

Brett was silent, too, his usually charming exterior going grim the closer they got to his family home. Was he embarrassed to be bringing her?

“I can stay at a hotel, you know. I don’t have to horn in on your mother’s birthday weekend.”

His head jerked as if he’d been deep in thought. “What?”

“The bad guys aren’t going to know where I am. I can stay in a hotel.”

“You’re staying at the house.” That’s all he said and then he went back to brooding.

She watched the green scenery go by for another mile. “How close are we?”

Right then, he turned the car into a long drive lined with trees. “Very close.”

As he pulled the car to a stop behind a huge white mansion, she felt her heart speed up until it was going faster than the Road Runner fleeing Wile E. Coyote.

“Your parents live here?” she demanded in a voice that sounded as awed as she felt.

“Yes.”

“You grew up
 
here
?”

“Yes.” He got out of the car and came around to open her door, but frowned when she made no move to step out. “It’s just a house, Claire.”

“It looks like a scene from
 
Gone With the Wind
.” She and her parents had lived in a pretty nice house in West Portland prior to her dad losing his job, but it had been nothing like this.

“No chance. My mother and sisters think Scarlett O’Hara gave southern women a bad name.”

“Because she was so selfish?”

His brows rose, as if he hadn’t expected her response. “Yes.”

“Okay…so it’s not a movie set, but it is beautiful—and
 
huge
.” She sighed and stared at the house and its incredible surroundings, unable to imagine growing up in such a place…and then leaving it.

He smiled, his eyes narrowing with a speculative gleam. “If I promised to bring you here every holiday and two weeks in the summer for our kids to run riot, would you marry me?”

She gasped. “I thought…”

“What did you think?”

“That you’d forgotten about that ridiculous idea,” she blurted out. But the image he painted of their
 
children
—not just child, singular—playing in the green, green grass, or climbing one of the huge trees around the mansion, was totally tempting.

“I’m reserving my resources.”

“What do you mean?”

But he didn’t get a chance to answer, because two boys with dark hair and identical grins had come hurtling from the direction of the house and threw themselves against him with gleeful cries of, “Uncle Brett, Uncle Brett.”

A small, blond girl followed the boys, her shorter legs not letting her reach Brett as quickly as the other two. When she did, she stood back, sucking her thumb and watching the boys and Brett engage in an impromptu wrestling match.

Claire climbed from the car and closed the door, snagging the little girl’s attention. She smiled shyly around her thumb.

Claire dropped to her haunches so she and the child were at eye level. “Hi, my name is Claire. What’s yours?”

She popped her thumb out of her mouth. “Jenny.”

“That’s a pretty name. Is it short for Jennifer?”

Jenny nodded. “Those are my brothers, Derek and Kyle. They’re bigger than me,” she said confidingly.

“I see. They like to wrestle with their uncle, don’t they?”

“Uh-huh.” She looked at Claire for several seconds before asking, “Are you Uncle Brett’s girlfriend?”

“No…um…” Claire hoped her consternation did not show on her face. “I’m, uh…his friend. That’s all.”

Jenny didn’t say anything to that, but popped her thumb back into her mouth, her expression solemn.

“Hey, sugarplum.” Brett had come to stand with one boy hung under each arm like a bag of oats. “Where’s your mama?”

“She’s inside,” Jenny said around her thumb.

“I’m right here, actually.”

Claire surged to her feet and Brett released his hold on his nephews as they all turned at the sound of the melodic voice. His sister was a beautiful woman, dressed elegantly in a pale pink suit and heels, with a superficial resemblance to Brett that was unmistakable.

The woman put her hand out to Claire. “I’m Eleanor Adams-Stanton, this disreputable person’s older sister and these three adorable cherubs’ mother.”

Claire shook hands with her. “Claire Sharp. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“She said she’s not Uncle Brett’s girlfriend,” Jenny piped up. “Nana was wrong.”

L
 
ooking supremely unconcerned by his niece’s comment, Brett ruffled the girl’s golden curls. “Claire was being shy, sugarplum. She’s my girlfriend, all right.”

Eleanor’s brows rose. “Maybe she’s not shy so much as ashamed to claim you?”

The twinkle in her blue eyes so like Brett’s indicated the words had been meant to tease, but a tiny clenching of his jaw said that he’d taken them to heart.

Claire moved a step closer to Brett. “Of course I’m not ashamed to claim him.”

“But you said you wasn’t his girlfriend,” Jenny repeated.

“Weren’t,” her mother corrected with a gentle pat on her daughter’s shoulder.

“It’s all pretty new and it’s not exactly official,” Claire said by way of an explanation.

“What does that mean?” one of the boys asked. “How do you get an official girlfriend, Uncle Brett?”

“It means, you hooligan, that I’m still working on convincing her to marry me. Once I do, it will be as official as it gets.”

His sister’s eyes widened in shock, and then a grin at odds with her elegant demeanor spread across her face. “Mama is going to be thrilled.”

“Do you have to wanna marry a girl for her to be your girlfriend?” the other boy—she thought it was Kyle—demanded.

“No, but I’m going to marry Claire and she
 
is
 
my girlfriend. She’s just not used to it yet.”

“Oh.” The young boy looked at Claire. “I have a girlfriend, but I don’t wanna marry her.”

Claire was going to kill Brett, but thought she’d wait until there were no children around to witness the deed.

She smiled at Kyle. “That’s probably best. You’ve got years before you should start thinking about marriage.”

“My daddy says the same thing, but he likes being married to my mama a lot, so I don’t know.”

Eleanor laughed, looking pleased by her son’s remark, and then took Claire’s arm. “Come along. Mama is dying to meet the first woman Brett has ever brought home to the family.”

First woman? He hadn’t told her he’d
 
never
 
brought another woman home to the family. No wonder his sister was looking so much like the cat that ate the canary.

Claire shot him a hot glare over her shoulder.

He just shrugged, a smile creasing his face in sexy lines. Then he mouthed,
 
I warned you.

And he had, but he hadn’t warned her he intended to tell his family he wanted to marry her. Being the first woman he brought home would have been bad enough, but that just cinched it. Brett had put her in an untenable position. She supposed that’s what he’d meant by saving his resources.

He planned to turn the women in his family loose on her and from her brief glimpse of Eleanor, that was a scary proposition. The next time Claire got Brett alone, she was going to make his ears ring.

Jenny’s tiny hand slipped into hers and squeezed. “I like you. You’d make a nice auntie.”

Claire felt a funny little flip in her heart. She smiled down at Jenny. “I like you, too.”

But she went speechless when they walked into the mansion. Even coming in through the back hall was impressive. The moldings were solid wood and carved from a time when workmanship really meant something. As they filed into the spacious entry hall, her breath caught. Its huge dimensions were eclipsed by the grandeur of the staircase and artwork gracing the walls.

“Oh, my.”

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Eleanor asked without so much pride as a practical appreciation for the beauty.

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to believe Brett left all this to live in an army barracks, and who knows what other forsaken places, when he was eighteen.”

“Sometimes a person’s dreams require sacrificing things that matter.”

He was suddenly beside her, his arm going around her waist, the “hooligans,” as he called them, tearing off ahead to enter a room off the opposite side of the cavernous entryway.

“You two stop running right this instant,” their mother called in a stern voice, but was overridden by a southern drawl so like Brett’s that Claire sucked in a shocked breath.

“Leave them be, Ellie. They’re too full of energy to move in slow motion all of the time.” A man who looked as she imagined Brett would in twenty years, with some silver in his blond hair and a few laugh wrinkles around his eyes, stepped out of the room.

“I don’t recall you ever allowing me to run in the house,” Eleanor replied wryly.

“Certain privileges are reserved for grandparenthood,” the man who had to be Brett’s father said, and then turned to her. “You must be Claire.”

“Yes.”

They shook hands, his grip firm but not crushing. “Loren. I would like to say that my son has told us a great deal about you,” he said as he led her into the living room, “but he’s been typically closemouthed, and now you will have to endure a family’s curiosity as we satisfy ourselves about you.”

Were they going to give her the third degree? That scenario was the last one she wanted contemplate. “I—”

“You make it sound like we’re going to cross-examine her, and I realize being a lawyer and then judge for so many years is hard to overcome, but do try to be civilized. You’re scaring the poor dear to death. Can’t you see how tense she’s gotten?” This came from a woman sitting on a low sofa, Kyle and Derek on either side of her.

She was every bit as elegant and beautiful as Brett’s sister, but her eyes and hair were dark and she was probably a good three inches shorter than her daughter. Though she looked much too young to have given birth to either Eleanor or Brett.

She shook her head at her husband. “Sometimes I wonder where you hide that charm that convinced me to marry you.”

“Brett’s must have gone missing, too. He hasn’t been able to convince Claire to marry him at all and he’s looking for us to help.”

“What?” His mother stared at Claire as if she were an apparition.

“I never said that,” Brett denied.

“You yourself told me you hadn’t convinced her. What else could you have meant but a plea for help?” Eleanor sat down on one end of a matching sofa opposite the one her mother and children were sitting on.

“My son asked you to marry him?”

Claire could only nod. Reminding them all, including the man she was now clinging to like a lifeline, that she had said no did not seem politic.

“Well, glory be, my son got some of his father’s wits after all. Those are the wits that he had before so many years in a courtroom drained most of them away,” she said with a haughty look at her husband.

Incredibly, he didn’t appear offended at all, but grinned and slapped his son on the back. “This is wonderful news, son.” He turned his grin to Claire. “What do your parents think of Brett?”

“Her parents are both dead,” Brett quietly stated.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” His mother’s dark eyes swam with sympathy. “I will not be offended that I am only meeting you for the first time, then. When he told me that he’d known you for over a year, I naturally thought that Brett had met your family already and kept you a secret from us. I couldn’t understand why, except that he has this silly little idea that we’re too prying. It shouldn’t have bothered me, I know…but I’m only human and I’ve been waiting so long for this son of mine to settle down.”

“We’ve only been friends, Mrs. Adams. Really.”

“Until recently,” Brett added. “Though I think we both knew for quite a while that we wanted more.”

“Do call me Felicia and you may call Brett’s father Loren. Why, you’re practically family.”

“Please…I…Brett…I mean…Please don’t get your heart set on marriage. I don’t think it would work,” she said all in a rush.

“Why?” his sister baldly asked.

Claire swallowed, trying to find the right words. “Our backgrounds are too different, for one thing.”

“There aren’t that many women who are ex-mercenaries like his friend Josie. Surely you wouldn’t limit him to waiting for one to come along.”

Brett’s hold on her tightened and tension emanated off of him. Despite the fact he said he wanted the marriage, he wasn’t any more comfortable with this conversation than she was. Maybe he would remember that, and the next time he was tempted to call in reinforcements, would keep his big mouth zipped.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what did you mean?” Felicia asked gently, her dark gaze probing.

Claire swept her arm out to indicate their surroundings. “I mean this. Your lifestyle, the way you raised Brett…it’s like a fantasy. He owns his own jet, for heaven’s sake, and I can’t even afford a used car at the moment.”

“This is about money?” Loren asked, his expression puzzled.

“No. Yes. Not entirely.”

Brett’s father laughed, a warm, rich sound. “You’re as confused as Brett’s mother was while I was courting her. That’s a good sign, son.”

“I hope so.” Brett pulled Claire onto the sofa his sister had sat down on.

His father lifted Derek and put him in his lap, taking the seat beside Felicia. “We’re not royalty, Claire…or the Kennedy clan.” He chuckled at his own joke. “My ancestors helped found this town and built this house for themselves and the generations that came after them, but we’re no different from your own parents.”

Claire just shook her head. He had no idea how wrong he was, but no way was she going to tell him.

Instead, she said the one thing that she could say with total honesty. “I used to think I was a nonviolent person, but there are times I could happily boil your son in oil. I really think whether or not we marry is something that has to be settled between the two of us.”

Thankfully, the conversation moved on to other subjects after that, and Claire found herself really liking his family.