Let It Be

by Marie Force

  Step one was meeting Molly’s parents and convincing them he would love and care for their daughter for the rest of his life. Step two was finding a job, and step three would be proposing to her and setting a wedding date. After all that was done, he’d take his new fiancée home to Philadelphia to meet his family and share their plans.

  Elmer Stillman was waiting for them at the bus station.

  Molly let out a happy cry and leaped into her father’s outstretched arms.

  “You can’t ever leave me for that long again,” Elmer said as he hugged her.

  “Don’t be dramatic, Daddy.”

  “I’m not being dramatic. Longest summer of my life, hands down. Counting the days until my little girl came home.”

  “I’m going to be twenty-three soon. When will you stop referring to me as your little girl?”

  “When I’m dead and buried?” He took one of her bags, grabbed her hand and headed for the parking lot.

  “Wait, Dad. I brought home a friend who I want you to meet and be nice to.”

  Elmer stopped, dropped her hand and turned, noticing Linc for the first time and eyeing him suspiciously.

  “Hello, sir, I’m Lincoln Abbott, a friend of Molly’s.”

  Elmer shook his hand but continued to size him up with sharp blue eyes that made Lincoln feel like a little boy. “What kind of friend are you, son?”

  “The boyfriend kind, sir.”

  “Is that right?”

  Lincoln refused to be the first one to blink. “Yes, sir. I love your daughter very much, and I hope to marry her as soon as possible.”

  “Linc! I told you to ease him in. That doesn’t count as easing him in!”

  Elmer scowled fiercely. “My Molly doesn’t have boyfriends.”

  “Honestly, Dad, I’ve had a boyfriend before, as you well know, so stop acting like a fool and be nice to my new friend.”

  “Is he your friend or your boyfriend?”

  “Um, well...”

  Linc nudged her and gave her an annoyed look.

  “Boyfriend. He’s definitely my boyfriend.”

  “Who wants to marry you,” Elmer said, giving Linc another suspicious glare.

  “That’s what he says.”

  “You two do know I can hear you talking about me, right?” Linc asked.

  Elmer sent him a withering look that made Linc thankful looks couldn’t actually kill. “No one is talking to you.” To Molly, Elmer said, “Where is he staying?”

  “With us, Dad. Now stop acting like a Neanderthal and take me home to see Mom and Hannah.” Molly took her father by the arm and pulled him along with her as they headed out of the bus station.

  Lincoln followed, hoping Elmer would let him into the car.

  “I decided right then and there that if I ever had daughters, I wouldn’t act the fool with the men they brought home,” Linc said. “I’d be much more evolved than Elmer was, that was for sure.”

  Hannah, Ella and Charley lost it laughing when they heard that.

  “Whatever,” Charley said. “You were the biggest ass-pain in history when we started dating.”

  “Remember how he’d never let Caleb and me be in the same room by ourselves, even if we were just watching TV?” Hannah asked.

  “I remember that,” Hunter said, laughing. “He’d sit between you on the sofa.”

  “It was outrageous!” Hannah said. “Even when we were engaged, he was ridiculous.”

  “My father-in-law taught me everything I know about keeping my daughters away from scheming young men,” Linc said, amused by their memories. He’d discovered some promises to himself were easier to keep than others, such as when boys had begun sniffing around his three precious daughters. Like Elmer, he’d been a little over the top, not that he’d ever admit that to his girls.

  “I had your number from the second you stepped off that bus,” Elmer said. “Imagine showing up out of the blue and talking about marrying my Molly. You were out of your mind.”

  “I was madly in love,” Linc said with a smile for his beloved.

  “It was revolting,” Elmer said, making his grandchildren howl with laughter.

  Molly reached for Linc’s hand. “Nothing revolting about it, and you have to admit, Dad, he jumped through all your ridiculous hoops.”

  “He did,” Elmer conceded. “Even the ones I thought would trip him up.”

  “Like when he sat outside your mother’s bedroom all night the first night I stayed at their house to make sure I wouldn’t wander during the night,” Linc said.

  “How did you know I was there if you didn’t wander?” Elmer asked, raising a brow.

  “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that there’s no statute of limitations on crimes committed while in the throes of forever love.”

  “Barf,” Landon said.

  “Nothing to barf about, son,” Linc replied. “Your mother was and is a beautiful woman. I wanted to be with her all the time. Still do.”

  “And I knew that the second I saw the way you looked at my little girl,” Elmer said.

  “Your little girl was almost twenty-three.”

  “She’s still my little girl, even after you had ten children with her. It would do you well not to forget that, young man.”

  “I never do, sir.”

  Elmer’s smile lit up his adorable face. Despite their auspicious—and suspicious—beginning, Linc and his father-in-law were the best of friends. They spent part of just about every day together, even if it was over a cup of coffee at the diner, during which they usually did nothing but push each other’s buttons. He’d learned everything he knew about being a good husband and father from Elmer and turned to him any time his heart was heavy, including now.

  “What did you think of Butler when you first came, Dad?” Will asked.

  “I loved it immediately, especially the store. I’d never seen anything quite like it.”

  “I decided to hire him so I could keep an eye on him,” Elmer said.

  “Oh, puleeze,” Linc said. “You were lusting after my Yale MBA. Admit it.”

  “I’ll admit no such thing, but I will give you credit for growing the business in ways I never dreamed possible.”

  “Thanks to my Yale MBA.”

  “Oh, stuff it.”

  “Do you kids see what I had to put up with from your grandfather from the very beginning?” Linc asked.

  “Seems to me he kept you humble,” Hannah said.

  “Exactly, sweetheart,” Elmer said. “He needed to eat some humble pie when he got here all high off his new Ivy League MBA, telling me he was going to marry my Molly. The impertinence.”

  Molly laughed at the face her father made. “It’s been forty years, Dad. It might be time to move on.”

  “Never.”

  “Why did you hire him if you were so suspicious of him, Gramps?” Ella asked.

  “You know that saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer?” Elmer asked, giving Linc a calculating look.

  “Which was Dad?” Ella asked.

  “I didn’t know yet, so I figured if I hired him, I could keep an eye on him and figure out which he was going to be.”

  “Oh whatever,” Linc said. “You were drooling over my MBA.”

  “That was vomit over the way you mooned after my daughter.”

  “I never once mooned your daughter.”

  “Well,” Molly said, “there was that one time—”

  “Say another word, and I’ll fire him,” Elmer said as the others laughed.

  As the chairman of the company’s board of directors, Elmer could, in fact, fire him, not that he ever would. Linc had done a good job of growing Elmer’s family business from a small-town store into a brand that was beginning to gain national recognition.

  “What I want to know,” Will said, “is what your dad said when you told him you’d accepted a job working for a country store in Vermont.”

  “Yeah, that didn’t go so well,” Linc said, sagging a bit wh
en he recalled the reason he was reliving some things he’d much rather forget.

  “Let me,” Molly said, tuning in to him as always.

  “Sure, love. Go ahead.”

  “About a month after your dad came home to Vermont with me, we went hiking on the mountain one day. It was a clear, cool beautiful September day, and when we reached the summit, he dropped to one knee and proposed. Even though I knew it was coming, he still took me by surprise that day, which I consider one of the best days of my life.”

  “Were you still worried about him giving up Oxford?” Charley asked.

  “A little, but he seemed really happy working at the store and living in Butler. We’d begun work on the barn, with a goal of having a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom habitable by the time the winter came along. The mudroom was our first bedroom.”

  “I thought you always joked we were conceived in a tent,” Hunter said, frowning. “As if we needed to know that.”

  “You were,” Molly said, “but that’s not part of the story you need to hear.”

  “Thank you, Jesus,” Colton said. “Ain’t no one wants to hear that.”

  “It’s a pretty good story,” Molly said with a saucy grin for Linc.

  “No!” their ten children said as one, with Elmer joining in the chorus.

  “It’s not too late for me to run that boyfriend of yours out of town on a rail,” Elmer said.

  “Actually, Dad, it’s about ten kids too late. But anyway, where was I? Oh yes, so we’re engaged and working on the barn, and Dad is enjoying working for Gramps, even if Gramps threatens to kill him on a daily basis.”

  “That was a very dangerous time in my life,” Linc said with a wry grin, “but well worth the danger to be with my Mols every day.”

  “The only thing standing between us and our plans was the fact that your father hadn’t told his family he’d decided to live and work in Vermont rather than go to England. And he wasn’t going to work for his family’s business.”

  “Where did they think you were the whole time you were in Vermont?”

  “At Oxford.”

  “You would’ve killed us if we’d done something like that,” Charley said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Linc said. “I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, but I wanted to have my life in Vermont set up before I went home to tell them my plans had changed. And I wanted your mom and me to be engaged.”

  “Did he ask for her hand, Gramps?” Will asked.

  “He did, and he said all the right things about how he’d take care of her and protect her and love her for the rest of his life. However, there was no mention of ten children, or I might’ve had to think twice.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have us,” Max said, gesturing to himself, Lucas and Landon, the youngest three siblings.

  “And that would’ve been a tragedy for sure. I’ve put up with him because I got all of you.”

  “Which is why the two of you have been scheming for years to get us all paired off,” Ella said with a kind smile for her grandfather. “Because you can barely tolerate him.”

  “Exactly. As soon as you kids are all happily settled, I can be done with him once and for all. Impertinent upstart, showing up holding hands with my Molly like he has a right to hold her hand.”

  “He did have a right, Dad, so you can knock off that tired forty-year-old nonsense.”

  Her father smiled sweetly at her. “What fun would that be, my dear?”

  Molly rolled her eyes at her father. “I insisted we go to see his family when we set a wedding date.”

  “I didn’t want to go,” Linc said. “I was afraid they’d find a way to mess with the perfection I’d found with your mother.”

  “Were they unkind?” Hannah asked, her brows furrowing as if she couldn’t imagine parents being unkind to their own child.

  “It wasn’t that so much as my father had a vision for how we ought to live our lives, and if we stepped outside the lines, he was quick to set us straight. It’d always been that way, and it had gotten much worse after we lost Hunter, so I had to believe it would be even more so in this case. And unfortunately, I was right.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.”

  —John Lennon

  Linc had lived in a blissful state of denial for more than two months by the time Molly insisted they take a trip to Philadelphia so she could meet his family and they could share their plans with them. He’d taken to life in Butler, Vermont, like the proverbial fish to water. He loved everything about small-town living—the ability to walk to just about anywhere, the friendly people, the charming store that Molly’s family ran and, of course, Molly herself.

  If she’d been lovely in Mississippi, she was even more so in her hometown, surrounded by her beloved family and friends. After being there with her, he could plainly see that she wouldn’t be content anywhere else. She had the same desire to travel and see the world that he had, but her home and her heart would always be in Vermont.

  Before he met her, he would’ve wondered if he could be satisfied living in a small town like Butler, but if she was nearby, he had what he needed. It was really that simple. And he loved working with her dad, even if he still treated him with the same suspicion he might bestow upon a serial killer who’d expressed an interest in dating his daughter.

  Linc was able to see through the bluster. He respected Elmer for being concerned about the man in his daughter’s life, but he was determined to prove he had nothing to worry about where Linc was concerned. Linc wanted the same thing Elmer did—for Molly to be safe, happy and loved for the rest of her life. He was more than prepared to live up to his end of that bargain, if only the showdown with his own family didn’t loom so large, like a black cloud hanging over his happily ever after.

  “I’m sure that once they see we’re truly in love, they’ll be supportive,” Molly said as they worked late into the night at the barn in early October.

  They planned to get married in January, after the holiday rush at the store, and he was counting the days until she was his wife. He couldn’t wait to sleep with her in his arms every night for the rest of his life. The time they spent at their future home filled him with anticipation for when they’d finally be living there together, rather than sleeping separately at her parents’ home, where he’d been relegated to the basement. He’d been tempted to sneak upstairs, but after Elmer had staked out Molly’s room that first night and later shown him his hunting rifle, he’d chosen to stay put, which, of course, had been Elmer’s goal.

  But here at the barn, they were completely alone, and even though they had more work to do than they could complete in a year, all he wanted was to be with her.

  “I wish I was so certain,” Linc said. “Of course they’ll love you. Who wouldn’t? But they won’t be happy that I plan to live here rather than there. That doesn’t fit with their idea of how my life should unfold.”

  “We’re planning a wedding that’s a couple of months away, and your parents don’t even know about me. I don’t feel right about that.”

  He didn’t either. If only he wasn’t so afraid they were going to somehow ruin the best thing to ever happen to him.

  “We’ll drive to Philly this weekend and get it taken care of. They have a right to know you’re getting married, Linc.”

  “I guess.”

  She sat on the floor of the room that would serve as their temporary bedroom while they worked on what would eventually be a two-story dwelling with plenty of bedrooms, painting the trim they’d installed over the weekend. Their summer in Mississippi had prepared them well for the challenges they faced at the barn he’d bought sight unseen that did, in fact, still bear the faint aroma of cow shit.

  Throughout those early months in Vermont, he’d known in the back of his mind that he needed to take steps that would bind him to his new life before he told his parents about the change in direction his life had taken. Their engagement, his job and the purchase o
f the barn had been critical to that plan.

  “I can’t believe they’ve thought you were in England all this time. It’s not right that you haven’t told them where you really are. My parents would lose their shit if I did that.”

  He squatted behind her, moved her ponytail out of the way and nuzzled her neck, making her giggle.

  “Linc! Stop. I’m painting.”

  “Take a break. I want to show you something.”

  “Let me just finish this section.”

  He waited, not so patiently, for her to be done and then helped her up from the floor. “I hope you’re not regretting choosing me, since you’re having to spend every night working over here after working all day.”

  “Are you kidding? I love that we’re doing this ourselves. Imagine how proud of it we’ll be when it’s finished.”

  “If it’s ever finished.” The enormity of the task they’d taken on overwhelmed him at times, but she was completely unfazed.

  “It will be, and people will come from all over to see our amazing home.”

  He took her hand and led her outside, where the air had become crisp and chilly as September had faded into October. The fall colors had dazzled him as he’d been introduced to an entirely new pastime called “leaf peeping.” According to Elmer, peeping season was the store’s busiest time of year—even more so than Christmas—and he was seeing that for himself as the autumn colors headed toward a spectacular peak.

  “Where’re we going?” Molly asked as they trekked across their huge backyard.

  “Follow me, and you shall see.”

  “You’re being very mysterious.”

  Smiling, he led her through the inky darkness to the place he’d set up for them earlier. “I wanted to take you somewhere romantic, somewhere we could be alone, but I kept coming back to our own home.” He pulled out the flashlight he’d stashed in his coat pocket earlier and illuminated the tent he’d pitched.