Thomas heaved a sigh of relief.
“Big dolt,” Tammy whispered and took his hand.
“So,” Drew drawled into the awkward silence, “it seems the only barrier remaining is that Thomas needs a job before he feels useful enough to ask Father for Tammy’s hand in marriage.
“You will always be everything to me, even if you couldn’t douse fires,” Tammy insisted, looking up at Thomas.
“Well I have a suggestion,” Drew said.
Damn if they didn’t all perk up their ears at that. You listened when a woman who could see the future has a suggestion.
“Thomas,” Drew said in mock severity. “Powers can sometimes work two ways. Lan creates destructive sound and beautiful music. Kee can paint the truth or camouflage with a lie. Jane gives darkness, but can mitigate it with light. You can do that too. So I suggest a demonstration.”
She broke away from Michael and walked over to the stove, lit a burner and took a small cup of bacon grease from breakfast and poured it into the open flame.
Shouts erupted from around the room as flames leaped up into the hood of the range and licked the walls. Drew jumped back. Michael lunged for the fire extinguisher that was kept under the sink. Dev started calling water.
“Water won’t put out a grease fire, Dev,” Drew shouted over the cacophony. “Thomas! Do something before the whole place goes up.”
Thomas’s eyes widened. He looked about to burst.
And then the flames collapsed in on themselves and were gone.
“Shit, howdy,” Tris exclaimed into the silence.
Everyone looked shocked, including Thomas.
Drew took a breath so she could recover her nonchalance. “He controls fire both ways.”
“Looks pretty useful in disasters, don’t you think?” Jane asked. She hadn’t moved. Her baby still suckled gently at her breast, under its blanket.
A slow smile spread across Thomas’s face. Tammy looked as if she would burst with pride. “See how valuable you’ll be?” she asked.
Senior cleared his throat. “So, uh, Thomas. Was there something you wanted to ask me?”
Thomas got up off the stool. “Mr. Tremaine, sir, I would like to have your daughter’s hand in marriage.” Senior was about to jump on that, but Thomas held up a hand. “I’m still ignorant of the world.”
“I’ll teach him,” Tammy offered, her gaze intent.
“I bet you will,” Lan smirked.
“I will try to be a good man for her. I will work hard.”
“I know that, son,” Senior said. “The answer is yes. It was always yes, by the way, whether you could snuff out fires or not. Tammy doesn’t need her father’s permission to love someone.”
Tammy burst into tears.
“Are you well?” Thomas asked anxiously.
Tammy couldn’t do more than nod. Thomas turned solemnly and knelt on one knee in front of the bar stool.
“Tammy Tremaine, will you marry me?”
For once in her life, Tammy couldn’t speak. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. Then she composed herself and smiled. “Tammy,” she said, musing. “For you, it isn’t a diminutive.” Then she just nodded.
A shout went up around the room. Thomas got to his feet. Tammy slid off the bar stool and they embraced, along with a deep kiss, to prolonged cheering.
As they came up for air, both abashed at the passion of their kiss, Drew slid back under Michael’s arm. “God’s in his heaven, Morgan’s in hell, and all’s right with the world,” she murmured.
The women of the family all gathered round Tammy for congratulations.
“Finally, we get to be bridesmaids at your wedding,” Kee said, through tears.
“I was really tired of being a bridesmaid,” Tammy laughed. “Thomas, you’ll have to pick one of my brothers for your best man. Warning, the field isn’t attractive. They all suck at speeches, one way or another. Kemble would be pompous. Tris would probably just grunt something. Dev would mutter something about life being like waves. You get the idea.”
Lan took Thomas’s arm and led him to the cluster of guys. “And now that you’re a member of the family, have I told you the story about the time I let ferrets loose in Tris’s garage? He was chasing them all over the place, and then he stumbled into a barrel of oil….”
“Not that one again,” Tris sighed.
“Not now, Lanyon,” Kemble said sternly. “You’ll have time enough to torture him later.”
“Welcome to the family,” Senior said, taking Thomas’s hand. “We’re a slightly better prospect than we were twenty-four hours ago.”
“Stars have aligned,” Greta announced as the two groups swirled together again.
“And we all lived to tell the tale,” Kee added. “I was really afraid of a Romeo and Juliet ending to that one. Star-crossed lovers, literally.”
“I played Juliet once.” Greta rolled her eyes. “It nearly killed me, it was so depressing.”
“My least favorite ending in Shakespeare,” Thomas confessed. “But you rewrote it, all of you.”
“Well, we’ve got a lot more work ahead,” Kemble said seriously. Then he grinned. “Glad to have you along for the ride.”
Thomas turned back to Tammy. Like magnets, they made their way through the crowd that had separated them in congratulations, back to each other.
“It will be a ride,” Tammy said, that mischievous glint in her eye again. “I’ll see to that.”
Lan made sounds of scary, sci-fi music. Dev did the “dum-dum, dum-dum” part from “Jaws.”
“You’ve got us for support, kid,” Michael said. “She can be a tricky one.”
“My baby?” Senior asked in mock surprise.
“No,” Thomas whispered in Tammy’s ear. “You are nobody’s baby. But you are mine.”
About Susan Squires
Susan Squires is a New York Times bestselling author known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has published seventeen books with Dorchester and St. Martin’s Press. Her contemporary Magic Series is independently published with six novels and a novella. Whatever her time period or subject, some element of the paranormal always creeps in to her work. She has been a finalist in the Romance Writers of America Rita Contest, and won numerous regional and national awards, including the Holt Medallion, the Golden Heart, and the Book Buyers’ Best award, as well as garnered several Reviewer’s Choice awards from RT Book Reviews and starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly. Publisher’s Weekly named Body Electric one of the year’s ten most influential mass market books and One with the Shadows, the fifth in her Companion Series, a Best Book of the Year.
Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and two very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help her write by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddddddddd.
Follow Susan on Twitter, like her Facebook page at AuthorSusanSquires or check out her website at www.susansquires.com for breaking news, and special features about the books.
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