“So are you saying it’s not true? That you’re not planning to come back?”
“My plans are none of your business.”
“You’re a fool, Jamison Porter.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been here just over two weeks, and you’ve already let that woman get her hooks into you. Worse, you let her get to you through your daughter.”
“Now, Louisa—”
“Don’t!” She raised a silencing hand, and her husband took a step back as if to avoid the blow. “This has to be said.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Steel undercut Jamison’s words as he stepped closer and lowered his voice. “If you’re here for Hannah, that’s fine. But my relationship with Rory is my business. You don’t know her—”
“Oh, and you do? Did you know the hotel is losing money and that one of those massive hotel chains has made an offer to buy it?”
Jamison glanced at his father-in-law, who merely shrugged. “Word gets around.”
“Right. Probably something you heard at the club,” he added sarcastically. “Even if that is true, it doesn’t have anything to do with me and Rory.”
“Oh, really. So you don’t think she’d be interested in a wealthy lawyer who could save her family business?”
“She isn’t like that.”
“This isn’t even the first time she’s latched onto a rich man. Did you know that? She went after her boss’s son at her last job.”
Jamison swore under his breath. “Yes, she told me, Louisa, but who the hell told you? You have no right—”
“I have every right where my granddaughter is concerned!”
“Nana! Papa!” Hannah’s happy voice bubbled over the harsh whispers, and Jamison forced himself to take a deep breath and a step back as she rushed over. “Look, Miss Rory, it’s my nana and papa!”
Rory laughed as Hannah tugged her over toward the older couple. She looked so happy, so beautiful. He wished for a way to warn her Louisa was on the warpath.
Louisa was wrong about Rory. He was sure of it. He trusted Rory. He trusted her with his daughter. He trusted her with his heart. He couldn’t be so wrong about her...couldn’t be so wrong a second time.
“Welcome to Hillcrest House,” Rory said as Greg lifted his granddaughter for a kiss. “Hannah has told me a lot about you.”
Louisa’s greeting was less exuberant, patting Hannah on the back as the little girl leaned over for a hug. “Yes, well, our granddaughter has had quite a bit to say about you, too.”
Picking up on the tension, Rory crossed an arm over her chest as she fingered the pendant she was wearing. “All good, I hope,” she said with a tentative smile.
“Hannah, my girl, why don’t we go take a look at that big ol’ wedding cake?” Greg suggested, leaving a heavy silence behind as he and Hannah walked away.
“It’s funny how small the world can be sometimes,” Louisa stated, but Jamison knew he wouldn’t find anything amusing in what she had to say. “I used to live in LA, and it turns out we have a mutual acquaintance—the Van Meters. You know them, don’t you, Ms. McClaren?”
Rory went pale, the color leaching from her face, as she took a stumbling step backward.
“In fact,” Louisa continued, “the Van Meters hired the company you used to work for to stage their house. Johanna Van Meter has wonderful taste. She was devastated to realize some of her priceless antiques had been stolen.”
Ignoring the uneasy feeling worming its way through his stomach, Jamison demanded, “Louisa, what are you talking about?”
“Ms. McClaren knows. Would you like to tell him...or should I?”
* * *
This was a nightmare. It had to be. Standing in front of Jamison as his mother-in-law blamed her for stealing from the Van Meters.
This couldn’t be happening and yet—
Rory had to swallow a burst of hysterical laughter. God, Louisa Stilton even bore a slight resemblance to Pamela Worthington. And the look of disdain—well, that was identical.
“Rory.” Jamison grabbed her arm, shaking her from the dreamlike paralysis that, no matter how far or how fast she ran, she could never escape. “Tell me this isn’t true.”
He loomed over her, a commanding presence in the dark tuxedo he wore so well, and she was struck again that this was the real Jamison Porter. Not the hard-body handyman with paint splattered on his jeans and T-shirt. Not the tortured soul who’d made love to her by the gazebo. Not the laughing father who’d played hide-and-seek with his daughter. This was Jamison Porter, Esquire—a man of wealth and power and status.
One who suddenly reminded Rory how it felt to be powerless.
“Tell me!”
Shock had wiped all reaction from his expression as Louisa spit out her accusations, but now Rory could see the emotion creeping back in. She could see the questions; she could see the doubt.
Trust me, she silently pleaded. Believe me... Love me.
But he’d never said the words. She wanted forever, and he wanted a weekend. A holiday. A fairy tale...
But this was one without a happy ending. “What do you want me to say, Jamison? That it’s all true? That thousands of dollars’ worth of belongings disappeared from a house I staged? That I was fired when pictures, receipts, transactions from online auctions were found on my computer at work?”
Tears clogged her throat and burned her eyes. “Fine, I’ll tell you. It’s true. It’s all true.”
* * *
“Go ahead and say it,” Rory told her cousin the next morning as she sank into one of the chairs in her office. “I know you want to, and I deserve it.”
Evie had pulled Rory out of the lobby on the verge of a breakdown. She’d overheard one of the porters speaking with a new hotel guest as he wheeled a loaded luggage cart past her. “You’re lucky we had a family check out early. The Bluebell suite is one of our best...”
The Bluebell...
Gone. Jamison was gone. He’d already left. Without giving her a chance to explain. Without giving her a chance to say she loved him before saying goodbye...
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe their relationship was destined to end from the start.
Evie handed her a box of tissues before circling behind the refuge of her desk. “You’re right. You deserve to hear this...so here goes.” She took a deep breath. “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, right.” Rory pulled out one tissue and then another. “Real proud.”
How many times had Evie warned her not to mix business and pleasure? She still hadn’t learned the lesson and totally deserved an I told you so from her know-better cousin.
“I am. It wasn’t that long ago that you and Peter broke up.”
“And here I am—” she waved a tissue in surrender “—four months later, stupidly falling in love again.”
“Bravely falling in love again.” Evie glanced away, swallowed hard and glanced back again. Her professional demeanor dropped away, leaving her looking vulnerable, raw, real... “It’s been two years since my engagement, and I haven’t had the courage to let a man close since.”
“I didn’t think you wanted a relationship,” Rory murmured, embarrassed she’d been so caught up in her own troubles that she hadn’t seen the loneliness her cousin tried so hard to hide.
Evie gave a short laugh. “It’s a lot easier to tell yourself you don’t want what you can’t have.”
“But you could... You’re smart, beautiful, sophisticated. Any man would be lucky to have you in his life.”
But Evie was already shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter whether some guy would or wouldn’t get lucky with me. I can’t bring myself to put any kind of faith into a relationship, and what guy is going to put up with a woman who doesn’t trust him?”
“Maybe one who understands what you’ve gone through? One who’
s willing to earn your trust?”
“No one wants to work that hard.”
“Someone will. The one man who’s worth it will.”
Evie shook her head again. “Never mind all that. This isn’t about me, anyway. It’s about you and the way you never let life get you down. That even after everything that’s happened, you still believe in love and romance and happily-ever-after.”
This time, it was Rory who shook her head as she wiped the tears from her eyes. “I don’t know about that...”
“I do. I know you, and I know you won’t let some corporate lawyer jerk change who you are.”
“He’s not a jerk,” Rory murmured. He was the man she loved. The handyman, the lover, the father, even the lawyer—all were different sides of the man she’d fallen in love with.
And maybe Lindsay had been right. Maybe Rory had touched something inside Jamison, but she hadn’t reached deep enough. She hadn’t been able to grab hold of the trust he’d buried so deeply, and without that...
“See?” Evie announced triumphantly. “You still have faith in people. That’s what makes you so good at your job. I know we don’t always see eye to eye, and that sometimes it seems like we’re too different to agree on much of anything. But the truth is, your strengths are my weaknesses, and vice versa. And that means if we work together, we’re pretty damn unstoppable.”
“I had no idea you felt so strongly about the hotel after...everything.”
“The truth is, I haven’t let myself feel much of anything in a long, long time. But this is where I belong. Where we belong.”
Where we belong... “Now if we could get Chance to come back.”
“That would be the icing on the wedding cake. But for now, it’s just the two of us, and heaven help any guy who gets in our way.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Hannah, you need to sit still.” Jamison struggled to cling to his patience as he tried to figure out how to keep hold of the brush with one hand, the neon-green rubber band with the other and his squirming daughter with his third, nonexistent hand.
“That’s too hard!” The little girl cringed away from the soft-bristled brush as though he held a branding iron to her head. “It hurts!”
“I’m trying not to pull your hair, but you have all these tangles.” How was it that every strand of his daughter’s blond hair seemed to be tied in knots? How was it that his whole freaking life seemed to be tied into one giant knot since he’d left Clearville?
As if reading his thoughts, Hannah argued, “Rory did it better.”
Jamison wished he could convince himself his daughter was simply talking about the uneven, frizzy ponytail springing from the top of her head, but he couldn’t. Rory had made everything better.
“We’ve talked about this, Hannah.” And they had. Incessantly in the week since they’d been home.
Hannah’s frown and saucer-size pout told him what she thought about that, but like it or not, Jamison gave a final tug to tighten the haphazard ponytail before grabbing his briefcase and Hannah’s backpack and ushering her out the door.
“I don’t wanna go to school.”
“You like school,” he reminded her—or maybe he was trying to convince himself—as he belted his daughter into the booster seat in the back of his SUV. “And after school, your grandmother is going to take you for a girls’ day out.”
Jamison didn’t know what that entailed and didn’t want to know. He was grateful to his in-laws, he really was. But by giving in and having them watch Hannah in the afternoons, he was playing into Louisa’s hands. He might have viewed it as a short-term solution, but he didn’t fool himself that she had given up on her long-term plan.
She needs you to fight for her.
Rory’s voice rang in his memory along with the stricken look on her face at the wedding. She had needed him to fight for her...and he’d failed miserably. She hadn’t stolen those items, no matter what the evidence might have said.
And if she’d told him what had happened, if she’d trusted him with what had happened, he would have been prepared for his in-laws’ accusations. Instead he’d been blindsided by the secret Rory had kept. And for a moment, when faced with the realization that maybe he didn’t know her as well as he thought, that maybe—like with Monica—he didn’t know what she was capable of, he’d shut down.
He’d retreated back into the shell that had surrounded him in the final months of his marriage and during the desperate, agonizing weeks when Monica and Hannah were missing.
Somehow, he’d found his way back home, where the familiarity of work waited. Where Hannah had started preschool and where, for a while, Jamison had thought he was going to have to enroll himself after spending the first few sessions seated in a humiliatingly tiny chair beside his daughter, who refused to let him leave.
He’d interviewed almost a dozen nannies, but none of them had been right. None of them had been... Rory. He couldn’t see any of them knowing how to turn a boring breakfast into smiley-face oatmeal. He couldn’t imagine any of them showing the patience Rory had when Hannah asked her to watch her practice walking down the aisle for the twentieth time. He couldn’t picture any of them healing old hurts, breaking through a protective shell, making him feel again...
And that was the real problem. Not that those women couldn’t be the nanny Hannah needed, but because they couldn’t be the woman Jamison needed. The woman he loved.
“I don’t want a girls’ day with Nana! I want Rory!” Hannah’s petulant demand so closely echoed the one in his heart that it was all Jamison could do not to snap at his daughter.
Instead, he finished buckling her in and climbed into the driver’s seat. “We can’t always have what we want,” he muttered under his breath as he jammed the key into the ignition.
Traffic into the city was a tangled mess, with cars locked bumper to bumper on the freeway. Not that that stopped other vehicles from trying to weave through the lanes, cutting off drivers and jamming on their brakes. When a red sports car nearly took off his front bumper while slicing toward one of the exits, Jamison swore and slammed on the horn.
Hannah’s scream nearly sent his heart through his throat. “Hannah, what—”
“Don’t go, Daddy! Don’t go!”
Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw the tears streaming down Hannah’s chubby cheeks. The hysteria in her voice told Jamison this was more than worry about him dropping her off at school.
Taking the same exit as the sports car, he pulled off into the first parking lot he came to. Hannah was still crying when he climbed into the back. Strapped in her booster seat, she reached out, clinging to him as tightly as she could.
“Hannah, honey...” Jamison undid the buckles at her chest and pulled her into his lap. “I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Another horn blasted from the nearby freeway, and Hannah cringed again. Swearing under his breath, Jamison asked, “Did I scare you when I honked the horn? I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
Her chin tucked against her chest, Jamison could barely make out the words his daughter was saying. “What did you say, Hannah? What was that about Mommy?”
“Mommy was mad on the phone. She said we weren’t coming home. Never, ever, ever again.”
His fight with Monica... The accident... Jamison had heard the whole thing. How stupid of him not to realize that, sitting in the back seat, Hannah had also heard her parents’ final, fateful fight. “Oh, Hannah...”
“I tol’ her I wanted to go home. I wanted to see you and Nana and Papa. Mommy said I had to stay with her.” Tears streamed down her face. “But I told her I didn’t want to, so she went to heaven without me.”
“Hannah, sweetie. Mommy—Mommy didn’t want to leave you.” His heart broke at the thought of his little girl thinking her mother had left because of something she’d said, something she’d done. �
�It was an accident.”
The words lifted a weight from his chest, and he sucked in a deep breath. The first he’d taken without the crushing guilt pressing on him since the day he walked into an empty house and realized Hannah and Monica were gone. They’d both made mistakes, but he was lucky. He had the chance to make up for them, while Monica—
“She loved you.” The words Rory had spoken that night in the gazebo, words he hadn’t been willing to embrace, came back to him. “She loved you so much, and she wanted you to be safe so that you could come back to me and Nana and Papa. Because we missed you.”
“Like I miss Mommy?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“I don’t want you to miss me anymore.”
“Neither do I, Hannah.”
Not when he’d already missed so much. “What do you say we play hooky today?”
“I don’t know that game.”
Jamison laughed. “It’s a fun game. One where you skip school and I skip work and we have a daddy-daughter day.”
“Really? Then what do we do?” Hannah’s eyes lit up with hope, and for a moment, Jamison panicked. He didn’t know any more about a father-daughter day than he did about a girls’ day out.
All you have to do is be there for her.
“We can go to the park and have a picnic. We can color in your coloring books and then watch one of your videos.”
“An’ have ice cream and popcorn?”
“Maybe ice cream or popcorn,” he offered, not wanting a repeat of the night at the rodeo. “Does that sound like fun?”
“That sounds like the best! I love you, Daddy.”
Breathing the words against his daughter’s blond curls, he murmured, “I love you, too, Hannah Banana.”
It wouldn’t always be so simple. But maybe it wasn’t always as hard as he made it out to be. Maybe he did have a chance of making things right...and not just with Hannah.
He’d finished belting Hannah into the booster seat when the sound of his phone ringing jarred him from his hopeful thoughts. His boss’s name flashed across the screen, but Jamison didn’t immediately reach into the front seat for the device.
The Best Man Takes a Bride Page 18