Meant for You

by Michelle Major

  He’d picked up a couple of fishing poles from the local sporting goods store and taught Cooper how to cast a line. Owen had spent a lot of money learning to fly-fish with a private guide when he’d first moved to Colorado. It gave him a ridiculous amount of pleasure to spend an afternoon fishing with Cooper. Several times he’d caught Jenny staring at him, a wistful look on her face, and knew he wasn’t the only one longing for something more.

  The trick was going to be convincing her to admit it.

  Owen realized the ceremony was over when everyone around him stood. His brother and Kristin walked past arm in arm. For a moment Owen forgot all the bullshit that was between them and simply wished Jack the best with life.

  He glanced down when Jenny took his arm.

  “Are you crying?” he asked as she swiped at her cheeks with her other hand.

  She sniffed. “Your brother is awful, but weddings always get to me.”

  An older woman who Owen recognized as a friend of his mother winked at him on her way out of the pew. “You’re next.”

  He felt Jenny recoil and a corresponding quiver pricked his heart.

  “Mom, let’s go.” Cooper gave them both a little shove. “We’ve got bubbles to blow for Jack and Kristin when they come out of church.”

  Owen placed a hand on her waist, and she shifted away slightly. Shit. One offhand comment from a stranger and it felt like the connection between them had been irreparably severed.

  Their bond was tenuous, in part because there was so much he couldn’t find a way to say to her. A million emotions he didn’t trust himself to share.

  “Okay, buddy,” she said as they moved toward the front of the church with the rest of the wedding guests. As Owen looked around, he was overwhelmed by the past and memories of his childhood. Even though it made him look like the jackass Jack had believed him to be, he couldn’t bring himself to meet the curious gazes of old neighbors and his brother’s childhood friends.

  He tried to protect Jenny from being jostled as they walked. As they came to the door, he saw his parents and his sister standing to one side of the wide stone steps leading up to the chapel. His mother blew him a kiss.

  It was something she’d done since he was a boy and he automatically raised a hand and pretended to catch it in his fist. Once he did, he raised his knuckles to his mouth. His mom’s eyes were gentle, and she gave him a small smile.

  Jenny linked their fingers and they stood behind Cooper as he waited with his bubbles. After a few minutes, Jack and Kristin walked out of the church, hands held and raised over their heads. The guests cheered and bubbles floated through the air, glistening with the promise of two lives joined together. The newlyweds made their way down the stairs and into the waiting car.

  Once they had driven away from the church, Cooper went over to greet Owen’s mom and dad. As the rest of the guests left the church steps, Jenny turned to Owen. “Are you ready?”

  “To head to the reception?”

  She placed a hand on his cheek. “To go home.”

  A dozen thoughts ran through his mind but the one word that spilled out of him was, “Yes.” He picked her up and swung her around. “Hell, yes.”

  Jenny laughed, swiftly kissing the crook of his neck. “I didn’t realize you’d been waiting for permission.”

  “I’m just happy it was your idea,” he told her. “When my mom protests, I’m blaming you.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” she answered. “Scapegoat.”

  He set her down and lifted her knuckles to his lips. “You are the best part of this week.”

  Her eyes were gentle. “That goes both ways.”

  He sent a quick text to his assistant to contact the flight crew he had on standby, then led her over to where his parents stood. Instead of incriminating Jenny, he took the easy excuse and blamed his work.

  Gabby punched him lightly on the arm, but he could tell by the smile she gave Jenny that his sister was happy with the way things had turned out.

  Neither of his parents looked pleased, but they didn’t argue. His mother wrapped her arms tight around his neck. “It was so nice to have you home,” she told him. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  It was a teasing comment, but it hit Owen like a fist to the gut. In many ways, he still felt like a stranger in his own family. But the week had shown him that he was no longer that sad little boy who didn’t belong. He’d made a life in Colorado and had finally come to terms with his past. He could own where he came from, but it didn’t need to dictate who he knew himself to be.

  Hank ruffled Cooper’s hair and promised to continue their baseball lessons during their next visit. He turned to Owen and gave him an awkward—but sweet—hug. “You’re doing good, son,” he said softly. Owen held his father’s gaze, trying to decipher what prompted him to finally offer that small bit of praise. After a moment, he simply nodded. But something that had long been wound tight in Owen’s chest loosened.

  Jenny also hugged both of his parents. He watched as his mom whispered something in Jenny’s ear that elicited a palpable reaction from his tiny redhead. She tried to play it off but he could tell from the way her skin paled so much that her freckles stood out in sharp relief and the way she refused to meet his gaze that she was upset.

  Jenny was silent as they packed up their suitcases at the rental house, and remained out of sorts on the way to the airport. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap and she was biting down so hard on her bottom lip Owen thought she might actually draw blood.

  “What did my mom say to you?”

  She shrugged in response, then looked to the backseat. Owen flicked a glance in the rearview mirror. Cooper had headphones on and his eyes trained to whatever game he was playing on his phone.

  “Something about our wedding plans,” Jenny said, her mouth pulled down at the corners. He reached for her hand but she crossed her arms over her chest. “I hate deceiving them. It was a lot easier to create a pretend relationship before I knew your family. Before I understood . . . how things are. Now I just feel dirty, you know?”

  He knew. He wanted to say he had no regrets in what they’d done, but it wasn’t true.

  His biggest regret remained that Jenny still seemed convinced it needed to end.

  “Where have you been? I thought you’d deserted me.”

  Mona’s gentle reprimand made Jenny’s heart hurt. She hugged her mother, letting the familiar smell of Olay lotion soothe her ravaged nerves.

  “Cooper and I went to a wedding with Owen,” she answered, sitting on the bed next to her mother. “Remember, I told you I’d be gone when I came to visit last weekend?”

  Mona’s eyes narrowed as if she was searching for the memory along the tangled pathways inside her brain.

  “I asked Ty to check in on you this week,” Jenny said.

  At that, Mona perked up. “He and Kendall both came. They’re going to make wonderful parents.”

  “Yes,” Jenny agreed. “It’s exciting. But it isn’t fair that Kendall isn’t puking or getting fat. All she has are bigger boobs and a gorgeous pregnancy glow.”

  Mona nodded. “The glow gave it away. I could tell with you, too,” she said quietly, although it was just the two of them in her room. Some of the residents were watching the Rockies game in the community lounge. With Cooper’s newfound love of baseball, he’d joined them.

  Jenny smiled and tucked a lock of silver hair behind her mom’s ear. “I wasn’t glowing. I was scared to death and trying to hide my morning sickness from you and studying for midterms.”

  “You were beautiful,” her mother replied, mimicking Jenny’s touch. Mona’s fingers were cool, the skin smooth like tissue paper as it grazed Jenny’s ear. “I knew you would be an amazing mother, sweetheart.”

  “I could never live up to you.” Jenny’s voice cracked on the last word. Mona had always been a shining beacon, never wavering in her beliefs. She’d been dealt some tough blows, but always took the high road and stayed true to her steadfa
st moral compass.

  Jenny’s inner life was like a tiny steel ball in a pinball machine, constantly battered from one side to the other. Tumbling and turning so she never got time to truly get her bearings. Every time life slowed down enough for her to feel like she was making headway, something else would launch her spinning again.

  Sometimes she hit a target and scored, like with Cooper. But sometimes she slammed into a bumper and spun down the drain, as she had when she’d betrayed Owen. When she was younger, the constant scrambling had felt like part of who she was. Now she wanted something different . . . something more.

  She wanted peace.

  She felt that peace when she was working in her nursery, which strengthened her resolve to make her business a success. But she’d also had it in Owen’s arms, and she was terrified of losing that.

  “What’s this?” Mona asked. Her voice soothed like being wrapped in a favorite blanket. “My girl isn’t usually one for tears.”

  Jenny sniffed. “What if I mess everything up again? I don’t even know how to figure out if the things I’m doing in my life are right or wrong. I don’t know where to go from here.”

  Mona pulled her close. “What does your heart tell you?”

  “My heart is the last thing I should listen to,” Jenny said with a laugh. “It never fails to steer me wrong.” Her heart had allowed her to believe that Trent would do the right thing and marry her, be a father to their baby. It had warned her not to get too close to Owen. Her heart had convinced her that she could make the garden center a success on her own, that she’d paid enough dues to finally earn her place in the world.

  She definitely didn’t trust her heart.

  “I should have listened to my heart when your father asked me to go with him,” Mona murmured with a sigh.

  Jenny lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder. “He took off on tour with his band,” she said. “He left you behind.”

  Mona’s smile was wistful. “Yes, but he’d asked me to go with him. You were just a baby, and Joseph had promised to settle down. To quit touring and get a regular job that would support our family.” She placed her hands in her lap and rubbed her thumb across the empty ring finger of her left hand. “I gave him an ultimatum—it was either the band or us. I should have known better. Your father was never one to be tied down.”

  “But that means he didn’t desert us,” Jenny murmured, everything she’d known as truth in life suddenly shifting as the foundation of her world split apart.

  “He loved you,” Mona said. “I always told you your father loved you.”

  “I didn’t believe you. If he loved me so much, why didn’t he ever come to visit? How could he just vanish from our lives?”

  Mona bit her lip. “Because I told him if he left that he was never welcome back. I was angry and heartbroken, and then he was gone. By the time you were old enough to ask after your daddy, I’d lost track of him. The truth was, I didn’t want him back in our lives stirring up old feelings and making you want things that weren’t right.”

  “You never mentioned that part.” Jenny couldn’t help the accusation in her tone and saw her mother wince. Emotions vied for position in Jenny’s heart—shock, anger, frustration. She felt everything and nothing at once but worked to remain calm so her mom could speak without becoming too agitated to continue.

  “I told you he loved you,” Mona insisted. “That explained everything you needed to know.” She stood and paced to the edge of the room. “You’ve got to get ready for the dance recital on your own this afternoon. Mrs. Bishop needs me to set the table for her garden party, but I left your ballet slippers and leotard at the end of your bed. I’ll be back down to the carriage house to drive you. We’ll get you there on time, baby girl.”

  “Mom, it’s okay.” Jenny stood, walked to her mother, and enveloped her in a tight hug. When Mona got agitated, her short-term memories faded and she slipped into the past as her reality. Part of the reason Jenny paid so much for the tranquil assisted living community was to keep her mother calm and rooted in the present. “I don’t even care about the stupid recital.”

  The words were an exact copy of what Jenny had said to her mother as a ten-year-old, when they’d been late to the recital because Libby Bishop had kept Mona late. Jenny’s mother would never say a word against Libby or the fabricated demands she placed on her. To Mona, the Bishops meant security and an entry into a level of society that never would have been available to Jenny otherwise.

  Mona hadn’t realized that Jenny never wanted that life. Now she knew it could have been different. The curiosity she’d tamped down for decades sprang to life inside her. Maybe the outcome would have been the same if Mona had left with Joseph, but Jenny would have known the father who hadn’t simply tossed her aside like so much waste and baggage.

  The father who had, in fact, loved her.

  Which made her . . . lovable.

  It had been stupid to believe otherwise, but that was the way her mind had processed being rejected by a parent. Even now, it was difficult to think otherwise. Her mother should have explained the whole truth about Jenny’s father years ago, but there was no point in arguing that now. Mona was not capable of having that conversation.

  “How is Owen?” Mona asked suddenly, and Jenny wondered if her brain actually broadcast thoughts onto her forehead. What other explanation could there be for how easy she was to read?

  “He’s fine.”

  He was perfect and handsome and set her heart racing every time she thought of him. Their good-bye at the airport had been tense, mostly because of how on edge she’d been by the time they touched down. The flight from West Virginia had been excruciating. Jenny had listened to Owen and Cooper discussing baseball stats, and she’d wanted nothing more than to make Owen part of her world forever.

  But the week was a sham, and it had to come to an end. The lessons Jenny had learned about trust and vulnerability and how the combination of those two only led to pain were too deeply etched into her soul. She could not risk her heart. She would not.

  Owen had left things up to her, as if giving her the control was some sort of test. He’d said that she should think about what came next and let him know. If it was indeed a test, she wondered if he expected her to pass or fail.

  “You should bring him to see me,” her mother said. “I liked him. He’s not the kind of man to go chasing his dreams on the stage of every roadside bar this side of the Mississippi.” She shook her head. “All I ever wanted was to take care of you, sweetie.”

  Jenny could hear the faint undertone of disquiet in her mother’s voice and gently steered her toward the door. “Let’s go find Cooper.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mona agreed. “That boy is getting taller every time I see him.”

  It was beyond frustrating how the disease’s progression continued to erode her mother’s brain, but Jenny smiled around the lump that clogged her throat. “Every time,” she agreed and they headed down the hall.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jenny was working in the barn later that night when she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive. She’d dropped off Cooper at a sleepover birthday party after leaving her mother’s and had spent the rest of the evening repotting vegetables and flowers. She’d hoped surrounding herself with the comforting scent of dirt and mulch would pull her mood out of the toilet.

  Gardening had always been her salvation, but now everything she was doing seemed tainted by the knowledge of how her garden center’s future would be built on the money she was taking from Owen.

  The money that would come from selling her engagement ring. Owen had put the choice of whether their relationship would continue in her hands, and it broke her heart. Jenny had always hated that saying about the silk purse and a sow’s ear, but the phrase had played through her mind on endless repeat since that afternoon. She knew which end of the idiom described her.

  A tear dripped off the end of her nose, and she swiped at her cheek with the back of a sleeve
. She refused to cry over a situation she’d created for herself.

  The door to the barn creaked open.

  “That was the shortest reunion dinner on record,” she called over her shoulder.

  Dina had taken her kids out to eat with their father. Apparently John Sullivan had a complete change of heart—and Jenny hoped conscience—once he’d spent a few weeks without his wife and kids. According to Dina, he’d been visiting them at Jenny’s farmhouse every night and pitching in to help with cooking and housework. Something he hadn’t ever done in their years of dating and marriage.

  Jenny still didn’t trust the guy, but she was coming to understand the truth of a situation wasn’t always as clear-cut as she might like.

  “I didn’t realize we’d begun the reunion portion of the evening,” came a deep voice.

  She whirled around, her hand knocking the pot she was planting off the wooden workbench. It fell to the hard ground and smashed into a dozen pieces, dirt flying everywhere.

  “Sorry,” Trent said from the doorway, looking anything but apologetic. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  She bent to clean up the mess, willing her hands to stop shaking. “Do you always go prowling around other people’s property at night?”

  He stepped farther into the space and the light caught on the flash of his teeth. “I wouldn’t have needed to come prowling if you’d returned my calls.”

  “I just got back into town,” she said, although that was only part of the truth. She’d listened to the voice mails as soon as she got home once Dina told her how insistent Trent’s calls had become.

  “Right. Dina said you went back to Dalton’s hometown to meet his parents. How cozy.”

  Jenny cursed Dina a little under her breath. Her houseguest hadn’t thought to mention the fact that she’d actually spoken to Trent when she’d told Jenny about the messages. The memory of how tenacious Trent could be when he wanted something seeped under Jenny’s skin like the first frost, chilling her all the way to her bones.