“My guess would be that Chelsea and Mattie will be contacting some friends of theirs and asking them to help in setting a trap of some kind for those scoundrels,” Grandfather Charlie said.
“And you’re going to let them?” Adam’s question, wrapped in outrage, seemed to hang in the air all by itself.
“How are the two of you not bachelors?” Peter Benedict asked. He shook his head.
“We don’t let the womenfolk do anything,” Grandfather Jeremy said. “They’re free to make their own decisions and choices in life. Our job, as their husbands, sons, and grandsons, is to support them in those decisions and choices and protect them without their being any the wiser.”
James looked at Adam. His brother looked totally bewildered, but James was beginning to understand something—and he didn’t feel too good about it at all.
“I think we need even more help than this,” he said. He swallowed hard and looked around the room. “I think we really don’t understand how to be proper husbands. And I, for one, am really worried that we’re going to fuck it up beyond all repair.”
Jeremy and Dalton met each other’s gazes, and looked over at their brothers-in-law. Grandpa Charlie and Grandpa Sam smiled and nodded, and then looked at Warren and Douglas.
“It’s about damn time,” Warren said. “Fortunately for you, your wife seems completely in love with you both. If in future you ever wonder about that little thing, be assured…that fact alone, after the way the two of you’ve behaved, is a damn miracle.”
Jonathan Benedict rubbed his hands together. “Hot damn. We get to tell the eggheads what they’ve done wrong. Someone get the tractor and haul in that list!”
“Ah, cousin-speak,” Nick Kendall said. “It’s a wonderful thing.”
“It is indeed,” Patrick Benedict said. “When it’s not being flung at you.”
Adam’s expression as he met James’s gaze said it all. They were in for a lot of ribbing, and they had no one to blame but themselves.
Chapter Thirteen
Pamela looked up from the book she’d been reading when the front door opened. James and Adam came in, and when they saw her there, looking at them, they both smiled. She thought their smiles were wrapped in some other emotion, but she didn’t feel alarmed by that fact.
She hadn’t expected them this early and had chosen to spend her time reading rather than watching television. It wasn’t even ten, and they’d only been gone a couple of hours. She closed her book and set it aside.
“How are the uncles?” Pam knew, of course, from talking to the other women that sometimes several of the men went over to Peter and William Benedict’s house to visit. She thought it a wonderful idea. She’d met the men, though she didn’t know them very well. But they’d been kind in donating all those berries for the women to make jam, and she knew they were generally the first to offer help to anyone who needed a hand fixing something around the house.
“They’re well,” Adam said. “They have the same sense of humor as the rest of the men in the family, of course. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“It’s not,” James said. “And tonight, rather than it being a case of our being there just to visit them, they—and the rest of the men—were actually there to help us.”
She looked from Adam to James. Both men wore almost identical expressions of sheepishness. “They helped you? In what way?”
Rather than sit beside her, as they usually did, the men moved the decorative plate, doily, and picture book to the edge of the heavy oak coffee table and sat side by side on it, facing her.
Adam picked up her right hand and kissed it. Then James did the same thing with her left.
“We’ve been so damn worried about…well, about something stupid, that we let our worry take over every corner of our brains that weren’t occupied with medicine.” Adam sounded contrite. He exhaled in a huff and shook his head.
Pamela wondered if the moment she’d been waiting for had finally come. Her heart beat just a little faster.
“We have,” James said. “And we’re both very sorry for it. But that foolishness ends tonight.”
“It does. Pamela? I love you, baby. I love you with all my heart.” He leaned forward and gave her a soft kiss on her lips.
“Pamela, I love you, angel. You’re my world, my everything.” He, too, leaned forward and gave her a soft kiss. Both kisses were over way too soon.
She felt the wet of her tears but didn’t bother to wipe them. She didn’t worry, either, that the men would misinterpret them, because she felt the width of her own smile. “I love both of you. I have probably from the moment we met.” She felt her face heat. “Even though I felt more than a little naughty loving you both, I couldn’t seem to help it.”
“We were afraid you wouldn’t, or couldn’t, love us both,” Adam said. “We assumed that, instead of asking you if you did.”
“We almost asked you a few times but always managed to talk ourselves out of it. And we’re not just talking about whether or not you could love us.”
“We never asked you if you wanted to come to Texas, or not. We uprooted your life, made you leave everything familiar, and we never even gave you any choice in the matter. And once you were here with us, we never asked you what you wanted to do—if you wanted to work, or hell, we never even asked you if you wanted to start a family.”
“We avoided any topic we thought might make you realize you didn’t or couldn’t love us, and in so doing, we realize now, we were doing the very things that might bring us to that bad ending we were so afraid of.”
Pamela had always known her men were not quite in tune with their inner social beings. That had never bothered her. She’d seen through their awkwardness to the good
