Leesa thought the free use of this wonderful complex was the best perk ever. The shower amenities were the best, and as hot water poured down on her, her mind began to wander over the topic she’d told her bestie had already been decided.
I’m lucky Rachel didn’t call me out on my lie.
The truth was she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about those two Benedicts. As she’d approached the table last night, her peace offering in hand, she’d overheard Ian Kendall’s words and seen their effect on Jason.
You don’t need to be concerned about Alice anymore, not one little bit. We’re going to be taking very good care of her from now on.
The look of pain on Jason’s face hadn’t lasted long, but she’d seen it—and so had Grandma Kate. God, he’d looked as if he’d been kicked in the gut. She’d bet what he’d heard was a severing of the ties between himself and his sister by his sister’s future husbands.
Maybe he had come into the place and acted like an ass, and maybe—well, no, probably—he’d been a bossy older brother toward his sister. But some people didn’t know how to translate emotion into action, and some people had no idea how their actions and words were sometimes interpreted by others.
Fuck.
Leesa straightened up and shook her shoulder-length hair. She finished up the job of getting clean and then turned off the water. Two things occurred to her, and she wondered how they could possibly be connected.
The first was that she’d spent way too much time in the military, where most of her coworkers had been men. She’d managed, pretty well, cleaning up her spoken language since she’d rejoined the civilian population. Maybe she should work on cleaning up her thought language, too.
The second thing was that all the self-denial or mental gymnastics in the world were not going to change the course of what was to come. It didn’t seem to matter that she’d made a decision, when she’d left the service, that she’d live the rest of her life as a single woman.
“If Grandma Kate is right, then I don’t have to worry about helping or hindering events.” So she wouldn’t. She’d just take each day as it came and wait to see what fate had in store for her.
She’d watched in the past as some of her fellow servicemembers would leave camp, destination deep-cover recon.
Leesa nodded her head once. That was exactly what she’d do, a kind of deep-cover recon. She dried off and got dressed. Her damp towel went into the laundry hamper, and her workout shorts and tee went into her bag and would go into her own washer as soon as she got home.
Carrie Benedict would have opened the restaurant by now. Leesa was due in by eleven. She checked her watch. She had just enough time to do what needed done at home before she began her shift.
She had no time to waste on thoughts of a pair of mouth-watering Benedicts. Neither was there any kind of busy she could think of to keep them from lurking in the back corner of her mind. Leesa nodded, her mind made up.
She’d consider the pair of hotties a pot of thirteen-bean soup, barely simmering but safe to leave on the back burner in the corner of her mind, for the time being.
* * * *
“Wow.”
Jason looked over at Phillip and nodded. “That was my impression, too.” He’d slowed his car when he realized the mansion coming up on the right—no other word would describe the house—was their destination.
“At least now I know why our cousins referred to it as the ‘Big House.’”
“I was pretty sure last night that they weren’t comparing it to a prison,” Jason said.
Phillip chuckled. Then he looked to the left. About a quarter-mile off stood another mansion. This one had definitely been constructed in the antebellum style. “That must be the New House,” he said.
“So named because it was built about a decade or so after the Big House.” Jason recited part of the information that had been thrown their way the night before at Alice’s engagement party. “Near the end of the nineteenth century.”
He pushed thoughts of the occasion aside but not so much because he didn’t want to accept the truth of her situation. The words of one of her fiancés, Ian, still stung in his memory. As if Ian had decreed that Alice was no longer his sister, that he no longer had any right to care about or for her.
Well, you sure as hell didn’t do a very good job, ever, in that regard.
Jason rarely heard his inner voice. He’d long before decided it couldn’t possibly be an agent for good. His father had once referenced his own inner voice as one of reason, but Jason had decided at some point that the voice in his head had little to do with reason.
He would sit and think about that previously accepted tenet, later.
He eased his car into the driveway and maneuvered it so that he parked it beside the row of several other vehicles there.
“J. Coop? You need to let it go, man. I don’t think Ian was telling you that you couldn’t have anything to do with Alice anymore.”
Phillip had begun calling him J. Coop—short for his first two names, Jason Cooper—when they began to spend most of their spare time together as kids. At first, he’d just assumed it was because his own brother was Jason Jonathan. Only lately he’d realized Phil could have called his brother J.J., like the rest of the family did, but he didn’t.
“Look, we’re here, where our family began. Let’s take a few days and simply enjoy the experience, okay? We’ll have lunch with Grandma Kate, and then we’ll join the cousins at that Roadhouse tonight, at the north end
