His father was on his feet now, moving more slowly than he’d remembered. Years of kneeling on cold, damp ground had made his knees stiff. “Boy, what brings you out here at this hour on a weeknight? Everything okay?” “Give him a minute to settle down,” his mother chided. “Come into the kitchen. I’ve just baked a coffee cake. We’ll have that and I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee.”
“What will the Hanfords do in the morning, if we eat their breakfast?” Paul asked.
“They’ll get oatmeal. It’s better for Mr. Hanford anyway,” she said, giving him a conspiratorial grin.
Within minutes they were settled around the kitchen table as they had been a thousand times in the past. It was where family decisions were always made, amid good food and gentle love.
“Work going okay?” his father asked, probing carefully.
“Fine, Pop. I have more business than I can handle.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m working with someone now.”
“Oh?”
He began, then, to tell them about Gabrielle and Second Chances, about the jobs they’d done, about her talent and enthusiasm.
“She’s more than a business partner, isn’t she?” his mother asked with her incredible perceptiveness. “You’re in love with her.”
He grinned ruefully. “It’s that plain?”
“It is to me. You don’t come home talking about casual friends with that special gleam in your eyes. You haven’t looked that way since…” She broke off uneasily.
“Since Christine. You can say it, Ma.”
“You’re better off without her. Surely you see that, son,” his father said. “She’d have brought you nothing but misery. She was spoiled rotten by her daddy. Maybe that wasn’t her fault, but it turned her into a user. She took from you without paying no mind to your feelings. She deserves that empty, cold marriage she’s found herself in.”
It was not the first time Paul had heard references to Christine’s unhappiness, but he found that at last it meant nothing. He simply felt sorry for her, as he would for anyone trapped in an impossible situation of their own making.
“Are you going to marry this Gabrielle?” his mother asked.
“I don’t think so, Ma. She’s…she’s a lot like Christine.”
His mother gasped softly and frowned. His father looked just as worried. “Now, son, you’re too old to be needing advice from me, but I’ve got to warn you—”
He held up his hand. “It’s okay. You don’t need to say it. I met her parents tonight and I think I finally realized why it wouldn’t work. She’d be caught between us.”
His mother stirred her coffee, her expression thoughtful. “Does that mean you think she’s in love with you?”
“She says she is.”
“But you said…”
“When I said she was like Christine, I didn’t mean she was selfish. I just meant that she comes from the same kind of privileged background. Her father’s Senator Graham Clayton, for God’s sake. He could hand her the world on a platter.”
His parents exchanged another worried glance. “But she’s satisfied with what you can give her?” his mother asked quietly.
“She claims she is, but I can see it’s not enough. She deserves all those things she can have if she goes back to South Carolina. Until tonight I’d been able to ignore the fact that I was denying her things that should rightfully be hers.”
“If you walk out of her life, do you honestly think that’s what she’ll do? Will she go home?”
He stared at his mother and thought of Gabrielle’s determination to make her own way, her absolute refusal to consider going back or even accepting help from home. It was a perspective he hadn’t considered. “No. I don’t suppose she would.”
“Is she smart?”
He grinned at that. “A hell of a lot smarter than I am at times.”
“Then she wouldn’t do something dumb like staying with you, if she thought it was wrong for her, now would she?”
He laughed and suddenly the doubts began to dissipate. “I don’t suppose she would.”
“And she’s smart enough to recognize a decent, caring man?”
He stood up, pulled his mother from her chair and swung her around. “Thanks, Ma.”
He bent down and gave his father a kiss that left a startled but pleased look on his face. “If this works out, I want you to come to dinner with us on Sunday.”
“No ifs. It will work out. You bring her here,” his mother countered. “I’ll make pot roast.”
“No. I want you to sit back and enjoy a meal for a change. Besides, you haven’t seen the apartment since we fixed it up.” He grinned at his father. “And I think Gabrielle would love your ideas for the garden. It seems she aspires to a green thumb. She’s got bulbs scattered all over the place and can’t decide where to plant them. If we don’t get them in the ground soon, I’m liable to cook them for dinner one night by mistake.”
“If you want to make us really happy on Sunday, you’ll announce your engagement. I’m ready for some grandbabies to take care of.”
“I’ll do my best, Ma.”
He drove home with a silly, expectant grin on his face. He and Gabrielle were going to work this out. He would do his best to win over her parents, but he wasn’t marrying them.
Marrying?
Well, hell, wasn’t that what this was all about? He’d been half-crazy in love with the woman from the first minute she’d appeared on his doorstep with her fox coat, stubborn chin and vulnerable eyes. He admired her strength and honesty. He thrilled to her sharp wit. And he cherished her gentleness. The images that flashed through his mind now weren’t of a sophisticated, stylishly dressed woman, but of Gabrielle with paint on the tips of her eyelashes, hands that smelled of turpentine and a smile that grew at the sight of him. Yes, marrying was definitely
