Surprise widened her pretty eyes. “You will?”
“Yeah, I will.” It was a test. If she balked, if she was ashamed of him because he didn’t have a cultured Southern accent or the sort of pedigree to impress her parents, he’d walk away from her right now. It would hurt, but he’d survived worse.
She sagged in relief. “Oh, Jack. Thank you. I would really love for you to come.”
“You would?” He tried not to let his surprise show. “Why?”
“Because I feel stronger when I’m with you, and you’re a great man to have in my corner. I’d be eternally grateful if you’d come with me.”
Her confidence filled him with a surge of electricity that lit his every nerve ending, and a strange sort of happiness descended. When she looked at him like that, it made him want to go to the ends of the earth for her. “Sure, Alice. I’ll come with you.”
Chapter Nineteen
Alice shouldn’t have agreed to let Jack come with her to the River House. Jack wanted to drive since he didn’t trust her electric vehicle to last the distance, and he was already an hour late picking her up because he was waiting on the delivery of two dozen golf carts. When he finally replied to her barrage of text messages, the easygoing reply was so typically Jack.
Don’t worry. I’ll be at your place with plenty of time to make the two-hour drive.
But not plenty of time to arrive before dinner. Her parents were sticklers for punctuality, and she was already arriving with the stain of public scandal slung around her neck. The least she could do was be on time for dinner. She sat on the front porchof her townhouse, checking her watch every five minutes and dreading the weekend.
She adored Jack’s rollicking-good fun, but her parents would disapprove. Jack drank milk straight from the jug, took pride in how loud he could belch, and wiped his greasy hands on her embroidered tea towels. Last week she ran into him coming out of the fitness club. ‘Hey Alice, come smell my gym bag. It’srank!’ She squealed and hurried toward the lady’s locker room, his laughter echoing after her, and she couldn’t stop laughing either. She accepted him totally, and would never dream of trying to change him, but her parents wouldn’t understand. She finally heard the gas-guzzling growl of his monster truck at three o’clock when he rolled into her parking lot.
Alice tossed her overnight bag in the back seat, then climbed into the passenger seat of the ridiculously jacked-up pickup truck. “Did the golf carts arrive?”
“Finally,” Jack replied. “I wasn’t going to accept delivery until they’d all been tested for noise and vibration. Don’t worry. I can see that dent between your eyes. We’ll get to your parents’ house in plenty of time for dinner.”
He merged on to I-64 heading north to Ashborough County. “Tell me more about your parents,” he said once they were safely on the highway.
She sighed, dreading the coming confrontation with her parents. “My dad is pretty tough, and my mother is worse. I know parents are supposed to set high standards for their kids, but they’ve always leaned into that pretty hard.”
“Give me an example,” Jack said, his eyes still on the road.
Reliving her long and tortuous history of letting her hyper-competitive parents down was among her least favorite topics, so she reached for an example of how they treated her older brother.
“When he was twenty-two, Adam qualified for the Summer Olympics in the Pentathlon. It’s the contest where you compete in swimming, fencing, horseback riding, pistol shooting, and running. Adam won the silver medal, and my parents were disappointed. He messed up the fencing with too many penalties. It’s been sixteen years, and theystillgive Adam a hard time for losing out on the gold medal because of those penalties. That’s what I mean about my parents being tough. They raised us all to excel in athletics, although it didn’t take with me. Obviously.”
She glanced at the map on her phone and sighed. According to the app, they’d arrive at the River House five minutes ahead of the six o’clock dinner. Way too tight to feel comfortable.
“Do you read the newspaper?” she asked Jack.
“Nope. Just the sports page sometimes.”
Her parents had theWashington Post, theNew York Times, and theWall Street Journaldelivered daily. Growing up, they’d drill their children about world events at the dinner table, and that continued to this day.
“Be prepared for a quiz about current events,” she said. “It’s another of their quirks. Dinner wasn’t a chance to relax and celebrate the day when I was a kid, it was just another opportunity for instruction. My parents wanted us to learn about government and international law, so they held mock trials for offenses. Crimes could be anything from who ate the last donut to what should happen if one of us refused a direct order . . . like when my brother Quentin couldn’t bring himself to help gut and clean the turkey my dad shot for Thanksgiving dinner. The trials were supposed to educate us in legal principles. Poor Quentin! He’s always been such an animal lover, but my mother charged him with dereliction of duty, so we had to have a mock trial. I was appointed defense attorney, and Adam was the prosecution.”
Jack hid a smile as he stared at the road ahead of him. “Who won?”
“I was only fourteen and my mom was judge and jury. Of course, Adam won. Quentin was sentenced to reading a book about the Bataan Death March to teach him the value of a hearty meal.”
She could have added more, but the muscles in Jack’s forearms were oddly attractive. They flexed beneath his tanned skin each time he adjusted the steering. His hands casually held the wheel. Those hands could swing a golf club with perfect finesse or caress her until she was breathless. She’d never been trapped in such a small space with Jack like this, and it stirred something inside.
Soon they were in the rural tidewater area and speeding past marshlands filled with tall, whispering grasses. Great blue herons stalked through the waters with their elegant gait, searching for fish. Despite the warmth, she and Jack both liked to drive with the windows down, and the earthy scent of sun-warmed grass was soothing.
It took almost two hours to reach Ashborough County and the two-lane route leading toward the River House. The narrow lane wound through towering white oaks and red maples, their canopies intertwining to create a lush, green-tinted world. Glimpses of the Potomac occasionally peeped through the forest wherever the understory was sparse.
They arrived at the lengthy driveway leading to the River House with eight minutes to spare. The drive had been so delightful she’d forgotten to provide Jack with last-minute instructions, and prayed he wouldn’t do something like eat pudding with his fingers or display his talent for singing through a burp.
“Did you bring a pack of chewing gum?”
