“You didn’t know that I would do anything for my brother?”
“You haven’t exactly been over the moon to help with this. You know that.”
“My version of helping just looks different from yours,” he told her. “I want them to have the very best of everything. I want to buy whatever it takes to make this wedding what they want it to be.”
She nodded again. “And I don’t think money is the answer to that.”
“I realize that now. But you must admit that money at least opens doors that would otherwise be closed. You like this place better than the Crystal Ballroom, all right. I can see why you feel that way. You might even be right. But isn’t it good to havea choice in the matter? And wouldn’t it be worse if we had no budget and had to find the cheapest place we could get, instead of thinking at all about what they’d like? What if they had to get married in some community center, or in their backyard?”
“Do you think they’d mind?” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t care, Theo. They love each other. They’d get married in a fast-food restaurant if they had to.”
“Of course theywould. But isn’t it nice that they don’t have to? You can’t tell me you don’t get what I’m saying,” he said. “I know there’s something sweet and romantic about the idea that they just want to be together no matter the circumstances, and I’m not saying that isn’t true. But look at all the decisions you’ve made about this wedding. You wanted to serve the perfect meal. Not the most expensive one, I know, but not the cheapest, either. You wanted to pick therightmeal for them, and isn’t it good that we could do that without worrying about where the money was going to come from? You understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” she agreed quietly.
“So, you get why I have to work holidays. Why I have to work as much as I can.”
“It’s not because you love baseball so much?”
“I don’t care about baseball. Max is the one who loves baseball so much, not me. That’s why he writes about it. Me, I own the Stallions because I thought it would be a profitable enterprise, and because it would let me take care of my family. Of Max.”
“That’s why you work as hard as you do?”
She was watching him closely, looking at him as if she had never seen him before. Theo leaned back in his chair and stared upat the ceiling, trying to decide how much he wanted to say. He never spoke to people about this. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even said something to Max about it.
But there was something about sitting here in the gathering dark that made Theo feel as if he could confide in Harper. Maybe it was the fact that he could no longer see her clearly — he was reduced to looking at the planes of her face in the shadows. It made him feel as if he was talking to a theoretical woman instead of a real one. It was almost like he was talking to himself.
“Everything changed after my father left our family,” he said quietly. “My mother was on her own. She did everything she could to provide for us, but we struggled. It had never been that way before. We had always been spoiled, always had more than enough. And I decided that I was never going to let anyone be in a position to do that to me — or to Max — again. I was going to make sure from that moment on that I had enough money to provide for the two of us, no matter what.”
He was aware of the fact that he was speaking too quickly, and he forced himself to sit back and relax, to exhale slowly and be quiet for a moment.
Harper didn’t respond.
But she looked at him in a way she never had before.
“I thought you were just obsessed with your work,” she said quietly after a moment.
“If I am,” he told her, “it’s for a reason.”
“He’s lucky,” she said softly. “He’s very lucky to have a brother like you, Theo.”
The words struck right at the heart of him, and Theo felt himself shiver.
He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had told him that Max was lucky to have him.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had believed it was true.
But sitting here with Harper, he knew one thing with absolute certainty — she wasn’t the kind of woman to butter a person up with sweet words and false compliments. If she said something flattering about someone, she meant it completely.
CHAPTER 14
HARPER
“Ihave to admit, you make a lot more sense now,” Harper told Theo as they walked across the grounds in the light of the rising moon.
He might have glanced over at her. She couldn’t have said for sure — she kept her gaze fixed ahead, feeling as though the peace between them was a fragile soap bubble that might pop at any moment, but she felt the weight of his attention. “I make more sense now?”
“What you told me about your family,” she explained.
