“Oh, that’s so lovely.” Branna sighed.
“We started with dinner in the next town. There was no way only the good folk of Howling were seeing me in Geraldine with Nancy seated beside me. I wanted to show them off to as many people as I could.” His laugh was a low rumble. “Then we drove back here, and I headed for the lake. There’s a place past my boy’s driveway that has the best view, so I parked there.”
When he’d said, “my boy,” Branna had heard the pride in those two simple words. She wondered if there’d been a time when her father had said “my girl,” sounding just like that.
“I was so nervous, when we got out of the car, I had to wipe my hands on my pants a few times before I took her hand. Nancy, being the woman she is, just smiled at me and said yes.”
“She said yes before you even asked her?”
He laughed again. “She did, and said that she could see how nervous I was, so she’d thought to make it easy on me.”
“It must have been a special moment.”
“Even thirty years later, I remember it as if it was yesterday.”
“That’s lovely, Patrick. My parents had me young, so I don’t think they had a courtship.”Why had she told him that?This town was loosening her tongue.
“And they loved you so much they stayed together because you made that love they shared stronger, Branna.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes.”
“They certainly seemed happy before my mother died,” Branna said, remembering the times she had watched her parents together. “They were always touching each other and fooling around.”
“There you go, then.”
She heard Patrick open his door again, and suddenly Mikey’s face appeared, looking over the front seat.
“You tired?”
“A bit,” Branna said, lifting a hand to tweak his chin.
“Well, it’s lunch time now, and we can’t start eating, Maureen said, until we find you and Mr. McBride.”
“Well, how lucky are you that you found us both in one place?” Branna sat upright. She felt rested and less confused. Her quiet time with Patrick had calmed her down, and she felt ready to face the people out there again.
“There’d better be chicken pie, Mikey, or I’m getting angry.”
“There is, Mr. McBride, and cake with chocolate frosting.”
“I always say that everything seems a lot brighter when there’s chocolate frosting around,” Patrick McBride said.
Branna followed as Patrick teased Mikey. She let Jake’s father put an arm around her shoulders, just like he did to the boy, and together they went inside, and she thought how lucky Jake was to have this man in his life.
They ate and talked, and Branna listened as the people of Howling made her feel loved. They painted off the rude signs in her lounge, and she laughed at Buster and Newman’s bad jokes, and by the end of the day, her house looked better than it had before it had been trashed.
“Pack some things, Rosebud, and we’ll head off.”
“Why?” She looked at Jake, who was sitting on her porch waving off the last car while she stood doing the same.
“Because, firstly, you’re not staying here alone, and secondly we can’t stay here with the paint fumes.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He rose as she spoke, and Branna had the urge to take a big backward step as he closed the distance between them, but digging her toes into her boots stopped her.
“Here’s the way it’s going to be, sweetheart. I’m staying with you until Cubby figures out what happened and who was responsible, so it would be in your best interest to get your head around that.”
