Love Under Two Kendalls Read online

  There was a certain kind of comfort in walking into a place and knowing everyone there. Adam never took for granted how fortunate he was to live in a community where he felt completely at home.

  He hid his disappointment when a first, quick scan of the dining room failed to find Ginny. Often, when they came in, she was in the kitchen, either putting in or picking up orders.

  “She must be in back,” Jake said.

  The door to the kitchen opened, and Kelsey emerged. Wearing a clean white apron, her hair pulled back into a knot at the back of her head, she looked a lot different from the grieving woman who’d first moved to Lusty over a year before.

  She headed straight for them, and she looked as if she was loaded for bear.

  “Ginny is fine. She’s just not here, in Lusty.”

  Beside him, Jake stiffened. “What do you mean, she’s not here? Where is she?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I can only tell you to go to the New House and speak with your mother.”

  “What the hell…” Jake cut off his rant before it began.

  Likely, Adam thought, in response to the expression that came into Kelsey’s eyes just then.

  She stepped forward and poked Jake in the chest with her finger.

  “This is a family restaurant, buster, so watch the language. And don’t shoot the messenger. I’ve been asked to tell you that your mom has Irish stew waiting for you at home. Michelle has already called her to let her know you’re on your way. Now go.”

  Adam had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Not so many weeks ago, the women of his family had gotten together and taken action, action that could very well have resulted in one or more of them getting killed.

  “Fuck,” Jake said as soon as they stepped out onto the street. “If this is an echo of the confrontation at the clinic…”

  “Yeah.” Adam didn’t think any more words were needed and neither, apparently, did Jake. He just moved quickly around the front of the cruiser, sliding in to the passenger side and snapping on his seat belt.

  Adam didn’t even bother with his seat belt. Key in the ignition, he fired the engine and peeled away from the curb, heading for the New House.

  First they’d listen. Then they’d decide what needed to be done next.

  Chapter 4

  Dusk had fallen, and the stars began to wink on as the sky darkened into nighttime. Ginny and Benny had been treated to a fine meal by Maggie—chicken in a wine sauce that rivaled the tastiness of some of Kelsey’s creations.

  Since Benny had reached the end of his energy, they’d come back to the suite Ginny and Benny were using, and while she’d put her son to bed, Maggie had brewed a pot of coffee for them.

  Now, sitting out on the balcony with the door behind her open so she could hear her son if he needed her, Ginny tried to gather her thoughts to answer all the questions she figured her aunt had to have stored up by now. In the background, the sound of waves washing up on shore provided a steady, almost mesmerizing pulse.

  Earlier, she’d felt her breath catch when Maggie had brought her around to the front of this suite, and she’d seen the ocean stretched out before her for the first time. From the vantage point of three floors up, it truly seemed as if that blue-gray expanse went on forever. The sky had been slightly overcast, and Ginny had been fascinated by the fact that looking as far as she could toward the horizon, she couldn’t tell where sky ended and ocean began.

  Ginny inhaled deeply. The air here was so different from what she was used to—so different from home.

  Just thinking of home brought Adam and Jake to mind. Her stomach clutched, and a tiny ache radiated from the area of her heart. The memory of their lips on hers came back in brilliant Technicolor. The flavor of them as they’d kissed her, and the exciting zing of arousal that had teased her feminine parts, made her yearn for them. She felt as if she hadn’t seen them in a long, long time.

  Nonsense, I’ve barely been gone a full day, and I saw them both last night.

  Ginny sighed. That was true, but she hadn’t said good-bye to them. Neither had she told them where she was going to be. She felt guilty about that, even as she acknowledged to herself she’d purposefully not contacted either one of them about her plans.

  She didn’t know if she’d been testing herself, or them. She suspected the former, rather than the latter.

  “That was a very heavy-sounding sigh.”

  Ginny looked over at Maggie. “It was.”

  “Did it have anything to do with either the Adam or the Jake that Benny was telling me about at dinner?”

  Ginny blushed, and counted it lucky that in the faint light, her blush could remain her secret. If she’d ever had any doubts about what her son thought of the brothers Kendall, those doubts had been forever banished at dinner tonight.

  To hear Benny talk, the men were a pair of living, breathing, superheroes. The thought crossed her mind then that, back when she’d believed Deke’s interest in Benny to be the beginning of a good thing, her son hadn’t cared for the man at all.

  “Actually, yes.” Ginny cleared her throat slightly. “And not with either one or the other of them. It has to do with both of them.”

  “Having trouble deciding between them?”

  Ginny swallowed. “Um, no. It’s not a choice between them. It really is both of them.”

  “Both of them? That sounds positively…interesting.” Maggie paused for a moment, then chuckled. “Lucky you.”

  Ginny’s laugh jumped out, a surprised reaction to the other woman’s comment. Then she sobered. Her aunt’s words echoed in her mind.

  “I have been lucky, you know? I mean, what happened before I ended up in Lusty, Texas? That seemed like really bad luck while it was happening to me. Only now I’m beginning to see that I had to go through all of that to get to where I needed to be.”

  “That’s often the way life is, I’ve found,” Maggie said. “And the place you need to be is this Lusty, Texas?”

  “Yes. I think…well, not just that I needed to be there, but that I was meant to be there.”

  “Do I assume the name of the town has something to do with why you’re involved with two men?”

  Ginny heard the laugh in Maggie’s voice, and the interest. What she didn’t hear was any censure.

  “I could tell you a story, if you like. It’s a story I’ve only learned recently, of some folks who lived more than a hundred years ago, and the founding of a town called Lusty.”

  “I’m in the mood for a good story,” Maggie said.

  Ginny had been through the museum a number of times since she’d arrived in Lusty. And she’d sat and listened to Grandma Kate and Bernice Benedict and Samantha Kendall tell different tales that had all become a part of the folklore of the small Texas town Ginny Rose had come to love.

  “It all began back in the 1880s, when a widowed Chicago businessman who had a new wife with a taste for the finer things sold his only daughter into marriage. That was the way of things back then, of course, but in this instance, the bridegroom was a man whose heart was as black as sin…” The words came easily, and while Ginny would never have thought she could play the role of storyteller, she found that she enjoyed sharing the knowledge she’d gained in the last six months.

  The story had become more to her than just words, because the people whose forebears she spoke of were people who’d come to mean the world to her. She’d seen the resemblance between Sarah Benedict and Susan Benedict Evans-Magee. She’d listened as Grandma Kate spoke of meeting Sarah Benedict and Amanda Jessop-Kendall for the first time. This was more than a story. This was history, and Ginny realized she felt as proud in the telling as she would have if the ancestors she spoke of had been her own.

  The moon painted the ocean with ribbons of silver, ribbons that danced in the current to the music of the deep. Out near the very edge of the horizon, Ginny saw lights, dozens of lights clustered together, moving ever so slowly from north to south across her field of vision. She realized
she was looking at a ship, sailing down the eastern seaboard, likely headed to someplace tropical and exotic.

  As she told of the history of the place she’d come to think of as home, it felt as if the panic that had gripped her since the night before began to finally ease. Perhaps coming here, taking herself and her son away from not only the threat, but from what they loved, hadn’t been what someone else in her position might have done.

  But she had acted. She hadn’t curled into a ball and whimpered. She hadn’t dissolved into tears. She’d taken control of the fear and done something about it.

  The words came easier, and Ginny slid into her own story, telling Maggie how she’d met Deke Walters, how he’d seemed so nice, so respectable. She told of not really being in love, but more in love with the idea of giving her son a father, of making a real family for Benny.

  And she told her how she’d gradually come to understand that it had all been a lie.

  Ginny didn’t spare herself when she described the circumstances that had brought her to Lusty for the first time. Here, she did stumble over the words when she talked about leaving her precious son. No, she didn’t spare herself, but she wanted Maggie to understand the sense of sheer desperation that had filled her at that point in her life. In that moment, on that day, she’d truly believed what she did was the only way she could keep her baby safe from a man who seemed determined to bring him harm. She’d come to believe that Deke hated Benny. Still hated him, likely.

  She stopped talking and sat for a long moment, feeling raw. Maggie handed her couple of tissues, and it wasn’t until she looked down at them in her hand that she realized she was crying.

  Ginny took the proffered tissues and wiped her eyes.

  “I hope that bastard paid for what he did to you.”

  It was the first time she’d heard sharp emotion in Maggie’s voice. Ginny looked over at her. “Adam—Sheriff Adam Kendall—saw to it Deke was charged. And the reason I’m here is that late yesterday, the man escaped custody. When he was arrested, he threatened to kill us—me and Benny. So when Adam told me he’d escaped…”

  “You got the hell out of Dodge.”

  Maggie had nodded decisively when she’d said that, and Ginny felt her tension ease even more. “I did, yes. Maybe not the best solution to the situation.”

  “I think you need to learn to be kinder to yourself, Ginny Rose. Now that you’re here, I’ll bet that everything that had frozen up inside of you yesterday when you heard of that bastard’s escape has started thawing out.”

  Ginny tilted her head to one side. “Yes, that’s exactly how I’m feeling right now.”

  “Of course you are, because you’re away from the danger zone. Now you can breathe, and think, and plan what you’re going to do next.”

  Put like that, it sounded like what she’d done was…normal.

  “I imagine it was difficult for those men of yours to let you go away without them.” Maggie took a drink from her coffee cup. “Everything I’ve ever heard or read about Texans makes me think they must have kicked up quite a fuss.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I imagine they’re doing that very thing right about now.”

  Maggie choked a little on her coffee as her laughter erupted. “You left and didn’t tell them? Oh my, that was brave of you. How did you manage such a feat?”

  “Well,”—Ginny smiled at Maggie because she really was feeling much more in control of things—“I had a little help from my friends.”

  * * * *

  “Damn it, Mother, we don’t want to sit down and eat.” Adam had taken his hat off when they’d entered the house. Now he hit it against his leg, a sign of frustration. “Stop hedging! We need to know where they are, and we need to know now.”

  “I’m not going to say a single word about Ginny Rose until the two of you sit down. Dinner’s ready.”

  “Mother…” Jake felt duty-bound to take up where his brother had just left off. He flashed a look at Adam meant to convey that they were in this together.

  Jake had rarely seen Adam this upset. He’d actually raised his voice to their mom. Jake figured it must have been a first. Mom hadn’t seemed surprised or particularly upset that he had, either. Another first.

  “Jake. Adam. Sit down. Have dinner before you go flying off to New Jersey.”

  “They’re in New Jersey?”

  Adam’s calm had returned, likely because their mom had astonished him with that little tidbit of information. His question had sounded quite conversational, more his normal tone.

  Conversely, Jake felt his own temper spike through the roof. “What the hell are they doing in New Jersey?”

  He didn’t get an answer. What he got was Samantha Kincaid Kendall in all her Irish-temper glory, arms folded across her chest, green eyes shooting sparks. For a moment it even seemed to him as if her red hair had caught fire.

  A wise man would backpedal fast, and Jake was no fool.

  “I beg your pardon. I apologize for my outburst. Why don’t Adam and I just sit down here and have dinner? Your Irish stew smells wonderful, as always.” Jake ensured he backed up those words with the best smile in his repertoire.

  A snicker from the vicinity of the dining room table assured him that at least he and his brother’s turmoil was providing a bit of entertainment for the rest of the family.

  “Yes, why don’t you?” His mother continued to give them both that look.

  Jake took his usual place at the table and caught the laughter in Peter Alvarez’s eyes. It appeared the entire family had assembled for dinner tonight—and it wasn’t even a Sunday.

  Adam sat beside him, and just the way his brother’s gaze swept the assembled family, Jake understood he was thinking the exact same thing. Everyone seemed to know what was going on with their woman except them.

  Morgan, Henry, and Tamara along with Jordan, Peter, and Tracy were all in attendance. Normally, there was nothing Jake liked better than to sit down at the table with his entire family. The only problem was, his entire family wasn’t in attendance tonight.

  Ginny and Benny aren’t here, and they’re the heart of my family.

  “Thank you, that’s much better. Charles, if you’ll start passing the salad around, and, Taylor, if you’ll pass the cornbread, please. Preston, will you begin to ladle the stew? Thank you.”

  Jake shot a quick glance at Adam. Whenever their mother had reached the end of her rope, she would give instructions to the dads, who said not a word but did just exactly what she asked of them. It usually only took a few moments after that for her calm—and her reason—to return.

  “Tamara, I understand you’ve found your wedding dress?”

  “I did! Wait until you see it, it’s gorgeous. There’s this new designer just getting started that Julia knows…”

  Samantha Kendall sent a beaming smile to Morgan and Henry’s woman and seemingly turned all her attention to the subject of lace, silk, and where to find the best shoes to match.

  Jake fought his impatience. If Ginny was in New Jersey, then they’d have to fly there themselves. Normally, family members wanting to utilize one of the families’ two corporate jets had to clear it first with the Town Trust. Permission was always granted provided the supplicant had good cause and no one else had booked them.

  Since Jake managed the business of the Town Trust, he knew one of the Lear jets was in the hangar here in Lusty, and no one had asked to use it. No question their cause was just. Henry would fly them, as that was one of his jobs. They just needed to find out where in New Jersey Ginny had gone, and then they had to get the jet ready to fly. That would take less time than if they called one of the major airlines at this very instant and tried to book a flight.

  Mother, as usual, was right. There really was no reason for them not to have dinner first. And there was something else happening here, as well…

  “She’s testing us.” Adam’s words, just above a whisper, assured Jake he wasn’t alone in his assessment.

  “That usually means w
e fucked up and she’s giving us time to figure out where we went wrong so we can make it right,” Jake said.

  He met Adam’s gaze. Until that moment he hadn’t considered that they’d taken a misstep with their woman, and he knew Adam felt the same way.

  Jake sat back, any interest in eating now gone. In his mind he backtracked over the last few weeks with Ginny, the times they’d popped in to see her at the restaurant, the time they’d brought pizza and played monopoly, the four of them behaving just like a real family.

  He replayed that fabulous kiss out at the hangar, when Julia had been kidnapped and everyone had been on tenterhooks, waiting for word from those two Navy SEALs who’d set off to rescue her.

  And then there was last night, when they’d come to her at the party to tell her about Walters. He relived that scene, how they’d told Ginny that she didn’t have to worry. They’d told her they would do all they could to keep her safe, reiterating over and over that she could trust them. And she did trust them. He’d seen the truth of it in her eyes. And then they’d told her…

  “Well, hell.” Jake exhaled and shook his head in disgust. Between him and Adam, they’d told Ginny a hell of a lot last night. But they hadn’t asked, and they hadn’t listened.

  At the same instant Jake sat back in his chair, Adam tossed his napkin down in what Jake knew was a show of total disgust with himself.

  “Could we have been any more stupid?” Adam asked.

  “Is this a question open to all of us? Because, frankly—”

  “Morgan.”

  Jake looked from his mother to his eldest brother.

  “Sorry, Mother, I couldn’t resist.” Morgan’s grin was unrepentant.

  “Just remember the law of sowing and reaping,” Samantha advised.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Morgan’s words may have been words of contrition, but his tone sure as hell was not.