By Proxy (13 page)

So, there you go. She held your hand this morning because she felt sorry for you, not because she has feelings for you. Did you actually think she might be interested in you, Sam? Oh, you did? That’s cute. And by the way, you were wrong.

It hurt him to admit it, but it made perfect sense, actually, that Jenny and Principal Paul would be a couple-in-the-making. She deserved someone good-looking and kind with his act together who lived somewhere she lived, worked where she worked, and loved it as she did. What better match for Jenny than a young principal in the school where she worked?
Certainly not you, Sam.

He shook his head, wishing it didn’t sting so much. He knew he had a connection with Jenny. She made him laugh, he enjoyed being around her, and she was beautiful. But it was much more than that. Her heart was the kindest he had ever known, and she also had strength and spirit. As much as he hadn’t really accepted the possibility of being with Jenny, the possibility he couldn’t be with her leveled him like a blow.

It also meant his feelings for her had grown beyond a connection or impression. Whether he liked it or not, Sam was falling for her.

***

“There you are!” Jenny plopped down on the bench next to Sam. “How long have you been done?”

“A little while. I didn’t want to disturb you and Principal Paul.”

“Disturb us?” She made a face. “We were just collating newsletters.”

“Mmm,” Sam demurred.

“Sam!” She elbowed him lightly and he looked at her face, her lovely face that had him all turned around in such a short amount of time. “Paul’s my boss. He’s just a friend.”

Sam nodded vaguely and looked at the bison with fascination.
Yup. He seems very friendly.

“Seriously. He’s my brother Lars’s best friend. Folks around here call him the ‘Fourth Lindstrom.’ He may as well be, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I
did
come to find you, Jenny. I heard you two talking.”

Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “What did you hear?”

“That there’s nothing between you and me.”

“Well, there…isn’t. Is there?”

Sam turned to face her. “I don’t know.” He shook his head back and forth, then shrugged. “I just know how I feel. I hated the way he took you away from me to go upstairs. I wanted to punch him in the nose, Jenny. I don’t know where that came from.”

She faced him and smiled, cocking her head to the side. “Sam? I don’t want to be with Paul. I told him so.”

Sam’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you missed the part where he confessed he had feelings for me. And I told him I didn’t see him like that.” His words to her from this morning must have popped into her head, because she added, “You had nothing to be jealous about.”

He wanted to deny he’d ever been jealous, but it would have been a lie. Instead, he reached for her hand and took it in his, quickly lacing his fingers through hers before she could pull away. He felt overwhelmed by her again.
How many times in 24 hours had Jenny taken his breath away?
He looked away from her so she wouldn’t see the play of emotion on his face, but pulled their joined hands to his face, closed his eyes and kissed the back of hers, then leaned it against his cheek.

She didn’t pull away or protest or say anything, just allowed his hand to hold hers, while the tension he’d been holding on to for the past hour slowly left his muscles and he relaxed in the wintery sunshine with Jenny beside him.

He finally moved their hands down until they rested where their thighs touched, side by side on the cold bench. The warmth of her leg through her jeans flicked a switch in his body. His pulse sped up and he felt his blood rushing to a place pretty close to where their hands rested.

“Hey,” he asked, trying to distract himself. “Want to get some lunch before we come back here to pick up the booth?”

She glanced at her watch. “It’s only eleven a.m.!”

He dropped her hand and stood up, grinning. “So says the person who dawdled in the principal’s office with a stapler while someone else lifted 20 heavy pieces of plywood across the length of a high school basement.”

“If only you hadn’t teased me,” she taunted in a sing-song voice.

He beamed at her. “Brash words from the woman who cooked—what was it?—
cheap pig
for breakfast this morning?”

She half-cringed, half-smiled up at him from her seat on the bench. “That was pretty bad, eh?”

“You’re pretty cute when you’re mad, Jen.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

Sam offered her his hands, which she took so he could pull her up. He might have stood there holding her hands all day if he hadn’t heard an approaching voice ask, “Since when can’t you stand up by yourself, little sister?”

“Oh, Nils!” Jenny leaned her head around Sam and stuck out her tongue at someone behind them.

Wait! Little sister? Nils was her brother?
Sam looked up to find himself facing three blond giants heading over to them from the nearby parking lot, eyes trained on Sam.

***

It should have surprised Sam to be having lunch alone with three hulking Swedes, but he was becoming accustomed to a different rhythm of life with Jenny around. And it didn’t include a ho-hum, predictable sequence of events.

Turns out Paul had called Lars, Lars had called Erik, and Erik had called Nils. And all three had decided it was time to meet this Sam, kin of Ingrid or not, before he spent too much more time with Jenny.

Jenny invited her brothers to join them for lunch but insisted on the Prairie Dawn so she could run upstairs and grab Casey for a quick walk, leaving Sam alone with “the boys,” a moniker so singularly ridiculous he wondered how she’d gotten away with it for so long. Then again, judging from the protective way the boys felt about Jenny, he imagined she could get away with just about anything.

They could almost have been triplets, they were so alike in height, coloring, looks, everything. All were taller than six feet, matching and surpassing Sam’s 6’1” easily. All had light blond hair and ice-blue eyes like huskies. Their chests were broad and filled out from hard work or active lives, and they all had the rugged coloring of men who spent a good portion of their lives outdoors.

They had minimal distinguishing features. Erik, the youngest and closest to Jenny in age, had a rounder face than his older brothers and was the shortest of the three by a hair. Nils was the oldest and had a cleft in his chin, like Cary Grant or Kirk Douglas. The middle brother, Lars, was the tallest and most well-built of the three. Sam guessed from looking at him that free weights were part of his regular routine; no way he looked like that just from bartending and hiking.

When they all sat down in the small booth, Jenny had taken the seat beside Sam, leaving Erik, Nils and Lars to squish onto the bench across from them, which essentially left Nils facing Sam head-on and his brothers bookending him with their backs, their legs hanging over the sides of the small bench. It was a ludicrous-looking setup, but Sam wasn’t about to complain.

Since Jenny had left with a promise to return—a promise Sam was frankly clinging to—the Lindstrom brothers effectively sat in judgment of Sam across a table of flimsy plywood, with interest in him anchored somewhere between curiosity and whoop-ass.
Protective
actually seemed a hopelessly weak word as he smiled engagingly at them across the table. He tried the smile he used with especially truculent clients, but they weren’t a real smiley bunch in return.

“So, Sam,” Nils began, putting his menu down and his paws flat on the table. “What are you doing here?”

“Didn’t Jenny tell you?” He knew she felt awkward about saying the vows and didn’t want to betray her confidence if she hadn’t shared the details of Ingrid’s request with her family.

“She said he’s giving some kind of legal help to Ingrid,” Lars piped up, speaking to Erik.

“We like Ingrid,” Erik offered.

“Well, there you go. Ingrid and Kristian needed some help with some legal work and asked me and Jenny to lend a hand.”

“Where you from? Up north? Billings? Missoula?” Nils again, naming the two largest cities in Montana.

“Chicago,” Sam answered.

Lars’s brow furrowed much like Jenny’s. “Chicago!”

Now Erik again. “Awful long way to come for
legal work
. Hard to get here from there.”

“That’s true,” Sam agreed. “Two flights to get to Billings and a long drive after that.”

Nils nodded. “Must have been something serious to make a trip like that.”

Sam was getting sick and tired of the cat-and-mouse style questions and comments. He folded his hands in front of him on the table and spoke directly, some steel in his tone. “You know what, guys? It’s this simple. Kristian’s my cousin. He’s like a brother to me. If he asked me to jump out of a plane, I probably wouldn’t ask too many questions before jumping. That’s just how it is. So, yes, when he and his fiancée asked for my help, I flew here from Chicago, and I’m going to handle his business for him because he’s in Afghanistan and he can’t handle it for himself. Any more questions about Kristian?” His brown eyes checked off each set of blue eyes one at a time, ending with Nils.

Nils eyed him back, then nodded in approval, suddenly showing a mouthful of the whitest teeth Sam had ever seen. “You sure you’re not from Montana?”

Sam smiled back and chuckled, grateful they’d settled things. “Spent a good bit of time north of Great Falls growing up.”

“Jenny-girl loved it up there in Great Falls,” Erik stated.

This was new information to Sam and it surprised him. “I knew she had gone to college there…”

“Oh, we had a time of it to get her to come home. Remember, Lars? Couldn’t get her to come back until…”

Lars nodded to his older brother. “Me and Nils didn’t like her so far away up there after she graduated the college, but she loved it. We tried to get her to come home, but she wouldn’t budge. Took that job and everything.”

“What job?” Sam asked, fascinated that small-town Jenny had once set her sights on Great Falls, a small city with more than 50,000 residents.

“At one of the schools there. Private one.” Erik now. “Teaching science to the little kids. Jenny always loved the little ones. She didn’t really want to work with the teenagers.”

“But the little kids didn’t need a science teacher here,” Lars finished.

“Why didn’t it work out? What made her—”

“Come home?” Nils cocked his head to the side as Sam had seen Jenny do many times. “Because our Mamma got sick.”

“Jenny came home to tend to her.”

Sam didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until it came out in a sudden rush of sympathy. “Sh-she came home to take care of your mother? I’m sorry. Jenny hasn’t mentioned her more than once, and I—”

“Mamma got sick three years back and it went quick after. Jenny came home to be with Mamma and then she stayed on even after she passed. To be near Pappa. And us, I think.” Nils finished and folded his hands on the table.

“Had to be hard for her to come back here after liking it so much up there in Great Falls,” Erik said, frowning. “Maybe you should have left things alone like Mamma wanted.”

Nils elbowed his younger brother in the side. “What’s right is right. Jenny would agree with me and Lars if you asked her,
little
brother. She needed to come home.”

Erik pursed his lips but said no more.

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

Lars nodded. “She was a good lady. Jenny-girl’s a lot like her.”

“She got back here and found an apartment and got the job at the high school. She has a good life.”

“Never talked much about Great Falls again.”

They were all silent for a moment. Sam couldn’t stop thinking about Jenny living in Great Falls. She seemed so at home in Gardiner, he just assumed returning home after school had been her first choice. What a revelation that she would have made a different choice if fate hadn’t intervened.

He thought of young Jenny losing her mother at twenty-one and ached for her. Losing her dream and her mother at the same time. Life was incredibly unfair.

A petite redheaded waitress stopped by their table and smiled at all four of them, her warm brown eyes finally resting on Nils. “Jenny comin’ back?”

Erik and Lars suddenly busied themselves with the menus. Nils cleared his throat and nodded at the young woman. “She’ll be back, Maggie.”

Sam glanced up at Maggie and smiled politely. As he started looking back down he caught a glimpse of Nils’s face and did a double take, realizing the telltale scarlet flush was not singular to Jenny. Nils was turning an interesting shade of salmon as he faced Maggie.

Now that Sam was clued in, he realized Maggie had offered a polite smile to all of them. The smile she offered to Nils now was eons away from mere politeness. When she spoke for a second time, Sam noticed her soft Scottish burr. “Then I’ll hold yer food ’til she gets back.”

Nils nodded at her once. She tucked her pencil back behind her ear, turned and walked away.

Sam watched her go out of earshot, then broke into a beaming smile, eyebrows raised in teasing, nodding at Nils intentionally. “Maggie, huh?”

Suddenly Jenny was back and plopped back down next to Sam, winking at Lars. “It’s
always
been Maggie for Nils. Not that he’s done much about it.”

“
Gode Gud
. Shut up, Jen,” Nils snarled, frowning at her and elbowing Lars in the side roughly. Erik was smiling back and forth at his brothers and sister in frank amusement.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nils. Ask her out already. Everyone in town knows you’re sweet on her.” Jenny whispered this across the table and Sam sensed she was enjoying herself immensely.

“When I want to ask someone out, Jen, I’ll good and darn well ask them out. Until then, it’s exactly none of your business,
lillesøster.
”

Jenny burst into barely stifled giggles and was quickly joined by Erik and Lars, whose shuddering shoulders gave away their amusement. Sam gave Nils a sympathetic look, and Nils rolled his eyes at his younger siblings, shaking his head in annoyance.