Forever His Bride (9 page)

“Daddy said we can’t help paint,” Buzz whined as he tried to stretch his arms around the ancient oak tree.

“Cuz we’ll make a mess,” TJ added.

The house was already a mess, and if Josh intended to use only the white paint, several cans of which she’d noticed in the back of his SUV as she’d run after the boys, the twins wouldn’t be able to do much damage. Not with that boring sterile color. Recognizing that they weren’t ready to start working yet, she dropped onto the lawn, which was more weeds than grass.

“I don’t wanna move here,” Buzz whined again as he ran back to her and dropped onto her lap. “I wanna live with you.”

TJ abandoned his quest for the branch, ran back and dropped down beside his brother. He elbowed Buzz aside for more room. “Me, too. I wanna stay with you and Mama and Pop.”

“Your daddy bought this house, so that you can live
here.
All of you.” And Molly. He’d bought this house—
her
house—for Molly. For her best friend. If Molly came back, he might resume that future with her for whatever his reason, since he claimed love hadn’t been a factor.

“If
we
have to live here,” Buzz lamented, “then we want you to live here, too.”

“Live with us!” TJ added.

“Then you could tuck us in every night,” Buzz murmured.

Brenna wrapped her arms around both boys and sprayed raspberries against their cheeks. “You sure you want me slobbering all over you?”

They squirmed and giggled, but neither tried to break free of her. Brenna was the one who wanted to run—screaming—from all the Towers males, big and little.

“Y
OU
BOUGHT
THIS PLACE
?” Nick asked as he stepped over the threshold over which Josh had carried Brenna the day before. “You
really
bought this place?”

Josh nodded and smiled at his friend’s shocked reaction. Maybe he should have left Nick in the garage—he’d already cleaned up most of it with Nick’s grudging help. “It’s a great house.”

“It’s a dump,” Nick insisted as he explored the H-shaped layout. The kitchen, family room, mud room and half bath were behind the two-stall garage, a formal living and dining area was in the middle, and a wing of four bedrooms and three baths was on the far side.

Josh grinned as he followed his friend through each room. “I love it.”

Nick turned and looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. And Josh probably had. But at least he had something physical to do, some way of burning off the sexual energy that was humming through his body.

“You’re crazy. You thought your bride would like this place?” he asked. “Really?”

Brenna Kelly did. “I don’t know…” Josh hadn’t really thought about Molly when he’d bought the house. He’d only thought of what a great house and yard this would be for the boys and the other kids he wanted to have some day.

“Have you heard from her?” Nick asked.

“Who?”

“Your runaway bride—has she called?” Nick asked. “Stopped by? Anything?”

Josh shook his head. “Nope.”

“What about
her?
” he asked, gesturing toward where Brenna played in the backyard with the boys.

Josh’s chest muscles tightened. He’d thought Brenna had been going in to the office, just for the morning, before she came by the house to help. And now she, instead of Mama, had his children. She looked so damn natural with them, as if they were her sons, too.

Clearing his throat, he asked, “What about Brenna?”

“Did
she
hear from her friend?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Did you ask?” Nick persisted.

Josh shook his head.

“Do you care?”

“What?”

“Do you care what happened to your runaway bride?” Nick asked, staring through the French doors to the backyard, as Josh did. “Or do you care more about
her?
”

Josh pulled his gaze from Brenna. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nick nodded. “Sure you do.
You
just don’t want to talk about it—about
her
—yet. We’ve known each other too long, man.”

“Yeah, we have.” Josh knocked his shoulder against Nick’s. “So tell me, did Colleen show up for your little picnic?”

Color flushed Nick’s face. “Colleen?”

“That’s the bridesmaid
you’re
working on, right? To find out where Molly is?” he persisted.

“It’s not like that,” Nick said defensively. “I’m not using Colleen. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

Josh nodded. “No, you’re not using her. You’re falling for her.” He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself—the excitement and affection in Nick’s eyes at just the mention of Colleen McClintock’s name.

Nick snorted. “You’re the one who falls for women five minutes after you meet them. Not me,” he vehemently insisted.

Was that what Josh was doing with Brenna? Falling for her? He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Okay, enough stalling. Let’s get back to work so we can finish cleaning this place and start painting.”

Nick didn’t argue the subject change, but whistled at Josh’s ambition. “Why are you in such a hurry to get this dump livable? I thought you had a place to stay.”

Josh cleared his throat. If he stayed much longer with Brenna Kelly, he’d wind up as crazy as his best friend feared he would become. “Yeah, but this is my house,” he said, “and I really want to make it a home for the boys.”

Brenna blinked to clear the mist from Josh’s image. God, the man couldn’t be any more perfect. The perfect father, the perfect friend. To resist the attraction, she had to find some fault with him. She had to be tough. So she said, “Then don’t mess it up.”

The two men whirled toward her, obviously unaware that she’d overheard the end of their conversation. “Mess it up?” Josh asked.

“You may have outbid me, but I’ll find a way to take the house away from you…” she threatened “…if you use that boring paint you bought.”

“What’s wrong with the paint?” Josh asked. “I bought it from Mr. Carpenter’s hardware store like Pop told me to.”

“That was smart,” she said. “If you want to fit in in Cloverville, you have to support the local businesses. The ones that have always been part of Cloverville.”

“We haven’t always been part of Cloverville,” Nick pointed out, “so we’re going to be lucky to get any business at the new office.”

“If you try to fit in, they’ll eventually trust you,” Brenna assured him.

“Eventually,” Nick muttered. “Great, just great.”

“We’ve been supporting the local bakery,” Josh said, pointing toward the box of doughnuts. “Of course, Pop won’t let me pay for anything…”

Brenna sighed. “That’s why I had to take over the bakery.” To secure her parents’ retirement, although she sometimes doubted they ever intended to retire. Maybe once she gave them those grandkids they kept hinting about…

Nick bit into the doughnut he pulled from the box. “Mmm. You’re doing a great job.” Then he saluted her with a bear claw, a sweet roll covered with nuts and caramel icing. “Now, what about the paint?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with the paint?” Josh asked.

“It’s white,” Brenna said, disgusted by the doctors’ lack of imagination. But then even though Josh was the perfect man, he was still a man.

Josh nodded. “Yeah?” Both men appeared clueless.

“It’s all white,” she said.

“What’s wrong with that?” Josh asked. “Nick, tell her there’s nothing wrong with white.”

“Of course you two would be fine with that. You’re doctors.” She smiled, as if unimpressed, even though she had much respect for their chosen profession.

“So?” Josh prodded her.

“You like cold and sterile,” she explained.

“It’s not cold and sterile.”

“I’ll let you handle this argument,” Nick said, patting his friend’s shoulder in silent support. “Let me see if the boys want something to eat.”

“Don’t get them all hyped up on sugar,” Josh cautioned.

But his best friend stepped through the French doors, brandishing the box as if he hadn’t heard a word Josh had said. “Damn…”

“They’ll wear off the sugar while they’re helping clean,” she promised.

“Clean? You
have
met my sons, right?” he checked. “They don’t pick up their toys, their clothes, their gum wrappers…Nothing.”

“Well, then it’s past time they learned.”

“Buzz and TJ?” He widened his eyes. “They’ve been suspended from
preschool
for not following the rules.”

Somehow she suspected he wasn’t kidding. Yet she couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, but you need to have them do some work on the house, too, so that they’ll feel like they’re helping you make this their home.”

Josh narrowed his eyes. “So you’re giving me parenting advice?”

Heat rose to her face. “I know I have no right…” But having no right hadn’t stopped her from kissing him.

“Wow,” he mused, his eyes twinkling again, “I’ve flustered Brenna Kelly.”

It wasn’t the first time. “What…?”

“I thought you were totally in charge at all times.”

“I think we both know better than that,” she said, closing her eyes on a memory of the two of them.

“We need to talk about
that,
” Josh said.

“No, we don’t,” she insisted. “We need to talk about the paint.”

“So you’re a decorator as well as a parenting expert?” he said, his eyes losing some of their sparkle.

“I took some extra classes at college,” she admitted.

“Interior design?”

One course in interior design. And another in child psychology. She’d always intended to get married and have kids, but she’d wanted the bakery to be a success first. She hadn’t realized that if she waited too long someone else would take the house she wanted and her best friend would get the guy…

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I suppose you have paint colors all picked out for
my
house?”

“Of course,” she said, as if he should have known. “I even bought the paint.”

His eyes widened. “You bought the paint? Kind of getting ahead of yourself, weren’t you?”

“This house had been for sale for a while before I started looking. I had no idea someone else had put in a bid just before me.”

“So what colors were you planning to paint
my
house?” he asked.

She walked around the living room, envisioning her colors on the dingy walls. “In the formal living room, and dining room a deep chocolate. Sage, in the kitchen and family room.”

“Sage?”

“You know—a grayish-green.”

He nodded. “I know what color it is, but why would you put that in the kitchen?”

“It’s sage.” During that decorating class, she’d given a lot of thought to the colors she’d paint her own house one day.

“With that carpet?”

“There’s ceramic tile under that carpet,” she reminded him. “I pulled up a corner of it.” She gestured toward the worn and stained yellow broadloom on the living room floor. “And hardwood in here.”

“Yeah, I know.” He glanced around as if considering her choices. Then he shook his head. “White will brighten everything up and make it clean—like a fresh start.”

A fresh start.
Now she understood his move to Cloverville. He had wanted a fresh start for him and Molly.

Ignoring the pang of jealousy that she had no right to feel she continued her paint argument, even though she had no more right to the house than the man. “Let some color into your life, Josh. Go for it!”

He stepped closer. “And here I thought you wanted me to back off.”

Brenna drew a shaky breath, but she refused to back away this time and planted her bare feet on the floor. She’d left her canvas sandals in the backyard with the boys. Without them Josh seemed to tower over her. Tall, dark and handsome.

Her breath caught in her lungs. “I do want you to back off,” she insisted. “I can’t…You and I, we can’t…Molly is my best friend. She has been since we were nearly the same age as the twins.”

“Molly doesn’t want to marry me,” Josh insisted. “She made that clear when she failed to show up at the church.”

“She was at the church.”

“Well, she failed to show at the altar.”

“After she has some time alone to think, she’ll change her mind,” Brenna insisted. Molly was too smart
not
to change her mind.

He sighed. “It doesn’t matter if
Molly
changes her mind.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she agreed. Because Molly had had him first. So if, as he’d sworn, he didn’t want to marry Molly anymore, it didn’t matter to Brenna. He still couldn’t be
hers.
She shook off her disappointment and focused instead on what else she’d lost without ever really having it. “What matters is that you don’t paint this house boring white.”

He touched her hair, sliding a lock between his fingertips. “I’m beginning to see the wisdom of color. Maybe I should paint the whole house red.”

“Red would be too much,” she said. “Way more than you could handle.”

He dipped his head, his mouth a breath way from hers. “But I like red.”

“I thought you’d prefer the brown.”

He shook his head. “No, someone suggested that I need more color in my life.”

Was he saying he needed
her?

Brenna’s pulse quickened. “Josh…”

His lips touched hers, brushing back and forth. She needed to pull back, she needed to step away. But her legs went limp and she could barely stand, let alone walk.

Josh was the one to step back and to release her.

“What…?” she asked, lifting her hands toward his shoulders. That soft, brief kiss, that wasn’t enough. Not when she knew there was so much more passion between them.

Josh caught her hands in his and pulled them away from him, his heart heavy with regret. If only he hadn’t heard the car drive up and the voices drifting in from the driveway.

But if someone hadn’t driven up, Nick and the boys probably would have interrupted them. Actually, with Nick and the boys there, Josh hadn’t intended to be alone with Brenna. He hadn’t
wanted
to be alone with Brenna. Because he wanted her…

“Josh?” She called his name, her green eyes registering both passion and confusion.

He gestured toward the front door, on which someone had just knocked.

“I don’t understand why I have to help him out,” Rory McClintock griped as he entered the house.

“He was almost your brother-in-law,” Mrs. McClintock explained. “He may still be, when Molly comes home.”

Did he detect a note of disappointment in his almost-mother-in-law’s voice? Perhaps she was the one who’d helped Molly come to her senses.

“Molly’s not here,” the teenager muttered, “so why do I have to be?”

“Because you’re out of school for the summer, and this is your detention for spiking the punch bowl at the wedding. You’re Dr. Towers’s manual labor.”

Or was she punishing Josh?

“I thought
I
was the manual labor,” Nick said as he stepped through the French doors.

Actually, what Nick was supposed to have been was the chaperone Josh had wanted so that he didn’t do what he’d already done—kiss Brenna Kelly again.

“You’re not getting out of working,” Josh warned his friend. But he wouldn’t need Nick for a chaperone, not when he had Rory and his mother.

The kid had probably been right, back in the limo, when he’d said Josh was lucky for not marrying into the McClintock family. They had the worst timing.

Brenna, her face flushed with the sort of color she’d boldly told him he needed in his life, stood near Mrs. McClintock. Her gaze was focused on the floor, however, and not on the woman she’d known since childhood. “Have you heard from Molly?” she asked.

Mrs. McClintock, with dark curly hair like her son’s and the McClintock legacy of dark eyes, slung an arm around Brenna’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about Molly,” she told the maid of honor. “She’ll be just fine. I’m sure she’ll come back soon.”

Then maybe Brenna would accept the fact that Josh and her friend were not in love and never getting married. But it shouldn’t matter to Josh that she believed him. The last thing he wanted was to jump from an engagement/almost marriage into another relationship.

No, the McClintocks’ arrival had been perfectly timed, saving him from making another mistake that could have cost him his heart—and the sanity over which Nick was so concerned. He had to focus on his children and his house, and forget all about Brenna Kelly.

“I
THOUGHT YOU TWO WASHED UP
at the house,” Brenna said as she steered the boys to the restroom in the back of the bakery. They still had more paint on
them
than on the walls of Josh’s house. And so did Nick, thanks to Josh teaching his boys how to tease his friend by flicking paint into his hair.

Uncle Nick
could not have handled the boys for two weeks, not by himself. But then with the way he acted whenever anyone brought up Colleen’s name, maybe he wouldn’t have had to handle them alone. Josh was probably right. His friend was falling for the youngest McClintock sister.

“Dry your hands,” she told the boys as they passed her on their way out of the bathroom. “Wait for me, too. We just stopped here to clean up.” And so that Brenna could pick up her messages. She hadn’t been in the office much the week before the wedding, and now she hadn’t been in most of the week since the wedding-that-wasn’t.

She had been too busy taking care of Molly’s business, when she should have been taking care of her own. Fortunately she had a team of accomplished bakers and savvy office staff. And if Pop and Mama weren’t helping Josh at the house, they were here instead—baking and handling anything else that might need immediate attention.

Brenna ran water in the sink to rinse the green paint from the white porcelain. Then she glanced in the mirror above the basin and noted a smear of paint on her face.

Had the boys done that? She flashed back to when she’d left the house, originally to take the boys back to Pop and Mama’s for a nap, and Josh had brushed a lock of hair from her cheek to tuck behind her ear. His finger had followed the exact path of the green smeared across her face.

“Damn him,” she murmured as she reached for a paper towel. Nick wasn’t the only one he’d played a practical joke on. She leaned closer to the mirror and checked her hair, which she’d bound into a high ponytail. At least he hadn’t spattered paint in her hair, as he’d taught the boys to do with Nick.

Grunts and groans and the high-pitched screech of ripping paper reverberated in the reception area.

“Let me see!” TJ shouted.

“No, I wanna see first!” Buzz shouted back. “I found it!”

Oh, God, what had they found? Maybe she should have taken them directly home for that nap. Even though she’d thought they’d gotten a second wind the minute she’d buckled them into the backseat, they sounded overtired and cranky.

Brenna scrubbed away the paint and headed out to break up the fight. The boys wrestled over a magazine. Not a car or sports magazine, but one of the fashion ones that Brenna’s assistant had fanned out across an antique chest that served as a coffee table in the comfortable but elegant reception area. Antiques that had overflowed out of the Kelly house had washed up at the bakery.

“What do you guys want to look at in this?” she asked as she put her hands over theirs on top of the glossy cover with the tattered edges, where they’d ripped it. Their pudgy fingers held the magazine open to a provocative advertisement. Weren’t they too young to be looking at lingerie ads? She really needed to speak to Deb about the magazines she put out. Right now the receptionist’s desk sat empty, the phone going to voice mail while she took her lunch break.

Despite their hostility toward each other, the twins exchanged one of their silent
looks.
Then TJ relinquished his grip on the magazine and spoke for them both. “We wanna see our mom.”

Buzz let go, too, leaving only Brenna holding the magazine open to a page featuring the image of a scantily clad model.

“Your mom?” she asked. They’d been so young when she’d deserted them that they must have woven fantasies about who she was.

“That’s her,” TJ said, pointing toward the waiflike blonde in an ad for knock-off lingerie. The model looked about as real as a plastic doll.

“But I didn’t think you guys were old enough to remember her when she left,” she said, not wanting to hurt their feelings, but wanting to be honest with them. Had they latched on to the image of this woman as their mother just as they’d latched on to Brenna? And as they probably would have latched on to Molly if she’d married their father? They were desperate for a mother to replace the one who’d deserted them.

“We were little,” TJ admitted.

“You were a baby,” Buzz said.

“
You
were a baby!”

Brenna held up the magazine to stave off another argument. “So why do you think
this
is your mother?”

“Daddy said it was. And he showed us other pictures of her, too,” Buzz told Brenna.

“She didn’t look like that in Daddy’s pictures, though. She had a big nose and dark hair. So then he showed us a magazine, so we’d know what she looks like now,” TJ explained.

Buzz grabbed the magazine from Brenna’s hand and hurled it against the wall. “I don’t want to see her!”

Because their mother didn’t want to see them. No one, not Josh or Molly or the boys, had told Brenna much about this woman. But she’d assumed the boys’ mother hadn’t had any contact with them since she’d left. Now Brenna knew why. The woman had been too busy building her career—one she apparently owed to Josh for helping her to look different, so she could land magazine ads.

TJ pushed his brother, knocking him to the floor. “You’re not supposed to throw stuff inside. You’re bad. She left because you’re bad.”

“You’re bad!” Buzz shouted back, pummeling his brother with small fists.

Brenna knelt on the floor and pulled the boys into her arms. Elbows and knees jabbed her as they fought each other and her, but she continued to hold them close, gently but firmly. “Neither one of you is bad.”

TJ hiccupped a sob. “We are. That’s what all the nannies say when they quit.”

“That we’re bad,” Buzz agreed, no longer fighting the insult.

Brenna’s heart ached with their pain, with the loss of the people who’d already come and gone in their young lives. No matter what happened with Josh, she would have to maintain contact with his boys.

“You’re not bad. Either one of you,” she insisted, hugging them closer. “You’re sweet, loving, fun, smart boys.” And she’d be proud to call them her sons. She would never leave them as their mother had.

“I wish you were our mom,” TJ said, hiccupping again.

Buzz rubbed his eyes, dashing away all evidence of the tears he’d shed before his brother could call him a sissy girl. “Me, too.”

She couldn’t lie to them. “I wish I was, too,” she admitted. “But I’m not. Maybe Molly will come home soon and she’ll become your mother.”

“We want you,” TJ insisted.

“Would you be happy with a cookie?” she asked as she rose from the floor and pulled the boys up. “We can see if Pop and Mama will let you help out in the kitchen.”

To get their minds off their mother, she took them on a tour of the bakery. At the end of the tour she left them in the kitchen with her parents, so that she could slink off to her office. Her chair creaked as she leaned over her desk. The torn and crumpled magazine, open to the picture of their mother, blurred before her eyes as tears threatened and then fell. She lifted her hands to her face and tried to stem them. But the boys’ misery over their mother’s abandonment filled her heart. It didn’t matter that they’d been so young when she’d left—they still knew what they were missing. A mother.

Was Josh missing her, his model ex-wife, too? Was that why he’d proposed to Molly, because she was gorgeous enough to be a model?

Knuckles rapped against her doorjamb, startling Brenna. With a shaking hand she pushed the magazine beneath a stack of files and reached for a tissue.

“Hey, Brenna,” called out a feminine voice, soft with concern, “are you okay?”

She closed her eyes tight then scrubbed at them with the tissue. She’d thought her assistant, Deb, back from lunch, had been the one knocking at her door—not her old friend. She lifted her gaze to Abby Hamilton. In short shorts and a white tank top, the petite blonde appeared taller than her barely five foot frame. While she leaned against the doorjamb, she was anything but casual as she intently studied Brenna’s face.

“I’m fine,” Brenna assured her friend.

“You’ve been crying.”

Brenna shook her head. “PMS. Don’t worry about me.”

Abby’s eyes narrowed with skepticism, but then, as if giving Brenna time to pull herself together, she turned her attention to the office. Brenna had painted the walls to look like Venetian plaster. Overstuffed chairs and antique oak furniture made the space as inviting as the home Brenna had hoped to someday make for herself.

Abby’s quick perusal of the office finished, she returned her attention to Brenna. Her gaze suspicious, she declared, “You don’t cry over PMS.”

“Allergies, then…” she blithely lied “…making my eyes water.”

“Brenna, I hope you know you can talk to me. I won’t tell anyone.”

Her heart warmed with love and respect for her friend. She hoped Abby moved home for good—she’d really missed her. E-mails, phone calls and letters were no substitute for the real thing. Of course, with helping Josh on the house and with the boys, she hadn’t had time to see Abby much since the wedding. “I know you’d take my secrets to your grave,” Brenna said. “Colleen told me.”

Colleen had told her the truth, with her inexplicable guilt more than her words. That Abby had taken the blame when Colleen had driven her car through Cloverville Park and into Colonel Clover. Everyone had believed the wild Hamilton girl had been responsible, and Abby, too, had insisted she’d been behind the wheel. Getting expelled from school had just given her a reason to leave Cloverville a little earlier than she’d been planning to leave. Which she’d been preparing for more because of her sorry excuses for parents than the town. Like Colleen, Brenna had often felt guilty, but with her it was for having so much more than Abby and Eric.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Abby insisted.

Abby, probably believing the secret was Colleen’s to tell, would never admit the truth. And Brenna didn’t want to talk about her tears, so she wadded up her tissue, tossed it in the trash and changed the subject. “Have you heard from Molly?”

“No. That’s why I stopped by,” Abby admitted, her eyes full of concern for their missing friend.

The longer Molly stayed away, the less concerned and more angry Brenna became. Even if Molly didn’t intend to marry Josh, she should be the one helping him with the house and with his boys. No matter what he claimed, Brenna knew Molly was the reason Josh had decided to move to Cloverville.

“We could drive over to Eric’s,” she said.

“And what?” Abby asked, with a nervous laugh, as if she believed Brenna might consider her suggestion. “Break down the door?”

Her temper flaring, Brenna admitted, “I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

“But they might.” Molly and Eric. “And then we what…Lose
two
friends?”

Her nerves were frayed from fighting her attraction to Molly’s fiancé—or ex-fiancé—and Brenna let her bitterness creep into her voice. “So you don’t want to do anything? You’re content to sit around and wait for her to figure out what she really wants?”

She didn’t know how much longer she could fight her feelings.

“I’m never content,” Abby reminded her. “I understand Molly being confused. Ever since her dad died, she’s thrown herself into school and hasn’t taken a minute to think.”