Jamie couldn’t help wondering if anyone had ever successfully turned Bobbie down. “It seems that I am.”
“Will you sit by me?”
“I would be delighted,” she assured him.
Bobbie looked from her grandson to Jamie. “He certainly seems taken with you. He’s usually shy with strangers.”
“Sam and I are pals, aren’t we, Sammy?”
He nodded and Jamie was pleased to see a shy smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Maybe she would even hear him laugh before the dinner party ended.
“Moo!” Abbie shouted gleefully, unwilling to be ignored for long.
Pushing the cart, Bobbie instructed Sam to follow her to the checkouts. He did, but he looked over his shoulder at Jamie until he was out of sight.
“Odd child,” she murmured, shaking her head in bemusement. She supposed he came by it honestly. The McBrides were a notoriously offbeat family, though Bobbie and her husband Caleb seemed to be the least scandal-prone of the bunch.
EXPECTING BOBBIE TO ANSWER her doorbell the next evening, Jamie was caught momentarily off guard when Trevor opened the door, instead. She recovered quickly, regarding him with a faint smile she knew he would have trouble interpreting. “Hello, handsome.”
She had always enjoyed flustering him, which probably explained why she tried to do so as often as possible. She figured it was as good a way as any to
keep him from realizing how often he flustered her.
She had suffered such a huge crush on him when she’d been a teenager, a crush she’d hoped at times that he shared. She had made no secret of her attraction to him, and she’d done everything possible to get his attention. It had shattered her secret daydreams when he had told her on the night before his graduation that he wouldn’t be seeing her anymore. He’d said they were too different—in age, in goals, in everything—and that there was no reason for them to pursue anything that couldn’t go anywhere. He had graduated and gone off to the East Coast for college and law school, and then had settled in Washington, D.C., with a wife from a suitably aristocratic Virginia family.
Even she didn’t know quite how she felt about him now, though her stomach still fluttered when he looked at her in that serious, searching way of his. Much the same way his son looked at her, she thought suddenly, realizing now why she’d reacted so strongly to young Sam.
A lot of things had changed since the last time she and Trevor had been together. The three-year age difference no longer mattered, and the very different career paths they had chosen to pursue had somehow led them back to the same place. She was becoming increasingly curious to find out what else had changed since he had so awkwardly let her down before.
Trevor chose to acknowledge her teasing greeting with a rather formal, “Good evening, Jamie. Please come in. Mother’s in the kitchen putting finishing touches to dinner, but she’ll be out soon.”
She sauntered past him, giving an extra little flip to the vented skirt of her short, sleeveless sheath dress—just in case he was looking at her legs. She could hear several voices coming from the living room, and she turned to Trevor to stall for a moment before joining the others. “It was nice of your mother to invite me to dinner.”
“Are you kidding? You’re the family hero. Mom would have liked to have a parade in your honor, but she settled for a dinner party.”
Jamie wrinkled her nose. “I tried to tell her it wasn’t necessary to make such a big deal of this. I really didn’t do anything all that spectacular.”
“You saved my son,” he said gently. “If Mom had insisted on a parade, I’d have gladly helped her plan it.”
Had she been prone to blushing, she would have been beet red. Instead, she reverted to dry humor. “But would you lead the band? You’d look really cute wearing one of those tall hats and holding a baton.”
He gave her a look. “As grateful as I am to you, there are limits.”
She laughed, pleased that she’d provoked him into acting more natural. She really didn’t want to spend the entire evening being treated like some sort of movie heroine—especially by Trevor.
She would just have to do her best to make him look at her in a different light, she mused.
3
CALEB MCBRIDE WAS the first to greet Jamie when Trevor escorted her into the living room. She smiled when he approached with a look of warm welcome on his pleasant face. Aware that there were other adults and several children in the room, she concentrated solely on her host for the moment.
Probably in his early sixties, Caleb had perfected the image of small-town Southern lawyer—genial, personable, courteous, but tough when he needed to be. Though she didn’t know him very well, Jamie had always liked him, even as she suspected that he was as consummate an actor as any she’d met on stage. Perhaps it was purely circumstance, but Caleb couldn’t have played his role in Honoria more perfectly if he’d followed a detailed script.
“It’s good to see you, Jamie,” he said, taking her hand in both of his. “After what you did, you will always be an honored guest in our home.”
She hoped she wouldn’t have to spend the entire evening trying to respond to comments like that. Deciding distraction was her best defense, she gave him a cheeky smile and said, “It’s always good to see you, too, Mr. McBride. I swear, you get better-looking every time I see you. If you weren’t married…”
He chuckled, obviously flattered. “If I weren’t married, I would still be twice your age.”