Just thinking her name sent a pang ripping through him.
She can’t be gone, he thought, using every shred of willpower to keep his composure.
He’d watched out for her since they’d been kids. Their chronically battling folks had died young. Their adventure-seeking dad broke his neck while hang gliding off Baja. Travis had been thirteen. Marlie ten. Their mom died three years later from a drug overdose backstage at some Goth concert she’d been attending with her latest boyfriend, who had been twenty years her junior. Yes, their parents’ deaths had been rough. But as cold as it might seem, since he and Marlie essentially had been raised by their paternal grandparents and an endless succession of servants, they hadn’t missed their parents all that much.
They’d had each other. Yeah, a lot of times Marlene had been a pain in Travis’s ass, but most times she’d been a cute mascot he and his friends had enjoyed having around.
“There’s Levi,” Kit said, quickening her pace to the tall, lean man standing, arms crossed, beside a mud-splattered red pickup.
Travis inwardly groaned. Levi was Kit’s fiancé. During the hour-long flight, Travis had learned the apparently perfect man owned the town’s only hardware/lumber store and had helped renovate the big red barn Marlie and Kit purchased to house the latest of their six daycares, which were in neighboring small towns. Kit traveled to each center, acting in a managerial position and occasionally filling in as needed while Marlene had done the books.
Travis couldn’t fathom why, but it irked him seeing Levi hold Kit proprietarily close, planting a brief kiss on her lips before settling in for a long hug.
Kit had tried giving Travis a hug back in his office, but he’d sidestepped the affection. Now, alone on a hot runway that reeked of jet fuel, Travis could’ve very much used a hug. So far from his desk, he didn’t feel like a powerful CEO but like the kid who’d arrived at this same airport well over a decade earlier, about to meet his maternal grandmother for only the second time.
He remembered his grandmother as a warm, simple woman. Her home a barely standing two-story, three-bedroom hodgepodge of additions. A day into his and Marlie’s visit, their grandmother had introduced them to the neighbor girl, Kit. From that moment on he’d been smitten by the long-legged brunette’s many charms.
For an endless summer he’d been part of the small town community. Felt as if he’d genuinely belonged.
If he were brutally honest, Kit had been his first love. Hell, maybe his only real love. And his feelings hadn’t been about the physical—the making love—that had drawn him to her. Everything about her from her cute accent to her casual clothes to her unabashed belly laughs had been miles from his stuffy, painfully polite upbringing. Her carefree spirit had reeled him in from her first friendly hello.
On a sweltering August Sunday, at this same airport, saying goodbye to Kit and her uncluttered way of life had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Sure, they’d promised to write, but after a couple letters apiece, as much as he’d still cared for her, the guys at his private school had ribbed him mercilessly for his summer fling with an Arkie. And so, bowing to peer pressure—something that still deeply shamed him—he’d put Kit, their magical summer and an unobtainable longing to be part of a real family from his mind.
Until now, when Kit was the only tangible link to anything he’d once known. Sure, there was Libby, but she barely knew him. And yet, from this moment on, due to a tragic twist of fate, he was to be her father. Father. How could he be good for Libby when half the time he wasn’t all that sure he was doing such a hot job raising himself?
“Hey,” said Levi, dressed in faded jeans, a red T-shirt and white Razorbacks cap. He held out his calloused hand for Travis to shake. “You must be that hotshot CEO brother Marlene was all the time talking about.”
Travis winced. Was that how his sister saw him?
With a partial smile, Travis returned the man’s handshake.
“Sorry about Marlene and Gary,” Levi said, taking Travis’s lone black bag and setting it in the truck’s bed. “They were a great couple. Everyone loved them.”
Travis’s throat tightened.
Thankfully, after a few awkward moments of silence, Kit said, “Well, guess we should get going.”
“Yeah.” Levi opened his door. “I left old Ben in charge, and you know how he is about getting so wrapped up in his afternoon soaps that he forgets we even have customers.”
On the way to the passenger side of Kit’s fiancé’s pickup, Travis asked the obvious. “Why not get rid of the TV? Or old Ben?”
“Simple,” Levi said, climbing behind the wheel. “The women who come in watch TV while their husbands shop, and I give them popcorn popped with the special coconut oil I sell. Since adding the TV and snacks, plus a few shelves of girlie knickknacks, my overall sales have gone up thirty percent.”
“Sweet,” Travis said, removing his suffocating suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves before climbing into the too-small cab beside Kit.
“Where to first?” Levi asked.
Kit said, “Travis wants to see Libby.”
“You’re evidently a very brave or a very stupid man,” Levi said, starting the truck, then putting it into gear.
“How’s that?” Travis loosened his tie, wishing he’d had Mrs. Holmes look into a rental limo and driver from Little Rock. Sitting this close to Kit wasn’t good. Even sweaty, she smelled intriguing. Earthy. Like the meadow where she’d taken him on a surprise picnic the afternoon after the night they’d first kissed.
Oblivious to his discomfort, Levi and Kit shared a laugh.
Kit patted Travis’s left thigh, causing still more inadvertent grief. “In meeting Gary’s parents—most especially his mother—you’re in for a real treat.”
“LIKE HELLYOU’RE TAKING my only granddaughter one foot outside city limits.” Beulah Redding, Marlene’s mother-in-law, was indeed turning out to be a treat. Five-eight and weighing a good three hundred pounds, she had a huge mass of Dolly Parton-style blond curls and a vast collection of windmills of every conceivable shape and size, including three real ones on the expansive front lawn and five out back. All that aside, the woman’s house was immaculate, as was six-month-old Libby, who was dressed in a cute pink jumper with her dark curls smelling of a recent washing and her skin scented with that baby-pink lotion Marlene had constantly been rubbing all over her.
“Be reasonable,” Travis said, helping himself to a seat on a blue velveteen sofa in the peach-colored room. “According to my sister and your son’s will, which Marlene had sent me a copy of for safekeeping in the event of…well, you know…” Travis couldn’t even bring himself to yet say the words. “Anyway, in the event we now find ourselves in, Marlene specifically named me as Libby’s guardian.”
Beulah switched off Jerry Springer, then settled into the recliner opposite the sofa. Kit, who sat on a brown floral sofa on the opposite wall beside a gurgling windmill fountain, looked every bit as uncomfortable as Travis felt. Lucky Levi had been dropped off at his store to supervise old Ben.
“I don’t care what the will says,” Beulah said, smacking the copy she’d been carrying around ever since plopping Libby into one of those baby activity seats bursting with knobs and squeakies for tiny fingers to explore, “I know in my heart he wished for me and his father to be Libby’s guardians. That way she can be raised right here with us. Learning our values—not your big city ways.”
As if he were negotiating a difficult business arrangement, Travis counted to ten in his head,