Smooth Talking Stranger (Travis Family #3)(72)

I recoiled. "I'm not like Mom."

"You are! You're jealous like her—you're jealous of me because I'm prettier and I had a baby, and I have a rich boyfriend."

Right then I discovered that you actually could see red, if you were angry enough. "Grow up, Tara," I snapped.

Click.

Silence.

I looked at the dead phone in my hand. I dropped my head in utter defeat. "Jack."

"Yeah?"

"I just told my sister—who's in a mental health clinic—to grow up."

He came up to me with the freshly diapered baby. His voice was soft and amused. "I heard."

I looked up at him bleakly. "Do you have Mark Gottler's number? I have to call him."

"Got it right here on my cell phone. You're welcome to it." Jack studied me briefly. "Would you trust me to take care of it?" he murmured. "Can I do that for you?"

I considered the offer, knowing that even though I could handle Gottler on my own, this was precisely the sort of thing Jack was good at. And right now it was nice to have the help. I nodded.

He handed Luke to me, went to the table where he had left his wallet, keys, and phone. In about two minutes he had Gottler on the phone.

"Hey, Mark. How are you doing? Great. Yeah, things are okay, but we have an issue here, and we need to get it straightened out. Ella just got off the horn with Tara . . . about that meeting we had, the contract. . . yeah. Ella's not too happy, Mark. Tell you the truth, neither am I. Guess I should have made it clear that it was confidential. But I didn't expect you to go talking out of school." He paused to listen. "I know why you did it, Mark." His tone was quiet but blistering. "And now you got these sisters as aggravated as two cats in a bathtub. No matter what Tara says she wants right now, she's not in any shape to make those decisions. You don't need to worry about if or when she signs the contract. Once my lawyer sends it over, you have your boys look it over, you sign the f**ker, and you send it to me." Jack listened for a moment. "Because Ella asked me to be in on it, that's why. I don't know how you usually handle these things . . . yeah, that's what I'm implying. . . . Fact is, Mark, I'm here to make sure Tara and Luke get their due. I want them to have what we talked over and what we shook on. And you know what it means to cross a Travis in Houston. No, of course that's not a threat. I consider us friends, and I know you won't back down from doing what's right. So let's be clear on how the next couple of months will play out: you're not going to bother Tara with this stuff again. We're going to nail down this contract, and if you cause any problems for our side, I guarantee you're going to have even bigger problems. And I don't think any of us want to go there. Next time you want to talk about any of this stuff, you call me or Ella. Tara's out of the loop until she gets well enough to leave that clinic. Good. I think so, too." He listened for a half minute or so, looked satisfied and said goodbye, and closed the phone with a decisive snap.

Looking at me, he raised an expectant brow.

"Thanks, Jack," I said softly, the tight feeling easing from my chest. "You think he was paying attention?"

"He was paying attention." Jack approached me as I sat on the sofa, lowered to his haunches, and looked into my face. "It'll be fine," he murmured. "You don't waste one minute worrying about it."

"All right." I reached out and stroked the dark layers of his hair. I felt oddly bashful as I asked, "Do you want to spend the night with me, or would you rather—"

"Yes."

A crooked grin spread across my face. "You want some time to think about it?"

"Okay." He squinted thoughtfully as if mulling it over, and a split second later, he said, "Yes."

EIGHTEEN

During the next month we spent every night together, and all the weekends, and still it seemed that I could never see Jack enough.

There were moments when I hardly recognized myself, laughing and playing like the child I had never been. We went to a roadhouse honky-tonk, where Jack led me onto the wooden dance floor, sticky with the residue of beer and tequila, and taught me how to two-step.

Another day we went to an indoor butterfly garden and let hundreds of colorful wings flutter around us like confetti. "He thinks you're a flower," Jack whispered in my ear as one of the butterflies perched on my shoulder.

He took Luke and me to an arts and flowers market, where he bought me a huge basket of handmade soaps and two pails of melting-ripe Fredericksburg peaches. We dropped off one of the pails at his father's home and visited for about an hour, going out to the back with him to view a putting green that had just been installed.

Discovering that I had never played golf, Churchill gave me an impromptu putting lesson. I told him I didn't need to take on a new hobby that I was bad at, and Churchill told me that golf was one of the two things in life you could enjoy even if you were bad at them. Before I could ask what the other thing was, Jack shook his head with a groan and dragged me out of there, but not before his father had made him promise to bring me back soon.

There were elegant occasions when Jack and I attended a charity event for the Houston Symphony, or went to the opening of an art gallery, or out to dinner at a luminous restaurant located in a renovated 1920s church. I was amused and also annoyed by the reactions of other women to Jack, the way they fluttered and flirted. He was courteous but distant, but that only seemed to encourage them. And I realized Jack was not the only one with a possessive streak.