was plainly obvious. Even at nine years old, the Jake miniatures seemed tall for their age. “No kidding. Did you wash your hands?”
Connor snickered a little as he nodded.
Zach—obviously the more blasé of the two—just rolled his eyes before finally nodding.
She gestured toward the exit again. “Then let’s go.”
There were even more cars lined up in the full parking lot when they reached her truck again, and the moment the boys were buckled into their seatbelts and she pulled out of the spot, another car pulled in. “You might as well eat the rest.” She gestured at the bag sitting in the console.
They didn’t need any more urging and they practically tore apart the bag in their eagerness.
“When did you have lunch?”
Connor lifted a shoulder. He was wearing a red T-shirt and cargo shorts. Zach, busily unwrapping a plastic fork and spoon on the other side of him, wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt with some unreadable logo on the front.
“We didn’t,” Connor said. He didn’t wait for a plastic utensil, but picked out a piece of sweet-n-sour pork with his fingers and popped it in his mouth before handing off the container to his brother and fishing in the bag for another.
They were gulping at the food so fast she regretted not stopping long enough to buy them something to drink. As it was, she didn’t even have her usual bottled water with her. And her air-conditioning was barely keeping up with the heat billowing up from the nearly grid-locked interstate. “Do you always call your dad Jake?”
Connor looked inside the paper bag as if he were hoping that more containers would magically appear inside of it. “Adam is our dad.”
Zach jabbed his fork into the sweet-n-sour pork. “Was,” he muttered.
Which had J.D.’s heart squeezing.
Was it any wonder they were now finding some mischief? “I heard about what happened,” she said quietly. “I’m very sorry.”
Connor’s head ducked, focusing harder on the rice.
“No big deal,” Zach said.
J.D. gave them a glance before turning her attention back to the traffic crowding it’s way along the interstate. Both boys were focusing intently on their food.
“I think it would feel like a very big deal to me,” she told them.
“That’s ’cause you’re a girl.” Zach looked out the side window. “Guys don’t get all upset like girls do.”
“Ah.” She tucked her tongue between her teeth.
“Can I turn on the radio?” Connor asked. He was clearly ready to change the subject.
“Sure.”
He leaned forward and fiddled with the dials and buttons and within minutes, he and Zach were squabbling over what station to listen to. J.D. just let them go at it.
They might be boys, but as far as she could tell, they didn’t sound a whole lot different than she and her sister Angeline had sounded when they’d been kids.
She and Angel had argued together just as much as they’d laughed together. And when J.D. had landed in Georgia, Angeline had soon followed. Only instead of mucking out stalls and hot-walking blood horses, her sister had become a paramedic. They’d rented a small house together in a quaint old neighborhood and that’s where J.D. had stayed after her sister moved back to Wyoming and became Mrs. Brody Paine.
She sighed faintly. She still missed Angel.
Now, more than ever.
The pain between her eyebrows deepened.
The sun was nearly set by the time she pulled up in the stately drive outside the mansion.
Jake’s lethal-looking sports car was parked in front of the marble steps and J.D. didn’t have to wonder if he’d received her voice mail or been informed of the boys’ activities, because he was standing on one of the steps. Obviously waiting.
J.D. pulled to a stop behind his car and gave the boys a sideways glance. “Judging by your dad’s expression, I’d say he cares quite a lot about what you’ve been up to.”
Even from the distance and the dwindling light, they could see the dark expression on Jake’s face.
And the twins looked as if they’d just as soon spend eternity sitting in her cab to getting out and facing the music.
She had a small bit of sympathy for them on that score. She was none too anxious to face Jake right now, herself. And given that, the smile she sent into the boys’ disgruntled faces was a little less sharp than it might have been. “Out you go.”
“He looks kinda mad,” Connor said.
Zach huffed and snapped off his seatbelt. “What’s he gonna do? Send us back home to boarding school? He’s already said that’s what he’s gonna do.” He shoved open the door and slid out onto the ground, all bravado and cockiness.
Connor followed a little more slowly. “Thanks for the food.”
Bemused, she could only nod.
She could have put the truck into gear and driven away, but instead, she hovered there long enough to see the boys trudge up the shallow, wide steps toward their father. She could see them speaking, but couldn’t hear the words.
A moment later, the boys were stomping through the ornate front door and J.D. was wishing that she’d resisted her lingering hesitation and just driven away, because once Jake’s focus was off his sons, it turned like a laser toward her.
Something sharp jangled through her.
She swallowed around the constriction in her throat and rolled down the window when he came down beside her truck.
He ducked his head so he could see through the window and she could see the rough shadow forming on his angular jaw and smell that faint, lingering scent of him that her memory had been hanging on to with fiendish delight.
“You’re not really sending them home to boarding school, are you?” she blurted.
His brows drew together. “Excuse me?”
The words were out there, so she couldn’t very well take them back even if she wished she could. At the very least, though, she might have phrased the question more tactfully. “Zach mentioned you planned to send them back home to school.”
“And you clearly disapprove.”
The growing heat in her face owed nothing to the hot day. “I’m sorry. It’s really none of my business.”
Before she could stop him, he’d pulled open her door. “I don’t know. They chose your truck to stow away in. Maybe that makes it your business. So yeah. Mabel’s already made the arrangements. They’ll be back terrorizing the halls of Penley next week.”
Knowing it wasn’t her business wasn’t enough to keep her from protesting. “But, Jake, they’re still upset about the accident. They should be with family. If you’re worried about them missing school, enroll them here. Or hire a tutor or something!”
“They’ll be better off at Penley than here with me. And they’ll be able to visit their mother if they’re back at school. Tiff’s housekeeper will cart them back and forth.”
She tried to imagine it and failed.
And Jake obviously read her expression all too accurately. “Tiffany’s the one who enrolled them. She wants them near her, now,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with a boarding school. I went.”
“Did you like it even when you weren’t grieving?”
The arrow seemed to find its mark and his face tightened. “At least