His future and the future of his brother, the future of his very
family
, depended upon their making sound decisions now.
“I told Stella on my way in that we didn’t want to be disturbed.
Do you know she actually smirked at me?”
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“It’s lowering when she does that,” Josh said. “I think the mistake Uncle Carson made was allowing the woman to give us gumdrops when we were kids.”
“That could be true. Something about the giving of gumdrops circumvents respect.” Alex settled in at the small, round conference table in the corner of his brother’s office.
Alex’s office was in the opposite corner of the top floor and identically appointed. Truthfully, Josh didn’t pay much attention to the furnishings or the decor. When he was working, he generally just focused on the matter at hand.
“We have a meeting with Doug Evercroft tomorrow. I’ve asked Colt and Ryder to sit in on it with us. That’s scheduled for nine a.m., isn’t it?” Josh took a seat across from his brother.
“It is, which means our next initial interview for the Legacy Project—my turn—should be the day after tomorrow,” Alex said.
“I want to review the entire project to date, if it’s all the same to you. I’m afraid a few of the details have slipped my mind in the last couple of days.”
“That’s fine. I could use a refresher myself.” Alex opened the folder he’d brought with him. “Do we need to review the mission statement?” Alex asked.
“No,” Josh said. “I think we’re clear on that one. We’re looking for a wife, a woman who will be the mother of our children, helping to form the next generation of our branch on the Benedict family tree.”
“Right. Speaking of family trees, did you know that Penelope seems to know just about
all
our family history?” In Alex’s experience, not many people outside the family had much interest in the beginnings of the intertwining of the Benedict, Kendall, and Jessop clans.
“Susan mentioned something to me about that when I called her this morning to explain that we used a few of their…um…provisions.
I was surprised, actually. Penelope said Grandma Kate had told her
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some stories. I just hadn’t realized that Grandmother had shared so many details with her. I guess we need to remember that although we’ve only just met pretty Penelope, Grandma’s known her a really long time.”
“Did you notice, that first night, at the restaurant? She calls her
Grandma Kate
, too.”
“I did notice that.” Josh wondered why that felt strange to him.
All of his friends, all the years while he’d been growing up, attending school, had called his grandmother Grandma Kate. Josh shook his head, trying to dislodge Penelope from his thoughts.
“Okay, item one.” Alex turned his attention to the papers in the folder. “Desirable qualities in a wife. One, must be in possession of a keen intellect. Two, must be open-minded when it comes to matters political and religious.”
“That was a good idea you had, insisting the successful candidate not be hot on any particular party or church,” Josh complimented.
“I just don’t believe in political or religious discrimination,” Alex said. “What a person believes should be sacrosanct.”
“I agree completely. All right, let’s carry on.” Josh got more comfortable in his chair.
“Three, must be well established in a career. I was wondering, does that sound, oh, I don’t know, snobbish? I mean, really,
career
sounds like we insist the lady have a bunch of initials after her name, and be a top-ranking executive. That’s rather…egalitarian of us, isn’t it?”
Josh frowned. “Good point. And I don’t think that’s what we really meant, anyway, was it? Our own mother worked as a sales clerk at Macy’s when our dads met her.”
“My point, exactly!”
“Why not change number three, then, to read ‘Must be meaningfully employed’?”
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“Excellent.” Alex took a moment to make the correction.
“Number four, must have outside interests and accept the same in return.”
“We came up with that one during the Thanksgiving Day Cowboys game, didn’t we?” Josh said.
“Right after Kelsey dragged Matt and Steven away during halftime at the parents’ place and never let them come back for the rest of the game,” Alex confirmed.
“I wonder if Penelope likes football?” Josh said.
So much for
getting her out of my thoughts.
“I don’t know. We should ask her when we go over there tonight,”
Alex suggested.
“Yeah, we should. We don’t really know all that much about her.”
Josh felt his mind begin to wander over the lovely, tasty territory that was Penelope Primrose. He hauled his thoughts back to the topic at hand. “Is that all the qualities we came up with?”
“Well, there were others we tossed around, but we decided these four were the most vital. Why? Is something missing?”
Josh said, “Well, a good sense of humor would be nice. And a willingness to, you know, try different things.”
“So, what, a sense of humor and a sense of adventure?”
“In the bedroom.”
“You want her to laugh at our cocks?”
“No, idiot, a sense of humor in general and a sense of
adventure
in the bedroom.”
“Aside from the part where you called me an idiot, I’d say those are both good points. I’ll add them.” Alex took a moment to jot the last points down. “I have to confess, I have no idea whether luscious Lola has a sense of humor or not,” Alex said.
“I have my doubts about Andrea in that area, as well,” Josh confessed.
“Well, since we haven’t had our second meeting with either lady or told them that they’re under consideration for the position of our
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wife, we could let that one go for the two of them—you know, sort of like a grandfather, um, I mean, grand
mother
clause.”
“Did you get a chance to reschedule with luscious, I mean, with Lola?” Josh asked.
“I’ve called twice, and left a message both times for her to get back to me, but so far, she hasn’t returned my call,” Alex said.
“Huh. I wonder why not?” Josh sat back in his chair and brought his right knee over his left. “She seemed more than eager when you made the date for the other night, didn’t she?”
“She did. When I told her it would the two of us and her, she said she was really looking forward to it.”
“How’d she sound when you called and canceled the other night?”
“I explained that Grandmother had unexpectedly arrived. She seemed fine with it.” Alex shrugged. “She didn’t say anything negative. Just said, ‘Fine, thank you for calling.’”
“That’s all she said? ‘Fine, thank you for calling’?”
“Her very words,” Alex said.
“Well, then, maybe it’s just a case of her being really busy,” Josh said.
“Are you going to call Andrea Martin and arrange to meet her at Sorrento’s for the day after tomorrow?” Alex asked. “Since I already made the reservations for three?”
“I’ve tried once, without mentioning the venue, and left a message for her to call me. You know, now that I think about it, maybe we shouldn’t mess with the batting order, as it were. Why not leave another message with Lola and mention we’d like to take her to Sorrento’s on Saturday night, but we need to hear from her by Friday evening to make it firm?”
“You’re right. We should have dinner with Lola first. I’ll call as soon as we’re done here.”
“Great. Who’s next on our list?”
“Our next candidate.” Alex flipped to the next page in his folder.
“Maria Sanchez, professor of English at Texas State.”
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Josh smiled. “We can do worse than the lovely Ms. Sanchez, that’s for sure. So, who’s my next candidate?”
“Ms. Sanchez is the last name on the list.”
“We only had three ladies on our list?”
“Three so
far
,” Alex corrected. “We haven’t been at this for very long. There’s the predictable learning curve for us. Don’t forget, we haven’t even set a project completion date, yet. This is all still in the preliminary stages.”
Josh sighed. “That’s true.” Then he sat back, let his mind go over the entire project, their goals, criteria, progress to date. “I can’t help but think we’re missing something. That there’s some angle or aspect of this we’ve completely failed to address.”
Alex closed the file. “I had a similar sense, just now. Maybe if we let it sit, up here,” he tapped his head, “the missing puzzle piece will drop into place.”
Josh nodded. “You’re right, of course. We’re both not only intelligent, we’re motivated. The answer is bound to come to us.”
“Come to us?” Alex got to his feet, stretched, then lightly bopped Josh on the head with the thin file folder. “Hell, it’ll probably march right up and spit in our face and we’ll wonder how the hell we ever missed it.”
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Chapter 10
Why can’t I make up my damn mind?
Penelope usually had no difficulty sizing up a situation—any situation—and making a decision. It made no difference if the situation was work related or personal, Penelope never, ever dithered.
Until now.
The brothers Benedict would arrive shortly, for dinner and sex.
Penelope took a moment to simply absorb the fact that she now lived in this luxurious penthouse apartment in Houston, Texas. Just outside the glass balcony doors, the city spread out before her clear to the horizon. As the sun began to set, the lights of Houston started to blink on, like a carpet of thousands of dazzling jewels to tempt the imagination.
Situated in the perfect place to enjoy this panoramic view, the dining room rectangular table awaited her pleasure.
She couldn’t decide whether to give the table a romantic kind of setting, or not. Would Josh and Alex think it, and therefore she, was hokey? Would they worry she was trying to be too romantic?
Was
she being too romantic?
There had been no promises spoken or implied between them—
unless you counted their apparent jealousy of her administrative assistant earlier that day. They’d had sex on three separate occasions, but they hadn’t gone out anywhere, like on a date. So what was this thing happening between them, anyway?
She couldn’t really count eating in the same restaurant on the day she met them as a date, because that had evolved from the meeting of the Lusty, Texas Town Trust. After the meeting, the impromptu
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83
family-style celebration had just kind of happened at
Lusty Appetites
.
She’d been carried along with the crowd, as it were. Besides, she hadn’t even
sat
with the men.
Decisions, decisions
.
So did she set the table, using the dramatic backdrop of the glistening Houston night scene and the Benedicts’ finest china, silver, crystal, and candles, creating a nice romantic ambiance? Or did she just toss some paper plates on the table, along with a roll of paper towels, and call it done?
Penelope couldn’t make up her mind.
In a flash of insight, she realized the matter before her wasn’t really about the dinner table at all. The real question was, did she want to try and edge this relationship from the purely physical toward something more on the path to the permanent, or just keep it as a temporary, intermittent booty-call arrangement?
Penelope hadn’t come to Texas to look for love. She came to do a job, to live someplace different. She came to get away from all the familiar places where she was faced with constant reminders of the grandmother she’d so recently lost. She came to give herself space and a chance to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
She realized after her grandmother’s funeral that, in a way, she’d been living her life as if everything about it had been temporary.
Though she’d not understood it at the time, her mother’s rejection had scarred her deeply. At ten, she’d only just begun to wonder what her father might have been like. He’d died before she’d been born, and he’d had no family. She hadn’t been the only fatherless child in her area of London wondering just that very thing. But when she’d come home from school that day to be faced with her mother, expression rigid, with an old, secondhand suitcase in hand, and told she was going to live with her grandmother in America, something inside her had shattered.
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Penelope blinked. The lights of Houston had blurred. She wiped her tears, angry with herself for allowing maudlin emotion to swamp her. Allowing
that person
to upset her anew.
To hell with it
.
She’d lived her life eating off paper plates—metaphorically, if not literally. She was worth the good china.
Damn right I am
.
It didn’t take Penelope long to set the table. To make it seem less formal, she decided against using a tablecloth. Instead, she’d selected three black, rectangular place mats. The plates gleamed now in the candlelight, pretty white with a gold rim and tiny yellow roses in a cluster. The china looked as if it had barely ever been used. Next she’d set out glasses, two for each of them, a water goblet and a wineglass. She liked wine, but she also had gotten in the habit of drinking water with her meals. The stainless steel cutlery wasn’t silver, but that was just as well. She didn’t have to polish the stainless.
An array of linen napkins had awaited her selection. She chose the ones that were the same rich yellow as the roses on the china. There even was a selection of napkin rings. She picked the green ones.
Finally, two crystal candlesticks with tapered white candles finished the effect. Whoever had arranged the buffet’s drawers had thoughtfully provided a candle lighter.
Penelope had set flame to the candles then stood back and eyed the table critically. It looked nice. Penelope smiled. It did look nice, and maybe that was all the justification she needed for the fuss.