Of course, if she told him all the things she’d been feeling lately, it was entirely possible he’d take off and spend the holidays as far away from Serenity—and her—as he could get. The thick invitation arrived with the afternoon mail. Tom stared at the formal calligraphy and knew without even glancing at the return address that it was from his parents. They always launched the holiday season on the second Saturday in December with a lavish party that he was expected to attend. Since that was the opening night of the Christmas festival, he was going to have to decline this year and the resulting scene was likely to be unpleasant. He might as well get it over with now.
He picked up the phone and dialed his mother’s private line. During this busy social season, she had a secretary answering their home phone and keeping track of her schedule.
“Hello, Mother,” he said when she picked up at once.
“Darling, how are you?” she said, sounding pleased. “I was expecting to hear from you today. Did you get your invitation?”
“It just came.”
“And you’ll be here, of course. Will you be bringing someone?” she asked. “Or shall I arrange for a dinner partner for you?” There was an unmistakably hopeful note in her voice with that last query.
“I’m really sorry, Mother, but I can’t make it this year.”
Stunned silence met his announcement. Then she said,
“What on earth do you mean you can’t make it? We hold this party on the same Saturday every year. It’s not as if I pulled the date out of a hat. Of course you’ll be here. Whatever it is you’re planning on doing instead can’t possibly be as important as this. Just cancel it.”
“I can’t cancel, Mother. This is a business obligation. The town’s Christmas festival begins that night. I have to be here.”
“To do what? Make sure the tree lights come on?” she scoffed.
“Actually, yes, and to see that the vendors are happy and that everything runs smoothly.”
“That’s absurd. They don’t need someone like you to deal with that. Delegate it. Let that little friend of yours handle it.”
“If you’re referring to Jeanette, she has her own responsibilities for that night. She can’t take on mine.”
“Thomas McDonald, I can’t believe you would place more importance on some ridiculous ceremony in that nothing little town than you do on your own mother.”
He’d been expecting the guilt card, but he still had to take a deep breath before responding. He might not care about these kind of social obligations, but his mother did. “It’s not a competition. This is my job,” he stressed. “If I could be there, you know I would be, because I know it matters to you.”
“Just wait until I tell your father,” she complained. “He’s going to have a thing or two to say about this.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Tom murmured. His father had acted as her unofficial enforcer as far back as Tom could remember. He’d never quite figured out the dynamics of their marriage or why his otherwise strong father so readily did his mother’s bidding.
“What did you say?” his mother demanded irritably.
“Nothing, Mother. Look, I’m sorry about the conflict, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We’ll get together another time.”
“The following weekend,” she said at once, seizing on the opening. “I’m having another dinner party that Friday. Something smaller and more intimate for a few of your father’s business associates. I intended to discuss that with you when I saw you, but since you’re obviously so busy these days, I’d better get it onto your calendar now.”
Tom was no more inclined to accept that invitation than he was this one, but he knew better than to offer another excuse. If he expected his mother to respect the things—and people—that mattered to him, then he had to show her the same courtesy, at least often enough to keep peace.
“We’ll be there,” he told her.
“We?” she asked suspiciously.
“Jeanette and I.”
“Tom, that’s entirely inappropriate.”
“Inappropriate?” he repeated, his tone icy. The last of his good humor vanished. “If Jeanette’s not welcome in your home, then perhaps I should rethink whether I belong there, either.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, bring her,” she said impatiently.
“But don’t blame me if she doesn’t fit in.”
“I will blame you if you don’t do everything you possibly can to make her feel welcome,” he warned.
“Please, Mother, do this for me.”
“I can only do so much,” she claimed, though with far less antagonism.
“Mother, we both know that your guests will take their cues from you. See that you send the right signals, or you can count me out for the rest of the holiday festivities.”
“You are an incredibly stubborn and willful young man,” she accused, but there wasn’t much heat behind the words.
“I learned from two masters,” he replied. “Tell Dad hello for me, okay?”
“Of course, though I don’t think I’ll mention how obstinate you’ve been.”
Tom laughed. “Of course you will. You won’t be able to resist. I love you, Mother.”
She sighed dramatically. “And I you,” she said. Despite her words, it was obvious that he’d put that love to the test. Something told him that as long as Jeanette was in his life, there were going to be a lot more tests. What he didn’t understand was why his mother had taken such a dislike to her. He knew in his gut that it went beyond that ridiculous incident at Chez Bella’s. And he also had this odd feeling that it wasn’t even about Jeanette personally, but about what she represented.
That’s where he got hung up. What could his relationship with Jeanette possibly have to do with his parents? Did they see her as some kind of threat to his relationship with them? That would only happen if they persisted in being antagonistic toward her.
Obviously if things with Jeanette progressed the way he hoped they would, then he was going to have to sit his mother and father down and work this out. He wanted them to appreciate her as he did. If they couldn’t, well, he didn’t want to think about what that might mean. He would wait and cross that road when he got to it.
Jeanette was finishing up a huge stack of paperwork in her office when she looked up to see a vaguely familiar man standing in the doorway. That he looked like an older version of Tom was even more of a shock. Even if she hadn’t seen him at a distance weeks ago, she would have recognized Tom’s father, though what he was doing here was beyond her.
“Mr. McDonald, what can I do for you?”
He seemed surprised that she’d guessed his identity.
“You know who I am?”
“You and your son look a lot alike. And we almost met on your first visit to Serenity. Would you like to come in and sit down? Or we could go out on the patio if you prefer.”
“Here will do,” he said, striding into the small office and making it feel even more cramped.
He perched on the edge of a chair across from her and regarded her with blatant curiosity. “I can see what my son sees in you,” he said eventually. “You have a certain elfin appeal.”
Jeanette had no idea how to take the comment, so she said nothing.
“You’re all wrong for him, you know.”
“A few weeks ago I would have said the same thing,”
she responded.
“Really?” He sounded startled by her candor.
“Our worlds are pretty far apart,” she continued. “But Tom’s almost convinced me that we can bridge the divide.”
He seized on her phrasing. “Almost?”
“He’s a pretty persuasive man.”
Her comment clearly distressed him. His gaze narrowed.
“What would it take for you to have a change of heart?”
he asked.
“Excuse me?” Surely she hadn’t heard him correctly, or at least he hadn’t meant what the question implied.
“My wife tells me you’ve lived in Paris, so you’re not just some little country girl who naively believes that love conquers all, am I right? You know how the world works.”
“I’d like to think so,” she said cautiously.
“Okay, then, what will it take for you to break things off with my son?”
“What will it take?” she echoed. “Are you actually offering me money to stop seeing Tom?”
“Money, a job in some other city, whatever it takes,” he confirmed. “My son has a brilliant future ahead of him, once he gets this crazy idea
about working for local govern
ment out of his head. To achieve his full potential, though, he needs the right woman by his side, someone with social stature.”
Jeanette had been so taken aback by the entire visit up until now that she hadn’t had time to get seriously offended, but Thomas McDonald was rapidly crossing a line. She stood up.
“I think you should go,” she told him.
“Not until we have a deal.”
“Then you’re going to be sitting here by yourself for a very long time,” she said. “I have no intention to listening to any more of this. It’s insulting not only to me, but to your son. It’s obvious to me that you don’t respect the kind, decent, hardworking man he is. He loves the work he’s doing and it’s important work.”
“He’s planning Christmas festivities,” he scoffed. “A man like Tom should be passing laws, making the world a better place, not worrying about the decorations on some ridiculous tree.”
“Because that’s the kind of thing you and your wife pay some lowly person to do for you, is that it?” Jeanette retorted. “I’ve heard all about the holiday spectacle that goes on at your home, so that must matter to someone. Your wife, maybe? Not that she would hang a single ornament herself, of course. That’s what the peons are for.”
“The point is—”
“The point is that you’re a snob, Mr. McDonald. And I won’t listen to another word you have to say about me or about your son. What goes on between Tom and me is none of your business.”
“You’re wrong,” he said heatedly. “I will not allow him to throw his life away on the likes of you.”
“You don’t even know me,” she said. “Now, get out.”
“I will tell my son how rude and disrespectful you’ve been,” he announced haughtily.
She smiled at that. “And I’ll tell him how insulting and offensive you’ve been. Which do you think will make him angrier?”
He looked surprised. “You’ve got spunk, I’ll give you that,” he said grudgingly.
“Something you should probably keep in mind,” she said.
“I told Clarisse this was a bad idea,” he muttered, looking defeated.
Discovering that his wife had been behind the visit was less of a shock than it should have been. Jeanette knew there was no love lost there. She just didn’t know what had triggered the woman to send her husband over here to try to buy her off.
“We’re agreed on that much,” Jeanette told him. “It was a lousy idea.”
His eyes sparked with a hint of respect. “Under other circumstances…” he began, but his voice trailed off.
“What?” she prodded.
“This bad blood between you and my wife, it runs deep,”
he said.
“Tell me something I don’t know. What I don’t entirely understand is why. Or what would make you come over here to try to pay me off to get out of Tom’s life. It’s not about what happened at Chez Bella, is it?”
Mr. McDonald shook his head. He seemed to be weighing the benefit of giving her a more complete answer, so Jeanette simply waited.
“You know that my son and I have been at odds over his future for a long time now,” he said eventually.
“He’s mentioned that,” she said.
“It’s not about me wanting to control him or even about me giving two hoots about social standing or anything like that.”
“But your wife obviously does,” Jeanette said. He gave her a rueful look. “You say that as dismissively as my son does. What neither of you understand is how important status is in certain circles. Clarisse came from money. Her family’s reputation was sterling, something I couldn’t say for my own. Oh, we’d had money, social stature and respectability at one time, but my father had pretty much squandered the money and our reputation by the time I was an adult. He made bad business decisions. He gambled. And he had affairs. A lot of men may do that, but they’re far more discreet about it than my father was. Everyone in Charleston knew. He humiliated my mother and left me and my brother to scramble to keep the family from losing everything.”
“That must have been hard,” Jeanette said quietly. She thought she was beginning to understand.
“You have no idea unless you’ve been there. Here I was a young man with good connections, but barely two cents to my name, when I met this amazing woman who could have married anyone. Clarisse’s parents knew the state of my family’s finances, to say nothing of all the stories about my father. They were adamant that there would be no wedding.”
His expression turned nostalgic. “Clarisse was formidable even back then. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She loved me and believed in me. She saw the future we could have even when I was far from certain about it. When her parents wouldn’t bend, we eloped. That’s how much faith she had in me.” He met Jeanette’s gaze. “So you can understand why I would do anything for her.”