The Blessing Read online

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “I guess you think the rest of my life is easy.”

  “You haven’t met this kid, and you haven’t seen how attached Amy is to him.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing. I can handle anything you throw at me. I’ll take care of the brat for one week, and if you don’t win this woman in that time, then you don’t deserve her.”

  Instead of gushing with gratitude, as Jason thought he would, David looked down at his beer again.

  “Now what is it?” Jason snapped. “A week isn’t enough time?” His mind was racing. How many Little League games could a man attend without going insane? Thank God for cell phones so he could work while sitting on the bleachers. And if he got into a jam, he could always call Parker. She was capable of handling anything at any time, anywhere.

  “I want your sacred promise.”

  At that, Jason’s face grew red. “Do you think I go back on my word?”

  “You’ll turn the job over to someone else.”

  “Like hell I will!” Jason sputtered, but had to look down so his brother couldn’t see his eyes. If the men he dealt with in New York knew him as well as his brother did, he’d never close a deal. “I’ll take care of the kid for one week,” he said more calmly. “I’ll do all the things that kids like. I’ll even give him the keys to my car.”

  “You flew; you don’t have a car, remember?”

  “Then I’ll buy a car and give him the damn thing, all right?” David was making him feel decidedly incompetent. “Look, let’s get this show on the road. The sooner I get this done with, the sooner I can get out of here. When do I meet this paragon of loveliness?”

  “Sacred promise,” David said, his eyes serious but his voice sounding as if he were once again four years old and demanding that his big brother promise that he wouldn’t leave him.

  Jason gave a great sigh. “Sacred promise,” he murmured, then couldn’t help looking around to see if anyone in the bar had heard him. In a mere thirty minutes he had gone from being a business tycoon to a dirty-faced little boy declaring blood oaths. “Did I ever tell you that I hate Christmas?”

  “How can you hate something that you have never participated in?” David asked with a cocky grin. “Come on, let’s go. Maybe we’ll be lucky and the kid will be asleep.”

  “Might I point out to you that it is two o’clock in the morning? I don’t think your little angel will appreciate our dropping in.”

  “Tell you what, we’ll go by her house and if all the lights are out, we’ll go past. But if the lights are on, then we’ll know she’s up and we’ll stop in for a visit. Agreed?”

  Jason nodded as he drained the last of his whiskey, but he didn’t like what he was thinking. What kind of woman would marry a man like Billy Thompkins? And what kind of woman stayed up all night? A fellow drunk seemed to be the only answer.

  As they left the bar and headed toward the sedan where Jason’s driver waited, Jason began to make up his own mind about this woman who had enticed his brother into wanting to marry her. The facts against her were accumulating fast: a drunken husband, an incorrigible child, a nocturnal lifestyle.

  Inside the car, Jason looked across at his younger brother and vowed to protect him from this hussy, and as they rode toward the outskirts of town, he began to form a picture of her. He could see her bleached hair, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Was she older than David? He was so young, so innocent. He’d rarely left Abernathy in his life and knew nothing of the world. It would be easy for some sharp-witted huckster to take advantage of him.

  Turning, he looked at his brother solemnly. “Sacred promise,” he said softly, and David grinned at him. Jason turned away. For all that his brother was often a pain in the neck, he had the power to make Jason feel as if he was worth what his accountant said he was.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE OLD SALMA PLACE WAS WORSE THAN HE REMEMBERED it. It couldn’t have had a coat of paint in at least fifteen years, and the porch was falling down on one side. And from what he could see by the moonlight, he didn’t think the roof was going to keep anyone dry.

  “See, I told you,” David said eagerly, seemingly oblivious to the house’s decrepitude. “The lights are all on. That kid never sleeps; he keeps his mother up all night.”

  Jason glanced at his brother and thought that the sooner he got him away from this harpy, the better.

  “Come on,” David said, already out of the car and halfway up the broken sidewalk that led to a fence that had half collapsed. “Are you afraid of this? If you are—”

  “If I am, you’ll double dare me, right?” Jason said, one eyebrow raised.

  David grinned, his teeth white in the moonlight; then he half ran up the porch steps toward the front door. “Don’t step on that, it—Oh, sorry, did you hurt yourself? The house needs some work.”

  Rubbing his head where a board from the porch had smacked him, Jason gave a grimace to his brother. “Yeah, like Frankenstein needed some fine tuning.”

  But David didn’t seem to hear his brother as he eagerly rapped on the door, and within seconds it was opened by a young woman. . . . And Jason’s mouth fell open in disbelief, for this woman was not what he had been expecting.

  Amy was not a Siren luring men to her; she wasn’t going to inspire sonnets written to her beauty. Nor was she going to have to worry about men falling at her feet in lust. She had long dark hair, which looked to be in need of a washing, pulled back at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup, and her pale ivory skin had a few off-white-ish spots on her chin. Her dark eyes were huge, seeming to almost swallow her oval face; they certainly overshadowed her tiny mouth. As for her body, she was short and fragile-looking, and from the way her bones protruded from her clothes, she needed a good meal. The only thing of substance about her were her breasts, which were huge—and were marked by two large wet circles.

  “Damnation!” she said as she looked down at herself; then she scurried back into the house. “Come in, David, make yourself at home. Max is—thank you God—asleep for the moment. I’d give you some gin, but I don’t have any, so you might as well help yourself to the fifty-year-old brandy, which I don’t have any of either.”

  “Thanks,” David said brightly. “In that case I think I’ll have champagne.”

  “Pour me a bucket full of it too,” came the answer from a darkened doorway.

  David looked at Jason as though to say, Isn’t she the wittiest person you ever met?

  But Jason was looking around the room. It had been a long time since he’d left what David referred to as his “house in the clouds.” “You live so much in private jets and private hotels and private whatevers that you’ve forgotten what the rest of the world is like,” he’d said too often. So now, Jason looked about the room in distaste. Shabby was the word that came first to his mind. Everything looked as though it had come from the Goodwill: nothing matched, nothing suited anything else. There was an ugly old couch upholstered in worn brown fabric, a hideous old chair covered in what looked to be a print of sunflowers and banana leaves. The coffee table was one of those huge, cast off wooden spools that someone had painted a strange shade of fuchsia.

  The nicest thing Jason could think about it was that it looked like a place where Billy Thompkins would live.

  David punched his brother in the ribs and nodded toward the doorway. “Stop sneering,” he said under his breath; then both men looked up as Amy reentered the room.

  She emerged from the bedroom wearing a dry, wrinkled shirt, and most of the spots on her chin were gone. When she saw Jason glance at her, she gave another swipe, removed the remaining spots, then gave a half smile and said, “Baby rice. If he got as much in him as I get on me, he’d be one fat little hog.”

  “This is my cousin Jason,” David was saying. “You know, the one I was telling you about. He’d be really grateful if you’d let him stay with you until his heart mends.”

  This statement so stunned Jason that all he could