Chapter Two
Despite the fantastic before-sleep sex, a full six hours of rest, and the general pleasantness of his usual morning routine with Patrick, Will walks into Brown Gargle with a headache growing behind his eyes.
His usually comfortable button-up blue shirt feels itchy, and his new leather loafers are a pinch too tight. His chest is tight too.
Despite plenty of interactions over the last few years, Will knows his mom has never really grown accustomed to Patrick’s gruff side. And, despite explaining to her that Patrick is on the autism spectrum and doesn’t always understand the nuances of social interactions, she doesn’t seem to get it. Always declaring that ‘excuses like that’ only go so far.
Never mind that his mom’s own behavior leaves a lot to be desired socially, in Will’s opinion. But she’ll never see herself the way he does, and Will can’t begin to explain it to her without another relationship tsunami rising between them. So he just has to grin and bear it. Again.
He smooths his hands through his hair and takes a calming breath.
Whatever she has to say to him, it’ll be fine. Patrick will be waiting for him this evening at home and, no matter what level of crazy his mother brings, they will be fine.
He just wishes his headache agreed with him.
Will checks his monitor and gets a good BG reading. So it’s probably not a glucose spike and his pump is most likely working fine. It’s just stress and that won’t end until he’s out of his mother’s clutches for the day.
Jax Taken Alive is behind the counter looking a bit tired and grim. His dark hair is growing out in a hip, rock-star-esque shag these days, but there’s a tension to his expression that isn’t usually there. The morning doesn’t seem to be agreeing with him either. That or he and Jenny are arguing again.
“Hey, man,” Will says, pulling out his wallet to pay for the Buckaroo-sized coffee that Jax is already pouring. “Can I get a jelly donut too?”
“Sure. Patrick coming or are you alone?” Jax asks, indicating the cups he uses to make Patrick’s usual Calamalatte Jane.
“Just me.” Will smiles and stuffs a five in the tip jar. “You okay? You look—” he waves a hand over his own face and says nothing.
“The usual.” Jax shrugs, getting the jelly donut from the display case and shoving it into a small takeout bag without asking Will if he’s staying or going. “She’ll either get over the age difference or she won’t.”
“Yeah,” Will agrees, taking the bag and the to-go cup without protest. “It’s not like you can do anything about it.”
And it’s been over two years. Will doesn’t understand why Jenny won’t just move on from either the problem or from Jax. One way or the other, she needs to choose. It’s cruel to keep torturing Jax this way.
Jax leans forward. “I’m aiming to do something about it.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I haven’t told many people, so keep this to yourself, but I’m working out a deal with Old Man Hart to buy him out of this place.”
“Wow, so he’s looking to leave the business?”
“He wants to retire to Cali to be near his grandkids. But I want to convince Jenny to marry me. Buying him out seems like a good first step toward showing her I’m not a kid.”
“You’re older than me. What makes her think you’re a kid?”
Jax raises a dark brow. “You run a massive charitable foundation. I’m a barista.”
“You aren’t just a barista. You manage this place. Old Man Hart’s never here. You keep it going.”
He shrugs. “In Jenny’s eyes, I’m still the kid barista she somehow fell into screwing and can’t seem to stop. She won’t even tell me she loves me.”
“What?” That seems absurd. Jenny was instrumental in getting Patrick to accept and declare his feelings for Will, and she’d wanted to beat up Will when he’d failed to declare his own in a way that prevented Patrick’s heart from being temporarily broken.
Now it turns out she’s a withholding jerk about her own heart? Will wonders what Patrick has to say about that.
Jax shrugs. “Baggage. From Tom.”
“The only thing Tom was good for was making Dylan,” Will says, sipping his coffee, and glancing around to see if his mom is already somewhere in the shop waiting impatiently to needle him with guilt. “Jenny’s better off without that guy in every other way. It’s good that he left.”
Jax’s dark eyebrows draw lower. “He’s been calling her again.”
“No way.”
“Wants to see Dylan.”
“Wow.” Dylan is three now, and Tom hasn’t been interested before. “What’s she going to do?”
The bell rings on the door behind him and Jax steps back from the counter when he sees who it is. “You’ll have to ask Jenny. Meantime, I think your coffee date is here. I’ll get her Americano West prepared and bring it on over.”
“William Patterson.” His mother’s voice is scolding and full of pain all at once.
Will sighs and turns around, his head throbbing again. “Mom. Hey, did you sleep okay?”
“I most certainly did not.” She turns up her pretty nose and sniffs. The purple silk of her clingy summer dress shows off her cleavage and hips nicely. Her makeup is flatteringly done, and her long blond hair flips under at the ends. The cowboy boots are the only giveaway that she works every day at a tack shop and is an excellent horsewoman.
“I’m sorry you didn’t sleep well. I thought I did, but I guess not, since I’ve got a rotten headache this morning.”
“Have you checked your BG?” she asks, her eyes widening in concern.
“Of course. It’s fine. I’m fine.” He smiles and takes hold of her elbow. “C’mon. Let’s find a seat. Jax saw you come in and he’ll have your usual right over.”
“And I’d like a Honeybear Bar too,” she calls over her shoulder as Will steers her toward a private table near the front.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jax answers with a nod, but without the handsome, flirty grin he usually shoots at pretty customers.
Will makes a mental note to follow up with him about Jenny later or poke at Patrick to see what he knows. The fact that Tom is back in the picture is a complication Jax doesn’t need. Will feels for the guy, but Jenny is Patrick’s best friend, and if things ever truly fall apart, he knows which side he’ll have to take to keep the peace in his own life.
Not that Patrick won’t tell Jenny all the ways she’s being an asshole if he doesn’t think she’s being fair. But, in the end, Patrick and Jenny are a forever thing, even if Jax and Jenny aren’t. Will knows it. Jax knows it. The whole world knows it. Heck, even Kimberly probably knows it.
Speaking of, his mother is busy powdering her nose and looking offended. He’ll have to break the ice.
“So, you’re worried about Caitlin going off to college, huh?” He’s going to stop by the house after work so he can say goodbye to his sister and make sure Caitlin knows he’s there for her anytime for anything.
“You didn’t think it was important last night, why do you want to talk about it now?” She blinks at him angrily, which is a thing he’s never known a person can do until now.
Stalling, he takes a bite of jelly donut and chews slowly.
She eyes him for a long moment and then finally says, “It’s still unnerving to watch you eat without giving yourself a shot first.”
Will smiles and wipes his fingers on a napkin. “For me too, but it’s been a good switch.”
Sometimes he wishes he’d kept on giving himself insulin injections despite Patrick’s urging to try out the newest sensor and pump advertised as the world’s first “artificial pancreas.” Even though there haven’t been any malfunctions, Will can’t stop the occasional paranoia, especially after semi-rough sex or going out riding, that the sensor may have dislodged and his monitor might not be getting the right readings to dispense insulin.
But Patrick is fastidious about checking the sensor and infusion sites, morning and night, and there’s never been an incident. So Will continues on with the pump. It’s freeing in a lot of ways—he can travel more easily and eat without the whole test, calc, stick routine. More importantly, he’s gone nine months without an A1C higher than six, which means better overall health in the long run.
Patrick loves that he can check the readings on his phone and gets alerts to any big dip or rise in Will’s blood sugar. Still, Will misses the sense of control shots always afforded him and the comfort of knowing exactly how much insulin is going into his body at any point in time.
He tries again. “About Caitlin.”
“What about her?”
“Mom.”
Kimberly tucks her hair behind her ears and snarls, “He said I was inane.”
She isn’t using Patrick’s name, so that mean’s she’s still angry. At least she isn’t calling him ‘that doctor’ or ‘that man’ the way she did when they were first married.
“No, Patrick said your crisis was inane.”
She narrows her eyes. “You always defend him. I’m your mother. You could defend me for once.”
“It was late. He was tired and he had an important surgery early this morning.” One Patrick’s been anxious to have behind him so he can go on their honeymoon trip with a clear conscience. “Honestly, the conversation could wait. It did wait. The world hasn’t ended yet.”
She lifts one carefully sculpted brow. “More defense of his behavior and more patronizing of me and my concerns.”
Guilt slithers through Will’s gut. Has he dismissed her unfairly? Caitlin is going very far away, and while the two of them have been on precarious terms for years now, Kimberly will certainly be feeling the pangs any mother does when her offspring grows up and leaves the nest.
Jax drops off Kimberly’s order and she presses a twenty into his hand. “Keep the change, sweetheart,” she says with a smile that raises the hackles on the back of Will’s neck.
“He’s Jenny Burger’s boyfriend,” Will says warningly when Jax walks away.
“He’s not her husband.”
Will takes a deep breath. Jax is a big boy and can fend off any advances Kimberly makes. Probably. It’s just annoying to see his mother already turning to her usual way of dealing with emotions she doesn’t want to feel: beginning an inappropriate love affair with whatever handsome man catches her eye.
“Mom, I have to get to work before long. Can we please talk about Caitlin now?”
Kimberly’s eyes leave Jax’s tight ass and focus on Will again. “Why couldn’t she have gone to the University of South Dakota like you did? Vermillion is too far away to be of much use to me, but at least she could have come home quickly enough if there was an emergency.”
“Because she’s had her heart set on the fashion merchandising program at Colorado State for the last year and a half. That’s what she’s been working for, why she broke things off with Scott Tate and got so focused in school. She’s figured out what she wants, and she’s not going to let anything get in the way of having it. You should be proud of her. I am.”
“She never could have gone if you hadn’t paid for it,” Kimberly says somewhat accusingly.
“Like Nonna wouldn’t have paid if I hadn’t?” Caitlin isn’t his Nonna’s granddaughter by blood, but she loves her just the same.
“Because she’s your sister and Eleanora knows you adore Caitlin.”
For a lot of years, ‘adore’ might have been overstating it. Caitlin was a pill throughout her puberty and adolescence, but she’s coming out the other side now. In fact, sometimes Will can see the woman she’s going to be and that vision makes his heart sing.
“You’ve always been her favorite grandchild. She ignores all her others.”
Will sighs. Clearly he’s not going to win with his mother today. Not at anything. So he eats more of his donut and sips his coffee, grateful that his headache seems to be diminishing. Sometimes the anticipation of interacting with his mother is worse than the real thing. And sometimes it’s not.
Kimberly sips her coffee and then says primly, “I didn’t appreciate Patrick dismissing me so callously last night.”
“He’s Patrick, Mom.”
“He’s an intelligent man who can be charming when he wants to be—obviously since he’s managed to win you over heart and soul—but he never bothers extending that charm to me.”
Charming isn’t quite the right word for Patrick ever, but Will doesn’t see the point of arguing it. People who like Patrick—and people Patrick likes back—are fine with him the way he is, the way he always is, because Patrick doesn’t change. It’s one of Will’s favorite things about him.
“We’ve had this conversation before and it never goes well.” Will smiles tensely. “Can we focus on Caitlin? You seemed to think her leaving constituted a national crisis last night.”
“Be a smart mouth if you want, but it is a real crisis, Will. Especially with you and Patrick leaving soon for your ridiculously self-indulgent holiday.”
“You realize you’re talking about our honeymoon?”
“It’s not a honeymoon, baby,” she says with a frosty dollop of condescending scolding. “You’ve been married for well over two years.” She sips her coffee and rolls her eyes.
“Exactly. We’ve put it off long enough.”
Kimberly slips her fingers through her blond hair. “This honeymoon doesn’t help your sister get to her soccer games or piano lessons, and it doesn’t help Connor get from school out to the farm, and it doesn’t help me with—”
“Mom, I get it. You’re put out by me and Caitlin not being at your beck and call.” He reaches out to take her hand, squeezing her cool fingers gently. “But I believe in you. You can do this without us.”
She jerks her hand back. “Don’t be condescending to your mother.”
Will ignores that and goes on calmly, “Besides, Patrick and I will only be gone ten days. When we get back, we’ll host the kids for a week.”
He frowns. Why did he offer to do that? He isn’t doing anything wrong by taking a honeymoon with his husband, and yet his mother makes him feel like he hasn’t earned it, and, worse, needs to make up for it. Not that Patrick will mind Olivia and Connor staying at the house for a while, but he’ll definitely have something to say about how Will came to agree to the whole thing.
He sighs. Can he ever escape his instinctive reactions to his mother’s machinations?
“That will be helpful.” Kimberly brightens a bit. “In the meantime, though, I’m not quite sure what I should do with them. Someone has to run the tack store. Since Jason quit, I haven’t had any good help.”
Will clenches his jaw. Jason Kirkpatrick had been his mother’s last on-and-off boyfriend. He’d finally decided to be done with Kimberly for good after Tony Molinaro, Will’s father, breezed through town to tumble Kimberly in numerous and various ways, and in way-too-public places.
When Jason got word that Kimberly had cheated for the third—fourth?—time, he quit both his job as the manager of the tack shop and the town altogether, moving to Idaho to take a ranch hand position.
Will never liked Jason that much, but he hates what his mother does to men. “There were good reasons he quit, you realize.”
She waves him off. “I’m in no mood for one of your lectures about addiction and your father and me.”
“It’s not like I don’t know about addiction, Mom.”
“And how is that going? How many months sober now?”
Will flinches. She knows it’s been since the night he and Patrick got married (the first time). He’s not going to indulge her waspish question with an answer. “Anyway, about the tack shop. I’m sure you could find some good help if you advertised on the rez.”
She shrugs and sips her coffee again. “Perhaps. That won’t solve my problems entirely, not when Caitlin is gone and you’re in…” Her eyes glint curiously. “Where is it you’re going on this honeymoon?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Right. A secret from your own mother.”
It’s a secret from him actually. Patrick’s planned the whole thing, probably with Jenny’s help, and Will doesn’t know their destination. He hopes it’s somewhere warm, but, otherwise, he’s excited to see what Patrick’s idea of a honeymoon looks like.
“Mom, we’ll be gone ten days. You’ll manage. Reba will help you and I’m sure you can get Kevin to do a bit more. I know he got a housekeeper after Grandma Betty…” he trails off.
He doesn’t like to mention his grandmother’s death to Kimberly. It sets off a whole other string of woe about how she’s been left alone, an orphan in the world, with only her brother and four ungrateful children to care for her now.
“You make it sound so easy, but you have no idea how Caitlin’s leaving is going to disrupt the fabric of our lives.”
“And you’ve known she’s going to Colorado for how long? You’ve had plenty of time to make arrangements. Hire a nanny. If the expense is too much, then I’ll help out. It’s not a problem.”
“A nanny! You’re willing to fob off your siblings on a stranger?”
Will rubs his face and his phone vibrates in his pocket. He glances down to see that his BG is going high and that his pump is dispensing extra insulin.
“Who’s texting?” Kimberly asks.
“It’s nothing. No one.” He slides the phone back in his pocket. “We live in Healing, Mom. There are no strangers here. Hire a nanny. Just for a few months. If we don’t like her, we’ll let her go.”
She glares at him a long moment. “We’d need to have a thorough background check done and—”
Will smiles. “I’ll put Nonna on it. You’ll have someone before Patrick and I leave town. I promise.”
Kimberly relaxes like a child who’s finally gotten her way and eats her donut happily.
Crisis averted.
Will doesn’t feel like eating more and simply sips his coffee, chatting with her about the recent delivery of two new horses at the farm. He knows Kevin’s working on breaking the stallion.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” Will asks.
“I need to get to the store,” his mother says, glancing at her phone. “And then I have to go out to the farm to consult with Kevin about those new horses. What’s on your agenda?”
“Good Works this morning and then I have an appointment.” He doesn’t say it’s with Caitlin at the house, because he knows their mother will “drop by” to join them if he does.
“Well, don’t forget to make time to say goodbye to your sister. She sounds like she never intends to come home.” Kimberly’s eyes grow wet but she stands up with a determined expression, kissing Will’s cheek. “Have a good day, baby. Give Patrick my love.”
Will watches her go, confused as always by her about-face on Patrick, and gathers his things. Waving to Jax, he heads out into the warm late-August morning.