Like you? his conscience sneered. The line between “good intentions” and “selfish bastard” had become amazingly blurred.
Jake tried to summon the mental picture of her and Giff at a kitchen table, surrounded by the undoubtedly cute kids they would have together. Instead, he imagined a tall, scuffed table in a dingy nightclub where Giff sat awkwardly, making a concerted effort to like a loud indie rock band while Brooke told herself that she didn’t mind not dancing, that there were more important qualifications in a potential mate.
“Jake? I know I just got through promising that I wouldn’t worry, but I take it back. You look troubled. Is something wrong?”
Other than the risk of my sabotaging your engagement? “Not at all.”
THE FLIGHT TO Chattanooga was far smoother than Brooke had imagined it would be.
The landing was not.
Brooke had been on roller coasters at the now defunct AstroWorld that had rattled her less. The older man who’d been seated with Jake and Brooke—Boom’s paying customer—had begun snoring five minutes after take off and hadn’t seemed at all disturbed by the screeching jolt of touchdown. Brooke had actually had to wake him up to announce their arrival.
Jake, darn his unflappable hide, looked as if he was trying not to laugh at her as helped her out of the plane. “You doin’ okay?”
“Fine, although I’ve realized…”
“What?”
She gave a quick toss of her head, feeling stupid. “Nothing. Just one of those old ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ things. It’s for the best that it never panned out.”
“Tell me you wanted to be an astronaut,” Jake said. “You’d be adorable in a NASA helmet.”
“Sorry if things got a little bumpy there at the end,” Boom told her. It looked as if he might even be a little red-faced about his landing job, but it was difficult to tell with his naturally ruddy complexion. “So, Jake, see you again Saturday afternoon?”
Jake nodded. “We’ll be here. Thanks for the lift, buddy.”
The two men shook hands, and then Boom smiled at Brooke. “It was especially nice to meet you, ma’am.”
She thanked him sincerely—landing aside, she’d just received a free flight. How often did that happen? And she’d truly enjoyed herself. Jake had given her a lot of information about what a typical day for a firefighter involved when he wasn’t fighting fires. For instance, last month, they’d done a practice burn at a house that had been sold to the city and was scheduled for demolition; it had been used as an all-day training activity. And while Brooke had known that firefighters routinely spoke to kids, she’d never really thought about the importance of a child seeing a fireman in his full gear, which could be intimidating.
“The thing with kids,” he’d told her, “is that when they get scared, they hide. In closets, under beds. The room is filled with dark smoke, which can be terrifying even to an adult, and then here comes this person in boots and heavy gloves with a tank on his back, breathing through a full face mask. The munchkins are thinking Darth Vader, not good guy.”
So the firemen would demonstrate what each piece of equipment was used for, then put it on so that at the conclusion of the presentation, students could actually walk up and interact with the suited-up fireman.
“Hopefully none of these children will ever be in a fire, but if they are, they’ll know not to hide from us, which increases the number of lives we can save. Another popular demonstration for the little guys is that we have a race to see which firefighter can get into his or her gear the fastest. I currently hold the station record,” he’d boasted.
If Meg had been on the plane, she would have made some bold inquiry about how fast Jake could get out of whatever he was wearing. Brooke, however, had more restraint. And a fiancé.
After they’d parted ways with Boom, she and Jake rented a car to get them around Chattanooga. He grinned at her while he unlocked the white sedan. “I’m not used to having someone along for the ride. It’s kind of nice.”
“Thanks. Let’s hope you still feel that way on Saturday. Sometimes you have a distinct ‘lone wolf’ vibe, and Kresley put you on the spot about taking me along.” Brooke frowned thoughtfully. “I think it must be hormone-related. She’s not usually an impulsive person.”
“Lone wolf, huh? Is that the polite term for antisocial?” Jake teased. “Trust me, I’m plenty used to having to share close quarters with others, and I get along with just about anyone if I need to.”
Brooke buckled her seat belt and turned to him expectantly. “So, what’s the plan from here?”
“Plan?” He sniffed with overacted derision. “You’re missing the point, Ms. Nichols. This isn’t an op or a three-alarm. We don’t have to follow any plans. We can do whatever we want or do nothing at all, eat dessert before dinner. Wear mismatched socks!”
She pursed her lips, well aware that he was picking on her but amused despite herself. Not that she planned to admit that. “Are you quite finished?”
“Probably not,” he said unrepentantly. “Expect random bouts of mockery.”
“You and Giff are so different.”
Jake slanted her a glance as he started the car. “Meaning he’s a gentleman who would never heckle a lady, whereas I’m a cad who doesn’t take anything seriously?”
“No. Well, yes,” she amended, returning some of the hell he’d been merrily giving her. “But it’s more than that. I know the two of you grew up together, which probably accounts for how close you are. Do you think if you’d met say, in high school or college that you would have become such friends?”
He was quiet for a long moment, his expression unexpectedly serious. “I don’t know. I hope so. He’s a hell of a guy, and probably a good influence on me. Without his family caring about me, I think I easily could have become an antisocial lone wolf. I was…angry a lot as a kid.”
From what he’d told her about his father’s drinking, he’d probably had good reason to be. “I’m glad the Bakers were there for you,” she said.
“Yeah. Me, too.” His tone was sincere, but the set of his jaw made the proclamation more grim than grateful.
Since Giff was the common denominator between them, it seemed paradoxical that bringing him up had turned a playful conversation tense. Brooke sat quietly in her seat, regretting the strain she’d inadvertently created and not wanting to say anything to make it worse.
As he turned out of the parking lot, Jake broke the silence, his tone casual. “I don’t usually go for touristy destinations—sometimes I just go camping somewhere or look for obscure places other people might not know about. But there’s actually a lot of popular stuff around Chattanooga I intend to see. The aquarium, the Ruby Falls cavern. Thought we’d drive toward the city, find a hotel and go from there. You have anything particular you want to do while we’re here?”
“Thanks for asking, but this is your getaway. I’m just here to document it.” If it had been her vacation, she would have preferred the security of knowing they had hotel rooms reserved, but Jake had scoffed that playing it by ear was part of the fun. She took a small tape recorder out of her purse. “You have any objection to being recorded? If I try to take notes in a moving vehicle, I won’t be able to read them later. My handwriting is atrocious as is.”
Jake did a double take, his head swiveling toward her for a moment before he looked back to the road. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Penmanship was the only bad grade I ever worried about getting in elementary school. With a lot of concentrated effort, I can now manage a decent cursive for a few lines, but I used to write stories when I was a kid. The ideas would come to me so fast, I’d dash everything down while it was fresh in my mind. The only people who could ever read it were my mom and me. Meg teased that it was why she never bothered trying to peek at my diary.” Brooke had figured the real reason Meg never bothered to steal a glance was because there was nothing in Brooke’s paltry entries that was half as exciting as Meg’s real life.
“Now you know my shameful secret, the dark truth people on my Christmas card list have only guessed at. I type and print a letter each year. All I handwrite is my name,” she admitted.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who dutifully recaps the year’s milestones and has all your cards in the mail right after Thanksgiving?”
“Guilty.”
He shot her a smug smile. “Well, when I get the card from you and Giff next December, I won’t be fooled.”
She thought ahead to Christmas, picturing a beautifully decorated tree, Giff carving the ham, Grace bringing presents wrapped in color-coordinated paper. Yuletide perfection. She smiled to herself, the positive image making her serene.
When she’d been younger—upset that her parents might actually be on the brink of divorce this time or embarrassed that her friends had seen Didi at the local grocery store in makeup and clothes better suited to her showgirl aspirations than the produce aisle—Brooke had retreated to her storybook world. Mothers there did not wear sequined tank tops to PTA meetings and dads yelled only at football teams, not hapless sous-chefs who left the kitchen in tears. The more Brooke visited that alternate reality, the clearer her daydreams had become. And now, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, they were all about to come true.
She was smiling to herself, thinking ahead to what she might get Giff for Christmas when Jake cleared his throat and jolted her back to the present.
“Did I lose you?” Jake asked.
“I…yeah, I guess. My mind wandered. Pretty unprofessional, huh? So, no problem being recorded then?”
“Nope. Fire away.”
“Okay. When you got back to the States and realized you wanted to start this road-tripping project, where was the first place you went?”
They chatted easily for the next fifteen minutes as he followed the signs directing them toward the heart of Chattanooga. Finally he interrupted to point out a sign for a franchise hotel.
“What do you think?”
It seemed like one of their better shots at reasonable pricing without being skeevy. “Sure.”
Moments later, they were parking in the hotel lot. He held the door for her as they entered the lobby.
The pretty redhead at the check-in counter gave Jake an appraising glance that Brooke tried not to notice. It wasn’t as if she had the right to be jealous. Still. For all the woman knew, Brooke and Jake were a couple, which made her overly flirtatious smile a tad annoying.
But the woman’s smile faded to an apologetic frown after Jake had asked if there were any rooms available.
“No, sorry. Ya’ll don’t have a reservation? With the big gospel competition this weekend, choirs are comin’ in from all over the country. We’re booked solid. Most places are gonna be,” she added.
Sure enough, Jake and Brooke heard that same prediction at the second and third hotels they tried.
The bald man at the front desk suggested, “You could always try Bob and Erma’s up the road.”
“Bob and Erma’s?” Brooke repeated. “Is that like a local, family-owned motel?”
“No, ma’am. Bob and Erma are empty nesters. All three of their boys went off on basketball scholarships, so they’ve got rooms to rent.”
Stay in a teenager’s bedroom while he was away at college? Brooke had a picture of herself sleeping in a room that smelled faintly of gym socks and had posters of bikini-clad models on the wall.
“Uh…thanks for the advice,” Jake said, already drawing Brooke toward the door as he added over his shoulder, “We’ll keep Bob and Erma in mind as a backup.”
Brooke smirked at him as he climbed into the car. “See, this is why some of us uptight folks like to plan ahead.”
Instead of acknowledging that she had a point, he chided, “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
She snorted. “As I believe I’ve mentioned, everyone else in my family had that part covered. I thought someone might want to give being sensible a shot. For a couple of years, I even tried to bring them around to my way of thinking, but it was like beating my head against a brick wall.”
He studied her for a long moment rather than turn the key in the ignition.
She began to feel self-conscious. “What?”
“Nothing, really. Just, I’ve been there myself. In fifth grade, sixth grade, maybe even as late as seventh, I tried everything I could think of to get my dad to sober up. I ran away once and left a note that I’d be back when he’d gone twenty-four hours without drinking.”
Brooke’s breath caught. “What happened?”
“He was passed out and never even saw the note. The Bakers made me call my mom, so that she at least knew where I was and that I was safe, and she talked me into coming home. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I think she might have been afraid of what my father would do if he got angry enough.”
Brooke’s heart broke for that long-ago boy; no kid should feel burdened with such adult responsibility.
“You can’t help an addict who won’t help themselves,” Jake concluded. “I gave up on him. By the time I was in eighth grade, I’d redirected my efforts from trying to change my dad to trying to get my mother to leave him. She and I could have had a chance at a happy, normal life.”
Did he realize that even now, so many years later, he sounded wistful?
Jake shook his head. “But she was as stubborn as the old man, a brick wall in her own passive way. Kept insisting that the man she’d married, the man he’d been before he was shot, was still in there and that she couldn’t leave him after all he’d endured. Even if he has stopped drinking now,” Jake allowed, his tone heavy with doubt, “I can’t imagine that all the years she stayed were worth it.”
Brooke hesitated. “I noticed that they were on Grace’s guest list for the party.” They hadn’t been invited to the wedding itself simply because it would be so small, mostly family with a few exceptions like Jake and Kresley.
“I know. Mom’s out of town, and Dad decided not to come without her.”
“When she gets back into town, are you planning on seeing them?” Brooke didn’t know the McBrides, didn’t particularly care about them one way or the other, but she cared about Jake. A lot. His past had clearly left a mark on him, but if his dad was clean and sober now, maybe Jake’s visiting home would be healing. Or at least present an opportunity for closure.
Jake narrowed his eyes at her. “Did Grace put you up to this? She’s been after me in both direct and sneaky ways to spend time with them.”
“No!” Brooke was insulted by the suggestion. “She didn’t ‘put me up’ to anything. I just thought that it might be good for you to—”
Through gritted teeth, he made a sound of frustration. “I would think that you, of all people, would understand my position. Doesn’t there come a time when you stop the insanity of trying to alter who people are and just take a step back? Live and let live?”
Brooke bit her bottom lip. To some extent, hadn’t she tried to distance herself—emotionally as well as physically—from her family when she left for college and when she accepted Giff’s proposal? Was she trying to replace her flawed family with the one she and Giff would build together? The glossy, socially polished fantasy version. The thought wasn’t as soothing as it had been an hour earlier; instead, it made her feel vaguely ashamed.
She was quiet as Jake drove. They backtracked a few miles, going farther away from downtown Chattanooga and its most popular sites. They got lucky at a hotel off the interstate that was undergoing renovations.
“Several floors are under construction,” the manager told them, “so we couldn’t offer a big block of rooms to the people coming for the choir competition. And I have to warn you, it can get a little noisy with the power tools and whatnot during the day.”
Brooke weighed the possibility of hammering and drills against the option of staying with Bob and Erma, and exch
anged glances with Jake.
“We’ll take it,” he said as she nodded in vehement agreement. “Them, I should have said. You do have two rooms available?”
“Yes, sir. I can give you adjoining rooms on the second floor.”
“Sounds perfect.” Jake glanced behind the man at a stand of brochures about the local attractions. “And can we have a couple of those, too?”
Brooke pressed a hand to her chest, widening her eyes. “Surely you aren’t going to stoop to looking at information about prices and operating hours and directions? That sounds dangerously like planning ahead.”
He grinned at her. “Maybe just this once.”
Chapter Twelve
Jake couldn’t get comfortable. He was fidgety in the too-hot hotel room and wondered if Brooke noticed that this was the third time he’d lowered the air-conditioning. As he walked away from the thermostat and back to the upholstered chair, his conscience picked a fight with him. It’s only seventy-two degrees in here, and you’ve withstood blazing infernos and time in the desert. Your problem is not the temperature.
Then a small devil appeared on Jake’s shoulder and looked pointedly at the king-size bed that dominated most of the room.
I’m ignoring you, Jake informed both his scruples and his baser instincts. He was certainly not going to make a move on his best friend’s girl. And since it was a nonissue, he had nothing to feel guilty about, either. So, begone.
Brooke, thank heavens, was occupied reading a brochure at the desk on the other side of the small room and didn’t seem to realize that her traveling companion had lost his flipping mind.
She took her planning very seriously. After she’d knocked on the door connecting their rooms, she’d suggested that since they only had one full day here—tomorrow—they rate the local sites in terms of priority.
The Best Man in Texas Page 10
