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Laughter spread around the table. There hadn’t been much levity among them lately. Asher liked the sound of it.
Genevieve held up both hands to restore some semblance of the order she preferred at family dinners.
“Can we let Asher get something to eat so he can make it to the hospital before visiting hours are over?”
“That’s right,” Ainsley said as she lifted the still half-filled tray of Dulcie’s award-winning fried chicken. “I’d forgotten it was his turn.”
Ainsley handed the platter to Callum’s fiancée, Hazel, who then passed it to Callum. With the help of her future stepdad, little Evie was the next to pass the plate.
Finally, it landed in Asher’s hands. The sides of mashed potatoes, green beans and country corn bread that followed were all colder than the cook preferred to serve them, but he’d been late, after all.
“So, Asher, what kept you?” Ainsley asked too casually. “Was there a problem at your new day-care center? What’s it called? Tender Years?”
Asher swallowed a bite of chicken and his annoyance and then wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Good memory. But, everything’s great there. Harper’s loving it.”
He caught his older sister’s attention and frowned at her. Sure, he hadn’t gotten around to telling the whole family yet about the possible second baby switch, but he didn’t plan to unload all the information on them at dinner. Particularly not Mom.
With as much as she’d had to deal with lately, he owed it to her to deliver the news gently that her first grandchild might not be related to her. Maybe he would even wait until the DNA results arrived so that he could offer the question and the answer at the same time.
He hoped Ainsley would stop trying to push him into sharing before he was ready, but he doubted he would get that lucky. An attorney to the core, she was used to winning every argument.
His stomach sank as she folded her hands on the table in front of her and smiled benignly.
“I had the chance to meet the owner of Tender Years the other night when Asher brought her to the hospital.” She grinned at Asher. “Well, meet her again, I guess. I went to high school for a little while with Willow Johnson. Oh. Right. It’s Willow Merrill now, but she wasn’t wearing a ring.”
He frowned at his sister again. It was a good reminder that he should never get on her bad side. He either had to tell them the whole story right then or let them wonder about a romance between him and Willow. Coward that he was, he chose silence...and speculation.
Grayson leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “I think I remember a Willow from school. She was the class behind me. Dark, curly hair, right? Real pretty?”
“How pretty?”
At her question, Savannah Oliver, Grayson’s brand-new fiancée, leaned forward from her seat beside his and lifted a brow.
Asher straightened in his chair, as well. He knew it was an observation from a long time ago, but it still didn’t sit well with him that his half brother had been checking out his friend. Was that what he should call the woman he hadn’t stopped thinking about since they’d made out in his truck the week before?
He tried to be casual, sliding his fork into his chicken breast and pulling off a chunk, but his brother wasn’t paying attention to him, anyway. Ainsley, on the other hand, was watching him with open curiosity.
Grayson reached for Savannah’s hand and laced their fingers together. “For me, no one comes close to you.”
Rafe pulled an imaginary weapon from a pretend holster and aimed it at his brother. “Hands up. It’s the mushy police.”
“Oh, you would have said something just as lovey-dovey to Kerry if she weren’t working long hours at the police department lately,” Marlowe pointed out.
“You would, too, if Bowie wasn’t out to dinner with a client,” Rafe said.
Marlowe shrugged, not denying it. “Anyway, didn’t your fiancée tell you it’s not safe to point weapons at people, even if they aren’t loaded?”
Again, laughter spread around the table as several of her siblings agreed that they both would have been as syrupy as Grayson if their future spouses were there.
Asher expected his mother to hush them again. Instead, she pinned him with her incisive stare.
“You brought a woman to the hospital?”
She’d been more protective of their father the past few months than even their brothers and sisters. He took a closer look at her, taking in the blue-black half circles of exhaustion that had formed beneath her eyes. The strain was getting to her. She was already dealing with so much that he couldn’t bring himself to give her one more thing to worry about.
“Willow, uh, just came along as a favor to me. I needed to finish with the day-care center paperwork, but if I didn’t get to the hospital right away, I was going to miss visiting hours.”
“That was kind of her.”
