A Bravo Homecoming (14 page)

Her mother, so tiny and delicate in a pink suit and ruffled lilac-colored blouse, stared up at him, wet-eyed. “Well, I am so pleased to meet you, too, Travis. I can’t tell you
how
pleased…”

Paco and one of the other hands were there, ready to help.

Travis said, “Paco and Bobby will take your bags inside.”

“Oh!” Her mother gave him a trembling smile of over-the-top gratitude. “Thank you so much, Travis. Yes.”

And then Ted appeared, smoking a cigarette, bearing down on them from the driveway that led to the garage and the space beside it where he had parked the Winnebago. Keisha waddled along in his wake.

Sam’s mother watched them approach, a look of absolute horror on her fine-boned face. “I see your father has already arrived,” she said weakly. “And he still hasn’t stopped smoking.” Was she going to faint, right there in the driveway? She’d damn well better not.

“That’s right,” Travis said cheerfully, as if everyone’s mother got the vapors like some anemic heroine from a Victorian novel—as if everyone’s dad had a pregnant girlfriend less than half his age. “He and Keisha got here yesterday.”

“Ah. Yes,” Jennifer said feebly. “Keisha. Of course.”

The twins snickered and whispered to each other as their mother kind of sagged against Walt, who put his arm around her and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

Ted descended on them. He dropped his cigarette and stomped it with his big boot. “Well, if it isn’t Jennifer and Walt and their two gorgeous girls.”

Keisha was right behind him, her hand under her belly to stop it from bouncing as she hurried to keep up with Ted’s giant strides. “Hello! I’m Keisha! So amazing to meet you at last!”

Inside, Sam introduced her mom and Walt and the twins to Aleta and Davis.

Travis’s parents were great. They shook hands and smiled sincerely and said all the right things. Then Sam led the Carlsons up to their rooms.

The twins went straight into their room and shut the door. Which was fine with Sam. Great, actually.

She wasn’t so lucky when it came to her mom.

Jennifer wanted to talk. She shooed Walt from the room and took Sam’s big hand in her tiny little pink one. “Samantha, sit with me.” There were a pair of ladder-back chairs by the window. Her mom led her over there and they sat. Sam couldn’t help recalling how Aleta had done more or less the same thing, that first day Sam arrived at the ranch with Travis. But somehow, when Aleta did it, Sam had felt flattered and only too happy to chat. With her mom, she dreaded what might happen next. “Now,” said Jennifer. “Tell me everything.”

Everything. Right. “Gee, Mom. That would take a while.”

It was, of course, totally the wrong thing to say. Her mom’s pretty face crumpled and her eyes filled with tears. “I only…I just thought we might…touch base a little. Is that so much to ask?”

It wasn’t. Sam knew it wasn’t. “Of course not. What did you want to know?”

Her mother pressed her lips together, put on a smile and tried again. “Well, I mean, look at you. You’re
gorgeous.
”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“How…well, I always knew you had good bones. That you could be attractive if you’d only try. And now you’re…I have no words. I’m just stunned.”

“It’s a long story.”

“And I would love to hear every detail.”

Sam had to admit that her mom was being kind of sweet really. That she was only trying to be appreciative and supportive. So Sam gave her an abridged version of the makeover, leaving out the part about how it had all started because Travis needed a fake fiancée. Sam said that she had wanted to make a change and getting professional help seemed like the best way.

When she was done, her mom clapped her little hands. “Oh, that is wonderful, Samantha. I’m so proud of you.” Jennifer. Proud of her. That was a first.

Sam basked in the moment. “Well, thanks, Mom.”

“And let me guess the rest. Your old friend Travis took one look at the new you and realized how blind he’d been.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“And now, here you are, getting married to your own personal prince charming.”

That made her smile. “He is a prince, isn’t he?”

“I know you must be so happy at last, to be in love with a wonderful man and to know that he loves you back.”

“I am happy. Very much so.”
Not that I wasn’t before.

“And if you had only listened to me, this could have happened years ago.”

Bam. The sucker punch. As always.
Sam kept her cool, even though her stomach had tied itself in about a hundred little knots. “Well, I didn’t listen to you. And it didn’t happen until now. And I’m more than happy with the way things have turned out.”

Her mother shook her pretty blond head. “Oh, Samantha. Always so proud.”

“I’m only saying that it all worked out. Can we leave it at that?”

“Of course,” said her mother. She meant,
of course not.
“I just…well, I don’t have to tell you. I mean, what can your father be
thinking?
”

It was pretty much what Sam had said to Travis the night before. But somehow, when her mom said it, it sounded snotty and mean-spirited. “Leave it alone, Mom.”

“Yes, well. I suppose I should.”

“Please.”

“It’s a terrible embarrassment. In front of Travis’s lovely family.”

“The Bravos don’t seem to mind. They seem to think Dad’s kind of fun. And everybody likes Keisha. I mean, what’s not to like?”

“But is he going to
marry
her?”

Sam realized that on top of her stomach hurting, she was getting a headache. “I don’t know, Mom. I figure that’s none of my business.”

Her mother visibly flinched. “What was that? One of those barely veiled criticisms of yours?”

You ought to know, Mom,
Sam thought but somehow managed not to say. Barely veiled criticisms were her mother’s weapon of choice. Sam got up. “I don’t want to fight with you, Mom. I just don’t.”

Her mother rose, too. “You’re right,” she said stiffly. “I don’t want to fight either. I only want for us to get along.”

The day before the wedding continued. Endlessly.

There was lunch in the sun room, where her mother and father actively ignored each other—her father talking too loud and too much, her mother saying little, but making small, outraged, impatient sounds and constantly pinching up her small pink lips. The twins, their sleek blond heads pressed close together, snickered constantly. Walt looked befuddled and Keisha occasionally said something harmless and sweet with the usual exclamation point after it.

The Bravos—Davis and Aleta, Mercy and Luke and Travis, too—took it all in stride. Sam knew they weren’t bothered in the least by her dysfunctional family. They made easy conversation and filled in the hostile silences with new, interesting and yet uncontroversial topics of discussion. Little Lucas was his usual adorable self and baby Serena lived up to her name, sitting quietly with her toys around her, beaming up at anyone who stopped and spoke to her.

Sam’s headache got worse. She wondered how she had gotten here, in this big, beautiful house, with Travis’s wonderful family and her totally messed up one. She thought of the
Deepwater Venture
—of all the rigs she’d worked on. And she saw herself, tall and capable and spattered with grease and drilling mud, striding confidently across the drilling platform, secure in her idea of herself and her place in the world.

She didn’t feel so secure now. She felt like she didn’t have a clue who she really was. She had no idea where she was going.

Or if she would ever get there.

Did other brides feel this way? For all their sakes—and the sake of their poor grooms—she hoped not.

The other Bravos started arriving around four. Dinner that night was sort of a rehearsal dinner, just minus the rehearsal.

They all came, each of Travis’s brothers and sisters, and their wives and husbands and kids, too. Dinner went nicely, Sam thought. With so many people there, her hulking, loud dad and passive-aggressive mom kind of disappeared in the crowd. She started to believe she just might make it through the weekend after all.

After dinner, Travis’s brothers kidnapped him. All the men—Walt and Sam’s dad included—drove away in various vehicles to meet up at some agreed-upon location for an impromptu bachelor party.

Sam and the other women stood on the porch, laughing and waving, as the men drove away.

When he came back, Travis would sleep alone in the blue room that night. And Sam would stay in the yellow room, with the door shut between them. She’d really wanted it that way when she asked him if they could sleep separately on the last night before the wedding.

But somehow, as the evening went on and Sam visited with her soon-to-be sisters-in-law and Aleta and Keisha, and tried to be nice to her mom and the Terrible Twins, she found herself wishing that when he came home, he would go straight to the door between their rooms, push it open and climb into bed with her. There was something about his solid presence in the bed that eased her fears and calmed her anxieties.

With Travis’s strong arms around her, she knew who she was again. Her doubts about whether she was cut out to be his wife—to be
anyone’s
wife—seemed meaningless and easy to ignore.

It was midnight when she climbed the stairs to the yellow room. She shut the door to the hall and also the one to the blue room. Then she stood at the windows for a long time and stared at the new sliver of moon out there in the wide Texas sky and wondered what was wrong with her.

She didn’t like her mother much and she wanted to bitch-slap both of her half sisters. Her dad drove her nuts.

But her birth family wasn’t what this weekend was about. This weekend was about her and Travis. Travis, whom she loved.

Travis, who was just right for her, who made her body glow with pleasure and who warmed her once-lonely heart.

She was the luckiest woman in the world.

So why was she longing to run away from her own wedding?

T
ravis accepted another Jack Black on the rocks and joined in the drinking song Ted had started.

As bachelor parties went, it was a tame one, held in one of the wood-paneled rooms at his father’s club. Tame was fine with Travis. There was some loud music—when Ted wasn’t calling for it to be shut off so he could lead them in another raunchy song. The liquor flowed freely and there were even some good-looking women there. Not that any of his brothers, his brothers-in-law or his father seemed to care. A couple of his brothers had been players back in the day. But now, they were all like him. One-woman men.

Even Ted, who sure knew the lyrics to a lot of dirty ditties, wasn’t the least interested in the bachelor party babes. True-blue to Keisha, who certainly deserved a good man. Walt, too, apparently, had no interest in a little bachelor party fooling around. He stayed well away from the women. Because he was too shy to try anything or because Jennifer was the only woman for him, Travis couldn’t have said.

It was kind of fun really. Kicking back with the other men of the family, drinking a little more than he probably should have, listening to rock and roll and Christmas music and singing along with Ted.

Or it would have been fun, if Travis could only shake the scary feeling that he was going to lose Sam. The same as he’d lost Rachel. The same as he’d driven Wanda away.

Every night the past week or so, he would wake up at three or four in the morning and just lie there, watching Sam sleeping, thinking how he’d never felt the way he felt for her—not even with Rachel—and wondering what tricks God and fate and blind misfortune might have up their sleeves for him this time.

Yeah. All right. He had a problem. And he knew it. And he was working with it. He knew he had…issues, as a woman would put it. As Sam herself had put it a few weeks ago.

He knew that Sam was right when she said it wasn’t his fault that Rachel had been run down by some out-of-it drunk driver. Sam was right when she said that he couldn’t protect her from every single bad thing that might ever happen to her.

And as soon as he’d given some serious thought to those things that Sam had said, he’d taken steps to get past his own irrational terror of losing her.

He’d made himself back off on all the plans he had that hemmed her in. He’d agreed to put off trying to have a baby. He’d made it clear to her that he would support her in getting her degree and her start in accounting. He saw that it was only right, for her to have the life she wanted. He
wanted
her to have the life she wanted.

Everything seemed good between them. Everything seemed right.

Except that sometimes, when he looked in her unforgettable blue eyes, he saw panic.

Sometimes he was sure he was losing her, even though he’d done everything he could think of to keep from driving her away.

He wanted the damn party to be over. He wanted to go back to the ranch and to Sam. Yeah, all right. They’d agreed to spend the night before their wedding in separate rooms.

Too bad about that. He wanted to shove open the door that separated them—to break it down, if he had to. He wanted to take her in his arms and never let her go. He wanted to tell her that she was everything to him and it was going to be all right.

But the bachelor party wasn’t over. And he was the groom, so he had an obligation stay to the end.

Plus, well, what if his fears were all in his own mind?

Hey, it was possible. Because he had issues, deep-seated fears. And if the whole point was not to hem her in or freak her out, well, what could she feel but hemmed in and freaked out if he burst in on her in the middle of the night just to make sure she wasn’t planning on running away from their wedding?

At some point, he had trust in her. Trust in what they had together. A man couldn’t make a woman stay with him.

He could only be the best man he could be for her.

And let fate and God and blind misfortune do what they would.

Ted started another song. Travis raised his glass and joined in.

The party lasted until after three. Then he rode back to the ranch with his dad, Luke, Ted and Walt—Rogan went with Caleb; he and Elena and baby Michael were staying at Caleb and Irina’s for the weekend.

The five men took their boots off before tiptoeing up the stairs.

Travis entered the blue room as silently as he could. The bed was empty and the door to the yellow room was closed. Just as he and Sam had agreed it would be.

He set his boots by the bed and went on stocking feet to that shut door. He didn’t open it.

But he did stand there for a very long time, wanting to open it,
aching
to open it. And telling himself that wouldn’t be right.

Sam woke at six on her wedding day.

She sat straight up in bed and stared at the door to Travis’s room.

Shut.

She wanted to leap to her feet and race to that door, to throw it open, and run to him, to climb into bed with him and hold him and whisper…everything.

All her fears. Her doubts. Her scary, nonsensical desire to throw on some clothes, tiptoe down the stairs, sneak out the front door and down the wide steps and take off along the driveway to the road.

To run and keep running.

To never look back.

Until she knew who she was again.

Until she could return to him secure in the knowledge that she was good enough. Ready enough.

Woman enough.

She didn’t, though—didn’t go to him, didn’t run away. She was not only riddled with doubt, but she was also a coward. Which was why she lay back down and closed her eyes and drifted off into a fitful, unhappy sleep until eight, when Mercy came to get her.

Sam put on some jeans and a cotton shirt and followed Luke’s wife down the back stairs and out the back door where a limo was waiting, Aleta and Sam’s mom, Keisha and the Terrible Twins already inside. The limo rolled along the single-car pebbled driveway that circled the house and then down the wider driveway to the road. Keisha said what a great day it was for a wedding. Aleta and Mercy agreed. Sam’s mom was subdued. Dina and Mila were downright civil. They giggled about how cool it was, to be chauffeured in a limo.

Not once did they snicker behind their hands.

Sam realized she was glad they were there.

The limo took them to Gabe and Mary Bravo’s ranch, where Travis’s sisters and his other sisters-in-law were waiting. And not only all the Bravo women.

There was a surprise guest. He emerged from behind Mary’s Christmas tree a moment after Sam walked in the front door. He wore forest-green trousers and a festive red shirt—and the rhinestone suspenders she’d sent him when she mailed him the card inviting him to the wedding.

Sam did not burst into tears at the sight of him. But almost. “Oh, Jonathan. I didn’t think you’d come!”

“Darling, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. I called Travis when I got your invitation. He had Mary get in touch. She graciously offered me accommodations here.”

Sam hugged him, hard. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you.”

“Don’t crush me, my love. You simply don’t know your own strength.” He wiggled from her grasp and smoothed his big hair.

Mary announced that breakfast was served. They all filed into the large, comfortable dining room and sat down to eat.

The food was really good, but Sam was too nervous to eat much. Jonathan, seated on her right, leaned close to her and told her not to pick at her meal. He said she needed food in her stomach.

In spite of the tension that tugged at the muscles between her shoulder blades and tied her belly in knots, she laughed. “I never thought the day would come when you would tell me to eat
more.
”

“That is exactly what I’m telling you,” he replied. “There is nothing as unattractive as a weak and peckish bride.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Peckish?”

“Irritable from lack of proper nourishment,” he elaborated in the snooty tone of voice she’d come to love.

So she did what he told her to do and ate some more. There was something so comforting about having him there. She could almost relax a little. After all, like Travis, he knew who she really was. He’d been there with her when she made all the changes that had led her to this day when she would become Travis’s wife.

Travis’s wife.
It seemed so huge and impossible. Panic clawed at her again.

She ordered it to be gone.

After the meal, the stylists, cosmeticians and nail techs arrived. Mary played an endless stream of holiday music and everyone got manicures and pedicures. And hair and makeup, too.

Travis’s sister, Zoe, was a semiprofessional photographer. She took a lot of pictures that morning. She would photograph the wedding party, too.

Jonathan, in his element, supervised the general beautifying. He advised the twins on nail colors. “Not that one, my sweet. It looks like dried blood—type O, I’m sure. This is your sister’s wedding, but she’s not marrying the Lord of the Night. Let’s go for something a tad less…vampiric, shall we?” He also suggested that Sam’s mom wear her hair in soft waves around her face rather than the tighter curls she usually went for. Both the twins and her mom did what he told them to.

There was just something about Jonathan. He knew how to bring out the best in a woman, and women, no matter their age, sensed that. They tended to trust his judgment without question.

A light lunch was provided at noon.

And then it was back in the limo to return to Bravo Ridge.

By one-thirty, a half hour before the simple wedding ceremony, Sam was dressed in her bridal finery and pacing the floor of the yellow room. She was beyond nervous by then, and more panicked than ever, so lost in her own anxiousness that she almost didn’t hear the light tap on the door to the hallway.

But then the tap came again.

She called, “Come in.”

Her mother, in a pretty lavender mother-of-the-bride dress, slipped through the door. She carried a large rectangular box in one hand and a bag in the other. Both the box and the bag were of shiny cobalt-blue foil, and both were tied with ribbons in white, silver and various shades of purple.

Sam got the picture. It was time for whatever special surprise Aleta and her mom had cooked up between them so that Jennifer would feel she’d contributed to the wedding.

Her mom sighed. “You are a vision.”

Sam felt the knot of tension in her stomach loosen a little. Okay, she and her mom had never enjoyed that close of a relationship. And Jennifer could drive her crazy with her constant advice on how to be more feminine, with her passive-aggressive remarks that made Sam want to shout at her to cut the crap and man up.

Still, Jennifer did care. It was so obvious from the hopeful, yearning look on her still-pretty face, from the way her little hands shook just a bit, ruffling the ribbons on the blue foil bag.

Sam gave her a big smile—a real smile. “Thanks, Mom.”

Jennifer swiped away a tear with the back of the hand that held the beribboned bag. “Come…let me show you.” She turned for the bed and sat on the edge of it, setting the box to the side and holding the bag so carefully in her lap. Sam went and sat down beside her. Her mom handed her the bag.

Sam fiddled with the ribbons. It took forever to get them untied. But her mom didn’t try to interfere the way she usually would. She sat there, her hands in her lap, until the ribbons were all undone. Sam sent her a questioning look then. But Jennifer only smiled.

So Sam reached in and took out a blue velvet box. She opened the lid to find a bracelet sparkling with alternating clear and purple gemstones. “It was
my
mother’s,” said Jennifer. “Diamonds and amethysts.” Amethyst was Sam’s birthstone. And she’d been named after her mother’s mother. “Your grandmother Samantha’s birthstone was amethyst, too—here. Let me put it on you.” Solemnly, her mother lifted the bracelet from the box. Speechless, Sam held up her arm and her mother hooked the little heart-shaped platinum clasp at her wrist.

The diamonds sparkled at her, bright as the one in the ring Travis had give her. Sam spoke in a voice that was thick with emotion. “It’s so pretty.”

“I wanted you to have it. As they say, ‘Something old.’”

“Oh, Mom…” Sam reached for her mother.

“Samantha…” Her mother hugged her back.

It was a great moment. One to remember and treasure. Just her and her mom, with all the tough years and the bad feelings put aside. The knots of tension within her seemed to loosen just a little. And the panic, at least right then, had subsided to a vague shiver of unease.

There was more in the bag, something borrowed—her mother’s diamond earrings. And a blue garter. Sam donned the earrings, eased the garter up under her dress to mid-thigh.

And then her mom gave her the box.

Sam opened it with the same slow care she’d used to untie the ribbons on the bag. Inside, was a large blue book.

Samantha and Travis…

“Aw, Mom. A scrapbook…”

“It’s not finished yet. The last third is empty. That will have the wedding pictures, and the honeymoon, too, and I’ll do more work on the cover, once I get the pictures of both of you…”

Sam turned the pages. She touched the lock of her own baby hair, the tiny pink sock and the little yellow bib.

There were lots of pictures of her growing up. Pictures of the Sam she always used to see when she looked in a mirror—the Sam some people mistook for a boy. There were pictures of her in her mom’s arms. And with her dad at the ranch. Riding Old Jay, her favorite gelding, and sitting in the back of her dad’s pickup in a plaid shirt with the sleeve’s torn off. There was even a picture of that awful birthday weekend not all that long ago, and of the cake her mom had made to look like an oil rig, the twins in the background, sticking out their tongues.

Her mother put her arm around her. “You were always such a very capable child. So…self-sufficient.”

She leaned into her mother’s embrace. “Yeah, I was that.”