McCarthys of Gansett Island Boxed Set Books 1-3 (45 page)

“I’m happy for you, Mac. You’ve got it all worked out.”

“All except for one thing: Maddie’s mom. She doesn’t know yet.”

“About you?”

“About any of it.” Mac’s brow furrowed with worry. “She has no idea she’s coming home to a wedding, and something tells me she won’t be thrilled to learn her daughter is marrying a McCarthy.”

“You’re crazy in love with Maddie
and
Thomas. What’s there not to be thrilled about?”

“For one thing, my mother helped to land her in prison. She won’t soon forget that.”

“
She
landed herself in prison by passing bad checks all over the island for years. Hell, I wrote off more than five hundred bucks in bad debt with her name on it.”

“You didn’t press charges?” Mac asked, incredulous.

Joe shrugged. “Would’ve just been piling on at that point, and I wouldn’t have gotten the money back.”

“Sometimes I wish my mother could’ve seen it that way, too,” Mac said.

“She had no way to know you’d end up marrying the woman’s daughter.”

“Still. . .” Mac’s face was set in a pensive expression that Joe didn’t often see from his usually confident friend. “I just hope she doesn’t cause any trouble. Maddie is so happy, and after everything she’s been through, she deserves a beautiful wedding with no complications.”

“You both deserve that. Leave it to your best man and your brothers to run interference.”

Mac smiled. “Gladly.”

Kay Lawrence rushed by them, casting a menacing scowl at Joe before she left the diner.

“Whoo,” Mac said, whistling. “Mama Bear is
not
happy with you.”

“Her baby bear got
exactly
what he deserved.”

“You won’t hear me arguing.”

Linda approached their table. “Scoot over, you two,” she said to Mac and Thomas.

Pretending to be put out by her, Mac made room for his mother.

“Now, give me that baby.”

Smiling, Mac handed Thomas over to his new grandmother. Joe marveled at how far they’d all come, from Linda not approving of Mac’s relationship with a woman unfairly branded the town tramp to Linda holding the woman’s child like he was her own flesh and blood.
 

“How’s my little man today?” Linda cooed, kissing the baby until he giggled with delight.

“I’m here, too, Mom,” Mac said with a petulant pout.

Never taking her focus off the baby, she said, “Yeah, yeah. Good morning, my darling Malcolm. Better?”

Mac scowled at her use of his dreaded first name. “Go back to ignoring me. Please.”

Joe laughed at their banter. “So,” he couldn’t help but ask, “what were you and Kay up to over there?”

“She thinks we need to try to get Janey and David back together.”

The news hit Joe like a punch to the gut, and it was all he could do to refrain from sucking in a sharp deep breath.

Apparently tuning in to his dismay, Mac met his gaze and rolled his eyes. “Tell me you didn’t agree to be part of that, Mom.”

“I agreed to think about it.”

Mac’s eyes bugged out of his head. “You gotta be kidding me! The guy
cheated
on your daughter! You can’t still want to see her married to him!”

Linda sighed and seemed to sag a bit. “Kay makes a good point about how long they’ve been together. I don’t want Janey to have any regrets.”

Mac snorted. “The only regret she would’ve had is if she’d married him and
then
found out he’s a cheating scumbag.”

“He swears it only happened once.”

“And you
believe
that? Come on, Mom. Get real.”

Paralyzed, Joe listened to their back-and-forth with a growing sense of dismay.

“Is that Janey’s mug?” Linda asked Joe. “She has one just like it.”

He looked up to find Mac zeroed in on him, but before he could say anything, Thomas let out a lusty wail, demanding his new daddy’s full attention.
 

Joe took that as his cue to escape. “Gotta run, folks. I’m on the nine.”

Distracted by the baby, Mac and Linda uttered hasty good-byes.

Outside, Joe took deep, gulping breaths of fresh air, hoping to slow his charging heart. Here they were trying to keep their relationship a secret, and a stupid cow mug had nearly undone the whole thing. Mac might’ve been distracted by Thomas, but later, when he had time to think about it, he’d wonder what Joe was doing with an odd mug that was exactly like one his sister owned.
 

“Shit,” Joe muttered as he made his way to the ferry landing. And Kay Lawrence, determined to fix things for her creep of a son. . . That news didn’t exactly make Joe’s day, either. “You gotta have faith in Janey. She knows what he is. It’ll take more than a couple of scheming mothers to undo the damage he did.”

“Having a nice chat with yerself?”
 

The voice startled Joe out of his musings. Big Mac McCarthy’s best friend, cab driver Ned Saunders, leaned against his battered woody station wagon waiting for his next fare.

Joe shook his hand. “How goes it, Ned?” The grizzled old man wore tattered khaki shorts with a T-shirt that read, “Squeeze Your Lemons on a Lobsta.”

“Getting tossed in jail and talking to yerself. What’s going on with ya, boy?”

Joe released a huff of laughter. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Never known ya to be one to take care of things with ya fists.”

“Your buddy Big Mac has already given me the same lecture.”

“I heard he didn’t make ya spend the night this time,” Ned said, chortling with laughter.

“Now that you’ve had your entertainment for the day, I gotta boat to catch.”

Ned went back to perusing a copy of the
Gansett Gazette
. “Give her some time, boy. She’ll come round.”

Startled, Joe stopped and turned back to stare at the older man. “What’d you say?”

“Ya heard me right the first time.” Ned nodded to the ferry landing. “Looks like they’re gonna leave without ya.”

Questions cycled through Joe’s mind: how did Ned know?
What
did Ned know? Who else knew? But the questions had to wait, because the ferry wouldn’t, and Joe needed to get back to his office on the mainland. As much as he hated to leave the island—especially with David still in town—Joe had a business to run, and last time he checked, it didn’t run itself.

Jogging down the hill to the ferry landing, Joe felt torn in a thousand different directions. His love for Janey had always been one of the simple truths in his life. How, then, he wondered as he dashed aboard the boat just as the final warning horn sounded, had the simplest thing become so damned complicated?

Chapter 13

After Joe left, Janey resisted the urge to go back to bed and instead took a shower and got dressed. She was out in the yard enjoying the warm sun and playing with the dogs when Maddie arrived.

“Hey,” Maddie said as she came through the house to the backyard. “The door was open, so I let myself in. Hope that’s okay.”

Janey smiled at her. They were still working out the boundaries of their new friendship. “Of course it is. You don’t have to knock here.”

“Oh, I’ll still knock. I wouldn’t want to
interrupt
anything.”

Janey felt heat creep into her cheeks when she thought of waking up with Joe.

Maddie laughed. “Your face gives away your every thought.”

“I know! I hate that.”

“Do I take that to mean you had a
friend
over last night?”

“Perhaps.”

Maddie lowered herself to the grass next to Janey. “Do tell.”

Janey fell back onto the lawn, which the dogs took as an open invite to lie on top of her. Running her fingers through Muttley’s soft fur, she tried to find the words. “Everything with him is so
easy
, you know?”

“That’s the way it should be. It wasn’t like that with David?”

“I thought it was, but it wasn’t like this. Joe is just so. . .”

“Perfect for you?”

“In many ways, yes.”

“Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming here?”

“Everything that’s happened with David has me questioning my judgment. If you’d asked me last week if I ever imagined he’d cheat, I’d say not in a million years. I was that sure of him. And look at what he was doing.”

“Janey, you can’t let what he did cause you to doubt yourself. You loved him. You thought he loved you. Why in the world would you think he’d cheat on you? The failing is in him, not you.”

“And I know that, but I can’t get past the idea that I must’ve missed something. There had to have been signs, right?”

“You guys have lived apart a long time. It’s not as easy to see the signs when you aren’t with him every day.”

Janey stroked Muttley’s ears. “Still. . . When I look back now, I can see there were things I either chose not to see or chose not to question. Like why it took him days sometimes to call me back or how plans would get canceled at the last minute. I always chalked that up to his job and didn’t think a thing of it. But now. . .”

“Now you’re questioning everything.”

Janey nodded. “It’s making me nuts.”

“I don’t want to say the wrong thing or overstep,” Maddie said tentatively.

Janey smiled at her. “It’s not possible for you to say the wrong thing to me. I want us to be the best of friends. You should feel free to speak your mind.”

Maddie’s eyes flooded with tears, which made her laugh. “I’m like an emotional disaster area these days. Everything makes me cry.”

“They’re happy tears.”

“Absolutely. Not only did I get Mac, but you and all your family. I feel so incredibly lucky.”

“Wait till our other brothers get here. Lucky might not be the word you’re using when you see how crazy Mac gets with them.”

“Don’t try to scare me off. Nothing could keep me from marrying him.”

Janey grinned at her. “What were you going to say? Before?”

“Just that I hope you won’t hold what David did against Joe. That wouldn’t be fair to Joe.”

“No, it wouldn’t, but let’s face it, none of this is fair to Joe. He’s in love with me, and I’m a mess. I know I shouldn’t be encouraging what’s happening between us, especially right now, and I have all these good intentions to stay away from him. But then he walks in the room and all my good intentions disappear. I can’t keep my hands off him.”

“You’re in major lust—and I can see why. He’s adorable and sexy.”

“Definitely
major
lust, but what if that’s all it is? That would crush him. He hasn’t said anything, but I know where he’s hoping this is heading.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“It’s hard to tell. Everything is so jumbled. If you’re asking if I love him, of course I do. I’ve always loved him.”

“But as a friend.”

“Right and that’s the problem. It’s hard to tell if I suddenly love him as more than that, or if I’m under the influence of great sex.”
 

“If you start to feel like it’s only a rebound, you need to end it. Immediately.”

“I know,” Janey said. “I’m so afraid I’m going to hurt him.”

“He’s a big boy, and his eyes are wide open. You can’t take responsibility for him. You have to think about yourself and what you want.”

“I’m trying, but it’s hard.”

“Just take it a day at a time and don’t feel that you have to figure anything out right away.”

“That’s good advice, and you should know after all you went through with Mac.”

“When I think about how close I came to losing him. . .” Maddie shuddered.

“You two are meant to be. You would’ve ended up together one way or the other.”

“I agree, but my mother won’t. I’m picking her up in the morning, and I can only imagine what she’ll have to say when she finds out I’m marrying Mac McCarthy next week.”

“You need to take your own advice and do what’s best for
you
. I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to see their daughter married to my fabulous brother. But if she gives you grief about it, just let her know if she forces you to choose, you won’t choose her.”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do.”

“Just remember what’s waiting for you in a week’s time, and you’ll find the courage you need to deal with her.”

“I can’t wait to be married to him, but I just keep worrying that something’s going to happen to mess it up before we say I do.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

Right on cue, Mac walked into the yard with Thomas on his shoulders. Talk about meant to be. . . Janey couldn’t get over how easily her stubbornly single brother had slipped into life as a family man.

“There’re my guys,” Maddie said, glowing at the sight of them.

“I got your text that you’d be here, so we’re making the transfer.” He hugged and kissed Thomas and lowered him to his mother. “See you later, buddy.”

Thomas let out a wail of protest.