“Are you all right with this?” he wanted to know. “I mean, you’re healthy? You’re going to be okay?”
“I’m fine and yes, I’m going to be great.” She smiled. “I want this baby, Uncle Hank.”
“Then I’ll do whatever I can to help you, honey.”
She smiled again. Hank wasn’t the most outwardly affectionate man, but he was loyal and kind and dependable. If he made a promise, he kept it.
“What’re you going to do about your job?” he asked.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.” She bit at her bottom lip as she thought about it. “Working with Mike for months will be impossible now. Especially once word gets out around the office—and it will—that I’m carrying his child.”
Hank frowned and looked as though he wanted to say something else, but he kept his silence and Jenny went on.
“But I’m not going to do anything about it right now. I’ve got the hotel in Nevada to finish.”
“You’re still going to do it?”
“Absolutely,” she told him. Not only was she too invested in the project to give it up now, but being in Laughlin working would keep her from having to deal with Mike every day. “It’s a fabulous opportunity and I don’t want to give it up. I’ve got the whole thing planned out and letting someone else take it over is just impossible.”
“Always were stubborn,” he muttered.
“Wonder where I got it,” she countered and went up on her toes to kiss his cheek.
He looked pleased but baffled.
“Come on in and eat, you two. Dinner’s going cold on the table.”
Jenny looked over at Betty Sanders, housekeeper, cook and, as Uncle Hank liked to call her, his nemesis. She was short and thin, disproving the theory that a great cook had to be big. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and had her long gray hair in a braid wrapped around the back of her head like a halo.
Jenny appreciated the offer, but she wasn’t all that hungry, either. “Thanks, Betty, but—”
“If you’re going to have a baby, you’re going to feed it. Now come in and sit down.” Betty had helped raise Jenny and had run Hank’s house and life for too long to stop now.
“Might as well,” Uncle Hank said with a shrug. “You know she won’t quit hounding you until you do.”
“True.” Jenny walked with him into the dining room, glad to be here in the home she’d loved growing up. Out the windows was a view of Balboa Bay, with beautiful houses lined along the shore and boats tied up at the docks.
When she first came here, Jenny had spent a lot of time down on the dock, watching the boats sail past, wondering if her parents would come back, if Hank would send her somewhere else. She’d felt lost and alone until the day her uncle had come out, sat down beside her and said, If you’re going to be spending so much time out on the dock, I’d better teach you how to sail.
He took her out on his boat that very afternoon and for the first time in her life, she’d felt the amazing freedom in skimming across the water’s surface, feeling the wind stream through her hair. He’d let her steer the boat, putting his big hands over hers on the wheel and explaining the harbor and the neighborhood that was now hers. That’s when she’d understood that she was there to stay. Hank had given her everything in that one afternoon.
At the round oak table in the dining room, all three of them sat down and dug into the hearty bowls of homemade potato soup. While they ate, they talked, and Jenny was glad her uncle seemed to be calming down.
“There’s just no point in worrying over what is,” Betty said, with a warning look at Hank. “Jenny’s fine and she’ll keep being fine with or without a man.”
“’Course she will,” Uncle Hank shot back. “That’s not the point.”
“It’s exactly the point,” Betty argued. “Why would you want her to have a man who doesn’t really see her for who she is?”
“I want him to do the right thing, is all.”
“The right thing is to walk away if you can’t care.”
Jenny felt as if she were at a tennis match. Her head swiveled back and forth as she followed the heated conversation that swirled around her as if she wasn’t even there. Through the windows, she could see tiny white patio lights strung across the pergola, blinking like fireflies.
“I’m just saying she shouldn’t have to do all of this alone,” Uncle Hank muttered with a nodding glance at Jenny.
“She’s not going to be alone,” Betty snapped. “She’s got us, doesn’t she? We don’t count?”