She faced him and smiled, cocking her head to the side. “Sam? I don’t want to be with Paul. I told him so.”
Sam’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you missed the part where he confessed he had feelings for me. And I told him I didn’t see him like that.” His words to her from this morning must have popped into her head, because she added, “You had nothing to be jealous about.”
He wanted to deny he’d ever been jealous, but it would have been a lie. Instead, he reached for her hand and took it in his, quickly lacing his fingers through hers before she could pull away. He felt overwhelmed by her again. How many times in 24 hours had Jenny taken his breath away? He looked away from her so she wouldn’t see the play of emotion on his face, but pulled their joined hands to his face, closed his eyes and kissed the back of hers, then leaned it against his cheek.
She didn’t pull away or protest or say anything, just allowed his hand to hold hers, while the tension he’d been holding on to for the past hour slowly left his muscles and he relaxed in the wintery sunshine with Jenny beside him.
He finally moved their hands down until they rested where their thighs touched, side by side on the cold bench. The warmth of her leg through her jeans flicked a switch in his body. His pulse sped up and he felt his blood rushing to a place pretty close to where their hands rested.
“Hey,” he asked, trying to distract himself. “Want to get some lunch before we come back here to pick up the booth?”
She glanced at her watch. “It’s only eleven a.m.!”
He dropped her hand and stood up, grinning. “So says the person who dawdled in the principal’s office with a stapler while someone else lifted 20 heavy pieces of plywood across the length of a high school basement.”
“If only you hadn’t teased me,” she taunted in a sing-song voice.
He beamed at her. “Brash words from the woman who cooked—what was it?—cheap pig for breakfast this morning?”
She half-cringed, half-smiled up at him from her seat on the bench. “That was pretty bad, eh?”
“You’re pretty cute when you’re mad, Jen.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
Sam offered her his hands, which she took so he could pull her up. He might have stood there holding her hands all day if he hadn’t heard an approaching voice ask, “Since when can’t you stand up by yourself, little sister?”
“Oh, Nils!” Jenny leaned her head around Sam and stuck out her tongue at someone behind them.
Wait! Little sister? Nils was her brother? Sam looked up to find himself facing three blond giants heading over to them from the nearby parking lot, eyes trained on Sam.
***
It should have surprised Sam to be having lunch alone with three hulking Swedes, but he was becoming accustomed to a different rhythm of life with Jenny around. And it didn’t include a ho-hum, predictable sequence of events.
Turns out Paul had called Lars, Lars had called Erik, and Erik had called Nils. And all three had decided it was time to meet this Sam, kin of Ingrid or not, before he spent too much more time with Jenny.
Jenny invited her brothers to join them for lunch but insisted on the Prairie Dawn so she could run upstairs and grab Casey for a quick walk, leaving Sam alone with “the boys,” a moniker so singularly ridiculous he wondered how she’d gotten away with it for so long. Then again, judging from the protective way the boys felt about Jenny, he imagined she could get away with just about anything.
They could almost have been triplets, they were so alike in height, coloring, looks, everything. All were taller than six feet, matching and surpassing Sam’s 6’1” easily. All had light blond hair and ice-blue eyes like huskies. Their chests were broad and filled out from hard work or active lives, and they all had the rugged coloring of men who spent a good portion of their lives outdoors.
They had minimal distinguishing features. Erik, the youngest and closest to Jenny in age, had a rounder face than his older brothers and was the shortest of the three by a hair. Nils was the oldest and had a cleft in his chin, like Cary Grant or Kirk Douglas. The middle brother, Lars, was the tallest and most well-built of the three. Sam guessed from looking at him that free weights were part of his regular routine; no way he looked like that just from bartending and hiking.
When they all sat down in the small booth, Jenny had taken the seat beside Sam, leaving Erik, Nils and Lars to squish onto the bench across from them, which essentially left Nils facing Sam head-on and his brothers bookending him with their backs, their legs hanging over the sides of the small bench. It was a ludicrous-looking setup, but Sam wasn’t about to complain.