But when she shifted her gaze to Cara who’d eased into her seat, her face did not relay one iota of happiness. Cara frowned at Kent as he and his father snipped off the ends of their cigars, willing him not to leave her alone with his mother and her laser-beam death-glare.
“So, you kids don’t use birth control, or did the mood grip you too hard?”
“Don’t start. You have no space to judge.” Kent kept his voice mild as he studied his cigar.
“Why, I declare I’m not. Only asking, you know, how we all talk in this day and age, in an open way.” She batted her lashes at him. He frowned, but to Cara’s dismay, climbed into the small boat and cast off so he and his father could putter a few yards away to poison the air with their smoke.
“Viv, you be nice. That girl is our grandbaby’s mama.” Kent Senior’s parting shot floated over to the two women who were locked in a minor stare-down. The words that girl rattled around in Cara’s head like marbles. Her ears got hot again.
Vivian broke the staring contest first. She took some of the lemon slices they had out for tea and squeezed them into a sweating glass of ice water, stirred it around, and gave it to Cara like some kind of a temporary peace offering. Although she was sorely tempted to refuse it, Cara couldn’t resist the strong smell of lemons, which did seem to settle her stomach, so she took it, sipped, and waited for the woman to speak her mind.
“I always thought Robert’s wife would be first, you know?” Vivian fussed around with the plates and forks. “Kent’s so...flighty about women. Always had a new sweetheart every time I saw him.” She tucked the fancy napkins into the movie-set-perfect picnic basket. “How long have you and Kent been...together?” The words implying something more along the lines of: how long have you been seducing my precious younger son, corrupting him with your sluttish, hillbilly ways?
Once she joined this woman’s family, Cara had to stop caring so much what she thought. Kent had said that more than once. The memory of her first hookup with him surfaced from the dregs of her consciousness, convincing her that Vivian could peer right into her brain and see the quick-and-dirty session her sweet boy had initiated in a smelly bathroom stall.
She opened her mouth to reply when that clear, bright kernel of possibility—that the child could easily be Kieran’s—hit her like a sledgehammer to the brain once again.
Well, at least if it’s a redhead, no one will be the wiser. She touched her hair as if in reminder.
The question went unanswered. Cara sipped in lieu of honoring it while Vivian continued to wipe down the table. Finally, she took a seat, her wine glass refilled.
“When I was pregnant, we drank and smoked, ate sugary crap, rode horses and all sorts of things you young girls won’t do.” She held up the cut crystal glass, so out of place on the boat and pondered its golden depths. “We had smaller babies, is all I can tell. And all this nonsense about the daddies helping out in the delivery room. Ick. Poor Kent Senior would have passed clean out at the sight of all that...mess.” Cara thought not for the first time that Vivian Townsend Lowery functioned fairly high for an alcoholic. Kent’s mother set the drink down and focused her icy gaze on Cara once more. “Tell me, dear. Has he told you about—”
“Viv!” Her husband’s shout from the small boat cut off the woman’s question. “Y’all come on over here. Let’s take a fast ride. Cara, hon, you up for it?” Her future father-in-law’s solicitousness seemed overdone, masking his distaste for her son’s choice of a bride “from the boonies.”
She observed her future husband, who smiled around the stub of the stinky cigar and a shiver shot down her spine. He was a catch—a real perfection specimen—combining his father’s broad shoulders and thick dark hair, with his mother’s patrician profile. She grinned at him and winked.
“I’m fine now. Mama Lowery gave me a little secret lemon-water drink and I feel oodles better.”
Kent raised a dark brow at the Mama Lowery comment. It gave her all sorts of satisfaction to hear the woman suck in a breath behind her. Senior smiled and he held out a hand to help her into the boat. Vivian glared at her son a moment then shrugged.
“We’re gonna be fine, now aren’t we?” She patted Cara’s bare knee one too many times once they were seated. “All one, big, happy family.”
Kent opened the throttle and the front of the boat lifted, making both women squeal and hang onto their wide-brimmed sun hats and relieving Cara of the need to respond.
Chapter Twelve