Priceless(42)

Mack laughed at her total lack of chagrin. “Oh, give it up, Destiny. You’ve been meddling again, and you’re damned proud of it.”

She leveled a look directly into his eyes. “Do you honestly have a problem with that, Mack? It worked rather well with Richard, didn’t it? He and Melanie are deliriously happy.”

“But I’m not in the market for a wife,” Mack pointed out, though with considerably less vehemence than he might have a few short weeks ago.

“Neither was Richard,” she reminded him.

“Why are you so blasted anxious to marry us all off?” he asked curiously. “Do you have someplace you’d like to be besides here? Are you thinking of going back to France and taking up your Bohemian lifestyle once we’re all settled? Is that what the rush is all about?”

“This isn’t about me,” she said. “It’s about you. Not a one of you has learned the first thing about love. I simply can’t understand how I failed so abysmally at teaching you the most important lesson of all. I decided it was past time I did something about it.”

Mack heard the genuine frustration in her voice and regretted that he couldn’t give her what she wanted. “I know you think we won’t be happy without wives and children, but there are other measures of happiness, Destiny.”

“Name one,” she challenged.

“I can do better than that,” he claimed, then ticked them off for her. “Success, friendships, family.”

“Family is exactly what I’m talking about,” she retorted impatiently.

“We have each other and we have you.” He gave her a penetrating look. “Unless, as I said, you’re anxious to leave after all these years and want to be sure we have someone in our lives to take your place.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly content with my life just the way it is.”

He gave her a wide-eyed look. “How can that be? There’s no man in your life.”

She frowned at having her own argument tossed back in her face. “There is no need to be snide, Mack.”

“Just pointing out the obvious flaw in your case for marrying us off.”

“If you are so fiercely determined never to marry, why are you still seeing Beth?” she asked.

He honestly didn’t have an answer for that. As they’d discussed at lunch, Beth wasn’t at all like the women he usually dated. She wasn’t wild or carefree. She was serious and thoughtful and took far too many of her patients’ problems to heart.

In recent weeks he’d often felt ashamed at how little he took seriously and how easy his life was. He’d always been conscientious about good deeds—Destiny has raised him and his brothers with a strong sense of their obligation to give back to the community—but he hadn’t taken it to heart the way Beth did. She genuinely cared about people. She had a passion for her work. More important, it was work that truly mattered. What he did was frivolous by comparison. Even his visits to Tony were window dressing. They weren’t the thing that would ultimately save the boy. Only Beth and her team could do that.

Mack cared about his brothers and his aunt. He even cared about Tony Vitale and other kids like him. But in general he’d learned to keep the world at a distance. Losing his parents so young had made him wary about loving anyone too much. It was too hard to tell when fate might snatch them away. He was terrified that the simple act of loving someone might doom them in some weird way. He knew it was a kid’s reaction to loss, but more and more lately he’d come to realize that he’d never entirely gotten past it. Faced with his growing feelings for Beth and his attachment to Tony and the fears they’d stirred in him, he was coming to accept that he was as haunted by it as his other brothers had been.

“Mack,” Destiny coaxed gently. “You don’t go out with a woman like Beth Browning unless you’re serious about her. She’s not one of those clever, worldly women you can toss aside with no harm done.”

Mack nodded, accepting the truth of that despite Beth’s own claims to the contrary. “I know that.”

Acknowledging that meant he ought to give Beth up now. It was the right thing to do, the noble, self-sacrificing thing to do. He’d been telling himself that all day. It hadn’t kept him from making another date with her.

The sad truth was, when he thought about how empty his life would be without her, he couldn’t begin to contemplate doing the right thing.

“Well, then?” Destiny prodded.

He met his aunt’s gaze and made a decision. “I’d like to bring her to dinner one of these days. How would you feel about that?”