The second Jonathon and Wendy were all alone, she practically threw up her hands. “Why didn’t you come get me the second they arrived?”
“You were dressing. I told them they could wait until you came down.”
She tilted her head, studying him as if he were some foreign life form she’d never seen before. “You stood up to them?”
Ah. So that’s what had her so puzzled. “Yes. I stood up to them. Do people not normally do that?”
She gave a bemused chuckle. “No. People don’t normally do that.” Shaking her head, she started carrying coffee cups from the kitchen table to the sink. Almost under her breath, she said, “I once dated a guy whose parents were lifelong members of Greenpeace. He’d spent every summer since he was ten on boats protesting whaling in Japan. He’d marched on Washington forty-four times before he was twenty. He’d been a vegan since he was three. Within thirty minutes of meeting my family, he was eating barbeque and smoking cigars out on the back porch with Big Hank.” Shaking her head, she started rinsing out coffee cups and loading them into the dishwasher. “Within a week, he’d accepted a job working for my dad.”
Jonathon studied the tense lines of her back. Her tone had been sad, but resigned. “The guy sounds like an idiot.”
“No. He was very smart. The last I heard, Jed was VP of marketing for Morgan Oil. And Daddy would never promote anyone that high up who wasn’t brilliant.”
Jonathon gently turned her away from the sink and tipped her chin up to look at him. “That’s not the kind of idiot I mean.”
Her gaze met his, confusion in her eyes for a minute. Then her gaze cleared as she realized his meaning. Pink tinged her cheeks and pulled away from his touch. Tucking her hair back behind her ear she swallowed. “Thank you. For standing up to them, I mean. For everything.”
“You’re welcome.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “You say that now. But you don’t actually know what you’ve gotten yourself into.” She looked pointedly at the kitchen door through which her family had left not long before. “This nonsense with them sweeping down on us unannounced? Inviting themselves to stay here? Ordering a bed for Mema to sleep on? This is all just the beginning. It’ll only get worse.”
“Of course it will,” he stated as blandly as he could. “You think I didn’t know that the second I opened the door?”
“I…I don’t know. I guess… Most people don’t see them for what they are.”
“Try to have a little faith in me,” he chided.
“I’m just warning you. My dad and Uncle Hank will woo you with their good ol’ boy charm. And just when you think that you’re their buddy and they’re nothing more than simple roughnecks, they’ll use that keen intelligence of theirs to manipulate you. And if they can’t control you, they’ll try to squash you.”
“Consider me warned.” He nodded. “Coming here was obviously a power play. They think they have the upper hand because they’ve chosen the time and location of the showdown. They’re trying to establish themselves as the decision makers in the relationship. What about your mother? She seems harm less enough.”
“Um, no.” Wendy thought about it. Of all the family members, her relationship with her mother was the most complicated. There were times when she actually liked her mother. Of course, she loved all of them, but her mother she actually liked. But she’d never understood her. And her mother had her moments of being just as vicious as Uncle Hank. “In all those scuba-diving trips you take, you ever been in the water with a jellyfish?”
“Several times. They sting like hell.”
“Exactly. They look delicate and frail, but they have more than enough defenses. That’s my mother in a nutshell. She can play the victim, but she’s as smart as—” That’s when it hit her. “Oh, crap.”
“What?”
“The bedroom!” She leaped to her feet and dashed for the stairs.
Jonathon snagged her arm on the way past. “What?”
She whispered, just in case anyone was close enough to hear, “The guest bedroom. Where I slept last night.”
He continued to stare blankly at her. Seriously? Mr. Genius couldn’t figure this out?
She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Last night. On our wedding night. I slept in the guest bedroom.” She resisted the urge to bop him on the forehead. “And now my mother is upstairs with Peyton. And if she sees the guest bedroom, she’ll realize we didn’t sleep together last night.”