Two Brothers and a Bride
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Elizabeth Harbison
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15,8K
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10
Chapter 1
“Twenty-nine years in this tiny town—”
“Thirty. I turned thirty last month.”
“Okay, thirty years. But you’re finally gettin’ out of here, Joleen. Honey, life’s turnin’ good. This is what your mama always wanted for you, and I’m so happy I could burst. Marrying Carl Landon! Child, you’ll never have to work again!”
Joleen Wheeler wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. “Marge, I didn’t say I’d marry him.” For some reason she clung to that thought like a life raft. “In fact, I’m not even sure going with him to Dallas for so long is such a great idea.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. She knew Marge and all the other girls at the Hometown Diner thought she was nuts to even hesitate leaving this steaming, greasy pit that smelled so strongly of hamburger and onion that she had to shower to get the scent off her at night.
Marge put her hands on Joleen’s shoulders and pressed her weathered face toward her. The familiar scent of onion mingling with Marge’s old-fashioned Yardley lavender perfume nearly brought tears to Joleen’s eyes.
“Jo, honey, you listen to me,” Marge said vehemently. “When your mama died, her last wish was that you wouldn’t stay working in this no-count diner in this no-count little town for the rest of your life.” She’d always wanted to stop waiting tables, but she’d died before she had the chance. Marge’s watery blue eyes were more impassioned than Joleen had ever seen them. “People get stuck here in Alvira and they never get out. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t miss it ‘cause of some grand notion about bein’ in love.”
Joleen gave a wry laugh and touched her finger to the wrinkled cheek of her mother’s oldest friend. “Marge, I don’t think loving the man you marry is a grand notion.”
Marge snorted and raised her chin, somehow managing to look down her nose at Joleen, who was a good five inches taller. “It is when it’s stopping you from marryin’ an oil tycoon.”
Joleen pulled back and walked to the corner jukebox. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to marry him, either. I only said I wanted a little bit more time to be sure...to be sure it is love and not something else.” Desperation, she thought, then pushed the thought away.
“Whatever it is, it’s worth marryin’.”
“We’ll see.” Joleen reached into her pocket for a quarter and pulled out instead the huge diamond and sapphire ring Carl had given her as a “token of his affection.” She looked at the ring for a moment, then sighed and put it back. “But, you know, his insisting that I move to his family’s ranch in Dallas for the summer so I can ‘see how good it feels to be a Landon’ makes me a little uncomfortable.” Unable to find a quarter, she pressed B3 and gave the machine a well-placed kick. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” started playing.
“How can you be uncomfortable about living in a big ol’ house with air-conditioning for the summer?” Marge asked incredulously.
“It’s not the air-conditioning I’m uncomfortable with, God knows.” Jo lifted her pale hair off the back of her neck and let it fall with a heavy flop. “It’s the ‘being a Landon’ part. I’m not sure I can do it if they’re so different from the rest of us.”
“Honey, it’s just the surroundings that are different,” Marge said. “The Landons eat, drink and go to the bathroom like the rest of us.”
Joleen laughed. “I’m not even sure about that.”
Marge shrugged. “Well, if they have one of those bidet things, you’ll learn to use it like the queen.”
“I think it’s pronounced be—day,” Joleen said, then reconsidered. “But I’m not sure. Oh, good Lord, Marge, what if it overflows and I have to tell someone and I call it the wrong thing?”
“Now, Joleen, don’t borrow trouble. You’re going to do just fine.”
“I sure do wish I shared your confidence.”
Marge regarded her in silence for a few minutes, then said, “Child, you can do anything you set your mind and heart to do.”
Joleen wasn’t quite sure what Marge meant by that, but before she could ask, the small bells over the diner door tinkled. They both turned to face it, Joleen automatically smoothing her denim skirt where her apron would normally have been.
A tall man, about mid-thirties, with dark brown hair and light eyes walked in, looking a little like a lost tourist. As soon as she saw him, Jo couldn’t look away.
He wore faded jeans that fitted him in a way that would have brought tears of joy to Levi Strauss’s eyes. His plain white cotton shirt was clearly high quality even though he wore it as casually as if it were an old T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. Joleen couldn’t help but notice the way it pulled slightly at the shoulders, suggesting a powerful physique beneath. His arms and the triangle of skin at his neck where the top button was undone were a deep sun bronze.
Even the laugh lines carved into his tanned face, next to those pale eyes and that sensually curved mouth, added to his magnetism. A woman would have hated to have those lines herself, but on a man they were like trophies, well earned and a pleasure to behold.
Joleen realized she’d sucked in her breath and let it out slowly. She felt like a high school girl gawking at the football captain. All her fears about marriage, which she had worked so hard to ignore, spilled into her mind. This was just the sort of man fate would send her way when she was trying to convince herself she could fall in love with Carl and stay with him for the rest of her life. A western Adonis, a Marlboro man without the cigarettes.
He had to be a mirage.
He glanced at the door behind him then back at Marge, and then Joleen.
There his eyes lingered, holding Joleen’s gaze as easily as a carnival hypnotist. The seconds stretched on, past the point where casual interest left off and Howdy stranger, want to come to my place? picked up. Except that Joleen wasn’t that sort of girl. Normally.
Now, for just a moment, she was able to imagine being that sort of girl... Until her logical mind snapped her out of it. This wasn’t fate, this wasn’t love at first sight, this was a normal, if extreme, reaction to a fear of commitment. It could have been Hank the barber coming in and she would have had the same second thoughts about Carl. Well, maybe not the exact same thoughts, but second thoughts nevertheless.
It was Marge who broke the awkward silence. “Stayin’ for the early bird special tonight?”
His eyes moved over to Marge. Joleen felt like a rag doll dropping to the floor, no longer suspended by his gaze.
“I’m looking for Julie Wheeler,” he said in a smooth masculine voice. But the end of his statement turned up like a question and he looked back at Joleen.
“Jo—” Joleen began, but Marge nudged her with her elbow.
“And just what do you want with this Julie Wheeler?” Marge asked, crossing her arms in front of her. Marge was used to deflecting suitors and creditors alike.
One of the man’s eyebrows lifted fractionally, as if he sensed that and was amused by it. “I want to take her home with me.” The comrnrs of his compelling mouth remained suspiciously tight, and Joleen was tempted to laugh except that her heart was in her throat.
She knew this man, somewhere in her soul she knew him. She’d never felt this kind of familiarity before, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“I’m sorry, there’s no Julie Wheeler here,” she began, ignoring Marge’s now-you’re-going-to-be-abducted look. “But—”
Marge nudged her again, harder, and she stopped.
The man’s brow relaxed and the lost tourist look disappeared. “I thought this had to be wrong,” he said with a chuckle, shaking his head and reaching for a small slip of paper from the back pocket of his jeans. “This is hardly ol’ Carl’s type of joint.”
“Carl?” Joleen asked quickly. Her heartbeat accelerated. No way. There was no way this guy she’d practically had imaginary sex with was a friend of Carl’s. Her luck wasn’t that bad.
“Carl Landon,” he said. An unspoken question lingered in the air.
The clock on the wall burned in the corner of Joleen’s eye. It was three-thirty. Carl was supposed to have gotten there half an hour earlier and, now that she thought about it, it wasn’t like him to be late. “Has something happened to Carl?” she asked, a little too loudly. Did I jinx him by telling Marge I wasn’t sure I wanted him? Did I foul up our relationship by being ridiculously attracted to a stranger when I’m supposed to be starting a future with Carl?
The man’s brow lifted again, and he shifted his weight, now regarding Joleen with some skepticism in his light green eyes. “Would it be fair to guess that now you do know Julie Wheeler?”
“I do if you mean Joleen Wheeler.” She met his sardonic look with some heat, forgetting, for a moment, the draw she had just felt toward this man. “That would be me.”
His eyes widened in what looked like genuine surprise for a moment before he quickly regained control and said, “I apologize for the mistake, Joleen. I can see how you might have been baffled as to who I meant when I asked for Julie.”
The spark which only moments earlier had ignited between them fizzled like a match dunked in water. He was making fun of her.
She felt the heat rise in her face but ignored it. “What’s this about Carl?” She swallowed hard. “He was supposed to meet me here half an hour ago—has there been an accident?”
“Nope. He had to take off for Monte Carlo this morning—business, of course.” There was almost sarcasm behind that statement. “He asked me to come and take you back to the ranch, so...” He shrugged and splayed his arms. “That’s what I’m doing. You ready?”
Joleen straightened, mentally digging her heels into the ground. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jake.”
“Jake..?”
“His brother.” He gave a brief smile, revealing the same impossibly straight white teeth as Carl’s, but on Jake somehow they didn’t quite seem so im possible. “Don’t tell me he’s never mentioned me,” he said in a voice that said he wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“He hasn’t,” Joleen said, frowning. Carl’s brother? This was Carl’s brother? The first stranger she ever feels instant lust for had to be Carl’s brother? This was definitely a bad sign. “I don’t think Carl’s ever mentioned you,” she said weakly.
“But the National Intruder sure has,” Marge broke in, scratching her chin and nodding. She glanced at Joleen. “I knew I’d seen that face before.” She turned back to Jake. “You’re the black sheep Landon kid who joined up as a monk somewhere in Tibet.”
Jake’s smile returned, tinged with wry humor. “Rumors of my vows were greatly exaggerated. I just stayed for lunch, really.”
Joleen noticed a subtle darkening in his eyes, then mentally chided herself for noticing. “I still don’t get it, why did Carl send you instead of letting me know himself?”
He sucked air through his frozen smile and shrugged again. “That’s Carl.” He looked behind her. “Are those your bags?” He started toward them.
“I can get them,” Jo said, a little too quickly and a little too loudly.
He raised his hands as if in surrender. “Okay, okay. Didn’t mean to insult you.” He stopped. “I’ll go pull the car up to the front door.”
“But I have my own car.” She wondered if her old clunker would make it all the way from Alvira to the western edge of Dallas. She’d been planning on riding out with Carl originally, because he’d insisted she use one of his cars when she got there. Something about not wanting to risk getting oil stains on the driveway. She could understand that. Well, she’d just take her car and park outside the driveway. That was better than sitting in a car with Jake Landon—or any stranger, she reasoned—all that time. “It’s right there.”
His gaze followed to where she pointed, then he looked back at her and cocked his head. “It’s a long drive,” he said doubtfully.
“I know that.”
“It’s going to be over a hundred degrees out today. That thing got air-conditioning?”
“Yes, of course.” Immediately she could tell he knew better, so she added, as if it was what she’d meant all along, “When I roll all the windows down.”
He looked at her for one charged instant, then nodded. “Okay, it’s your choice. You can follow me.”
She took a steadying breath after he turned to leave. “Perfect.”
He regarded her in silence for a few more moments, perhaps waiting for her to give one last delicate protest so he could come to her rescue, then said, “I’ll just go pull my car up out front then, so you can follow me out.”
She nodded and took another breath after he turned to leave. “I’ll be right out.” She turned to Marge and said under her breath, “I don’t like this one bit.”
“Oh, go on,” Marge hissed back. “And ride with him. You know you can’t depend on your car.”
“At the moment I have more confidence in my car than I do in—” she was going to say myself but she knew Marge would jump on that, so she said, “in some stranger I’ve never even heard of before.”
“It’s Carl’s brother, what could happen to you?”
Joleen looked back at Jake leaving the diner. All she could see was the flattering fit of his jeans as he walked away and the way his shirt pulled at the shoulders and loosened at his trim waist. He couldn’t have looked sexier if he’d tried.
“Nothing could happen,” Joleen said, with less satisfaction than she would have liked. “Nothing.”
Marge laid a gentle hand on Joleen’s shoulder. “Listen, Jo, give this thing a chance. You’re wound up as tight as a trussed turkey. Relax.”
“It’s difficult to relax knowing I could be making the biggest mistake of my life. Giving up my apartment was a big deal but giving up this...” She looked around and smiled. “I know it ain’t much, but apart from night school these past few years, this place has pretty much been my whole world.”
“And it’ll always be here for you if you need it,” Marge assured her. “You know you always have a job here and a home with me.”
Joleen looked at her, but the tears burning in her eyes obscured her vision. “Thanks, Marge. That means a lot.”
Marge sniffed loudly. “But you’re not going to need to come back here, honey. You’re gonna walk out that door and follow that man into your future.”
“You mean—”
“I mean now. You never know what’s going to happen until you try.” She raised her eyebrow in a way that Joleen had long known meant there would be no arguments. “Now get on out there and send me a postcard from Dallas.”
You never know what’s going to happen until you try. It was true. It was a cliché, but it was true. Joleen squared her shoulders and looked out the door at Jake. “I’ll go now,” she said, turning back to Marge. “And I’ll do my best to make it work.”
Jake walked slowly to his Jeep and resisted the urge to look back at Joleen Wheeler and the greasy spoon she was about to emerge from. This was unbelievable. If this was a dream it was uncharacteristically surreal, even for him.
Something about her was so...what was the word? Familiar. For no good reason, he felt like he knew her, and he just knew Carl was underestimating her, that she had a lot more fire in her than Carl could see. But maybe Jake was completely wrong about her. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong about people, and undoubtedly it wouldn’t be the last.
He heaved a breath and allowed himself one glance back. The two women were hugging tightly by the door. He’d felt something the moment he’d laid eyes on Joleen—he could have sworn Carl had said Julie. It was the sort of attraction that happened across crowded rooms in old movies.
Her voice had the soothing timbre of a low-toned flute playing a lullaby. And her perfume had a light flower scent he recognized but couldn’t identify. It had drawn him toward her, like a bee to the flower itself. But it wasn’t just her voice, or her face, or the way she smelled. There was something else about her that made him want to be near her.
He forced the thought away. Why was he trying so hard to define it? It wasn’t like it mattered; she was coming to the ranch for Carl. Hell, she was going to marry Carl, as impossible as that was to imagine.
The idea that Carl would go this far in his aspirations to become governor...Jake shook his head. What was it Carl had said? That he needed to find someone obscure, someone beautiful he could dress up and mold into whatever he wanted.
“Your typical small-town, all-American girl,” he had said. “If I could ‘rescue’ a girl from poverty in a one-horse town, I’d be a hero to the working class.”
It made sense in Carl’s self-absorbed mind. The working class wasn’t a constituency he would normally be popular with, to say the least He was viewed as an oil magnate who was born into money and did little to earn it. That wasn’t exactly true, but to many people using money to earn more money through interest and dividends—not to mention gambling—wasn’t quite the same as earning it.
Jake stopped at his car door and turned back when he heard the tiny tinkle of the bells on the diner door. Joleen came out with one small tattered suitcase in her hand and a large leather purse over her shoulder. She didn’t meet his eyes, so he was able to look at her more objectively than he had at first.
She was, he noticed now, built like the proverbial brick house. Chunky, his mother would have said in disparaging tones. Not what anyone would really call fat, but Joleen’s figure was fuller than what was currently fashionable. It suited her. She would have looked odd if she were as rail thin as most of Carl’s girlfriends. With hair so pale it was almost white, she looked exactly like a 1950s pinup girl. Yet she didn’t play that up. Her simple skirt and modest short-sleeved shirt did nothing to emphasize her cleavage or shapely legs. Jake liked that. Better to leave some things to the imagination.
But now he didn’t allow himself that moment of imagination he’d indulged in when he first saw her. Whatever Carl’s reasons for getting involved with her, he was involved and Jake wasn’t the kind of guy to look at another man’s girl.
No matter how pretty she was. No matter how soft the expression in her eyes, or how full her lips were.
The pity of it was that she probably didn’t know what she was getting herself into. She probably had no idea what it was like to be Carl Landon’s wife.
Jake could see what Carl had meant when he said Joleen had “potential.” He hated that Svengali attitude, but he could see what Carl saw: Joleen had a beautiful face. No, it was more than just beautiful, it was captivating. She had that undefinable quality that makes movie stars legends; some inner glow that made it difficult to take your eyes off of her.
Her eyes were clear blue, and her brows arched over them in a way that made her look both open and intelligent. Her nose was straight and unremarkable, its most notable characteristic being that it lacked the artificial tilt and narrow tip that so many of the Dallas set had paid to have added. Her chin was strong in its set and slightly rounded. But Carl would probably starve that off her, Jake thought.
It was too bad, Jake thought again as he watched her turn and wave once more to the woman inside the door. This Joleen was probably a really nice girl. She had no idea her Cinderella dreams were leading her straight into the demolition of all the wishes she thought life with Carl would fulfill.
“I’m ready when you are,” she said, pulling him out of his thoughts.
He looked at her old jalopy. The tire tread was nearly worn down on the rear tires, and the wind carried the faint scent of oil, as well as Joleen’s sweet flowery perfume, from that direction. “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather just ride together?” he asked casually.
She obviously knew exactly what he was getting at. She yanked open the rusty door of her car and tossed the suitcase and purse in, then turned to Jake with a slightly self-conscious shrug. “It gets me where I want to go.” As if on cue, the side mirror slipped halfway off its mount.
Jake smiled. “Does it know you want to go a hundred and ten miles away?”
“It’s a good old American-made car.” She knocked the mirror back into place as she passed. “These things never die.”
“There are plenty of lousy American cars.”
She stopped at the driver’s door and looked at him across the roof just long enough for him to notice her face had colored.
Immediately, he felt bad for having insulted her. “I’ve even had one or two troubles with old Bessie here.” Bessie? Where the hell did that come from? Suddenly as nervous as a kid, he tapped his Jeep on the roof and the awkward silence extended.
“Well, I’ll be behind you if you have any car trouble,” Joleen said with a shadow of a smile. Jake couldn’t tell if she was joking or reassuring him.
Whichever it was, he liked the way she said it.
He watched her climb into the car and, Jake could have sworn, tied her seat belt across her waist. She had to crank the engine three times before it finally turned over. When it did, Jake pulled out in front of her and started down the long highway toward Dallas.
Jake had the feeling that the asphalt line into Dallas was nothing compared to the other road ahead. The one that might well define his future and his brotherly honor.
Because apart from his mother, who was nursing an ingrown toenail in her bedroom and probably would be for the next month, unless she decided to get off the eiderdown and go to Palm Beach, he and Joleen were going to be alone on the ranch together until Carl got back.
