nineteen

Tucker knocked on the door of the old home, his hand stiff and his body aching. He’d been sleeping about as well as a cat in a washing machine. In the three nights since PJ had walked out on him, he’d tossed and turned until the wee hours of the morning, flopping across his bed, kicking the sheets free, and then grumbling when he had to find them in the morning. He’d gotten a grand total of three hours of restless sleep, and he felt every minute he’d missed.

Scrubbing a hand down his face, he scratched at his whiskers. His three-day-old beard was a reminder that he had no one to kiss, no one to care if he had a beard or not.

Forget that. It wasn’t about just anyone caring. It was about protecting PJ’s sensitive skin. It was about making kissing as pleasant for her as it was for him.

Pleasant. Ha. Yeah, right.

Okay, it was more than pleasant. It was darn near earthshaking.

And he’d kissed it goodbye with one stupid decision.

“Hold yer horses. I’m on my way.” The familiar voice reached him just as the door swung open and Aunt Shirley greeted him with a scowl. “What are you doing here?” Hands on her hips, she looked like a soldier holding the fort. No entrance. No exceptions.

He mumbled something and pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of the eatery where they’d entered the tunnels. Where his whole life had changed. Just not in the way he’d imagined.

“I figured you’d’ve sold some treasure and bought up all the spots on my television by now. But as far as I know, you haven’t even announced the truth behind Buddy Jepson’s letter.”

Everything she said was true, and he didn’t have a good response. So he hung his head, crossed his arms, and hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know why I’m here. But I can’t make myself announce that we found the treasure. I guess I thought you’d understand.”

Aunt Shirley’s laugh was low and humorless. “You and Peej make some pair.”

“PJ? She was here?” He whipped his head around, searching for any sign of her. “Do you know where she went? I haven’t seen her in three days. I stopped by her office, but she wasn’t there.”

“Calm yourself, boy. She was here yesterday.”

With a deep breath, he nodded. “Sure. Okay. Well, I guess I’ll go.”

“Don’t be absurd. Get in here.” She opened the door wider and held her arm out toward the kitchen. “Let’s have ourselves a glass of sweet tea, and we can figure this all out.”

When they were settled with tall glasses filled to the brim with tea sweeter than PJ herself, Tucker stared at the dancing ice cubes and waited. He wasn’t exactly sure for what. He only knew that he didn’t know where to start.

“So?” Aunt Shirley prompted him.

“It’s been a couple of rotten days.” That was an understatement if ever he’d said one.

“Peej let on as much. She told me everything.”

He choked on his drink, just about ready to swallow his tongue. “Everything?”

She nodded. “She told me about you two fake dating.” Her fingernails drummed against the Formica tabletop. “Stupid, stupid move. I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d need to fake it.”

The disappointment in his aunt’s tone made him rush to respond. “I didn’t.” But then the words stopped. They were too raw, too painful to make it out of his throat.

“What did you do?”

He’d made PJ think his election was more important than she was. Not exactly the way to win a woman’s heart—especially when that was all he really wanted to do.

Heaving a deep sigh, he began with a story Aunt Shirley had already heard from PJ. But this was his side of it.

“I know we shouldn’t have pretended to date—well, we didn’t even really do that. We just let everyone think what they wanted to. We spent a little more time together, held hands a little more often. And kissed.”

“So it was all fake?”

“Oh, no! I mean, it started that way. I just wanted to help her deal with the situation with Winston. But then . . . I don’t know. It became real. It was like I saw her in this new light. For years she’d just been my best friend, the one person I knew I could always rely on. Then one moment I looked up, and she was all beautiful eyes and silky hair, and she fit into my arms like God made her just for me. It wasn’t just that she was an amazing woman, but she was meant to be my amazing woman. And I couldn’t stop looking at her legs.” He hadn’t meant to be quite that honest, but there it was.

Aunt Shirley’s laugh was contagious, and he let himself chuckle. It was that or a total breakdown. He’d been fighting the latter for two days straight.

“And then you kissed her?”

“Yes, ma’am. I did.”

“Of all the things that Peej told me, that’s what surprised me the most.”

“That I kissed her?” He was wondering why it had taken him so long.

“No. Don’t be ridiculous. I knew you’d figure that out soon enough. Why’d you pick that moment? Such a public place?”

Right. That made more sense. He’d asked himself that more than once too. “I guess because . . .” He’d rather keep this particular truth to himself. But if he was to have any chance of fixing things with PJ—and he desperately wanted that—he needed Aunt Shirley’s help. “It was my dad, actually.”

“Travis?” She nearly jumped from her seat. “Not my brother. He doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body.”

“Not romantic, no. But he did say something that made me take action.”

The corners of her mouth turned down as she leaned an arm across the table. “I’m so sorry. I know y’all have a tense relationship.”

That was a nice way of putting it. “He was—he was trying to set her up with some lawyer at my party, and I lost it. I’m telling you, I saw red. He was going on and on about how she wouldn’t want the whole town thinking we were dating—even though it wasn’t quite real yet—when she could have someone like Flynn Rutledge.”

“Rutledge? That pretty boy? Oh, no. Peej would never end up with someone like that. Not with the likes of you around.”

“I could have used you there that night. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost my temper and kissed her.” Then where would he have been? Still pretending when all he wanted was real and true and forever. No, he’d made a choice that night, and it may not have ended well, but at least he’d had a taste of heaven on earth. And he knew it was worth fighting for. He just didn’t know who to fight. “Then again, I’d have hated to miss out on that kiss.”

Eyebrows waggling, Aunt Shirley nudged his shoulder as she got up to refill their glasses. “That good?”

“So good.” But if she had to ask, had PJ told a different story? “PJ wasn’t—she didn’t say something else, did she?”

“Oh, I’m not going to spill her beans. A woman never tells when another woman kisses and tells.” She winked. “But Peej was not disappointed.”

He let that fill him with warmth from his heart to his toes, but a cold rush showered over him just as quickly. He’d had his last taste of her lips, his last feel of her in his arms, unless he could fix this. He had to fix this.

“Then why doesn’t she want me to win this election? Does she think I’m as incompetent as my father does?” Please, Lord, no.

“I think she does want you to win. She just wants you more than that.”

His knee started to bounce as he swiped a hand across his forehead. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why is winning so important to you?”

He jumped to his feet, pacing a line in the linoleum of her floor. “Nobody likes to lose. I mean, I want to win. What’s wrong with that?”

“I think it’s something a whole lot more than that. And I’m guessing it has something to do with the reason you kissed her in the first place.”

“My dad? No, I mean, this isn’t about him.”

At her full height, Aunt Shirley was about five and a half feet tall, and she’d returned to her seat after refreshing their sweet tea. But even standing across the room, Tucker felt like he was facing down a giant. One he’d been avoiding since he was a boy. One who looked an awful lot like his father.

“My dad, your grandfather, believed in making something of yourself. He didn’t finish high school and worked a warehouse job he hated his whole life, but by golly, his kids were going to be educated and well respected. He hammered that into your father and me every day. Did we do our homework? Were we making good grades? Had we applied to the right colleges? He was relentless, and your dad probably got it worse than I did. I was supposed to go to college to get my MRS degree. Instead I went after my nursing license and never looked back. But your dad only learned one thing from our dad—love is contingent on success.”

Aunt Shirley twirled the ice in her glass, her gaze focused on the pink place mat at the seat he’d vacated. “I’m afraid you might have begun to believe that. I’m begging you, don’t buy it. Don’t live your life that way. Love is love because it is freely given. It may cost everything, but it is free to give. God loves you that way. I do too.”

“And I love PJ that way. But I have to show her—and my dad and this whole city—that I’m worthy of her. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hearing people tell her she could have done better than me.” He shut his eyes as though that would make it easier to tell the truth. “Because I’m afraid that one day I might start believing it. Then I really wouldn’t be worthy of her.”

Aunt Shirley slammed her hand on the table. “Tucker Westbrook, you listen to me, and you listen good. You don’t have to be anyone but the man God created you to be. You are loved, and you are enough. No badge or public office will change who you are.”

PJ had said something similar in the tunnels, and he wanted to believe it now as much as he’d wanted to believe it then. But after hearing a different story for thirty years, he couldn’t get the cadence out of his head.

“I was never much of a reader. Couldn’t get the letters to stay where they were supposed to. And if it hadn’t been for PJ, I would have dropped out in junior high.” He resumed his pacing, his steps even and measured, but the room wasn’t big enough, and the walls felt too close. “She was the best thing that ever happened to me. There’s no way I could have opened my business without her help. Or even made it through my tours. She’s been there at literally every important event in my life. Knowing she’s here in town but I can’t talk to her . . .” He hit himself in the chest. “It physically hurts. I don’t know if I know how to do life without her. And I don’t think I want to.”

“Has she ever once made you think you had to earn her friendship—her affection?”

“No, but—”

“What makes you think she’d start that now?”

He scratched at his beard, suddenly hating everything it stood for—every wall between him and the woman he loved.

“You are a derned fool if you can’t see how much that woman wants to love you. Badge or no badge, she wants to know that you’re going to stay by her side. Forever. She stuck by you through all of that school stuff, the Middle East, and even this election.”

He jerked back, her words like sniper fire, sharp and to the point. She might be right. Could it be possible that PJ wanted the same thing he did? The two of them. Together. For always.

“How can I . . . What can I do to show her?” He already knew she wouldn’t answer his calls, and chasing her down at her apartment wasn’t likely to win him any brownie points. Besides, she was probably staying with her mom to avoid him.

“I’m going to let you in on a little secret. This family isn’t perfect, but it’s filled with a long line of courageous people. When you went on your first tour, I thought about Caroline’s diary and her letters home. She didn’t choose the easy path. She could have stayed in Savannah with her parents. But she chose the one God had for her, even when it meant angering her father. She took off for parts unknown with the man she loved, not because it was simple but because she knew she could face anything with Josiah by her side.”

Aunt Shirley stood and walked toward him. Her hand on his arm stopped him midway through another step, and he met her bright blue eyes. “Tucker, I love you like a son. I’m proud of you no matter what. But you need to be courageous right now and win her back.” Her small hand patted his shoulder. “Or I might never forgive you.”

There was no question about it. He had to win her heart. End of story.

He was pretty sure he knew how to do it. If it required courage, he knew how to use that. He just needed a few allies to make it all come together. Usually he’d call PJ right about now, and she’d set up all the details. But not this time. This was up to him. And she was worth it all.

Grabbing his aunt by the shoulders, he kissed her cheek. “Thank you. I’ve got to go. I’ve got calls to make.”

“Go get her, boy.”

When Tucker pulled his car into the driveway of the home he’d grown up in, he waited for that sense of dread that always arrived. But it didn’t come. He marched to the front door, pushed it open, and hollered inside, “Hey, anyone home?”

“Tucker? I’m in the kitchen.”

His dad was standing on a stepladder, power drill in one hand, a freshly painted white cabinet door with decorative scrolling in the other.

“You need a hand?”

“No, I’m f—”

The cabinet door wavered, and his dad leaned to grab it, teetering on the second step of the ladder. Tucker lunged for him, catching the door and pushing his dad upright before he landed on his mom’s new granite countertops.

“Whew. Thank you. Your mom would kill me if I damaged one of these doors.”

Tucker rested it on the floor and nodded for his dad to get down. “Might as well let me give you a hand since I’m here.”

They switched places, Tucker taking the spot at the top of the ladder and screwing the hinge on the top of the door. The cabinets didn’t quite reach the ten-foot ceilings, but they were close.

“I heard you found the treasure—proved our ancestors weren’t smugglers.”

“Yep.” He fit the next hinge into place. “But I’m afraid we were definitely thieves. Thieves with good hearts.”

His dad grunted, maybe from the weight of the door he was still holding in place. Or maybe from the hard truth that the Westbrook ancestors weren’t quite as upstanding as everyone would have hoped. “What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Well, the authorities are still working to verify ownership, so I don’t have much of it. Jethro’s been awarded his aunt’s necklace, based on the letters from Caroline that Aunt Shirley had.” He paused as the power drill whirred into action. “The city might try to claim the rest of it—but there’ll probably be a finder’s fee. At least, that’s what Carter said. There may even be a book deal in it. Imagine me writing a book.”

His dad didn’t laugh. “Why haven’t you gone to the media? They’d eat that up. The election’s tomorrow, and you haven’t given yourself much time to spread the word that Jepson has been wrong all along. Better hurry up.”

Tucker heard the chastisement in his father’s words and counted to ten until the tension in his muscles eased. Aunt Shirley had been right. His dad had bought into a lie that love could somehow be earned. Tucker wasn’t interested in anything that resembled that.

Somehow that freed him to feel sorry for his dad. And that made it a whole lot easier to let his jabs fall by the wayside.

“I guess I found something more important than the election,” Tucker said as he climbed to the bottom rung of the ladder and tested the door. It was sturdy and swung smoothly. “I wanted to talk to you about Penelope.”

Just then the door from the garage opened, and his mom strolled in, colorful shopping bags in hand and a wide smile splitting her face. “Well, I didn’t expect the two of you to be here together.”

“Tucker was helping me put up the cabinet doors. They look good.” His dad turned back toward him. “You always were good with your hands.”

Tucker nearly fell off the ladder. He could remember the number of times his dad had given him a real compliment. Zero. He couldn’t help but wait for the backhand to follow.

When his dad was silent, Tucker asked, “What do you mean by that?”

His dad shrugged. “Only that you could fix nearly anything when you were a kid. You took apart a computer when you were twelve and put it back together without a hitch. I always thought you’d make a great surgeon.”

“I wish you could have loved me even though I’m not.”

“Tucker!” his mom cried, her bags falling to the ground.

His dad cocked his head. “Are you serious? You think I don’t . . .”

Tucker swallowed the urge to bolt, stepped off the ladder, and looked right into his dad’s eyes. “I always thought I didn’t measure up. You made it seem like if I wasn’t book smart, I wasn’t worth your time and I wasn’t worth much.”

“Oh, Tucker.” His dad’s face was hard to read, the lines around his mouth pained, his eyes shadowed. There was a war battling within, a fight that Tucker could see. The man he knew his father to be versus the man he thought his father wanted to be.

It took everything Tucker had not to let his dad off the hook, not to sweep things under the rug. After all, love might be free, but it was incredibly costly.

“Dad, I love you. But sometimes you make me feel like you wish you’d had a different kid.”

“A different kid?” His dad cleared his throat. “Did a different kid serve his country with distinction for two tours? Did a different kid start a respected security company? Did a different kid find a treasure that no one else has been able to find for 150 years?”

Tucker ducked his head, suddenly a twelve-year-old boy longing to hear his dad say he was proud of him. “Well, I couldn’t have done any of it without Penelope.”

“Even so.” His dad clapped him on the shoulder. “I am so proud of you and the man you’ve become. Win or lose this election, I’m glad you’re my son.”

Tucker let out a half laugh. He’d waited so many years for this, and now that it was here, he didn’t know what to say. So he didn’t say anything. He just hugged his dad, pounding him on the back.

“I’ll try to do better,” his dad said.

“Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

“Me too.”

A sob suddenly tore through the kitchen, and they stepped apart to find his mom crying over the counter. “You have no idea,” she mumbled. “Been waiting so long. You boys . . . I’ll make snacks.” She scooped up her bags and disappeared down the hallway before both men chuckled.

“I guess Mom’s happy.”

His dad shrugged. “Guess so.”

“Listen, Dad. Before she comes back, I need to talk to you about something else.”

“Is this about Penelope?”

Tucker grinned. “I need your help.”