“Where did you come here from?” Jensen asked Harriet from her other side. “Lancaster, Pennsylvania?”
Harriet blinked at him from behind her glasses. “Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seems oddly specific. And no.”
“Have you ever been to Lancaster, Pennsylvania?” Jensen asked.
“Not to my knowledge.” Harriet frowned at him, then turned back to Missy. “I grew up near Kansas City, Missouri. Went to college in Minnesota, then got my master’s in Illinois. When I had the opportunity to come to Cold River, I couldn’t refuse. I’m a born-and-bred midwesterner, but I knew it was the place for me.”
“So what brought you here today?” Rae asked from across the table, sounding perfectly innocent. So innocent, in fact, that her own husband snorted from beside her. “To the Bar K, specifically?”
“Not with Jensen,” Amanda murmured, her eyes piously lowered to her plate. “But to see him, all the same.”
“Killing it on the narration there, monkey,” Connor said from his seat across the table.
Amanda made a face at him, and Jensen prepared to wade in and knock some heads together. Metaphorically. Or maybe not so metaphorically, given the way Zack and Riley were smirking at him.
“I’m looking for role models,” Harriet said in her brisk, matter-of-fact way. And clearly misread the stunned silence it took over the table. Jensen sat back in his chair, prepared to look lazy and unbothered no matter what, because that was the best way to handle what was coming. Harriet plowed on ahead. “I’m trying to teach some students I have in summer school about things like primary sources, and I find it’s more helpful to have guests. It keeps them interested. And everyone seems to know who Jensen is.”
“I’m sorry,” Connor said with a big laugh. “Did you say role model? Jensen?”
Jensen sat there, a big grin on his own face, while his entire family burst out laughing.
Funny thing was, on any other Sunday, he might have laughed with them. He knew he was no role model. He’d never wanted to be anything of the kind. He’d known a real role model once, and he knew he was to blame for what had happened there.
But this wasn’t the time to think about Daniel.
Because there was something about how much his family laughed, and how long, that settled in him in a way he didn’t much like. And there was something else all wrapped up in the Miss Harriet Barnett–ness of it all. About how still she was, sitting with her perfect posture in the chair next to him with all that blond hair piled so strangely on her head.
And he was close enough now to see that it wasn’t simply blond, because nothing about her was simple. It was too many shades of gold to count, and how annoying was that?
Amanda wiped at her face. That was the level of her hilarity. “What exactly are you going to teach those poor, impressionable children, Jensen?”
“I did a pretty good job with you,” Jensen drawled, not really taking the edges off it.
Amanda rolled her eyes at him, but it was Riley who spoke. “I don’t think barfly is the kind of role you’re supposed to model for young folks. Their parents tend to object.”
This from a man who was not yet a parent, but clearly spoke for them all.
“You make barfly sound like a bad thing,” Jensen replied lightly, and figured he deserved a halo for not pointing out that Riley had propped up his share of barstools in the years when he wasn’t a happy, expectant father, and Rae had been a forbidden topic of discussion around this very same table.
No halo appeared, but he knew he’d earned it all the same.
“Zack is the sheriff and a role model for us all,” Connor said, sounding far too amused. “As he will be the first to tell you, at length. But all that law and order should set those kids on the straight and narrow. You should get him to do it.”
“Maybe they’ve seen enough badges already,” Jensen found himself saying. And not entirely because of that obnoxious Aidan Hall and his criminal family. “You ever consider that?”
“I do consider it,” Zack said. “Usually an aversion to the badge is a good sign that there’s some delinquency that needs addressing.”
“I think it’s lovely you want to help out, Jensen,” his grandmother said as if she hadn’t heard all that laughter. “Which is more than the rest of them can say, I think.”
That didn’t stop the laughing, which was probably good-natured. Probably. Even his father looked like he almost smiled, which, for the remote Donovan Kittredge, was as good as falling on the floor in hysterics.
It didn’t really feel all that good-natured, though.
Jensen was a pretty laid-back guy. He prided himself on it. He was surrounded on all sides by family members who got wound up at the slightest provocation, so maybe he’d developed his particular brand of easygoing charm in opposition to that.
He could psychoanalyze himself all day. Just like all of his ex–temporary flings liked to do. And usually he ended up laughing it off, whatever the analysis was. Because he’d learned too young the difference between an honest-to-god tragedy and … everything else.
Any second now, he’d join in the uproarious laughter at the very notion that he might be a role model to some kids stuck in summer school.
But Harriet Barnett was sitting next to him, perched on a chair shoved in tight with the rest of them around his parents’ dining room table. Her glasses were falling down her nose. He could smell whatever she’d used on her skin because she was sitting so close, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that knowledge. A hint of cinnamon and a touch of vanilla that made him think not only of dessert but how much he, personally, liked himself an extra helping of dessert. Her hair was too many shades of gold, that ridiculous cardigan was falling off one shoulder, and he had never seen that much floral anywhere except maybe the wallpaper in his grandmother’s guest room.
She was not laughing.
Instead, she cast that steely-blue gaze of hers all around the lot of them, her mouth in that unsmiling line that, in his opinion, only called more attention to the fact that it was a fine mouth to begin with.
Then she turned that gaze on him.
Jensen had never felt the sensation that swelled inside him then. He had made it his life’s work to laugh at the joke first, last, and loudest, but he felt his grin fade as Harriet just looked at him.
With a gaze that held enough weight to shove his ribs around.
Like she knew—like she just knew—all the things he kept locked up tight, far beneath all that laughter. Far away from the light of day.
Harriet Barnett seemed to look straight through him while his own flesh and blood laughed and laughed and laughed.
He would have preferred it if she’d hit him.
“Yes, Grandma,” Jensen drawled, before he thought better of it. Before he asked himself what he thought he was doing. “I can’t wait to help. As you all know, there’s nothing I love more than giving back. Especially to Cold River High, the alma mater that I love so much.”
“I think that’s laying it on a bit thick,” Harriet said with all that reckless determination from beside him. How could she not know how dangerous it was to walk around the way she did, so intense, where everyone could see? But then she smiled, and Jensen stopped worrying about anything else. “But thank you, Jensen. I won’t forget it.”