Jenny blinked. “Hey, wait a minute,” she protested. “That’s not the kind of thing I’d charge you for.”

“Then that would be a first,” he said dryly.

“Look, you don’t want my help, it’s no skin off my nose. You don’t seem to be doing so great on your own, though.”

“Trust me,” he said. “I can handle this without any help from you.” He studied her curiously. “But can I assume from what you’re saying that you would approve of your mother and me getting married?”

She looked reluctant to make that big an admission, but finally she shrugged. “I suppose it would be okay.”

He grinned. “Thanks for the endorsement.”

“Would it mean I could stop doing chores and get an allowance?”

“I doubt it.”

“Oh.” She regarded him intently. “But you would want me around, right?”

“You bet,” he said. “It’s definitely a package deal. You comfortable with having me as a stepdaddy?”

To his astonishment, Jenny shifted and threw her arms around his neck. She didn’t say a word, but the dampness of fresh tears on his neck told him all he needed to know. He had himself a daughter.

Janet was feeling besieged. Not by Harlan, bless his heart. To her surprise he was giving her all the space she’d claimed to crave. No, it was his family that wouldn’t leave her in peace.

Every son, every daughter-in-law made some excuse or another to pay a call, to proclaim all of Harlan’s virtues, to try to wheedle from her a reason for her reluctance to accept the proposal, which they had somehow discovered he’d made. She had the same answer for each of them: “Does your father know you’re here?”

And when the reply was consistently no, she suggested that they talk with him if they had questions about the relationship. “He knows why I won’t marry him,” she repeated over and over.

Unfortunately, Jessie wasn’t as easily dissuaded as the others. She popped in two weeks after that disgraceful scene Janet had caused by running out of the dining room at White Pines. The minute she’d walked through the door, she settled into a seat opposite Janet and showed no inclination at all to leave.

“I’m not going to talk about it,” Janet declared for what must have been the hundredth time, hoping just this once to stop any questions before they started.

Jessie nodded. “That’s understandable,” she soothed.

It was, perhaps, the hundredth time Janet had heard that, too. Everyone who’d dropped by had said the same thing, then proceeded to butt in just the same.

“It’s private,” Jessie added, indicating a deeper understanding than most.

“Exactly.”

“Harlan’s probably done more than enough bullying himself without the rest of us getting in on the act.”

“Precisely,” Janet said.