MBA. Admit it.”
“I’ll admit no such thing, but I will give you credit for growing the business in ways I never dreamed possible.”
“Thanks to my Yale MBA.”
“Oh, stuff it.”
“Do you kids see what I had to put up with from your grandfather from the very beginning?” Linc asked.
“Seems to me he kept you humble,” Hannah said.
“Exactly, sweetheart,” Elmer said. “He needed to eat some humble pie when he got here all high off his new Ivy League MBA, telling me he was going to marry my Molly. The impertinence.”
Molly laughed at the face her father made. “It’s been forty years, Dad. It might be time to move on.”
“Never.”
“Why did you hire him if you were so suspicious of him, Gramps?” Ella asked.
“You know that saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer?” Elmer asked, giving Linc a calculating look.
“Which was Dad?” Ella asked.
“I didn’t know yet, so I figured if I hired him, I could keep an eye on him and figure out which he was going to be.”
“Oh whatever,” Linc said. “You were drooling over my MBA.”
“That was vomit over the way you mooned after my daughter.”
“I never once mooned your daughter.”
“Well,” Molly said, “there was that one time—”
“Say another word, and I’ll fire him,” Elmer said as the others laughed.
As the chairman of the company’s board of directors, Elmer could, in fact, fire him, not that he ever would. Linc had done a good job of growing Elmer’s family business from a small-town store into a brand that was beginning to gain national recognition.
“What I want to know,” Will said, “is what your dad said when you told him you’d accepted a job working for a country store in Vermont.”
“Yeah, that didn’t go so well,” Linc said, sagging a bit when he recalled the reason he was reliving some things he’d much rather forget.
“Let me,” Molly said, tuning in to him as always.
“Sure, love. Go ahead.”
“About a month after your dad came home to Vermont with me, we went hiking on the mountain one day. It was a clear, cool beautiful September day, and when we reached the summit, he dropped to one knee and proposed. Even though I knew it was coming, he still took me by surprise that day, which I consider one of the best days of my life.”
“Were you still worried about him giving up Oxford?” Charley asked.
“A little, but he seemed really happy working at the store and living in Butler. We’d begun work on the barn, with a goal of having a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom habitable by the time the winter came along. The mudroom was our first bedroom.”
“I thought you always joked we were conceived in a tent,” Hunter said, frowning. “As if we needed to know that.”
“You were,” Molly said, “but that’s not part of the story you need to hear.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” Colton said. “Ain’t no one wants to hear that.”
“It’s a pretty good story,” Molly said with a saucy grin for Linc.
“No!” their ten children said as one, with Elmer joining in the chorus.
“It’s not too late for me to run that boyfriend of yours out of town on a rail,” Elmer said.
“Actually, Dad, it’s about ten kids too late. But anyway, where was I? Oh yes, so we’re engaged and working on the barn, and Dad is enjoying working for Gramps, even if Gramps threatens to kill him on a daily basis.”
“That was a very dangerous time in my life,” Linc said with a wry grin, “but well worth the danger to be with my Mols every day.”
“The only thing standing between us and our plans was the fact that your father hadn’t told his family he’d decided to live and work in Vermont rather than go to England. And he wasn’t going to work for his family’s business.”
“Where did they think you were the whole time you were in Vermont?”
“At Oxford.”
“You would’ve killed us if we’d done something like that,” Charley said.
“Oh, absolutely,” Linc said. “I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, but I wanted to have my life in Vermont set up before I went home to tell them my plans had changed. And I wanted your mom and me to be engaged.”
“Did he ask for her hand, Gramps?” Will asked.
“He did, and he said all the right things about how he’d take care of her and protect her and love her for the rest of his life. However, there was no mention of ten children, or I might’ve had