Million Dollar Christmas Bride - Holly Rayner Page 0,4

up with her and have dinner. She’s living here in Memphis now, and I can’t exactly ignore her, given that we’re in the same city. It’s not the same for you. You’re in California.”

“That’s another thing,” Danielle said. “I can’t believe her nerve, moving back into the house we grew up in. When she called, she told me she’s given away most of her money. Our mother, the philanthropist! What a big heart she has! So big that she’ll abandon her children, and—”

“Dani,” Jackson said, cutting his sister off before she could get too heated. “I get it. You’re upset. You don’t have to establish a relationship with her again. But I do—at least just this dinner. I have to see her.”

He felt himself get slightly choked up at the thought of seeing his mother after so long. What would she look like? He could remember what she looked like at the age of forty-four, when she left Tennessee. He’d been ten, and to him, his mother was an angelic figure who swept around the house in long, shimmery evening gowns, perpetually getting ready for one high-society event or another.

When he’d learned that she was leaving them, he’d been crushed.

Now, thirty-one years after her departure, he was going to come face-to-face with her again.

I’m not ten anymore, he thought. I’m a grown man. Her mistakes don’t have power over me anymore.

He tensed his jaw and forced down the knot in his throat. It settled somewhere in his stomach, in a way that felt all too familiar. For years, he’d been stuffing down feelings that threatened to overwhelm him with regards to his mother.

He spotted the sign for the Parlor Grille up ahead. “It’s just dinner,” he said aloud, though the comment was meant more for himself than for Danielle.

“But can you believe that she plans to sell the house we grew up in and donate the funds to charity?” Danielle said. As usual, she was stubbornly refusing to let go of the conversation topic of her choice.

Jackson had years of experience with his sister’s flair for the dramatic. “Easy, Dani,” he said. “I’m going to try to talk to her about that, actually. I want to see if she’ll consider leaving the house to me.”

“You?” Danielle said.

“Well, you don’t want it,” Jackson said.

“Of course I don’t!” Danielle said. “That place has nothing but bad memories. As far as I’m concerned, it should be demolished.”

Jackson pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot and turned off the car. “Come on… you don’t mean that,” he said. “You and I had so many good years in that place. Remember the tire swing out front? And the gardens in the back that led out to the woods? What about the field—”

“We’d run through it, out to that little stream that ran through the property.”

“Right. We built a bridge once!” Jackson said.

“Sure, but that was all so long ago. Who cares?”

Jackson sighed. “If you don’t care about the place, why are you upset that Mom’s living there now? Come on. You can’t really mean it when you say you don’t care.”

“I do mean it,” Danielle said. “Good riddance to it. I just don’t want Mom to live there because she doesn’t deserve to. She left us.”

“Now you just sound cold and bitter,” Jackson said. “Mom is family.”

“She’s not my family,” Danielle said resolutely. “She left us, not the other way around. It took a long time for me to be okay after that, and goodness knows I’ve spent enough on therapy. I’m not going through all of that again. I’ve put to rest all of my feelings for her, so yes, I’m sure I do sound cold. That’s because I don’t care about her. I can’t let myself care. I’ve moved on, Jackson. Have you?”

The question hung in the insulated capsule of Jackson’s sports car.

He cleared his throat and tried to prepare an answer.

He couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what the answer was. He had a vague sense that he’d never be able to move on from the pains of his childhood as clearly and with as much discipline as his sister had. They’d always been so different, he and Danielle. He was the sentimental one, who cherished photographs and saved old greeting cards, while Danielle preferred to toss items like that into the trash bin and move on. Maybe that was why she’d moved off to Los Angeles at the age of eighteen, while Jackson had decided to stay in the very city he was