She hit the kitchen first and found Bea at the island pulling muffins from a baking tin with aid of a butter knife.
“Good morning, dear!” she said brightly. “I’m just getting ready to take this in to the dining room. Will you fetch me the butter?”
“Sure.” She did so, bemused, accepting the kiss her mother-in-law pressed to her cheek. “What’s going on?”
Bea was glowing, her smile bending her eyes to tiny crescents. “It’s wonderful. They’re having a brother breakfast.”
“All of them?”
“All that are here, darling.”
Emmie nodded. “That’s good.”
“Isn’t it? I keep trying to get them all together, but King won’t listen to me about it. It’s important, I think, to spend time with your brothers and sisters. If you have them, that is,” she said in deference to Emmie’s only child status. “I never had any myself, but I always wanted a few. How fun it would have been to have a brother. Girls need brothers, I think, just as much as boys do.”
Bea could get wound up and chatter on for hours if left to her own devices. Curious, Emmie said, “Have you met King’s sisters?”
“Oh yes. Lovely girls. There’s Raven, who’s just a few months younger than Shane. Her mother’s a model,” she said in a confidential tone. “Willowy thing, all legs. Eccentric name, you know.”
Emmie nodded with pretend graveness.
“And then there’s Cassandra, who’s the youngest of the nine. Just turned sixteen.”
Emmie tried not to show how staggering that was to hear. Walsh was forty, and he’d said his oldest brother, Phillip, had just turned fifty-three. She didn’t want to do the math.
“Will you help me carry these in?” Bea asked of the two heaping baskets of cinnamon muffins.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Walsh was sitting at the head of the dining room table; it was his house, after all. To his right was Phillip, on his left Shane. Fox sat beside Phillip, and there were no traces of tension.
Emmie set the muffins down on the table, snagged one, and went to kiss Walsh. His smile was easy, relaxed, and her chest swelled with gladness. He’d been edgy and nervous lately, and it was good to see him like this.
“Busy day?” he asked when she pulled back.
“Yeah. I’ve got Sam bringing her sister in for a lesson this afternoon.”
He frowned. “Sam?”
“Samantha. Aidan’s girlfriend.”
“Yeah, love, I know who she is. I also know his last girlfriend keeps her horse here. You really want them running into each other?”
“Tonya hasn’t been around much lately.”
He stared at her.
“What? Am I supposed to tell her she can’t come because things might get awkward? She’s not some flighty airhead. And God knows she has to be aware of his history. If Tonya shows up, I’ll keep them apart. It’ll be fine.”
“Famous last words.”
“What?”
“Nothing, darling.”
~*~
At Emmie’s suggestion, Sam bought her sister a pair of cheap paddock boots, a helmet, and drove her out to Briar Hall for her very first riding lesson one cool, bright Saturday afternoon. At the Halloween party, Sam had admitted her struggles with Erin to Walsh’s old lady, and Emmie had immediately suggested lessons. “It can’t hurt,” she said. “And who knows, she might take to it.” Given that jazz, tap, chorus, gymnastics, piano, ballet and cheerleading had all failed to hold Erin’s interest, no, throwing horses on top of the pile couldn’t make her aimlessness any worse.
