The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

He grinned. “You don’t like kids?”


“I love kids,” Emma said. Children didn’t make judgments about her. They didn’t care if she was tactless. “I love kids who aren’t from Beverly Hills,” she amended, and smiled at him. “Kids who don’t get facials and massages.”

“Or get to choose their own nannies,” Cooper said.

Emma gasped with delight. “You read about that, too?” she asked, referring to an Us Weekly article about a certain supercelebrity who allowed his children to choose their nanny. They’d been through six in the last year alone.

“I may or may not have flipped through a magazine recently,” he admitted with a charmingly self-conscious smile. “But it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? When I was a kid, I was hardly allowed to choose a shirt for school, much less a nanny. Not that there were any nannies floating around where I grew up.” He stood, gathering up some of the foam squares that had been lost from the pit. “And believe me, if I’d spoken to my mother like I just heard the guest of honor speak to hers, I would have been skinned alive and left to hang in the Texas sun.”

“Same here!” Emma agreed as she gained her feet. Her mother had never let Emma get away with anything. Her stepsister, Laura, could get away with everything. Not Emma.

“Have you ever done a bat mitzvah like this?” Cooper asked Emma as he tossed the foam blocks back into the pit.

“I’ve never done a bat mitzvah at all! I had no idea so much was expected. I mean, the girl is turning thirteen, not twenty-one.”

“Right,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s a lot of work. Looks like it might have been a complicated event.”

“Not really.” Emma glanced up; Cooper was looking at her. Sort of studying her, his gaze discerning. She realized she was having a conversation with him, an actual conversation. She nervously tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Complicated is like a wedding anniversary I was involved with a few months ago. A polygamist wedding anniversary.”

Cooper blinked. A grin spread across his face. “Get out.”

“I am so not kidding. Four cakes,” Emma said, holding up four fingers and wiggling them at him. “And that was only the beginning. There were four wives who all had completely different ideas for the event.”

Cooper laughed as he picked up a riding toy. “Tell me.”

“Well, the first wife thought it ought to be a barbeque. Nothing too fancy, and trust me, she was none too fancy,” Emma said with a laugh. “But the second wife wanted a big formal sit-down dinner at a hotel. She was the loud, opinionated one. She convinced one of the other wives to be on her side, and it looked as if she was going to get her way, but then the newest wife—who looked like she was eighteen to their thirty-or forty-something—said she wanted a dance.”

“A dance,” Cooper repeated, as if he was trying to imagine it.

“Like a high school dance,” Emma said, thinking back. “Which I think was not cool with their religious beliefs, not to mention all the awkwardness around deciding who gets the first dance with the hubby. Oh, and they wanted the event to happen in two weeks.”

Cooper laughed at the absurdity of that as he tossed more foam blocks into the pit. “So what happened?”

“Well,” Emma said, warming to the tale, to actually talking without annoying him, “I was called in at the last minute to help get it resolved. So I drove out to their house in the Palisades—” She laughed. “That house had four master suites and umpteen bathrooms and my God, the kids! There were kids everywhere, like it’d been infested. And the wives, holy shit—they were all so mad, they talked over each other. I wasn’t much help, either, because I couldn’t really concentrate, you know? I kept thinking, how do you do this? How do you pass him around? And none of them seemed to like each other, so I really didn’t get it.” She laughed and shook her head. “I like to think I’m open to different lifestyles. But that one? It confuses me.”

“I don’t get it either,” Cooper said, walking back to where she stood. “I can’t seem to wrap my head around one wife, much less four.”

“Exactly,” Emma said. “Our planner, Gage, kept pleading with the wives to agree and finally got them to a compromise on a sit-down barbeque. He pitched it as being an under-the-stars event. You know, out in the open to accommodate all those people.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“I thought so,” Emma said. “But then the youngest wife? The cute eighteen-year-old with the curvy figure and no kids?” she said, sketching out a woman’s figure. “She told the old lech what she wanted and that was that. He told the other wives to stuff it, they were having a dance. And they did. But with four separate cakes.”