“Have a good day,” he called after her. “I’ll see you this evening.”
Knowing that was true put a big smile on her face as he climbed into the car. Thinking of the inevitable goodbyes when he went back to his life in Dallas made the smile fade.
“So, tell me about this woman you’re really in town to see.”
Jason grimaced at the question from his aunt Lindsay Grant as he faced her across a table in a downtown Little Rock restaurant Wednesday. He would be sharing Thanksgiving with her, her husband and their daughter and son the next day, but he was treating his maternal aunt to lunch today while the others were all busy. He didn’t bother with prevarications, since his family members had a knack for ferreting out the truth. Instead, he asked, “How did you know?”
“Justin,” she said simply. “He connected the dots between a woman from Little Rock you met at a wedding last month and your sudden urge to visit your aunt for Thanksgiving. He mentioned it to your mother, who told me.”
Jason groaned. He’d thought his mom was surprisingly accepting about his desire to spend Thanksgiving in Little Rock rather than at the huge, annual feast to be held at his parents’ house in Dallas. Lindsay, Nick and their offspring often made the drive to Dallas to join that celebration, but had chosen not to do so this year because of other obligations this weekend, a tidy coincidence for Jason’s last-minute plans. Now he suspected that his sweetly scheming mother had given her blessing because she was hoping a romance would ensue. She’d been prodding Jason to get out and date again ever since his breakup with Samantha last year. Apparently, she had approved of what she’d seen of Madison during the wedding. He just hoped neither his brother nor mother had mentioned the connection to anyone in the Lovato family, considering how skittish Madison had been about BiBi finding out about them.
Still slim and pretty in her fifties, his mother’s youngest sister smiled at him, looking so much like his adored mother that he couldn’t help returning the smile. “You don’t have to tell me about her if you’d rather not, but I’d love to hear about her.”
“There’s not a lot to tell yet,” he admitted. “I’ve only known her for a little over a month. We’ve spent only a few days together, though we’ve stayed in touch since the wedding.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Time doesn’t matter. How do you feel about her?”
He chuckled
wryly. “I’m nuts about her. But, you know, most people spend a little more time than our family generally does to get to know each other before making any serious commitments.”
His mother’s family were firm believers in love at first sight. Both she and each of her siblings had romantic stories of how they’d met and married their mates, and the success of all those marriages was a testament to their insistence that time was irrelevant when it came to matters of the heart. Several of his cousins had followed in the family tradition of marrying quickly, and so far, so good with the matches they had made.
As for himself…well, he’d dated Samantha for months before conceding defeat, but he admitted privately now that he’d known almost from the start that what they had would not last. Yet from the minute his eyes had met Madison’s at that rowdy costume party, he’d known she was special.
It seemed he had more in common with his Walker kin than he sometimes realized.
“What’s her name?”
“Madison Baker. She’s a fourth-year psych resident. I asked her last night if she knew Nick, but she said she didn’t.” Lindsay’s husband had practiced pediatrics in Little Rock for more than twenty years. “Her brother, Mitch, is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at the children’s hospital. Nick may know of him.”
“He probably does. I don’t know him, though.”
“Her sister, Meagan, is also a surgeon, an attending physician at the med school. Jenny will probably get to know her when she starts med school next year.” Lindsay and Nick’s daughter planned to follow her dad into pediatrics, while younger brother Clay was more interested in mathematics.
“You’re still assuming she’ll be accepted. We haven’t heard yet, you know.”
Jason shrugged. “She’ll get in. Having a dad in the local medical community is a definite plus, even if he isn’t involved with the university. Not to mention her glowing résumé and stellar grade point average. She could have gone anywhere she wanted for medical school.”
Lindsay had to concede. “Probably. But as selfish as it is, I’m glad she wanted to stay here. She said she plans to practice in the state so she might as well train here and start building her professional network.”
“Makes sense. That’s part of why I stayed in Texas.”
Lindsay gave him a look that held affectionate skepticism. “It had nothing at all to do with you wanting to stay close to your family?”
He shrugged a bit sheepishly. “Okay, maybe it did.”
“I think it’s lovely that you’re so close to your family—both on the Walker and D’Alessandro sides. I’m sure you know how fortunate you are to have a whole lifetime of that sort of love and support.”
“Of course I know.”
No one knew better than a member of the Walker family how important those family ties could be. Having been separated as small children when they’d lost both their parents, his mother and her brothers and sisters had all been adults when they’d finally been reunited, thanks to his mother’s decision to hire private investigator Tony D’Alessandro to locate her six missing siblings after her adoptive parents died. Tony had tracked down all five surviving siblings, and then had married his client, bringing Michelle into his own large, demonstrative, Italian-American family. The oldest of Michelle and Tony’s four offspring, Jason had heard the story many times, but he never tired of it.
The youngest Walker sibling, Lindsay had been just a baby when she’d been adopted by a family in Little Rock, with whom she was still very close. Unlike their older brothers and sister, Michelle and Lindsay had no memories of those early years together, but they had formed very strong bonds with them all in the thirty-plus years that had passed since they’d reunited. Jason had always figured those years apart had reinforced a need and appreciation for home and family, especially for the older Walker siblings who had spent their childhoods in foster care. That had to explain at least in part their tendency to swap lifelong vows as soon as they identified their soul mates.
“So, your Madison is a doctor from a family of doctors. She can certainly understand the demands on your time, just as you understand hers.”
“She’s not ‘my’ Madison, Aunt Lindsay. She’s—”