Читать книгу His Brother's Fiancee - Jasmine Cresswell - Страница 14

CHAPTER FOUR

ON THE VERY DAY that Michael and Emily became engaged, Amelia Chambers announced her decision to host the prewedding bridal dinner at the San Antonio Federal Club. Founded the year after the Republic of Texas joined the United States, the club was originally intended as a meeting place for the city’s leaders, and its role hadn’t changed much during the 155 years of its existence. Its decor remained stuffy Victorian, with nineteenth-century English hunting prints on the walls, plaid carpet in the bar, and enough walnut paneling to rival a French château. The most powerful people in San Antonio still belonged to the club, and mere money wasn’t enough to get a person elected. For that, you needed the sort of connections the Chambers family had enjoyed for generations. Connections that Holt, Amelia and Michael Chambers continued to cultivate with painstaking care.

Sam Sutton, by contrast, had been too busy establishing a profitable business to waste time acquiring the type of friends who could get him drafted into the inner circle of San Antonio’s social elite. It was only in the past couple of years that he’d started to think how nice it would be to give Raelene the pleasure of belonging to the same snooty club where her granny had washed dishes during the Depression—and been grateful for any leftover food she was allowed to take home.

He had to admit he’d originally thrown Michael and his daughter together in hopes that they might hit it off, and he wouldn’t deny that it had been mighty useful when Emily decided to marry the guy. Holt Chambers’s offer to propose Sam for membership in the prestigious club would never have happened if Emily hadn’t been marrying his son, and the Laurel Acres deal would have been a lot more difficult to negotiate.

By the same token, it was darned inconvenient that his daughter had decided not to marry Michael—and at the very last minute, too. Lord knew, if Emily had been trying to screw things up, she couldn’t have picked a more surefire method. Not to mention how her behavior was going to set tongues wagging.

But Sam was a father first and a businessman second. He would never want Emily to hook up with a man she didn’t love. Not for the sake of the Laurel Acres project, that was for sure, and much less for the sake of membership in a club where you paid too much money to eat dubious food with fancy French names. Names that left you wondering just what the heck you were actually swallowing. Raelene lived in mortal dread that one of these days she’d order rattlesnake or snails or alligator, all wrapped up in puff pastry and stuffed with truffles.

But for all that he wanted his little girl to be happy, Sam believed in calling a spade a spade, and he never swept problems under the rug, so there was no getting around the fact that Emily’s broken engagement left him real worried about the future of his dealings with the Chambers family. His gut told him that a personal link between the two families was necessary if Holt Chambers was going to honor the complex verbal agreements that underpinned the official Laurel Acres contracts. Sam had worked damned hard and made a tidy profit over the years—enough to make him mighty proud of what he’d achieved. But the Laurel Acres project was among the biggest developments he’d ever tackled, and if it didn’t work out, he could lose enough money to hurt. To hurt pretty bad, in fact. The knowledge that Michael had his finger firmly on the pulse of his family’s business interests had been reassuring, keeping Sam’s stomach from feeling too queasy as he poured truckloads of money into the initial stages of the development.

Sam tried to comfort himself with the thought that Emily wasn’t completely severing her link to the Chambers family. After all, Jordan was a Chambers, too, and marriage to him ought to forge just as tight a connection as marriage to Michael. Ought to, but probably wouldn’t, since Jordan seemed to be ignored by his father and brother as far as business dealings were concerned. Jordan had never put in an appearance at a negotiating session and never signed a single legal document connected to the Laurel Acres project. As far as Sam could tell, he hadn’t even been consulted about the decision to sell land that had been in the Chambers family for over a hundred years.

Under the circumstances, Sam had to wonder if Emily’s marriage to Jordan would prove a strong enough bond to keep the deal on track. If Michael Chambers was pissed off with his brother—not to mention angry with Emily—he could make things difficult for everyone. Mighty difficult, in fact.

Despite these very real concerns, Sam had been surprised to discover that he felt more relief than anything else when Michael had dropped his bombshell and announced that Emily no longer wanted to marry him. Sam didn’t entirely cotton to Michael Chambers, even though the guy was considered San Antonio’s most eligible bachelor. His campaign for governor added the perfect finishing touch to his already desirable image, but it didn’t reassure Sam any. Not now that he knew the guy a little better.

Sam had been impressed by Michael when they first met, and Raelene had been thrilled to think that their daughter—their own sweet Emily—might one day become the First Lady of Texas. But the better he got to know Michael, the less Sam liked him. The guy was too much of a slick politician, with smiles that came a tad too easily, and a way of conversing that had him managing to agree with two or three different viewpoints all at once. Sam’s exuberance over the match had cooled dramatically in recent weeks, and even the prospect of having Emily living in the governor’s mansion hadn’t been enough to rekindle his enthusiasm.

There had always been something wrong with the relationship between Michael and his daughter, Sam reflected, handing his car keys to the parking valet and offering his arm to escort his wife up the steps into the club. From day one of Emily’s engagement, he’d sensed an off note. Now that he’d seen his daughter with Jordan, he realized what the problem had been. Sam smiled to himself. It had been a real simple problem when you got right down to it: Emily had agreed to become engaged to Michael for the wrong reasons. She’d never been in love with him, at least not top-over-tail crazy, the way she ought to have been. Instead, his prim-and-proper darling had fallen for Jordan, the bad boy of the Chambers family. No wonder Sam had noticed increasing tension on Emily’s part as the wedding day approached. Now he understood why: she’d been trying to work up the courage to follow her heart and break off her engagement to the oh-so-eligible Michael.

Sam chuckled inwardly, then turned to look at his daughter, thinking how pretty her golden brown eyes were, and how elegant her long chestnut hair looked, all swept up on top of her head, with just a few curls clustering at her neck. She’d brought him and Raelene so much joy over the years. He wished there had been more time for the three of them to talk before they had to rush out again to this stuffy party. He wanted to hear how she and Jordan had met, and when they’d fallen in love, but they hadn’t had a moment to chat. Emily and Jordan had hurried off to get a marriage license, something that had proved difficult to achieve, even pulling strings and calling in favors from everyone that Holt Chambers knew at the county clerk’s office. Once Emily got back to the house, there had barely been time to take showers and get changed for tonight’s shindig. There’d been no time at all for finding out how his daughter’s thoroughly conventional relationship with Michael had given way to a passionate, not at all conventional relationship with Jordan.

However it had happened, Sam sure was glad that his daughter had found real love at last. He wasn’t a man who felt at ease expressing mushy sentiments, but he knew that without Raelene at his side, he’d never have made it through the lean years while he struggled to get his business established. Even more important, without Raelene and Emily, there would have been nobody to share the success with when it finally came.

Feeling a sudden lump in his throat, Sam patted his wife’s arm, then turned and gave Emily a beaming smile, pleased to see how lovely she looked, despite the stresses of the past few hours.

Emily returned his smile, but her eyes didn’t light up the way they usually did. “You okay, muffin?” Sam asked. He didn’t understand why Emily set such great store by always doing the right thing, but he knew her well enough to guess that tonight was going to be torture for her.

“I’m fine, Dad, thanks.” Despite the confident words, she drew in an audible breath, and her voice shook when she continued speaking. “I guess I’ll be relieved when this evening’s over, that’s all.”

“Don’t you give another thought to what people are going to say about this, muffin.” Sam tried his best to reassure her. “Just remember what’s important. You and Jordan are in love and you want to get married. In the long run, that’s all that matters. Five years from now, nobody will remember you and Michael were ever an item.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Dad.” At least outwardly, Emily had already managed to recover her poise, which was no surprise to Sam. His daughter was a grand master at concealing her true feelings.

“Thanks for being so supportive,” she said quietly. “You’ve been really understanding about all this. I honestly don’t know how I…we…ended up in such an impossible situation. I’m sorry to be causing you and Mom so much embarrassment….”