Page 49 of Clara Knows Best

“You just felt like she hated you?”

He finished shaving his upper lip before answering. “I don’t know. Kind of.”

“But now you know everyone loves you. With or without a shirt.”

“Are you trying to make me blush?”

“That, or ask me out,” she said without thinking.

His dark eyes snapped to hers.

“’Morning,” Beck grumbled from the open doorway. “Good to see you, Jesse. Almost didn’t recognize ya.”

“Beck. How you doing, man?”

They shook hands.

“All right,” Beck answered. “Oh, hey, Clare, got you something.”

“You did?”

He handed her a little plastic bag. “Saw it at Buc-ee’s last night.”

“That’s so sweet, Beck,” she exclaimed, taking out a delicate turquoise bracelet. “It’s super cute. And I have a belt that’ll match it.”

“Well, there you go. Mom up yet?”

“Yeah, in the kitchen. Dad’s frying bacon.”

“Cool,” he said. “Hey. Did Clara really have a hangover last weekend?”

“Definitely,” Jesse answered, toweling his face.

“Not cool,” Beck told his sister with a sleepy grin, and then slapped the top of the door jamb before vanishing down the hall.

They were alone once more and it was very quiet. Time for a little damage control.

Clara fastened her new bracelet and hopped off the counter. “I was just kidding before, you know. About you asking me out.”

Jesse finished rinsing his razor and tossed it into his Dopp kit. “Don’t worry about it. You’re probably ovulating.”

Spoken like a man who’d never consider asking her out, even if she moved back to Austin.

“Moisturize,” she reminded him glumly.

“Uh-huh.”

He rubbed lotion into his face with alarming vehemence, sprayed antiperspirant under his arms and pulled on a T-shirt.

“Time for breakfast,” he announced, and hit the light switches on his way out of the room, plunging her into semi-darkness.

Clara followed slowly, reflecting ruefully that there was nothing like a shirtless man shaving his face to make a girl sit up and take notice.

15

Jesse’d had plenty of opportunity, back in the day, to observe the emerging personalities of his little foster siblings, and as they sat at Liesl’s having Dr. Wilder’s birthday lunch, he watched how they interacted with each other. They were close-knit despite their differences, that was for sure, and he knew that their affectionate camaraderie had been mindfully scaffolded by parents who never left anything to chance.

With his mother’s ambition and his father’s gift for strategy, Hart had always been destined for big-league success. Most people had stood a little in awe of him since he was a kid. He led his brothers and sister by shining example or brute strength, as the case may be.

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