Ask Anyone by Sherryl Woods

and suggested they join us.” She smiled at him sweetly. “You don’t mind, do you?”
    â€œWhatever makes you happy,” he said, his own tone sour.
    Daisy chuckled, though her expression quickly sobered when Bobby scowled at her.
    Lunch went downhill after that. Daisy and Jenna kept up a nonstop barrage of talk about the plague that brothers could be on their lives.
    â€œI’m going to remember every word of this,” Bobby told Daisy. “Tucker will find it fascinating, I’m sure. And you’ll eventually pay for every disparaging word you said about the two of us.”
    This time his sister didn’t even try to hide her amusement. “Your threats have lost the power to scare me,” she told him loftily. “But I will leave you two alone now. Darcy, would you like to come home with Tommy and see his boat?”
    Darcy nodded with the first evidence of animation she’d displayed all during the meal.
    â€œIs that okay with you, Jenna?” Daisy asked.
    â€œIf you’re sure you don’t mind. I’ll be by in an hour or so to pick her up.”
    Not if he had anything to say about it, Bobby vowed, at least not without him right by her side to make sure the conversation never veered into the kind of girltalk that would come back to haunt him.
    â€œWe’ll swing by when we’re finished with the tour,” he told Daisy. “If you’ve baked something by then, it will go a little way toward getting you off the hook.”
    Daisy rolled her eyes. “Will chocolate chip cookies do?”
    â€œAs a down payment,” he told her.
    When Daisy and the kids had gone, he turned and saw that Jenna was studying him with evident fascination.
    â€œYou know, for all that talk of Daisy’s about how annoying you and Tucker are, you’re really very close, aren’t you?”
    Bobby was surprised she had to ask. He was even more startled by the genuinely envious note in her voice. “Of course. Aren’t you close to your brothers?”
    Jenna shook her head. “Not really.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    Her expression turned thoughtful and perhaps just a little wistful. “Maybe it was because after my mom died, I was the one sent away to boarding school, while they got to stay home with my dad. I resented it.”
    Bobby tried to imagine Daisy’s reaction if King hadtried such a thing with her. Daisy would have fought the move tooth and nail. She might have been her daddy’s meek, well-mannered angel most of the time, but Daisy did have a temper and she had taken it upon herself to play mother to Tucker and Bobby. She would never have permitted King to interfere with her self-assigned duty. If he’d actually managed to get her enrolled at a boarding school, Daisy would have turned right around and hiked home the next day, and that would have been that.
    Not that King would have considered it in the first place. Keeping Daisy at home had made his life run more smoothly. She’d slipped into the role of hostess at Cedar Hill as if she’d been born to it. Never mind that she’d been barely in her teens at the time. How sad that Jenna hadn’t been given the same chance to carve out a niche for herself at home with her family.
    Bobby regarded her sympathetically. “That must have been hard.”
    â€œIt was devastating,” she said simply. “Just when I needed the rest of my family the most, I became an outcast.”
    â€œHow’d you handle that?”
    A faint smile touched her lips. “The same way every teenager gets even. I rebelled.”
    Bobby had no difficulty at all envisioning the woman beside him staging a rebellion that would shake the rafters. Her audacious intrusion into the middle of his life testified to her inventiveness.
    â€œWhat did you do?” he asked.
    â€œWell, there was the incident of the snake tattoo,” she said, her eyes twinkling mischievously.
    The