Page 34 of Jaxson

Jaxson leaned close. “I do not know what Kate sees in him. Trust me, he is a monster.”

“Your mom stopped by,” Tillie said.

“She did?”

“Yeah, she has invited us both to lunch on Sunday.”

Jaxson looked across the table, and it appeared as if he had lost a little color. “Do you want to go?”

“Would you like me to go?” Tillie asked. “You’ve not talked about meeting your parents, and that is a pretty big step.”

Jaxson reached across the table and took her hand. “I want you to be there. I want you to meet my parents. I just wish I was there to kind of buffer between the two of you. My mom can be a little much. I’m her little boy.”

Tillie smiled. “Of course you are, and besides, I happen to like your mom. Are you worried they’re going to hate me?” She hadn’t thought about that.

“No, my parents are going to adore you.”

Chapter Eleven

“When are you going to marry her?”

Jaxson looked over at his dad. They just finished his mother’s delicious meal, and he and his father insisted on doing the dishes, rather than allow their women to clean after they cooked. His father had done this all his life. When Susan cooked, it was their responsibility to do the clean-up.

“Dad? What the ... seriously? She is just outside. She could hear you.” And he didn’t want to scare Tillie away.

She’d been so nervous about this meeting. He moved toward the back door to check to see Tillie was still on the back porch, enjoying a glass of his mom’s homemade lemonade. Sometimes his mother did it a little on the sour side, but today it was perfect and he knew it was because of Tillie.

“And does that scare you?” Mark asked.

“That Tillie will hear, freak out, and run away? Absolutely.”

Mark laughed. “But not about marrying her?”

Jaxson had his hands deep in soapy water as he ran the cleaning brush across the plate. His mother always refused to have a dishwasher as she considered them a waste of money. Her motto was, if you had to rinse the plate off to put it in the dishwasher, you may as well clean the damn thing.

“I want to marry her, Dad. I want to make her my wife,” he said, pulling his hands out of the suds and rinsing them.

“You want to marry her?”

“Yeah, more than anything.”

Mark smiled and then reached into his jacket pocket. “Your mom asked me to give this to you,” he said. “It was given to her by your grandmother, and now it is time to be passed on to you. It’s the engagement ring all Riggs women get to wear.”

Jaxson recalled the ring as it sat on his mother’s finger for the last thirty-seven years. They were engaged before he was even a thought.

“It’s beautiful.”

“And she knew when her son was ready to propose, it would need to be passed on, and now it can be. It has to be passed on to you.” Mark gripped his shoulder. “You did make us believe for a while there that you might never settle down, but I knew you had it in you.”

“Dad, I don’t know how to ask her,” he said. He ran a hand down his face, suddenly regretting years of being a player, of using girls and tossing them aside. He never promised anyone anything.

“You’ll figure it out. Now, come on, let’s get these dishes done, and when the time is right, you will know exactly when to give it to her.”

Jaxson wanted any engagement proposal he made to Tillie to mean something. She meant everything to him.

They joined their women on the back porch, and he was so happy to see his mother and his woman getting along.

After enjoying some lemonade and watching the sun go down with his folks, he and Tillie left and walked back toward her place. It was a short walk, but he took her hand, linking their fingers together, and he basked in the knowledge that his mother already adored her. She had already won his mother over, and that was the biggest challenge of all.