Sophie answered with a huge grin of her own. “Oh, good. This is supposed to be a happy occasion, right? I mean, it’s a wedding! How cool. Are you a friend of the bride or the groom?”

“The groom. I’m Annabeth Connelly.”

“Wow! Are you Will’s sister?” Sophie asked, her excitement bubbling over.

Annabeth was used to the question, but it still embarrassed her to answer it. “No, I’m his mother.”

“Man, you’re pretty hot to be a mom of a guy that old.” Walker’s voice was filled with so much awe, Annabeth nearly laughed.

“Wow,” Sophie said. “Like, he must be thirty. And you’re so . . . young.”

“It’s because I was sixteen when I had Will.” Annabeth watched as her words registered with both teenagers. Walker immediately took a big step back from Sophie, and Annabeth had to bite back another smile. She never passed up an opportunity to use the scared-straight approach to make a point against teen pregnancy. Someone should at least learn from her mistake.

“Oh.” Sophie twisted her hands in front of her. “Well, you should be happy, right? Will is getting married and you have a new grandson. It should be a nice ceremony, even if they are doing it in my dad’s family room. So unromantic. I hope he thought about flowers and stuff. He isn’t always tuned in to what needs to be done at a social event. My mom says it’s because he’s socially inept. Too military minded, whatever that means. But all guys are kinda like that, you know?”

Annabeth didn’t think Hank was socially inept. Every time they’d met over the past four years, he’d been the opposite, actually; more gallant, a perfect gentleman. In fact, she’d been guilty of comparing other men to Hank and finding them lacking. Friends said she was too picky, when she’d only been adhering to a standard set forth by a man who would likely only be an acquaintance in her life.

She hated to burst Sophie’s bubble. “Actually, there weren’t any flowers or music. It wasn’t that kind of ceremony.”

Sophie’s jaw dropped. “What? They already had the ceremony? I missed it?” She turned to Walker, her eyes slits in her pretty face. “I told you not to stop at IHOP! Now I’ve missed the wedding.”

Walker took another step back. “Whoa, chill. I was hungry. Anyways, you can still show your earrings to the designer. She’s probably had a few glasses of bubbly, which means she’ll be easier to convince to buy your jewelry. After a few drinks, my mom will let me do whatever. How do you think I got the car for the weekend?”

“I’m afraid that won’t work, either. No champagne.” All in all, the ceremony was pretty bare bones. Annabeth had hoped for at least a photo to preserve the occasion for Owen when he was older—they were doing this for him, after all—but she’d dismissed that idea after glimpsing her son’s tortured face when he’d stormed out of the powder room earlier. “And if you’re looking for Julianne, she’s already left. She wanted to get back to the hospital to see Owen.” The bride’s face hadn’t been much better when she’d exited.

Sophie plopped down on the sofa with an emotional sigh, mirroring Annabeth’s actions from moments before. “Wow. I’m gonna get grounded for sure, and all for nothing. My one chance to get a top designer to see my jewelry, and I blew it.”

Walker sat down on top of the coffee table in front of her. “No, I blew it, Soph. I’m really sorry. We shoulda just stopped at a drive-through or something.”

Annabeth handed Sophie the box of tissues as she sat down beside her. “Your parents don’t know you’re here?”

“Well, obviously my dad was gonna find out, but it would have been worth the punishment if I could get Julianne Marchione to use my necklaces or earrings in one of her photo shoots. I didn’t even know my dad knew her until my mom was blabbing to all her friends that one of the players on the Blaze had knocked up a famous fashion designer.” She looked up at Annabeth sheepishly. “Sorry. I mean, well, about the knocked-up part.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. That’s exactly what happened.” Annabeth reached up to finger one of the earrings dangling from Sophie’s ear. “Did you make this? It’s stunning.”

The earring, a cascade of wire-wrapped clusters of purple amethyst briolettes topped with moss aquamarine stones, shimmered in the room’s low light. As the owner of an antiques shop, Annabeth had developed an eye for distinctive and original jewelry, and Sophie’s creation was unique and very fashionable. Not to mention marketable.

The girl reached up and withdrew the earring from her ear and handed it to Annabeth for a closer look. “Yeah, I have a matching necklace for them, too.”

“Soph is a whiz at making jewelry,” Walker chimed in, admiration in his voice. “You should see what she can do with a soldering iron. And those thingies she makes with the leather, they’re—”

“Walker, I don’t think Annabeth cares about my jewelry.” Sophie snatched back the earring and began putting it back in.

“Actually, I do.” Annabeth looked over at the girl’s stunned face, her hand poised with the earring halfway in her earlobe.

“You do?”

“I own a small antiques store in a very trendy summer resort town. My customers love one-of-a-kind jewelry like yours. I’m sure it would sell quite easily.”

Sophie’s face lit up, nearly matching the soft pink of her hair. “Really, Annabeth? Oh my gosh, that’s so mad!”

“But”—Annabeth held up a finger as Walker and Sophie were fist-pumping one another—“only if you tell me why you need the money. If you’re using it to buy drugs, the deal is off.”

“Hey!” Walker cried.

“Drugs? No way,” Sophie protested. “I’m so not into that!”

“Yet you’d risk getting grounded to sell some jewelry. Why?” Annabeth had worked with enough teenagers to know things weren’t always what they seemed. Her gut was telling her Sophie was sincere. She hoped her gut was right.

“I’m perpetually grounded. I have a D in physics, so I’ll likely spend my summer trapped at home watching the twins while my mom plays tennis at the club and weekends at the shore with her book club.” Sophie leaned back against the sofa cushions and crossed her arms in disgust. “My friend Lizzie moved to L.A. last year and I want to go visit her. My dad keeps saying he’ll take me, but since there’s no professional football team in Los Angeles, that isn’t likely to happen. So I wanna buy my own ticket. Lizzie says I’d like California. I wouldn’t stand out so much there. I just want to meet people like me, you know?”

“The kids at our school are all rich, WASPy tight-asses,” Walker added. “They don’t appreciate Sophie’s artistic genius.”

Annabeth’s heart squeezed tightly in her chest at Walker’s words. She could easily relate. At fifteen, she’d been thrust into a small-town school in the heart of the Bible Belt weeks after her free-spirited hippie parents had been killed in a car accident. Her parents didn’t believe in the institution of marriage or school or anything else, instead roaming the country wherever the wind blew them. Needless to say, the transition to normal life was a bumpy one for Annabeth, and acceptance was difficult to achieve. Of course, showing up to school pregnant at sixteen hadn’t helped.

“Here.” She pulled a business card out of her clutch and handed it to Sophie. “I’ll be in the store tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you call me then and we can chat about what you have and work out the details of getting your product to the shop.”

Sophie hurled herself into Annabeth’s arms. “Oh, Annabeth, I love you!”

“Sophie Claire!”

The three of them jumped to their feet at the sound of Hank’s voice.

“Dad!” Sophie squeaked.

“What are you doing here?” Hank demanded.

Sophie clenched her fingers in her skirt. “Um . . .”

Hank ignored his daughter. “And more importantly, how did you get here?”

“Yo.” Clearly, Walker didn’t possess innate self-preservation skills, or he’d have kept quiet.

Fisting his hands at his hips beneath his unbuttoned suit jacket, Hank glared at Walker behind his wire-framed glasses. Not quite as tall as Will, Hank still wasn’t a small man. She could see well-defined pectoral muscles beneath his crisp dress shirt. A small abrasion, likely from his razor, marred his rugged jaw, but it didn’t detract from his handsomeness. His nostrils flared briefly when his steely blue eyes came to rest on her. Annabeth had to lock her knees at the fierceness of his gaze.

“You got in a car with him?” He sliced a finger through the air at Walker. “On the highway with Mr. T-bone-his-mother’s-car-the-day-he-gets-his-license? What were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t like that! That old geezer didn’t look where he was going when he pulled out. It wasn’t my fault.”

“Daddy, Mom exaggerated that whole thing just so you would back her up when—”

“Enough!” Hank bellowed.

The room was silent as Hank took a few calming breaths, one hand massaging the back of his neck. Annabeth really didn’t want to overstep her bounds, but she didn’t feel right leaving the kids defenseless, either.

“Walker, why don’t you go to the kitchen and help yourself to a piece of the cake I brought. Someone should enjoy it,” she said, ruefully.

Right on cue, Walker’s stomach growled. He looked from Sophie to her father. Sophie rolled her eyes at him before nodding at him to go. Hank leveled another fierce glare at Annabeth as Sophie sidled up closer to her. Annabeth answered his gaze with a raised eyebrow. If he wanted her to leave, he’d have to ask her.

Hank sighed. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

“Not exactly.” Defeat rang in Sophie’s voice.