Free The Merger by Bernadette Marie Page A

figure it out.”
    Avery nearly choked on her beer. “What I have with Pete is exactly what my mother had with Uncle Zach. Nothing. All I can hope for someday is he will marry someone with a nice brother and set me up. It worked for my parents.”
    Julie sat and listened to the two women banter. What an interesting web this family had woven. She tried to put all the pieces together.
    “So your dads are brothers, right?”
    Both women nodded.
    Julie pointed toward Clara. “Your dad is the adopted one?”
    “You’ve been getting a Keller family run down.”
    Julie shrugged. “I thought it was a Benson run down.”
    Both women laughed. “It all ties together,” Clara confirmed. “But yes, my father was adopted by the Kellers when he was seven. Avery’s dad is the only biological son of my grandparents.”
    “That’s awesome,” Julie said with quite a bit of enthusiasm. Being an only child she couldn’t even image what it would be like to have a bounty of cousins and siblings.
    Clara rolled her bottle between her hands. “My parents were high school sweethearts. Got married. Had kids. Got divorced and married other people—then got married again. To each other.”
    Julie realized her mouth had dropped open. “They’re married now? To each other?”
    “Have been for nearly twenty-five years this time.”
    “Why did they divorce?”
    “Times were hard. They just forgot their way. But you can’t mess with fate. When it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”
    Julie turned to Avery. “Your Uncle Zach, is that Spencer’s dad?”
    Avery grinned. “Yep.”
    “Your mom had a thing for his dad?”
    Avery’s shoulders straightened as she crossed one slender leg over the other. “They grew up together. His dad was shipped off to France to boarding school. My mother is French.”
    That explained the beauty of Avery, Julie thought. The dark hair, the fine, nearly fragile features of her face—she was model perfect.
    Avery tossed her hair over her shoulder. “My mother fell in love as a small girl and chased Spencer’s dad until he married Spencer’s mom Regan. Then at Clara’s dad’s wedding to …” she looked at Clara for confirmation.
    “Kathy.” Clara looked at Julie. “He married a woman named Kathy. They were married about eight hours.”
    Julie nodded as if she had kept up, but she might need a refresher course later.
    “Right,” Avery said. “Kathy. Anyway, my dad was set up as my mother’s date for the wedding. They ran off and had this quick affair. Jetted off to my grandfather’s yacht where my mother stranded him.”
    Julie swallowed hard. Who was this woman?
    “You know they had some affair?”
    “It was a big deal because I came from that lustful week.”
    Clara laughed and her cheeks filled with color. “Her family is a lot more open about this stuff than mine would have been.”
    Avery shrugged. “Sex is sex. Love is love. My mother doesn’t hide that she had sex with a lot of different men. She was in a position to have whatever she wanted. My dad was a young, and handsome doctor with his own list of go to nurses.”
    Julie had to remind herself to blink. “You know all of this?”
    “I know all of this. It’s no big deal.”
    It sure would have been to her, Julie thought. Then again, her parents were in their late forties when she was born. She didn’t really know anything about their younger lives. She’d missed out on grandparents and everything these girls seemed to have.
    “Anyway,” Avery continued as she picked up her beer. “Mom got pregnant, moved to Nashville and did what she could to prove to my dad she could be more than some rich snob. She could be a good mother and she wanted him to fall in love with her.”
    “Rich snob?”
    Avery’s eyes lit. “Pierpont Oil ring a bell?”
    “Are you kidding me?” Julie’s voice rose in pitch and volume.
    “That’s my grandfather.”
    Clara shook her head. “Tell her about the vineyard. You’re going to want