Penny Jordan Tribute Collection. PENNY JORDAN

made my three score and ten—and some besides,’ Joe reminded him virtuously, but Brad wasn’t deceived. He knew his uncle and his soft-spoken determination to live to celebrate his one hundredth birthday.

      ‘You’re an old fraud,’ he told Joe ruefully now.

      ‘And you’re a fool,’ the older man came back, watching him with fierce fondness. ‘None can deny that you’ve done a good job standing in for your parents, Brad, nor that you’ve always put others before yourself, but they’re all grown and gone now and unless you want to end up lonesome and alone…

      ‘Who is she?’ he asked craftily. ‘Someone you met in England…? I was stationed over there during the war, you know; nearly married an English girl myself… My, but they’re pretty. Would have married her, too, if she hadn’t decided she preferred a fighter pilot to me. Worse mistake I ever made.’

      Brad gave his uncle a frowning look. Joe, as he knew from wide experience, was a shameless manipulator of the truth when it suited him and this was certainly the first that he had ever heard of a wartime romance. His uncle’s shrewdness in guessing about Claire had thrown him off guard, though.

      ‘I’ve never heard about any English girl before,’ he told his uncle.

      ‘That’s because I don’t mention her. Don’t like to admit to having made a mistake. That’s a trait we both share… Should have married her when I had the chance, only I thought I’d kinda make her wait a little. I was young and I dare say a little swelled-headed at times. She didn’t want to wait, though, and I lost her…

      ‘Oh, I got over it… kinda… I came home after the war, met your aunt Grace and we got married, but I never forgot my English girl. Margaret, her name was. Peggy, they called her. Pretty as a rose, she was, with the softest skin.’ He gave a sentimental sigh.

      ‘Oh, Grace and I got on well enough together. She’d lost a fiancé during the war herself and so we both knew the score. Kinda makes you think, though. When I look around me now, see all of you together… If I’d married Peggy perhaps my grandchildren would be here now. There’s nothing like having a family of your own, Brad.’

      ‘I have a family,’ Brad pointed out brusquely to him. And besides, she… my English girl… doesn’t want me, he wanted to say, but the habit of keeping his own problems to himself, which had begun with his parents’ death, was too deeply ingrained now to be overcome.

      ‘A man belongs where his heart is, Brad; that’s his true home,’ his uncle told him quietly.

      His uncle was right, Brad acknowledged later as the first of the early-evening shadows started to fall and the family gathered around the fire, the little ones snuggling up to their parents, the older ones—the soon-to-be teenagers—hanging together in their own small, private group, too old now to want to mimic those they saw as the babies of the family by staying with their parents and still too young to be allowed to separate themselves from the family group.