Cara Colter - Weddings Do Come True

More even than a friend. A link to ways long forgotten.

He went back into the living room. Danny and Doreen streaked by, his hat down around Doreen’s chin, Danny riding hard on a broomstick.

“What’s your name?” Ethan asked the woman.

He knew before she answered, he was going to hate her name. He knew she would have a name like Tiffany, or Jade, or Charity.

“Lacey,” she said evenly, “Lacey McCade.”

Bingo. Not a sensible name like Mary or Betty.

“Mrs. Bishop broke her hip,” he said to Gumpy. “She’s not coming.”

Gumpy beamed as if he’d just won the lottery. The kids screeched through, squeezing between the coffee table and the couch.

But she reached out an arm and stopped Doreen and then caught up Danny. “You can help me bake cookies tomorrow if you go quietly and put on your pajamas.”

Tomorrow?

“What kind?” Danny demanded.

“What kind do you like?”

Ethan glared at her. Tomorrow?

“Chocolate chip,” they said together.

“We don’t have chocolate chips,” he said. Not that she was going to be here long enough to bake cookies.

“I can do it before I go,” she told him levelly, as if she could read his mind. “It only takes half an hour or so.” And then as if that settled it, she smiled at the kids, a smile so radiant it almost melted the caution he felt. Almost. “Do you like oatmeal cookies?” she asked them.

They hooted their approval, just as if they fully intended to earn their cookies by quietly going and putting on their pajamas.

“Oatmeal?” she asked him.

He nodded curtly, folded his arms over his chest, tried to suppress his surprise—and annoyance—when Doreen and Danny regarded her solemnly for a moment, and then marched off silently to put on their PJ’s.

Gumpy looked smug.

“She’s not staying,” Ethan bit out.

“Well, she’s gotta stay tonight. Unless you got a spare set of keys made after we ran those ones through the baler.”

He hadn’t, and Gumpy knew it.

“I’m taking the toilet apart right now. The keys are probably caught in the trap.”

“Well, I ain’t waiting up for you to do it.”

Ethan saw he was being unreasonable. He’d already decided they would have to take her back tomorrow. It would be too late to do it after he’d rescued the keys. And he still had to get those kids to bed.

But the kids marched out in their pajamas, asked a couple of anxious questions about cookie baking and then asked her if she’d tuck them in.

Not him, the one who’d cooked for them and watched Toy Story with them twenty-seven times and washed their mountain of dishes, and let them play with his damned hat.

Nope. Her. The impostor.

“Well, now she’s gotta stay and make cookies,” Gumpy pronounced with satisfaction when she’d left the room, one hand firmly in the grasp of each child. “Promises are important.”

Actually, though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, that would work out fine. He could get up early with Gumpy and feed the cattle, she could watch the kids and make cookies and then leave right after lunch. Not perfect, but workable.

Whatever had driven her here, he was pretty sure she was not the type who would be rummaging through the house looking for stuff to steal.

Not that he had anything worth taking. Unless you counted Chris Irwin’s video. The VCR was Gumpy’s.

“Been a long time since I had cookies that didn’t come out of a bag,” Gumpy said, getting up and stretching. “I’m goin’. Do you think she’ll cook us breakfast? I’m fair tired of instant porridge.”

Ethan was tired of instant porridge, too, especially the way Gumpy made it, with hot water straight out of the tap. But if he complained, he’d end up with breakfast duty. So he just said, “Get real. Does she look like the type who cooks breakfast?”

“She does to me,” Gumpy said stubbornly, and moved by him. “She’s going to make cookies, ain’t she?”

Ethan followed him and watched as the older man went down the stairs to the landing and bent over his boots, continuing to mutter the whole time.

“I bet the cookies won’t be any good, anyway,” Ethan said.

Gumpy mumbled something.

“I didn’t catch that,” he finally said, knowing he was taking the bait.

Gumpy straightened. “I think we should make a bet. If she cooks breakfast, she stays.”

“Gumpy, I don’t even know where you found her.”

“At the airport, just like you said.”

“We don’t know anything about her.”

“Just look in her eyes.”

“She lied to you. She’s no nanny.”

“Neither are you. I don’t hold it against you.”

“But I never said I was,” he said with elaborate patience.

“I bet she can do the job.”

“And I bet I’m going to be asked to be the guest conductor for the Calgary Philharmonic.”

“She’s supposed to be here.” He opened the door and cold air blasted in.

Gumpy considered himself to be something of a mystic. He was right about things often enough that Ethan had stopped laughing. He eyed the old man warily.

“If she cooks breakfast tomorrow, you should ask her to stay,” Gumpy said stubbornly.

“Only if it’s good,” Ethan said dryly. Not much danger on either count, but Gumpy looked pleased, like a fisherman who had a strong nibble. “Maybe you should stay in the house tonight.”

Gumpy shook his head obstinately and went out.

Ethan turned back into the house, which was unbelievably silent. If he strained, he could just hear the soft murmur of her voice. He turned on the radio to drown it out. Fighting weariness, he turned off the water main and began to scoop the water out of the toilet.

“The kids are asleep. I’m going to go to bed.”

By now he had out a wrench and was unbolting the bowl from the floor. He looked out at her from where he was twisted beneath the tank. She was standing in the door watching him as though he was performing heart surgery. “Yeah. Sure. First door on the right.”

“I figured it out. The lace doily on the dresser was a dead giveaway.”

He glanced at her sharply. Was she smarter than she looked? He’d put that little scrap of lace out to make it look welcoming for Mrs. Bishop. It was the only doodad in his house.

“Sleep in tomorrow,” he suggested. After all, he had a bet to win. Not that he had much in the way of breakfast makings around, anyway. He hadn’t really had time to properly stock groceries. He had eggs, cereal and instant porridge. Good luck turning that into anything special.

Gumpy wouldn’t consider boiling the water for the instant porridge cooking, would he? Contemplating that, he went back to work.

An hour later, the keys rescued and the toilet bowl reanchored to the floor, he showered, checked on his niece and nephew and walked by Lacey McCade’s firmly shut door.

It occurred to him she hadn’t had a single piece of luggage with her.

Which made him wonder again where she had come from and why. It also made him wonder what she was sleeping in.

Lacey lay awake in the inky darkness. The bed was narrow and lumpy. She wondered what he was sleeping in. Boxers?

She could feel herself coloring to the roots of her hair. Which was a mess.

She was in a strange man’s house, under false pretenses, thinking decadent thoughts. What had happened to her? She was not the same woman who had gotten up this morning, calmly eaten her toast and jam, and headed for work.

Just this morning she had been the fast-rising woman lawyer, preparing for the wedding of the century, and the life of acquiring the stuff—the beach house, the car.

The kids, she realized, had never come up.

A foolish thing not to have discussed with the man you were going to many—presumably the catch of the season.

Lacey replayed the conversation she’d had with Keith, from the airport at Calgary, rather than think any more thoughts about the cowboy in his boxer shorts. Or lack thereof.

“Keith,” she had said, watching a 747 lumber along the runway, looking as if it would never have the power to take off, “Cancel the wedding.”

At the precise moment she had said those words, the plane was suddenly in the air, its huge body soaring upward at an impossibly steep angle.

She surprised herself. Her voice sounded firm and sure and uncompromising.

Silence. Then, “Lacey?”

“Cancel the wedding,” she repeated, more strongly than before.

She pictured him behind his desk, his tie undone, his blond head bowed over some paperwork, though she thought she probably had his undivided attention now.

“I can’t cancel the wedding,” he sputtered. “It’s three weeks away. It’s going to be the wedding.” Long fingers would be scraping back his hair, his handsome features would be marred by a frown, the wrinkles deep in his forehead.

Lacey turned from the bank of windows. The plane was now a speck in the distance. She took a deep breath. On the other side of the pay phone she was using stood a beautiful statue, cast in bronze, protected by a glass case. It was of a cowboy standing quietly beside a horse that dipped its head to water. Something about it had made her ache with an emotion she did not understand.

But that had something to do with the word the. Why did it have to be the wedding?

She would have settled for a wedding. For ordinary things.

She snorted at herself. Since when?

Since precisely three hours ago, when the off-ramp to the airport had beckoned to her so bewitchingly she could not say no.

“Where are you?” Keith demanded.

“I don’t think that’s important.”

“Area code 403,” he read off his call display.

Her eyes rested on the bronze again. When she was a child, she had begged her father to consider the Stampede as a vacation possibility. There had never been money for exotic holidays, though. Not that her father would have considered a rodeo exotic.

Lacey wondered about taking it in while she was here. Then some long-forgotten part of her recalled the Stampede was in the summer. July? And summer was long past here.

Listening, she could hear Keith on the other end of the line, thumbing through papers. The telephone book, she guessed bleakly.

“Canada,” he crowed. “Alberta. Lacey, what are you doing in Alberta?”

“I don’t know,” she’d answered truthfully.

And she didn’t. She only knew that when she had seen the airport sign, she had been compelled to obey something within her that told her to go. To go now. Before it was too late.

For what, she was not sure.

Keith was handsome, gloriously so. And wildly successful in his own right, quite separate from the old family wealth he came from. “A young man going to the very top,” her father had pronounced with grave approval after meeting him for the first time.

And, of course, Lacey had her own career, and though it was not quite as illustrious as Keith’s, between the two of them they were well on their way.

Again, her eyes had been drawn to the bronze cowboy. So still.

Of course he was still, she chided herself with annoyance. He was bronze.

“Lacey, what’s the matter?”

Keith was trying so hard for a tender note, but she could picture him glancing at his watch. And she could certainly hear the edge of impatience in his voice. The wedding was about to go up in smoke because of a whim. Her whim. Keith did not like whims.

He liked things organized. Predictable. Perfect.

“I can’t go through with it,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

“There’s no such word as can’t.” This was an expression Keith had picked up at one of the motivational seminars the company had sponsored.