Always the Baker, Never the Bride

by Sandra D. Bricker

  “He likes it,” Fee told her, and Emma watched him carefully.

  “Looks like.”

  “I prefer the other one,” Sophie announced. “I don’t like amaretto.”

  “No?” Emma asked. She sat down beside her aunt and squeezed her hand. “I never knew that.”

  “Mama used to sneak it when she thought nobody was looking. The alcohol, not the cake.”

  Emma giggled. “This is different, Aunt Sophie. This is the flavor of amaretto without the alcohol.”

  “Oh.” Sophie paused to consider the point, and then shook her head. “No. I like the pistachio best of all. I’d like that for my birthday cake.”

  “You got it.”

  Jackson finally pulled the fork from his mouth, but he did it slowly, between pressed lips. When he opened his eyes, he shook his head and groaned again. “Mmm-mmmmmm. That one’s my favorite.”

  “Are you given to drinking, Jackson?” Sophie asked him seriously.

  “Not at all, Sophie. But I really like this cake.”

  “I like the pistachio.”

  “That one’s good too.”

  He dug his fork into the champagne-amaretto cake for another chunk. “I don’t know how you make these things without eating them,” he told Emma. “I’d be in a coma several times a year if I were you. I have no willpower when it comes to sweets.”

  “I taste them,” she admitted. “But never more than a bite or two.”

  “And only after a full meal,” Fee added. “She tolerates sugar better when it’s combined with protein.”

  “My nurse,” Emma said with a grin, nodding toward Fee.

  “You’re a nurse, Fee?” Sophie asked, wide-eyed. “Do you scare your patients when you dress like that?”

  Jackson and Emma both snickered as Fee responded by forming her lips into a wordless round O. Before she could answer, their conversation was halted in its tracks as Avery rushed through the doorway toward them.

  “Sophie!” she cried. “What were you thinking?”

  “Have you met my sister?” she asked Jackson.

  “I have. Hello, Mrs. Travis. Why don’t you join us for coffee? Everything is just fine here.”

  Avery’s expression melted down a few notches as Jackson held her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said at last, then she sat down in the empty chair at the foot of the table, Sophie to her right and Jackson to her left. “Coffee would be lovely.”

  Fee produced another cup and filled it while Avery sat there watching her sister sip her own coffee.

  “Sophie,” Jackson piped up. “Have you seen our courtyard?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “We do. Would you like to go for a stroll with me and see it?”

  “That would be nice. Will you all excuse us? My friend Jackson would like me to walk with him.”

  Emma marveled at Jackson’s gentle way with her aunt, and she watched them amble arm-in-arm until they reached the lobby, turning left through the glass doors to the courtyard.

  “How on earth!” Avery exclaimed the moment they were out of earshot.

  “I’ll go start the clean-up in the kitchen,” Fee said before leaving them.

  Emma nodded, then she turned her attention to Avery. “I don’t know. She just showed up here this morning. I found her having coffee with Jackson.”

  “And that ridiculous outfit she’s wearing! Where did she find that?”

  “No clue.”

  “So much for keeping her safe in an assisted-living facility,” Avery said on a sigh.

  “I’m sure they have these challenges all the time, Mother. We’ll just go and speak with the administration staff, tell them they’ll have to keep a closer watch on her, that’s all.”

  Avery lowered her head into her hands, and Emma got up, scraped the chair Jackson had occupied toward her, and sat down on it. She placed her arms gently around her mother’s shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.

  “I just love the crazy old bird so much,” Avery said, and Emma gawked in surprise for an instant. Then they both began to laugh at the uncharacteristic comment out of Emma’s very proper mother. “Well, she’s such a handful.”

  “But as lovable as they come,” Emma reminded her.

  “Yes. Yes, she is.”

  “So I come out of the kitchen to find Aunt Sophie sitting there at a table with my boss, and she’s dressed in a ball gown and a tiara!”

  Gavin chortled at Emma’s description, drawing the attention of all the other diners at Morton’s Steakhouse. “I’ll bet your mother delivered a full-sized cow when she saw that.”

  “She’s got her work cut out for her,” Emma reminded him. “Taking care of Aunt Sophie isn’t going to be easy.”

  “It wasn’t easy when she had all her faculties. This is going to be downright impossible.” The waiter stepped up to the table, and Gavin diverted his attention momentarily. “I’d like a Grey Goose martini, dirty with bleu cheese olives. What about you, Princess?”

  “I’d like a sparkling water with a lime twist,” she told the waiter. “And his dirty martini? Can you turn that into the same?”

  Gavin clucked an objection that didn’t take shape before the waiter nodded. “Two sparkling waters with a twist.”

  “You take all the fun out of a place like this, Emmy.”

  “Good. The less fun you have now, the longer you’ll be around.”

  “A longer time to have no fun at all.”

  “Just the way God intended.”

  “Bah!” he grumbled. “Well, I’m having a steak for my supper. Not a darn thing you can do about it. Hear me?”

  “I can live with that,” she said, glancing over the menu. “What do you say to some steamed asparagus, and some spinach and button mushrooms?”

  “I say bring it on, as long as it’s on the plate next to a pound of steak and a potato swimming in butter.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  Gavin hesitated before he smiled. “And you are beautiful, Princess. It’s good to see you.”

  “You too, Dad.”

  “I like this new clan you’ve stumbled into too.”

  “The Drakes.” She nodded. “They’re pretty great.”

  “You and this Jackson Drake. Anything going on there that you want to tell your old man about?”

  “He’s my boss.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s my boss,” she said, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head.

  “You like him.”

  “I do. He’s a very nice man, and he’s given me a fantastic opportunity.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Then when are you going to find a very nice man of your own, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you give me some tips?” she suggested as the waiter delivered their drinks. “Are there any very nice women on your horizon, Dad? Isn’t it time you found one of those for yourself?”

  Gavin glared at her for a moment, and then broke into a grin. “Fair enough.”

  “Now why don’t you hand over those cigars you have hidden in your pocket so we can get that out of the way and enjoy our dinner.” He didn’t move a muscle to comply. “Come on, Dad. You know how stubborn I can be. Do you want to spend all our time tonight battling?”

  Without a word, he produced three fat cigars from his pocket and placed them on the table between them.

  “Thank you. Now tell me about your retirement plans,” she said as she wrapped the cigars in a linen napkin.

  “What are you doing? Don’t do that.”

  “Waiter?” she said as a uniformed server passed the table. “Would you dispose of this and bring me a new napkin, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Ahhhh,” Gavin groaned, and he could hardly yank his eyes away from the disappearance of his cigars. “That was uncalled for.”

  “So you … retiring. Explain this to me in a language I can understand.”

  He moaned softly, glance
d longingly in the direction of the waiter’s exit, and then sighed. “How did I raise such a cruel young woman?” he asked, punctuated by another grumbly sigh. In another instant, he brightened. “Oh, that’s right. That would be your mother’s influence.”

  “Dad,” she chastised. “Don’t do that.”

  “I have to. We’re divorced. It’s what we do.”

  “Speaking of you and Mother …”

  “Must we?”

  “Aside from a couple of random digs, you two didn’t make any horrible scenes to embarrass me or yourselves the other night. What’s up with that?”

  Gavin grimaced. “What’d we do, let you down?”

  “Not at all,” she enunciated. “It was just so unusual. What’s going on with the two of you?”

  “We’ve had a lot of space between us,” he remarked. “If we’d only limited seeing one another to every few years while we were married, we’d still have wedded bliss.”

  Emma groaned.

  “Don’t analyze us, Emmy. It will only make you crazy.”

  They matched one another with crooked, quirky little smiles, then in stereo: “Too late.”

  Two steak dinners later, they’d covered every subject under the sun that related to Emma; however, Gavin wasn’t doing much talking about his own life.

  Eerily evasive, she thought as she watched him hand the waiter the leather folder with his credit card poking out of it.

  “So. Dad.”

  “Nothing good ever came from a beginning like that,” he quipped.

  “When we talked on the phone, you said you’d sold Travis Development. What led you to do that?”

  “Old age.”

  “Dad, you’re hardly a senior citizen.”

  “I’m sorry to have to break this to you,” he retorted, “but I turn seventy next month. That’s senior.”

  “Seventy? Really?” Emotion clouded Emma’s thoughts. She didn’t think of her father in numeric terms. The realization was rather staggering.

  “I should have sold TD a long time ago, Princess. The right buyer came along at just the right time, and I decided not to wait any longer.”

  Emma stroked his hand. “Now what? Will you stay in D.C.?”

  “For a while.”

  “Any chance of getting you to come back to Atlanta?”

  Gavin narrowed his eyes and arched his brow. “I never say never.”

  “Really?” The excitement bubbled up inside her, and then reality dawned. “In the same city with Mother?”

  In his best Old West cowboy voice, he said, “Hombre, this town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

  “Dad.”

  “You really don’t think we can coexist in the same city, Emmy?”

  “Well …” She shrugged. “How about the same county?”

  “Mm, I don’t know.”

  “State?”

  “Maybe.”

  Gavin chuckled and drained his coffee cup. “If there’s no dessert or cigars in my immediate future—”

  “Which there isn’t,” Emma cut in.

  “—then what do you say we am-scray, Princess?”

  “Sounds good.”

  It was another mild evening in Atlanta and, after kissing her father good-bye in front of the restaurant, Emma was on her way home with the window cracked about an inch and classic oldies on the radio. She cranked up the volume in an effort to disguise her somewhat tone-deaf rendition of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and slipped under a yellow light at the intersection.

  Georgia 400 was unusually open, and the ride back to Roswell was brake-light-free. Twenty minutes later, she pulled into the space behind her apartment building with #6 painted on it in neon orange. She turned off the engine, propped open the door, and then just sat there with her head back, listening to the melodic semi-silence of the evening.

  The soft hum of distant traffic was overlaid with the harmony of Mr. and Mrs. Eggleston’s late-day conversation wafting through the back door they almost always left propped open. A slight metallic tap-tap-tap from somewhere far away added the conjunct movement of the song, and the rhythm of the breeze through crisp autumn tree branches created perfect triad chords. Her little Roswell neighborhood composed the soundtrack of her life on nights like this one, and Emma was prone to being mesmerized by the music.

  “Emma.”

  The timbre of Jackson’s voice fit so melodically into the song that she almost missed it. “Emma Rae.”

  She snapped her neck to the side and came centimeters away from letting out a scream when she found herself face-to-face with Jackson, folded down toward her, his arm draped over the side of the open door.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he assured her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, her heart pounding against her hand.

  “We have a little problem.”

  When he stepped away from the car, Emma looked past him and saw her aunt Sophie, dressed in a terrycloth bathrobe and mismatched slippers, propped on the top step near her neighbor’s back door, bathed in the yellow glow of the porch light and waving at her.

  “Good morning, Emma Rae,” she called out. “How would you like your eggs?”

  Unique Wedding Themes for the Discriminating Bride

  A sunrise wedding, with an elegant brunch reception.

  A “white diamond” wedding theme, with everything in white and crystal.

  A murder mystery weekend with a surprise wedding thrown in for the guests.

  A secret location for the wedding, with a “treasure hunt” that morning that leads the guests to the venue by various clues.

  A vintage wedding, held in an English garden with high tea, parasols, and lace gloves.

  A “Roaring 20s” wedding that includes feather boas, flapper dresses, and long pearl necklaces.

  A theme park wedding location where, instead of a reception, guests ride roller coasters and play arcade games afterward.

  An eco-friendly wedding where, instead of gifts, the guests donate to the couple’s favorite environmental charity, the flowers are wild, and the candles are made of soy.

  An Asian theme, with edible orchids topping the cake, traditional dishes and chopsticks for the reception, and Oriental fans as centerpieces.

  Bring the outdoors in with an “au naturel”-themed wedding, decorating with stones, vines, twigs, and pinecones. Use rustic containers and pillar candles for unique ambiance, or baskets of fresh herbs as a centerpiece.

  14

  I think you two should consider doing something different. Not the traditional sort of fare. Something truly unique.”

  “Aunt Sophie,” Emma said as she unfolded the quilt and tucked it under Sophie’s chin, “what are you talking about?”

  “Your wedding!” the woman exclaimed, and the quilt slipped right out of Emma’s hands.

  “My … what?”

  Sophie inched down and tilted her head into the fluffed pillow beneath it, closing her eyes as she smiled. “You make such a lovely couple.”

  Emma shifted on the edge of the bed and looked back at Jackson where he stood in the doorway of her guest room. His expression was blank as he returned the stare for a moment, then he turned around. She heard the padded thump of his shoes on the hall rug as he walked away.

  “Aunt Sophie,” she whispered. “Jackson and I are not a couple. He’s my boss.”

  Emma flicked off the lamp next to the bed, and a stream of warm light illuminated Sophie’s cheek from the hallway.

  “Don’t be silly,” Sophie replied. “You have nothing to be afraid of, Emma Rae. You’ll be just the wife Jackson needs. You’ll see.”

  Emma’s pulse fluttered within her, and her wide eyes ached.

  “Sleep well,” she said, then she placed a gentle kiss on Sophie’s cheek.

  Just as she reached the doorway, her aunt whispered to her. “Do you know what I was thinking, Emma?”

  “What’s that?” she replied from the doorway.

  “Wouldn’t
it be funny if I caught the bouquet?”

  Emma sighed. “That would be funny.”

  “Does Jackson have an uncle who can sing?”

  “I … don’t know.” Her cheek twitched as she tried to connect the dots.

  “If he does, and I catch the bridal bouquet, make sure to tell Jackson to aim the garter at him. I’d like a man who can sing. Nobody in our family can carry a tune even if it’s in a paper sack with a handle.”

  That was the truth, but Emma didn’t say it out loud. “Good night, Aunt Sophie.”

  “Good night, dear.”

  Emma flicked off the hall light as she passed through. The living room was dark, the only light at all coming in through the window from outside and from the dim overhead in the kitchen.

  Jackson’s silhouette reminded Emma of her father the way he fit perfectly into the Ercol Bergere easy chair. “Coffee?” she softly asked him.

  “No. Thanks.”

  She was almost on her tiptoes as she moved to the sofa and sat down on the edge.

  “I called your mother,” he told her. “She’s going to call the facility and let them know that Sophie is safe for the night.”

  “How—”

  “I found her number in your cell phone. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” She chuckled and slid back into the couch, kicked off her shoes, and folded into the padded arm. “You’ve been so amazing, Jackson. I can never repay you for your kindness to my aunt.”

  “She makes it very easy to be kind. She’s a wonderful woman.”

  “Underneath all the crazy.”

  “No. Right on top of it,” he corrected.

  Emma dipped her chin down atop her folded arm and smiled at him. “She thinks we’re engaged, you know.”

  “That’s very generous of her.”

  She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “When she first showed up at the hotel tonight, she thanked me for asking her to marry me. Now it looks like she’s handing me over to you.”

  Emma chuckled. “I guess she thinks we’re a better match, then.”

  “Astute.”

  Her eyes darted up again, and she watched Jackson carefully, although his gaze didn’t return to hers.

  “You’re sure you don’t want any coffee?” He nodded. “Do you mind if I make myself some tea?”