Third Time's the Bride!

by Merline Lovelace

  I’ll do right by your son, she promised Caroline silently. I’ll make some mistakes along the way. I’ve certainly made more than my share in the past. But I swear I’ll love him with everything in me. Him and Brian.

  Tommy came clattering down the stairs at that moment with his crammed backpack weighing his shoulders down. Brian gathered his briefcase and issued a not-so-gentle warning.

  “Be good, buddy. No more shooting spitballs through your straw at lunch.”

  His blue eyes pained, the boy projected the image of a wounded angel. “Cindy started it.”

  “I know. You told us. That doesn’t mean you had to finish it. I’ll see you tonight. You, too,” he said to Dawn as he bent and brushed his mouth over hers.

  She leaned into the kiss, so happy and relieved to see the shadows had left his eyes that she gave considerably more than she received. At which point she discovered Brian was no longer worried about his son witnessing an exchange of spit. He deepened the kiss and only broke it off when Tommy did an impatient jig.

  “Daaad! You guys are gonna make me late for school.”

  They all left together, Brian in his black SUV, Dawn and Tommy in the white compact. They picked up his pal Cindy on the way. She buckled in beside Tommy in the backseat and promptly accused him of forgetting the book on Ice Age cave art her brother had loaned him.

  “I didn’t forget it! Addy said I could keep it till I finished looking at the pictures.”

  “How long is that going to take? ’Til we’re in second grade?”

  Dawn listened to their squabbling with half an ear. Part of her couldn’t quite believe she’d already made the transition to carpooling and soon-to-be soccer mom. The rest of her kept returning to the memory book. The project had fired her creative juices. She intended to start on it as soon as she got back to the house.

  * * *

  Her first order of business was to call up a playlist and connect her phone to the gatehouse’s wireless speaker system. She always worked better with music in the background. For this project she chose a playlist that included big, sweeping movies themes.

  With Maurice Jarre’s epic score from Lawrence of Arabia to motivate her, she went back to the main house. She used the printer/copier/scanner in Brian’s office to scan the photos and regimental records from the Civil War, then sent the JPEGs to her laptop.

  She carried the albums and framed photos back to the gatehouse with her for quick reference and set up her laptop on the table in the breakfast nook. Before jumping into the memory book’s construction, she searched dozens of commercial sites for the graphics she wanted to include as illustrations.

  Researching the 8th Virginia Infantry regiment sidetracked her for a good half hour. She learned that the newly raised 8th Virginia guarded vital river crossings until the First Battle of Bull Run. The regiment acquitted itself with honor at Manassas, where J. D. Ellis was wounded. In March 1862, the 8th took part in the Peninsula campaign as part of Pickett’s Brigade. Their courage and the massive casualties they sustained in that campaign earned the regiment the dubious title of The Bloody Eighth.

  Dawn could have spent hours poring through the 8th’s fascinating history. After compiling a folder of Civil War images and icons, she finally cut herself off and turned to the Roaring 20s. That era was more fun, although she doubted Tommy was old enough yet to appreciate flappers and slick-haired Great Gatsby types swilling bathtub gin.

  Her next task was to identify the twin-tailed bomber in the faded WWII photo. It didn’t take her long to verify that it was a B-24 Liberator. She increased both the size and the resolution of the photo until she could read the aircraft’s tail number and did an online search, but didn’t discover another photo of it or the well-endowed beauty decorating its fuselage.

  Refusing to give up, she refined the JPEG until she got clear enough images of the insignia and patches on the pilot’s uniform to trace them to an Army Air Corps unit based in North Africa.

  She lingered much longer over the photos of Brian in his marine corps uniform. His dad had obviously saved every one he’d sent home. There was the shaved-head officer candidate. The lantern-jawed new lieutenant standing at rigid attention on a grassy parade ground. The three pals in camouflage with their arms hooked over each other’s shoulders. The caption below read, “Ross, Digger and Brian at Basic School.” Whatever that was.

  After that came initial aviation training in Pensacola, Florida. Then primary flight training, which Brian ended with a triumphant grin and a photocopy of the orders assigning him to helicopters. Advanced helo training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. A photo of Brian and another pilot in helmets and dusty, desert-hued flight suits standing beside a chopper.

  The handwritten caption underneath said Iraq, March 2003. Frowning, she Googled the Iraq War and learned the invasion had kicked off on March 20 of that year. And Brian had been right there, in the first wave. Dawn had mixed emotions about the war, but none at all about the men and women who’d been sent to fight it.

  Still frowning, she Googled the helicopter in the photo and identified it as a UH-1N Iroquois. She skimmed the information in the article and stopped dead when she saw it had first flown in in Vietnam in 1969.

  “Good grief!”

  She stared at the date in disbelief. Brian and his unknown pal had been flying a three-decade-old whirlybird.

  And they were still flying those suckers. Everywhere! Shaking her head, she skimmed down the list. Austria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Bahrain. Every country in the alphabet, down to and including Zaire. The worldwide inventory gave Dawn an entirely new appreciation of the man she’d agreed to marry.

  When they’d met in Italy, she knew Brian was there on some hush-hush, top secret modification his company had engineered for Special Operations aircraft flown by NATO crews. Neither he nor Travis nor Carlo had dropped even a vague hint what that mod encompassed. That had been fine with Dawn. Her interests at the time focused on Tuscany’s sun-kissed vineyards, Venice’s moonlit canals and the bundle of unharnessed energy that was Tommy.

  The hotel where Brian, Tommy and his nanny had stayed was one of the best in Venice. One of the top ten in the world, according to Condé Nast. The Gritti Palace’s sumptuous decor had pretty well confirmed that Brian and his corporation had raked in some tidy profits over the years. So had the slick private jet they’d flown home in. And when Dawn had driven into EAS headquarters a few days ago, LauraBeth had pointed to a wall-sized map of EAS’s operations.

  But the scope of Brian’s achievements hadn’t really sunk in until this moment. She stared at the photo of a younger, tougher version of the sophisticated man she knew and marveled at what he’d accomplished in such a short time.

  He’d learned to fly in the marines. Went back to school afterward. Built a company from the ground up. Married, had a son and lost a wife. And in the process, he’d helped keep these Vietnam-era choppers in the air, along with a dozen other military aircraft she would bet.

  Irritated that she hadn’t asked more about the products EAS provided, she vowed to rectify that mistake in the very near future. In the meantime, she had a memory book to create, a quick trip to Boston to schedule, several parties to pull off and a wedding to get through.

  Chapter Eleven

  Wednesday evening, Dawn and Brian hosted a celebratory dinner to officially welcome Travis to DC and his new job at EAS. Callie and Tommy helped with the preparations. Their combined efforts had all four of them laughing and left the kitchen a total wreck. They got the mess cleaned up and everything into the oven or on the stove in time to greet their guests. LauraBeth and her husband were the first to arrive, followed by another dozen or so of EAS’s senior executives with their spouses or significant others. They gave Dawn as warm a welcome as they did Travis and Kate, making the whole evening a total delight.

  With the images from the m
emory book still fresh in her mind, she subtly pumped Travis, some of the other execs and LauraBeth for details about EAS operations. The picture they painted remained a little hazy around the edges but still impressed the heck out of her. EAS, she learned had contracts with every branch of the US military and at least two dozen foreign nations,

  “You won’t see much of your husband come November,” LauraBeth warned. “He’s scheduled for back-to-back meetings in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman. I’m trying to make sure he’s home by Thanksgiving, but it’s looking iffy at this point.”

  Great! Another “if” to factor in to the great Thanksgiving war. She hid a grimace at the memory of the as-yet-unresolved feud between her parents and resisted the urge to beg LauraBeth to book her on the same flight to the Middle East as Brian.

  * * *

  The following afternoon she and Brian drove down to Charlottesville, Virginia, so he could introduce her to his parents. Evelyn and Tom Ellis were gracious and appeared happy for their son, but Dawn sensed that they harbored some doubts about their short-notice nuptials.

  On Friday, Callie and Dawn met Kate for lunch at Tysons Corner. Home to the corporate headquarters of numerous companies and two upscale malls only a stone’s throw apart, it was located just off the Capital Beltway. Dawn hadn’t really been able to afford to shop here as a graduate student. Today she intended to hit every store in both malls if necessary to find a wedding grown that wasn’t as fussy as her first or as absurdly, ridiculously expensive as the second.

  “Don’t worry,” Kate assured her over a lunch that included spinach salads, lobster ricotta and, for Callie and Dawn, the light, sparkling Prosecco they’d discovered in Italy. “You’ll find exactly the right dress. Third time’s a charm, right?”

  “God, I hope so!”

  “How long did it take you to pay off the last dress?” Kate asked curiously. “Six months?”

  “Eight,” she said glumly, spearing her spinach. “The pearls on the bodice and train were all hand sewn.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  Dawn’s expression softened.

  “Callie sent me a link to a website for a charity that recycles wedding gowns into angel gowns.”

  “It part of the Helping Hands Program,” Callie explained. “They provide comfort and assistance to parents with infants in neonatal ICU’s. So many of the babies are preemies, and so many don’t make it. The NICU Angel Gown volunteers cut down and rework wedding dresses to provide grieving families a precious burial gown or suit for families.”

  “Oh, how sad. And beautiful.”

  In an unconscious gesture, Kate pressed a palm to her still-flat tummy, as if to assure her baby and herself they’d never need an angel gown. The thought of the grief the parents who’d lost their child had to have suffered, though, prompted her to offer her own gown.

  “I’ve still got it packed away somewhere. Send me the link, too, and I’ll donate it.”

  “You sure?” Dawn asked. “That could be a little girl you’re gestating. She may want to wear her momma’s dress some day.”

  “I sincerely doubt that. If it’s a girl, she’ll probably inherit Travis’s superjock genes and get married in half-laced high-tops. But enough about dresses past. What are we looking for today?”

  “Something simple.”

  “Right.”

  “Elegant.”

  “Okay.”

  “Comfortable.”

  “Got it. Now finish your ricotta and let’s hit the stores.”

  The big chains—Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s and Neiman Marcus—anchored the two malls. They in turn were augmented by dozens of smaller boutiques offering everything from haute couture to funky chic.

  To Dawn’s relief, she found the perfect dress in the second boutique they hit. The tea-length sheath of ivory satin was topped by a lace jacket that tied at the waist with a satin bow. The lace wouldn’t keep her warm if the weather turned nasty, but the two-piece ensemble was so deceptively, stunningly chic that she decided she could shiver for fifteen or twenty minutes if necessary.

  And surprise, surprise! The boutique owner just happened to stock a little pillbox hat made from the same lace. Trimmed with only enough netting to give the illusion of a veil, the cap added an unexpectedly jaunty air.

  “That’s it,” Kate exclaimed when Dawn modeled the entire ensemble. “That’s so you!”

  Callie agreed, but raised a brow pointedly when she read the price tag dangling from the jacket sleeve.

  “You think that’s bad?” Dawn tapped a fingertip against the lace cap. “This little sucker costs more than the dress. But the two combined are still not even close to what I paid for the last disaster.”

  While she took another turn in the three-way mirror, her friends shared quick glances, obviously remembering how long it had taken her to settle on a choice for her previous two trips to the altar. She caught the quick exchange and laughed.

  “Don’t panic. This is it. I love it.”

  “Then get it,” Callie urged. “We’ve still got shoes, undies and an obscenely decadent negligee to hunt down.”

  * * *

  The next day was Saturday and the date set for their quick trip up to Boston. She and Callie got up early and grabbed a quick cup of coffee and bagel with Brian.

  He would do Tommy Duty over the weekend and had drafted Addy to cover Monday afternoon until he could get home from work. Tuesday, too, if necessary. But he’d adamantly nixed the idea of Dawn and Callie rattling back down from Boston in a U-Haul, towing her car. Instead, the ever-efficient LauraBeth had set up professional movers, arranged for her car to be transported and booked their return flights with the same blinding speed she’d lined up caterers, photographers, a florist and a string quartet for the wedding now only a week away.

  Callie and Dawn flew out of Reagan National a little past nine. An hour later they touched down at Logan International. They grabbed a taxi and headed into the city, both feeling a sense of homecoming.

  All three—Callie, Kate and Dawn—had been born and raised in a small, western Massachusetts town. They’d attended different colleges and grad schools, after which Kate followed Travis to his various air force assignments. Callie and Dawn had gravitated back to Boston to work, though, and felt the tug of their roots as they drove into the city.

  Fall had already wrapped New England in glorious colors. The beltway around the city blazed red and orange and gold. Dawn’s condo was a few miles off the beltway, in an upscale gated community close to the sprawling complex that housed her company’s headquarters. Callie lived closer to her work in downtown Boston, in an older section of the city.

  Unfortunately, neither of them had time to enjoy either the foliage or the cool, crisp temperatures. Sorting through what Dawn would ship down to DC and what would go into storage took most of the weekend.

  They drove over to Callie’s two-bedroom apartment early Monday morning. Very early Monday morning. Neither of them really believed the creep who’d sent those emails was staking out her apartment, but Joe Russo had warned her to be careful.

  It took only a half hour or so for Callie to pack a suitcase. They drove back across town and Dawn dropped Callie off to wait for the movers before doing battle with the nightmare that was Boston rush-hour traffic.

  Handing in her notice and saying goodbye to her team turned out to be more of a wrench than she’d anticipated, even though their well wishes were colored with some jibes about her previous near misses. Dawn escaped with her smile slightly strained and a surprisingly lucrative offer from her boss to do freelance designs for the company’s ongoing advertising campaigns.

  “Damn,” she told Callie later that afternoon as they took a taxi to the airport. “If I’d known I could make almost as much schlepping into a home office in my jammie
s, I would’ve gone solo years ago.”

  “I doubt that. You’re the most gregarious of our threesome. Kate can lose herself in ledgers and spreadsheets. I have to—had to—brace myself every time I had to appear in court. You collect friends and admirers without even trying.”

  “Speaking of admirers, I got a text while I was at the office. You’ll never guess who’s coming to the wedding.”

  “Not that race car driver you hooked up with after you dumped Number One?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “The attorney who handled that nastiness with Number Two? He seemed pretty taken with you, as I recall.”

  “More taken with the hefty fee I paid him.”

  “Then who?”

  “Carlo di Lorenzo.”

  “Your playboy prince?” Callie’s mink-dark eyebrows soared. “The same man who did everything but stand on his head trying to convince you to jet off to Casablanca with him?”

  “Marrakech,” Dawn corrected with a wide grin. “Brian called him about some modification to the NATO transport they’re working on, found out he’ll be in New York this week and invited him down to DC for the wedding. Joe Russo’s coming, too,” she added with a quick, sideways glance at her friend. “He had to cancel out of some high-powered international symposium, but said he’d be there.”

  “It’s fate,” Callie murmured, unknowingly echoing LauraBeth’s comment of the previous week. “All of us who were at the Trevi Fountain when Kate and Travis renewed their vows will be together again.”

  “I know!” Thinking back to that happy scene, Dawn reached across the taxi’s plastic-covered seat and squeezed her friend’s hand. “Remember the first time we watched Three Coins in the Fountain?”

  “How could I forget? There we were, three gawky teenagers with foam curlers in our hair and bowls full of ice cream, going all dreamy and starry-eyed over Louis Jourdan.”

  “Let’s not forget the pizza.”

  “Or the mozzarella stringing from our chins. Oh, God! We pigged out on so much that night, I was nauseous most of the next day.”