Least Likely Wedding?

by Patricia McLinn

  “Rob. I was about to give up hope. I can’t imagine what you could find to do in that tiny town until this hour.”

  He resisted the temptation to make a crack that people in small towns had sex, too. But that would just prolong the preliminaries before they got to what she wanted. Besides, he wasn’t having sex, and he sure as hell didn’t want to discuss that with her.

  “I’m here now, Janice. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know why you would assume it was a problem.”

  He held his silence.

  Impatience sharpened her next words. “The problem is what you could be doing to yourself.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not. If you’re even considering throwing away your career over some technicalities, you are far, far from fine. If you’ve pulled out your trusty legal pad and done a pro-and-con assessment, you have to see I’m right, Rob. Do you want to ruin your career?”

  If she knew how many times he’d sat with a legal pad and hadn’t been able to write down a thing, she’d never let this go.

  “No.”

  “Well then, that’s your answer.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s more to consider than my career.”

  She pounced on that. “That’s right. The future of a company that’s been good to you, the welfare of its stockholders, and the careers of people you’ve worked with and liked.”

  As if he hadn’t thought of all that.

  “If the company comes clean—”

  “Oh, please. You know that in a situation like this, if there’s even an appearance of irregularities, the regulators, the politicians and the media will be out for blood. They know how to get the big headlines—bring down a respected company. They’ll tear apart a profitable company for nothing, when—”

  “Mitchell told you to call.”

  Damn, damn, damn. Even now he’d hoped his mentor and friend would make things right, as he’d said he would. This call was the proof that Mitchell was following another path.

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Mitchell Gordon called you into his office and fed you all this and told you to get me to promise to be quiet.”

  “So what if he did contact me? He thought you’d listen to sense, that even though we’re divorced you’d respect my judgment. He’s concerned for your welfare, you know. And you owe that man, Rob. He gave you your start, he boosted you all the way along.”

  “Yes, he did.” It made his disillusionment all the harder to stomach.

  “Don’t you have any gratitude, Rob? Or loyalty? My God, Mitchell was your champion, and now you’re going to stab him—and yourself—in the back for technicalities?”

  What happened when gratitude and loyalty to one man could only continue at the expense of integrity?

  “They’re not technicalities, Janice. Those laws are there for a reason. They protect people’s incomes, their ability to live their lives.”

  “What about the incomes of all your fellow employees? What about their lives? You’re willing to sacrifice them for a bunch of strangers?”

  For strangers and a principle.

  “Even if you don’t have any feeling for Mitchell or the company, how about having the smarts to protect your own rear end?”

  “If my career goes—”

  “If?” She laughed. “Oh, your career will go, all right. It’s your freedom that could be in jeopardy now. Staying out of jail.”

  “I had no hand in any of the company’s wrongdoing.” And he had copies of the records to prove it. He wasn’t entirely naive. As much as he’d hoped Mitchell would do the right thing, he’d made sure he had documentation of both what was going on and his own lack of involvement before approaching his boss.

  “How about withholding evidence for months? You could go to jail for that, you know.”

  Yes, he knew. The lawyer he’d consulted in June had wanted him to turn over everything he’d had right then.

  But he’d promised Mitchell. He’d wondered if Mitchell knew the position Rob was in when he’d begged for this summer to “set things right.”

  Now he had his answer.

  Janice wouldn’t have thought about that twist on her own, it wasn’t her brand of manipulation. Mitchell must have handed it to her.

  “What’s your interest in this, Janice?”

  “I still care about you, Rob. I hate to see the career I helped you build—”

  “What’s your real interest?”

  She gave a throaty laugh. It was meant to be sexy. He knew it was mostly to mask that she was pissed that he wasn’t allowing himself to be herded along the path she had in mind.

  “I don’t know why you would think—”

  But her stalling had given him time to work it out. “Mitchell promised to give you part of the advertising account if you persuade me to come back into the fold.”

  “That account is one hell of a coup,” she purred.

  “It would be if you got it.”

  “Oh, I’m not putting all my eggs in the Rob Dalton basket. I’ve worked up ideas for a campaign to offset anything you might say to the media.”

  “Mitchell was making you a promise he can’t keep, Janice. Torenson makes the decisions about advertising.”

  “So, I’ll win him over, too. Mitchell will take me in and introduce me and—”

  “That’s the first difficulty. Mitchell and Torenson hate each other. Second, Torenson vacations every year with the top brass from the company he’s using now.”

  “I’ll win him over,” she snapped.

  “Janice, Mitchell’s playing you. Using your ambition to get you to do his dirty work.”

  “Screw you!”

  She slammed the phone in his ear.

  Everything he’d told Janice was true. Unfortunately, everything she’d said was true, too.

  An investigation could do irreparable harm to the firm and to the careers of many innocent employees. And he could be vulnerable to prosecution.

  Maybe this was why he had so much trouble putting his pro-and-con lists on paper. There were too many cons, no matter how he looked at the situation.

  The next day, Rob’s car pulled to the curb a block from the Hollands’ house. “Good morning,” he said.

  Kay fought her reaction to Rob’s smile with an accusation. “You’re early. I haven’t finished walking Chester.”

  “You could’ve let her out in the yard. It’s fenced for the Hollands’ dogs.”

  “I know that.” That was a lie. It hadn’t occurred to her. When dogs had to go out, they were walked, usually by hired dog-walkers. And she had a new appreciation for them after concentrating on holding the leash exactly the way the book said, not letting Chester strain ahead or lag. “Chester wanted to go for a walk.”

  She’d hoped that in addition to serving Chester’s needs the walk would wake her up. She’d barely slept last night.

  First, she’d watched Chester explore her new surroundings, and reveled in the fact that she sat in this homey kitchen, with this homey dog—her, Kay Aaronson, whose experience of homey wouldn’t fill the head of a pin.

  She’d made up a flier about Chester, because she’d said she would, but then she’d spent hours flipping from one book to another for advice on dog care. Even after she’d gone to bed, she’d twice gotten up and gone downstairs to check that Chester had enough water. She’d dozed, then jolted to awareness every time the dog moved on the floor beside the bed. When Chester didn’t move, she strained to hear proof the dog was breathing. Finally, she got up and looked up sites on the Internet about crafts and historical sites, with Chester curled up at her feet.

  Rob turned off his car and got out. “Where are you headed?”

  “Bliss House.”

  “Morning, miss.” A man with a semicircle of white hair around a bald pate passed them on the sidewalk. “Morning, Rob.”

  “Morning, Tom.”

  Kay paused, but Rob kept walking. She stutter-stepped to catch u
p and called out a quick “Morning,” after the man.

  She was starting to get the hang of this. In Tobias, whether you knew the person or not, you didn’t pass without saying hello.

  “That’s Tom Dunwoody Sr.,” Rob said when they were out of earshot. “He’ll sell his carved duck decoys when Bliss House opens. He does great work.”

  Rob waved to a young couple with a toddler in a small front yard of a neat, square house. As they continued their walk, he exchanged greetings with another half-dozen people.

  At Bliss House, they found construction at full volume and Fran giving a tour of the nascent gardens to a gaggle of gray-haired ladies.

  “Garden Club,” Rob said. “They’ve volunteered to help plant.”

  She eyed the women, who all appeared to have passed the social security starting line years ago.

  “I know,” Rob said, obviously reading her reaction. “Fran’s going to have them handle the small plants. It’s the trees and bushes she’s ordered that concern me. Steve and Max are up to their eyeballs in work, there’s no one else on our volunteer roster suited to the job, and the budget doesn’t have much room for labor.”

  “What about you?”

  He looked away. “I’ll be in Chicago by then.”

  The undercurrent in that simple statement could have carried her across Long Island Sound in a second.

  But before she could examine it, she heard Miss Trudi call out, “Oh, here is our dear Kay Aaronson.” In an instant, she was surrounded by gray-haired ladies and Rob had disappeared, the rat.

  Kay nearly sank under a wave of introductions to Miss Trudi’s fellow garden club members, but did grasp one element. Muriel Henderson and Miriam Jenkins would be among those selling their wares at Bliss House. It gave her an idea.

  “Miss Trudi, can you arrange for me to meet with people who will be selling their crafts?”

  “An excellent idea, my dear. I will most certainly do that.”

  After that, conversational eddies tossed Kay this way and that until her head swam. She was grateful when Fran guided the gaggle away.

  She found Rob leaning against the newly refurbished front gate.

  “I hope that’s wet paint,” she grumbled. “You deserted me.”

  “Yup.” He grinned. “It only would have been worse with the two of us together to cluck over. Much worse.”

  Their gazes met, held. Then they both looked away.

  He certainly knew better than she if those women might misconstrue seeing the two of them together. She should be grateful, she thought as they began the return trip, that he tried to avoid such misunderstandings. All part of that do-the-right-thing mentality of his.

  “Are you late for an appointment?” Rob asked suddenly.

  “No. Oh.” She recognized what he was getting at. “I was at New York speed again. Sorry.”

  “No problem. It’s good to get my cardio work in early in the day.”

  She chuckled, and slowed her steps. Not because she was striving to be companionable with him, simply because adapting to this relaxed pace put her in tune with Tobias.

  He picked up where he’d left off yesterday, talking about how the town had grown, with time-outs to fill her in on people they met. How this one was related to that one or worked with the other or volunteered with another.

  It was easy here in Tobias to see how people interconnected, how they needed each other. People everywhere wove a web of relationships—business or personal. New York offered so many possible threads to follow that sometimes it was hard to recognize an overall pattern, and to know you were part of it. But not here in Tobias. Here, you knew the interconnections, and celebrated them.

  She glanced at Rob.

  “What?”

  Her glance had stuck. She’d been staring at him, and he’d caught her.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” she blurted. It hadn’t been the track her mind had been following—that track could have earned her a ticket for indecency on a public sidewalk if Tobias had thought police—but once she said the words, she realized she was interested. “What was it like growing up here? That’ll help me understand Tobias.”

  He looked unconvinced, but asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “For starters, what did you do during summers as a kid?”

  “Swam, sailed, rode bikes, built forts, played baseball, tennis, soccer—about every sport. But my parents also believed in kids having time to entertain themselves.” He looked into the distance.

  “Miss Trudi told me they were great people. It must have been so hard to lose them so young.”

  “It was.” He cleared his throat. “We used to ride our bikes to the far side of the lake and poke around old cabins in the woods over there.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Steve and me, Steve’s kid brother Zach, too.”

  “Why poke around old cabins?”

  “Mostly because it was forbidden.” He grinned, and she could see him as a tousle-haired ten-year-old. “I suppose it could have been dangerous, with those things rotting away. But the worst that happened were bumps and bruises and scratches from the raspberry bushes.”

  “Raspberry bushes?”

  “They were on the way back if we did the whole circuit. Other side of the country club, around where the old highway bridge crosses the river. That made it more daring, because we ran the risk of being spotted and word could get back to our parents.” He laughed. “But when we got home, they knew anyway. Especially when they spotted Zach.”

  “Why especially him?”

  “Because he always looked the worst. Steve and I would tell him he had to pick raspberries for us or he couldn’t come, because he was younger. He’d go charging in there like a maniac. He never passed up a challenge. And he never passed up a chance to make his mother furious.”

  “Over eating raspberries?”

  “Wait until you meet Lana Corbett. You’ll understand. And let me tell you, she’s mellowed. Corbetts do not indulge in such low behavior—that pretty much covered anything a kid would consider fun.”

  He obviously was mimicking Lana Corbett, but Kay also heard an echo of her mother. Strange that Steve, so relaxed and kind, might have had an upbringing with similarities to hers.

  “What about your parents?” she asked.

  “Oh, they had rules, but no delusions about social prestige. Looking back I see the rules were about keeping us safe, and teaching us to be responsible. At the time I thought they were killjoys and strict beyond belief.”

  They were negotiating a tilted patch of sidewalk where a huge tree root had erupted. He let her go ahead and their hands brushed. For an instant she thought he might take her hand.

  He stepped back to allow a cushion of space.

  Kay wanted to slap her head—of course he stepped back. Hadn’t she gotten that into her skull yet?

  “What about you?” he asked. “What was your childhood like?”

  Lonely. “The usual—school, lessons, camp in the summer.”

  “Lessons?”

  “Riding, tennis, piano, ballet.”

  He chuckled. “So you tormented your parents with tournaments and recitals.”

  “My parents had—have—very busy social calendars.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me—it’s so poor-little-rich-girl to whine even though you lived at increasingly better addresses, went to the best schools, had playdates in the Hamptons. I am not a poor-little-rich-girl.”

  “But people give you grief about being rich—people like that actor.”

  She’d forgotten Brice’s cracks about how she got the music video. “I’m used to it.”

  He studied her face. “What was your favorite thing to do as a kid?”

  The answer came immediately. “Go to Dora’s studio.”

  “Did you paint?”

  “Sure. If you wanted to be around Dora, that’s what you did. Are you familiar with her style?” He nodded. “Then you know how exactin
g it is. I remember many canvases that looked amazing to me but that didn’t meet her standards, so she painted over them. But she let me just be a kid, experiment, play.”

  “Did you keep it up?”

  “No. You could say I outgrew it.”

  Or you could say that her family imploded, she’d never returned to the studio and, until a few months ago, she hadn’t talked to her grandmother for sixteen years.

  She picked up the pace even as she dug into her tote bag.

  “Hold Chester’s leash, will you?” Without looking at Rob, she practically flung it at him.

  What was she thinking? Walking her dog down a small-town street with a nice guy beside her—it was all a fantasy. The dog wasn’t hers, she didn’t belong in the town and the guy had no intention of pursuing the sparks between them. He’d said it straight out—they came from different worlds. And she didn’t belong in his.

  She didn’t have to turn around to know man and dog watched her. She fumbled the paper against a telephone pole and attached it with the stapler.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Flier about the dog. I made them last night. Someone will recognize her from the description and she can go back to her true home.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I do.” She cleared her throat. “I’m being practical. Even if the previous owner doesn’t claim her, someone will see the fliers and want to adopt Chester, so she won’t be without a home when I leave.”

  Rob adjusted his hold on Chester’s leash, wondering why Kay’s mood had taken a downturn that made the stock market crash of 1929 look like an easy glide. She attacked that flier like it was an enemy.

  Kay Aaronson was a most interesting woman.

  She was putting up fliers inviting someone to claim this dog, which spoke of someone determined to remain unencumbered, to keep her life streamlined to allow for maximum maneuverability.

  Yet, if he’d been a betting man, he would put money down that she was hoping with every staple that no one would claim Chester.

  As she marched on to the next pole, he paused to read:

  Found:

  Who: One female dog. (No name on collar, but phone number 262-555-2891 imprinted on tag. Number no longer in service.)

  Where: In the vicinity of Bliss House.