Least Likely Wedding?

by Patricia McLinn

  Description: Golden and white fur. Beautiful markings. Sunny disposition. Well-trained. Knows sit, stay, come, lie down, learning shake. Very affectionate. Tall enough to pet without bending down.

  Contact: Kay Aaronson, 262-555-3874, 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.

  That description sounded more like a besotted owner’s list of charming traits than a wanted poster’s vital statistics.

  “Why between three and four? Will you be around then?”

  “The machine can get any calls if I’m not,” she said indifferently.

  “You could list your cell phone.”

  “I’m not going to post my cell phone number all over Tobias. It could tie up my phone for emergencies.”

  He would have laughed if she hadn’t been so entirely clueless that she was making it difficult for anyone to claim Chester. She had no idea how her eyes brightened when the dog nosed at her hand for petting or how her face softened when Chester curled up at her feet. Yet she couldn’t seem to trust that this animal was at least as smitten as she was.

  Why couldn’t she believe it?

  Kay was a fascinating combination of self-assurance and insecurity.

  When he’d tried to apologize for exposing all the flaws in her ideas for the Bliss House opening, and she’d said there was no need since he was right, he’d been bowled over. He couldn’t imagine anyone else being that non-defensive. And after a brief setback, her belief that she could do this job—maybe that she could do any job, considering the variety in her résumé—had rebounded to full strength.

  Yet, she’d said Chester must be desperate to want to be with her.

  And she’d seemed so wistful when he’d talked about his growing up, about his family.

  My parents had—have—very busy social calendars.

  Miss Trudi had said something similar. What could Miss Trudi have been hinting at when she’d talked about strains in Kay’s family? Kay’s parents sure hadn’t supported her when she’d called off the wedding. Maybe she hadn’t treated the guy great, but family should stick by you.

  With all urge to laugh long gone, he jerked his thoughts to the present, watching Kay staple another flier to a pole.

  “Today,” he said, “we’ll cover the official aspects of Tobias—Town Hall, the hospital and—”

  “No. I can’t leave Chester. It’s too soon.”

  This from the woman posting fliers inviting people to take the dog.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, mentally adjusting the schedule he’d made. “We can explore Lake Tobias, starting with a drive around it.”

  “But Chester—”

  “We’ll take her. In fact, we can stop at animal welfare for—”

  “I told you, I’m not taking her to the pound.”

  “I meant to get her a county tag.”

  “Are you some sort of law and order junkie?”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Her response was the whack, whack of another flier stapled to a pole. “There. That should get attention.”

  “Right.”

  Rob showed her around the piers and parks of the town’s revitalized waterfront before they stopped for lunch at the Tastee-Treat Ice Cream Shoppe, near the community pool. Both were doing good business.

  Sitting at a small table under a faded sun umbrella, where no one seemed to object to Chester lying at their feet, Kay had a salad to Rob’s hamburger and fries, so she felt plenty virtuous enough to go for the two-scoop ice-cream cone he offered. Besides, it was hot today.

  “Here we are, pralines-and-cream on top of rocky road for you.” He let the change slide from his hand onto the table so he could hand the cone to her. “Those seem appropriate—you look like you’d be pralines-and-cream, but you lead people down a rocky road.”

  “Ha!” That was all she said as she swept her tongue around the pile of ice cream to make sure no melting drib-lets escaped. “And what about you?”

  “What about me?” He was eating his cone with such a look of deep attention that his thick lashes nearly masked his eyes.

  “Strawberry and chocolate? Could you get any more basic? With tastes like that I’m surprised you ever wanted to go to the big city of Chicago.”

  “Couldn’t get what I thought I wanted here.”

  “Ah,” she said wisely. “Back to the financial analyst stuff. So you always knew you wanted to be a financial analyst?”

  “I knew I liked dealing with numbers, and helping people with money appealed, but I didn’t narrow it down until I decided to get an MBA.”

  She whistled—not her best, since her lips were cold.

  “You can’t be impressed,” he said. “MBAs litter the ground in Manhattan.”

  “True, but I rarely eat ice cream with them.”

  “Got something against MBAs?”

  “I’m an open-minded sort, but they’re so scheduled. You’d have to make an appointment in February to have ice cream in August.”

  “Must be the Manhattan MBAs, since we didn’t know each other in February.”

  “But you’re on a leave of absence. Someone who could take a leave of absence can’t be as strictly scheduled as other MBAs.”

  “Not so. I not only follow a schedule, I had a master plan for my life.”

  Had. There he went talking in the past tense again.

  “By college I had my whole life mapped out. Get good grades, get into the MBA program, find the right woman, finish the MBA, land the right job, marry, move to the city, get established, move up and up. Make our fortunes—” His slight, dry smile tightened her throat. “Then step back, slow down and have our family.”

  “Sounds—” she looked at him from under her lashes as she selected the word “—reasonable.”

  He crunched into his cone. “I hit a few potholes. You might notice—no wife, no kids.”

  She dismissed that with a wave. “You’ve got your fortune, the wife and kids will follow.”

  “No confidence that I could win a wife without money, huh?”

  “Why take the risk?”

  He laughed.

  It shouldn’t feel this good to make someone laugh.

  She devoted herself to another neatening-up foray around the cone, making sure she caught every soft slide of ice cream. With the pralines-and-cream long gone, a rocky road miniature marshmallow detached from the rest of the concoction, and she caught it with the tip of her tongue before curling it into her mouth.

  That was when she met Rob’s look.

  She stopped, with her tongue tucked inside her top lip with its sweet load. She didn’t move, she didn’t speak. Under other circumstances she might have even said she froze. But not with that look aimed at her.

  It could have melted her ice cream—or her. The earth’s crust had to be getting mushy, too. Talk about your global warming.

  Rob jerked back as if escaping a flame.

  “Well.” That was all he said for a good half a minute. He wrapped his last bite of cone in its paper holder, put a stack of napkins in front of her and threw his garbage out. “You about ready?”

  She swallowed, found the sweetness of melting marshmallow in her mouth and had to swallow again before she could say, “Just about.”

  Rob scooped up the change he’d put on the table.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. He returned to the window, getting in line behind a mother with four children. He’d decided one cone wasn’t enough?

  The mother handed cones one by one to her children, a squawk arose, she switched two of the cones, restoring peace, and paid. Rob stepped to the counter, said a few words and handed over money. But he left the window without a cone and headed back to her.

  “What was that about, Rob?”

  He gestured for her to go ahead, at the same time saying hello to a gray-haired couple eating banana splits.

  “I just noticed she’d given me too much change,” he said. “What?”

  She looked away immediately. “Nothing.”

  But it wasn’t nothing.
Barry not only hadn’t returned the money when a cashier at a theater had given him an extra five dollars, he had chortled about it. Even if it had occurred to him to do the right thing, he definitely wouldn’t have stood on line to do it.

  Rob stepped ahead of her to open the passenger door. She paused, an urge to kiss him—on the cheek, she’d just kiss him on the cheek—nearly overwhelming. But she held back. She patted him on the arm.

  He looked from where her hand rested on his forearm to her face. A quizzical expression, along with a renewed lick of flame in his eyes, almost had her reconsidering her restraint. Almost.

  “What was that for?”

  “That was for your being a very nice man, Rob Dalton.”

  Who knew nice could be so darned sexy. Or was it just her that his decency turned on?

  His quizzical expression deepened. “Because I didn’t cheat the ice cream shop?”

  “Among other things.” She sank into the car seat so she didn’t grab him and show him exactly what those other things were whether he liked it or not.

  Chapter Six

  She’d been giving him a lot of questioning looks.

  At least that’s what Rob told himself they were. Much better for his self-control if they were.

  What the hell had gotten into him? As if he’d never seen a woman eating an ice-cream cone before.

  “So, picking up our tour around the lake,” he said to break the silence, “we see another landmark—the famous raspberry bushes on the banks of the mighty Tobias.”

  He kept up the commentary, pointing out the country club, a resort Steve had been instrumental in getting reopened, the site of the rundown cabins he and the Corbett brothers had explored as kids.

  They pulled off the road into a tree-lined drive and stopped in front of a neat one-story frame house.

  “What’s this?”

  “Max and Suz’s house.”

  Kay reached for the camcorder as they got out of the car. She’d had it going all during the drive. It was her protective barrier, and he had no right to object, since he’d made the rules about keeping their distance.

  He hated the thing.

  “Leave it for now. I promise to bring you out again to tape it if you want, but for now look.”

  She didn’t reply, but she left the camcorder on the car seat. “Aren’t Max and Suz working at Bliss House?”

  “Yup. We’re here to use the pier. You can’t know this town without sailing Lake Tobias.”

  “But Chester—”

  “That’s why we’re sailing from here instead of the town pier. I called when you picked up Chester’s things and had one of Max’s guys sail it over at lunch, then Max gave him a ride back. We’ll tie up Chester in the shade and leave her plenty of water and toys, and we’ll be able to see her and she’ll be able to see us—you—the whole time.”

  Chester appeared perfectly content with the plan. It took more coaxing to get Kay to leave the dog and get in the boat. But once they were on the water, and she could see Chester had settled down under a tree, she relaxed.

  Out in the sun, she took off the black shirt she’d worn knotted at the waist of her black shorts and revealed a black sleeveless T-shirt. No, less than sleeveless. The armholes were cut so high they left narrow straps to bridge the front and back, baring her shoulders. Beautiful shoulders. Creamy-white over the strong line of bone. He wanted to taste them.

  He tore his thoughts away from contemplating her taste and tossed her sunscreen from the plastic ready bag kept in the boat.

  “This is wonderful.” She spread on the lotion.

  He tried not to watch, and failed. “Haven’t you sailed?”

  “Not like this.” She swung an arm out in a broad gesture, and people on the two boats in sight waved. She grinned and converted the gesture to a true wave.

  He looked at her, sitting in his small boat as if she belonged. The sun glinted in her hair and squinted her eyes into an even deeper smile. How the hell had she become this unaffected person, given what her parents were, based on what she’d said and what Miss Trudi had said?

  Still looking at the water, she continued, “Some of Mother and Father’s crowd sail competitively, actually they all do it competitively one way or another. You know, whose boat’s bigger, fancier. But definitely not like this. This…this is sailing just for the wind and the water.”

  She sighed such deep satisfaction, he thought the sail would fill with it.

  Something in his chest sure as hell did.

  His hand on the tiller clenched, starting the boat in a turn without a conscious decision. Following the motion, he warned, “Coming about,” swung the boom once he was sure she had ducked, and adjusted his position so he wasn’t looking at her.

  “Now, aren’t you glad we haven’t spent this day at Town Hall and the hospital?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Do you sail on Lake Michigan?”

  “Not much. Never seemed to have the time.”

  “Because you were working so hard on your map to success. If you want to talk about how your schedule went wrong or the divorce or—”

  “Not particularly.”

  “It’s not good to bottle it up. Eventually the lid pops off and it can happen at the worst time.”

  “Like walking out on your groom twelve days before your wedding? Bottling things up so the guy had no idea what was happening until you hit him out of the blue?” They stared at each other. He recovered first. “Sorry. I had no right to say that.”

  “At least you weren’t bottling it up.” They exchanged small smiles.

  “It’s none of my business what happened with you and your fiancé,” he said. Why the hell couldn’t he remember that before he opened his mouth? This business with Mitchell and the firm had to be wearing at him even more than he knew.

  “No, it isn’t,” Kay agreed. “Just like it’s none of my business what happened with you and your ex-wife. Not that I don’t want to know…”

  This time their smiles were genuine.

  She got serious first. “I’ll tell you, Rob. After knowing you, I’m more certain than ever that ending it twelve days before the wedding was infinitely better than ending it twelve minutes after, or twelve days after or twelve months after.”

  What did she mean after knowing you? Because they never would have met if she’d gone through with marrying Barry? Or was she referring to seeing the effects of his divorce.

  He didn’t ask. Maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. He caught the wind for a good run, sending the boat scooting across the water. When the wind shifted slightly, he settled for the tamer broad reach.

  “That was great!” Kay’s eyes sparkled and her cheeks were flushed.

  “My mom used to say that in sailing, you always think there’s a way you could have made better use of the wind, but that shouldn’t stop you from appreciating the motion and balance and breeze you’ve enjoyed.”

  “So, your mother was the sailor in the family?”

  “Both my parents sailed, but Mom was more willing to give up the tiller enough to let others learn.”

  “So you take after your father.”

  “Are you implying I’m controlling?”

  She tipped her head, the breeze caught the feathery ends of her hair setting them to dancing, almost as wildly as the devilment in her eyes. “Implying? More like saying it outright.”

  “Hey, I don’t try to make all the decisions. Look at the committee. I go along with the flow and—”

  “Until anyone steps on the budget’s bottom line and then you come down like a hammer.”

  “Someone’s got to watch for red ink.”

  “Hah! You don’t even let it get pale gray. And what about this showing me around Tobias—you probably have a printed agenda for each day.”

  “That you’ll keep changing.”

  “It’s good for you.”

  “Maybe.”

  She gave him that look again. That same one as yesterday in
front of the library, when she’d looked inside him.

  He cleared his throat. “So, did you learn sketching from your grandmother?”

  She raised an eyebrow at the subject change, then said, “Yes, but I don’t do it anymore.”

  “I saw you sketching the gardens as Fran described them.”

  “Oh, those.” The good humor was gone. “Those were doodles.”

  He’d asked her the question to gain distance from that look, but now she had him curious. “Looked like more than doodles.”

  “You know the interesting thing,” she said, ignoring his comment, “is that we have so many choices for expression. Take film. That’s the medium for contemporary times.” And she was off.

  Years in business had developed Rob’s bull-detector to a fine instrument. He partially owed his quick rise to it. With one exception, he’d had an unerring sense of when executives were on the level and when they were trying to dazzle him with bull. And with that exception, loyalty and gratitude had clouded his judgment. Granted, his bull-detector was a little out of tune after this summer, but he knew when it was being shoveled. And Kay Aaronson was shoveling for all she was worth, running on about rotoscoping and narrative and POV shots.

  He cut through her rambling with a direct question. “Did you stop painting because your grandmother’s a famous artist and that can be hard to live up to?”

  “I’m not trying to live up to her.”

  That had a ring of truth to it. “With the way you talked about going to her studio as a kid, but then you told Nell you don’t go there anymore, and what you said about not sketching, when it’s clear you love it… It adds up to something.”

  That pane-of-glass face of hers showed her debating whether to keep silent.

  “There was a…a family situation a long time ago. Dora, my grandmother, has been estranged from my parents and me since I was thirteen.”

  “But she was behind your doing the shoot here.”

  “Yes, she was. We…ran into each other. Talked some. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

  “What do you want to happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And wasn’t that what he’d been thinking all along—that she was a woman who didn’t know what she wanted.