“That’s not the only thing. I was wondering…”
“What?”
He motioned. “Maybe you could tell me some more about your vanilla. Like what you’ve just been doing. I know you keep this place locked up. I only saw it before because of the copperhead. But somehow…there’s been no time to ask you about what you’re doing.”
Something changed in her expression. She emerged completely from the rain forest—or what looked to him like a rain forest. She was wearing disgracefully short shorts and had bare feet. Mighty dirty bare feet. And there was a glint in her eye that was slightly…challenging.
“What I’ve been doing tonight is about sex, Tucker. Are you sure you’re up for the lecture? It’s pretty tedious to someone who’s not interested.”
“You can trust me. I’m 100 percent interested.”
“Well…” She sashayed past him, turned the faucet in the sink, reached for soap and water. “Here’s the story. It’s easy enough to grow a vanilla plant, but really hard to get the plant to produce a vanilla bean. I’m afraid the problem is sex. I don’t want to shock you, Tucker, so I won’t go any further if you’re uncomfortable with some graphic terms.”
“That’s okay. I’m old enough, honest. You want to see my ID?”
“No, no, I trust you. The issue is pollination. A lot of plants pollinate pretty easily, via wind or bees or birds. But my vanilla plants—the vanilla plants that produce offspring in the form of a vanilla bean—they happen to have a girl part, and a boy part.”
“I’ll be darned. Who’d have thought it?” Suddenly he wasn’t feeling so weak. Garnet wouldn’t be talking to him like this, looking at him like this, if she were about to give him his walking papers. She was still standing at the sink, wiping her hands with a towel. She’d washed her face, too, but missed a spot. She hopped up onto the counter, still wiping her hands, but her expression he could only describe as downright perky.
“Now, Tucker, I never liked hearing what goes on in someone else’s bedroom. It isn’t any of my business. But someone has to help the vanilla along. I don’t want to explain too much. But basically, to make a baby vanilla bean, we need to have the pollen come in contact with the stigma.”
“Uh-oh. This might be over my head.”
“I’m sure you can grasp the concept. It takes me—the matchmaker—to peel back this teensy flap of tissue in order to get some of that special pollen. Now, in human boys, that’s called—”
“I know about boys. You don’t have to tell me that part.”
“Okay. So I scoop up some of that special pollen stuff and smear it all over the stigma. It’s a messy, sweaty business, but I love it.”
“I know you do.”
“See, there’s this long tube that goes into the flower. So once the pollen contacts the stigma, it goes down that tube. Deep inside, well, that’s where the baby vanilla bean starts growing.”
He’d reached her. It took a long time because he’d walked toward her so slowly. Once she perched up on the counter, she’d started swinging her legs. The closer he got, the faster she swung her legs.
He picked up the scrap of towel, brushed the dirt off her cheek that she’d missed. At that point, she went still altogether, her eyes on his. She’d been gutsy and sassy enough moments ago, but now her lips were trembling. Just a little.
“Garnet?” He leaned into her, accidentally managing to part her legs. He touched his forehead to her forehead. “You mentioned a couple of times that you think of yourself as plain vanilla. Ordinary. Not fancy.”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“I get it. That that’s how you see yourself. But I see you as the rare orchid. Like no other woman. Special. Requiring special care, extra respect, extra cherishing.” He tilted his head, homed in for a kiss. The first, he hoped, of several million kisses that night.
“You’re delusional,” she said gently, when he finally raised his mouth again. Her lips, he noticed, were wet. No longer trembling. But the pulse in her throat was beating like a drum.
“I’m not delusional.”
“I’ve made some giant-size mistakes.”
He nodded. “So have I. Which is precisely why we need to be married. So we can make mistakes together instead of coping alone.”
“Tucker! Did you say the M word?!”
“Yeah. I said the L word first. But you ran. So I figured maybe we should put it all more specifically. Love. Marriage. Living in the same house. Two boys, maybe more. I’ll handle your snakes. You handle—”
“Tucker! I can’t think when you do that!”
So he had to do it some more. Level more kisses on her, kisses involving tongues and pressure and coming on sipping-slow. Walking his hands on her, rubbing here, kneading there, bringing her closer to him. Closer again. So close her nipples hardened against his chest, and that beating pulse in her throat started to pick up speed like a jackhammer.
He surfaced again. Only for oxygen. “I have a plan,” he said thickly.
“Uh-oh. Every time you say, ‘I have a plan,’ I know there’s trouble coming.”
“But this is a good plan.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“All right, all right. I’ll tell you about my plan a little later.” He figured he’d soften her up over time. Over a lot of lovemaking. Over a whole lot of love and living together.
“Uh-oh. I forgot to tell you something, Tucker. Something important.”
“Hmm?” He heard her, but it seemed mighty unlikely she was in the mood for any more talking. There were telling signs. The way she was running her hands up his shirt. The way she was shifting back and forth, snugging her pelvis tight against him. The way she leaned into, yearned into, cradled into that last kiss.
“I love you.”
“I know,” he assured her.
“I mean…really love you. Huge love. Real love. Scary love. The whole shebang.”
“Yeah. Petrifying, isn’t it? So it’s extra good that we’re doing this love thing together.”
She lifted her head, cheeks flushed, lips red—but she was chuckling.
About time, he thought, to lift her to her feet, shut out the lights and aim inside.
Epilogue
On the first day of school, Garnet and Tucker watched the boys join the throng of kids hiking toward the school entrance. Some things were always the same—the kids all looked as if they had new shoes, new book bags and fresh haircuts.
But some things were distinctly different. Middle school had a completely different look than elementary.
“Do you see those girls?” she asked Tucker.
“Do you mean the one with the makeup troweled on? Or the one with the skirt hiked up so far I can practically see her underpants.” Tucker clawed a hand through his hair. “I’m not sure I’m going to survive middle school.”
“We’ll do okay. It can’t be that bad.” Garnet tucked her arm in his as they walked back to the van. “You know how worried we were at the start of the summer? But now I think…we were both crazy. Our boys are totally fine. My Pete is never going to be an athlete. Your Will isn’t likely to turn into an egghead. But they’re both happy. With themselves, with who they are.”
She lifted her hand—the way she seemed to do accidentally, several times a day. The necklace was new. She’d never been much for fancy jewelry, but this was a simple, long chain of garnets. The stones loved being caught in the sunlight, blazed with warm, soft color. She adored it.
The necklace had been a gift from the boys and Tucker. They’d wanted to give it to her on Christmas, but none of them could wait that long for her to see it. They’d panned for the stones, tumbled them, taken them to a jeweler to have the necklace made.
Her boys, she thought, were the best.
But her man was even more “best.”
With a grin she reached over to kiss him. They had heaps to work out yet, but it was all coming together.
She had a plan.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt of Once Upon A Matchmaker by Marie Ferrarella!
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Chapter One
So this was what all the secrecy, giggling and whispers had been about.
Micah Muldare sat on the sofa, looking at the gift his sons had quite literally surprised him with. A gift he wasn’t expecting, commemorating a day that he’d never thought applied to him. He’d just unwrapped the gift and it was now sitting on the coffee table, a source of mystification, at least for him.
His boys, four-year-old Greg and five-year-old Gary, sat—or more accurately perched—on either side of him like energized bookends, unable to remain still for more than several seconds at a time. Blond, blue-eyed and small boned, his sons looked like little carbon copies of each other.
They looked like Ella.
Micah shut the thought away. It had been two years, but his heart still wasn’t ready for that kind of comparison.
Maybe someday, just not yet.
“Do you like it, Daddy?” Gary, the more animated of the two, asked eagerly. The boy was fairly beaming as he put the question to him. His bright blue eyes took in every tiny movement.
Micah eyed at the mug on the coffee table. “I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” Micah told his son. “Actually, I wasn’t expecting anything at all today.”
It was Mother’s Day. Granted he’d been doing double duty for the past two years, being both mother and father to his two sons, but he hadn’t expected any sort of acknowledgment from the boys on Mother’s Day. On Father’s Day, yes, but definitely not on this holiday.
The mug had been wrapped in what seemed like an entire roll of wrapping paper. Gary had proclaimed proudly that he had done most of the wrapping.
“But I put the tape on,” Greg was quick to tell him.
Micah praised their teamwork.
The mug had World’s Greatest Mom written on it in pink-and-yellow ceramic flowers. Looking at it now, Micah could only grin and shake his head. Well, at least their hearts were in the right place.
“Um, I think you guys are a little confused about the concept,” he confided.
Gary’s face scrunched up in apparent confusion. “What’s a con-cept?”
“It’s an idea, a way of—”
Micah abruptly stopped himself. As a reliability engineer who worked in the top secret missile defense systems department of Donovan Defense, a large national company, he had a tendency to get rather involved in his explanations. Given his sons’ tender ages, he decided that a brief and simple explanation was the best way to go.
So he tried again. “It’s a way of understanding something. The point is, I’m very touched, guys, but you do understand that I’m not your mom, right? I’m your dad.” He looked from Gary to Greg to see if they had any lingering questions or doubts.
“We know that,” Gary told him as if he thought it was silly to ever confuse the two roles. “But sometimes you do mom things,” he reminded his father.
“Yeah, like make cookies when I’m sick,” Greg piped up.
Which was more often than he was happy about, Micah couldn’t help thinking. Greg, smaller for his age than even Gary, was his little survivor. Born prematurely, his younger son had had a number of complicating conditions that had him in and out of hospitals until he was almost two years old.
Because of all the different medications he’d been forced to take, the little boy’s immune system was somewhat compromised. As an unfortunate by-product of that, Greg was more prone to getting sick than his brother.
And every time he did get sick, Micah watched him carefully, afraid the boy would come down with another bout of pneumonia. The last time, a year and a half ago, Greg had almost died. The thought haunted him for months.
Clearing his throat, Micah squared his shoulders. His late mother, Diane, had taught him to accept all gifts gracefully.
“Well, then, thank you very much,” he told his sons with a wide smile that was instantly mirrored by each of the boys.
“Aunt Sheila helped us,” Gary told him, knowing that he couldn’t accept all of the credit for the gift.
“Yeah, she drove us to the store,” Greg chimed in. “But me and Gary picked it out. And we used our own money, too,” he added as a postscript.
“‘Gary and I,’” Micah automatically corrected Greg.
The little boy shook his head so hard, his straight blond hair appeared airborne for a moment, flying to and fro about his head.
“No, not you, Daddy, me,” Greg insisted. “Me and Gary.”
There was time enough to correct his grammar when he was a little older, Micah thought fondly.
Out loud he marveled, “Imagine that,” for his sons’ benefit. A touch of melancholy drifted over him. “You two are growing up way too fast,” he told them. “Before you know it, you’re going to be getting married and starting families of your own.”
“Married?” Greg echoed, frowning as deeply as if his father had just told him that he was having liver for dinner for the next year.
“To a girl?” Gary asked incredulously, very obviously horrified by the mere suggestion that he be forced to marry a female. Everyone knew girls were icky—except for Aunt Sheila, of course, but she didn’t count.
“That’s more or less what I had in mind, yes,” Micah told his sons, doing his very best not to laugh at their facial expressions.
Covering his face, Gary declared, “Yuck!” with a great deal of feeling.
“Yeah,” Greg cried, mimicking his brother, “double yuck!”
Micah slipped an arm around each little boy’s very slim shoulders and pulled them to him. He would miss this when the boys were older, miss these moments when his sons made him feel as if he was the center of their universe.
“Come back and tell me that in another, oh, ten, fifteen years,” he teased.
“Okay,” Gary promised very solemnly. “We will, Daddy.”
“Yeah, we will!” Greg echoed, not to be outdone.
Micah’s aunt, Sheila Barrett, stood in the living room doorway, observing the scene between her nephew and her grandnephews. Her mouth curved in a wide smile. While she lived not too far from Micah, it felt as if this was more her home than the place where she received her mail. She took care of the boys when her nephew was at work, which, unless one of his sons was sick, was most of the time.
“They picked that mug out themselves,” she told Micah, in case he thought that this was her idea. “They absolutely refused to look at anything else after they saw that mug. They thought it was perfect for you.”
“And of course you tried to talk them out of it,” Micah said, tongue in cheek. His amusement was there, in his eyes.
Sheila shrugged nonchalantly. “The way I see it, Micah, little men in the making should be as free to exercise their shopping gene as their little fem
ale counterparts.”
“Very democratic of you,” Micah commented, the corners of his mouth curving. Aunt Sheila had always had a bit of an unorthodox streak. He learned to think outside the box because of her. He sincerely doubted that he would be where he was today if not for her. “Well, just for that, I’m taking all of you out for lunch.”
“Aunt Sheila, too?” Greg asked, not wanting to exclude her.
“Aunt Sheila most especially,” Micah told his younger son. There was deep affection in his voice. “After all, Aunt Sheila is the real mom around here,” he emphasized pointedly.
Clearly confused, Greg turned to look at the woman who came by every morning to take him to preschool and his brother to kindergarten. Every afternoon she’d pick them both up and then stayed with them until their father came home. Some nights, Aunt Sheila stayed really, really late.
“Aunt Sheila has kids?” Greg asked his father, surprised.
Sheila smiled, answering for Micah. “I have your dad,” told the boy.
They had a special bond, she and her sister’s son. When the world came crashing in on him when his parents were killed in a car accident while on vacation, Micah had been twelve years old. Injured in the accident, too, he’d been all alone at that San Jose hospital. She’d lost no time driving up the coast to get to him. She’d stayed by his side until he was well enough to leave and then she took him home with her. There was no looking back. She’d raised him as her own.
Greg was staring at her, wide-eyed, his small face stamped with disbelief. “Dad was a kid?”
“Your dad was a kid,” she assured him, biting her tongue so as not to laugh at the expression of wonder on the little boy’s face. “And a pretty wild one at that.”
“She’s making that part up,” Micah told his sons. “I was a perfect angel.”
“When you were asleep, you looked just like one,” Sheila agreed, then added, “Awake, not so much.”
“Can you tell us stories about when Daddy was a kid?” Gary asked eagerly.
Little Matchmakers Page 19
