Only she understood how much of Pickett’s self-concept had been eroded by not having the energy, the stamina, and the vigor expected of a person her age. Her high-achieving family had believed Pickett had a character flaw that kept her from doing her best, and so had Pickett. Watching Pickett blossom and begin to assert herself once she had energy to burn had been the single most satisfying experience of Emmie’s life.
Celiac couldn’t be cured, but a person could become symptom-free by avoiding all wheat and wheat products and all the botanical cousins of wheat, like rye and barley. Completely. Always. For the rest of her life. Until a person tried to eliminate it, he or she had no idea how ubiquitous wheat was, and how often it was a hidden ingredient. Whenever she was with her, Emmie didn’t eat anything that Pickett couldn’t eat, so she understood how often Pickett couldn’t participate in that most basic human bonding ritual: the sharing of food. And probably, only she understood how much sharing the cake with her brand new husband would mean to Pickett.
So whatever strange vibe Emmie was getting from Caleb-she didn’t have to worry about it. She didn’t have to worry that he kept helping her more than she wanted to be helped. This was for Pickett, and all she had to do was stay focused on her goals.
“Grace was here all morning with the decorator,” she told Caleb as he hefted the large box weighing over sixty pounds onto his shoulder, “putting on the finishing touches. The catering staff won’t begin setting up until later. A quick in and out to switch the cakes, and we’re done.”
They entered through the side portico-covered entrance he had discovered, and a short walk down the thickly carpeted hall took them to the reception room.
“The room is this way.” He urged her forward with a fleeting touch on the small of her back. It was the kind of touch men gave women they were with, but she had her head on straight now. She refused to read anything into it.
Balancing the box on one shoulder, he opened the door. Emmie got her first look at the reception room.
Grace’s taste was exquisite. Even though she’d hired a decorator, she’d done a lot of the work herself. To Emmie’s surprise, Grace had eschewed the traditional bridal white and instead filled huge urns with lush arrangements of autumn flowers, seedpods, and even shocks of corn and fluffy white cotton bolls. The result was lush and elegant, and yet as warm as Pickett herself.
Emmie’s heart warmed toward Grace as she surveyed the evidence that Grace appreciated her sister as she was.
Right behind that thought came a chill. The cake she’d had copied was exactly the towering white confection she would have expected Grace to choose. She felt the blood drain from her face.
“What’s the matter?” Do-Lord swung the large box from his shoulder onto a table covered with a bronze green ( not white!) cloth.
“The cake. The cake I brought doesn’t go with this.” She waved her hand to indicate the room’s decorations. With her usual flare Grace had melded a harvest theme, suitable for the Saturday after Thanksgiving with the gaiety of a wedding celebration. Urns and tables sported large fabric bows with ends allowed to trail whimsically.
Frantically, praying Grace had reverted to type at least in the matter of the cake, Emmie scanned the large room for the cake table, which would have been set up separate from the buffet. At last she saw the cake on the other side of the room, flanked by more harvest still lifes.
“Oh no. That’s not the cake.”
Chapter 7
White- faced and shocked as a person drawn against her will to look at a car wreck, Emmie wove through the tables, each with a still-life centerpiece, to get a closer look.
“I don’t understand it. A picture of the cake Grace ordered was on the bakery’s website. She must have changed her mind at the last minute… but I don’t see how.”
Emmie looked dazed, stricken. Shoulders slumped in defeat, she cradled the arm in the sling. When she swayed, Do-Lord shoved a chair at her back.
“Sit down,” he ordered, and pressed her into it firmly enough to show he meant business. He knelt in front of her and took her wrist to check her pulse. Her fingers were icy, but the throb he felt under the silky skin of her wrist was strong and steady. He curled her fingers into her palm, and cupping her hand in his much larger one, he blew on the fingers to warm them. “You looked ready to collapse. Don’t you think you’re taking this too seriously?”
In a moment the stunned look left her eyes, and she withdrew her hand almost apologetically. “It’s just that I wanted to do something for Pickett. Everything about this wedding is for her family, not her. If she had her way, she and Jax would be married in her mother’s living room with only her closest family present. But they howled at the notion. Said this or that cousin’s feelings would be hurt. Said it was bad enough she was getting married after only being engaged a month. Said it would be like the wedding was something they were ashamed of. In the interests of family harmony, she gave up all say-so about her own wedding. I wanted one thing about this wedding to be special because it was about her.
“You want to know the irony? Grace has done a beautiful job. This isn’t her taste.” Again, Emmie waved to indicate the room’s decorations. “Everything, including the cake, looks exactly right for Pickett.”
She had told him she wasn’t playing a joke on Pickett, and he’d believed her. Still he’d persisted in thinking this whole caper was a prank, a way to spit in the eye of Grace and others. She really cared about Pickett though. Despite how different they appeared, genuine loyalty and affection existed between them. He’d gone along with her, because although he had no particular desire to get involved in this family’s weird dynamics, he’d wanted Emmie in his debt. She wouldn’t renege even if they didn’t fulfill the current mission objective. He already knew that much about her.
“So what do you want to do?” He’d made all the progress necessary for now. There was too much heat between them for him to doubt the final outcome, but Emmie wasn’t used to a man’s attentions. It would take patience and skill to get her where he wanted her.
“There’s nothing to do. If we switch the cakes now, we’ll ruin Grace’s decorating scheme. Even if Grace knows I’m the one who did it, Pickett will catch the fallout. I couldn’t let that happen.”
The color had come back to her cheeks, but he hated the bleak, defeated look in her eyes, the downturned curve of her mouth. “You’re giving up?”
“What else can I do? I tried.”
“Is no try,” he intoned with Yoda seriousness, “is only do, not do.”
“Oh, please. I don’t buy Hollywood philosophy anymore than Hollywood history.”
“For SEALs, that’s not Hollywood. That’s the real world.” Do-Lord produced a pocket knife and slit the packing ta�
�pe.
Emmie gave him a baleful look and rose from the chair. “Okay. I tried. I failed. Is that good enough for you? We might as well get out of here.”
“Nope. Before we go, I at least want to see this cake you went to so much trouble to get.” Inside the box were several smaller boxes, as well as plastic pieces with functions he didn’t recognize. He pulled out papers enclosed in a plastic zip-bag. “What are these? Instructions?”
“Yes, they said they’d include directions for assembling the cake,” Emmie answered impatiently. “Come on, let’s go.”
“In a minute,” he kind of liked that she was ordering him around again, assuming she was in charge. He liked it better than sad and defeated anyway. He was also curious about how a cake the size of this one was put together-something he’d never had occasion to wonder about before.
He studied the diagrams and the photo of what the finished product would look like. He held up the photo. “You know, Emmie, I think this is that cake. See that pattern of leaves, and those vertical stripes?”
“Okay, it is the same cake.” Once Caleb had pointed them out, Emmie could see that Grace had used the restrained, classical proportions and embellishments of the original to form a background for the fruits and flowers. “And it’s brilliant. She has symbolized Pickett’s warmth and cheerfulness, her nurturing and generous nature supported-even enriched-by resting on very traditional values. It’s beautiful, and you can see Grace isn’t trying to make Pickett over. She understands who Pickett is.”
“Brilliant analysis,” Caleb pronounced with a dry snap. “The only trouble is, Pickett can’t eat this cake.”
“I’m trying to look on the bright side. See the glass half full and all that.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a quitter. All we have to do is take the decorations off that cake and put them on this one.”
“I’m not a quitter. I’m a realist. Whatever that woman’s touch thing is, I didn’t get it. Even with two good hands, I couldn’t come close to making my cake look like Grace’s. Could you?”
“I don’t know about having a woman’s touch, but yeah, I can do it. It’s just a matter of deconstructing it, understanding the components, and reassembling.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. That’s all we have to do.”
“Trust me.” He pulled his cell phone from an inside pocket and handed it to Emmie. “Do you know how to use the camera? Okay, get pictures from as many angles as possible, while I retrieve my laptop from the truck.”
“Laptop!”
“Um- hmm. The phone pictures will be too small to give us the detail we’ll need. Plus I’m going to want to graph it into sectors.” He stopped visualizing the steps he would need to look into her eyes, where hope warred with incomprehension. They were such pretty eyes, but strained-looking, and tinged violet underneath. She was exhausted from being in constant pain. With one finger he smoothed the pleat that marred the silken perfection of her brow.
“Trust me,” he urged again, and dropped a kiss on the place he had smoothed. He hadn’t intended to kiss her yet, but having felt that incredible skin with his finger, he wanted to explore the texture with his lips. He wrenched his thoughts away from images of sampling the taste of her breasts and inner thighs.
Right now, he honestly wanted to help her give her gift to her friend. Quixotic though it was, the task of re-decorating a wedding cake grabbed his interest. Ever since he had embarked with Emmie on this quest, the boredom that had been his constant companion, the sense of being one step removed from everything, had disappeared. And it wasn’t just the prospect of getting some sex that had galvanized him. He could switch the cakes by himself, but if he could convey to her his enthusiasm, and instill his confidence, it would be even more fun.
“I can tell you’re exhausted. But I know how to do this. I’ve never reverse-engineered a wedding cake, but it’s the kind of problem I solve all the time.”
“Okay.” He could almost see her pull herself together, reach inside herself for her reserves, but when she unconsciously tried to square her shoulders, she winced.
“Do you have any pain meds?”
“I’m taking the anti-inflammatory they gave me, but the stuff for pain makes me goofy.”
“All right. Let’s get this op over so you can rest until time for the wedding.”
Resting wasn’t really an option. As soon as they finished here, she had to go to Pickett’s mother’s house where Pickett’s sisters would dress her in her maid of honor outfit. Grace and Sarah Bea and even Lyle, who usually maintained a hands-off attitude, had made it clear that even if she had been capable of hooking a bra or zipping a dress, they wouldn’t have trusted her to dress on her own.
She’d resent their bossiness except they were right. She wasn’t ugly. She was just plain, and really that suited her fine. When she’d tried a few times to put together outfits that looked like what other girls wore, the results were disastrous. And makeup? She’d bought eye shadow and blushers but had no idea what to do with them. She had no problem with her lack of feminine skills except for occasions like this, which were fortunately rare.
But for an occasion like this, even Grace didn’t depend on her own skills. She’d hired a hairdresser and makeup artist to primp and paint them. Emmie hoped she wouldn’t hate the results, but she figured she probably would. She’d had it with frizzy perms and fussy “do’s” she didn’t have a prayer of maintaining without using enough hairspray to cause an air quality alert.
The phone in her hand vibrated, and she handed it to him.
While he answered, for the first time Emmie took a mental step back and asked herself what was going on here. Nobody had kissed her like that in longer than she could remember. She didn’t have a word for what it had felt like. He apparently had moved on, but she was still trying to understand why he had done it. Still bemused by the kiss, Emmie wondered when he’d become the one in charge.
She’d been ready to give up, and though she didn’t see how he thought they could succeed, his confidence was contagious. She was willing to shift the problem to his capable shoulders. Intent on her goals, she had tried to ignore the fact that he rocked her off balance over and over. Now she had to face the realization that he interested her as a man. He had eluded her every attempt to categorize him.
The truth was relationships were few and far between for Emmie because except on an cerebral level, most men bored her. And without any false pride, it was simply true that few men could keep up with her intellectually. Choosing her career over any relationship had entailed no sacrifice.
She’d assumed the sexual interest she felt from him was a male reflex. According to something she’d read recently, the attracti�
�veness of so-called ideal women amounted to fitness for childbearing. Even the famous preference for blondes boiled down to the fact that they had more estrogen. This made her as attractive as the next woman since she was healthy, and her hair was dark ash blonde. As for her attraction to him-well, she was a woman, and biology was biology. He was an excellent specimen by any measure. A man who would be able to keep her and her babies safe.
No. She wasn’t going to think about it. She wasn’t going to think of it at all. For a minute, when he’d placed that kiss on her brow, she’d gotten the idea there was something about her, rather than her estrogen quotient that he responded to. Which was ridiculous. She was probably kidding herself, and she had sworn she wouldn’t do that again.
“Good news.” Do-Lord pressed the end button and turned back to her. “That was two of the guys from the unit who have come for the wedding. They’re already in town, and they’ll be here in a few minutes. With their help we’ll have this cake dismantled and reassembled in no time.”
Emmie looked up from her picture taking to see two men glide into the room as Do-Lord opened the door.
“This is Senior Chief Lon Swales.” Do-Lord indicated the older man in his forties. “And the ugly one is Davy Graziano.”
As Emmie shook hands and responded to their “pleased to meet you’s,” she had a fleeting impression that Do-Lord and the senior chief were related. No, she’d spent too much time in the last few days noticing family resemblances. On second glance, except for a similarity of coloring, they didn’t look that much alike. It must be something about their stance, the way they held their heads. They were all members of the same crack SEAL unit and undoubtedly spent a lot of time together.
Sealed with a promise Page 8
