Josh finally saw the ploy for what it really was, a full-court press to get him back together with Stephanie. “Sir, I thought you understood. Stephanie and I didn’t have some silly little argument. We’re in total agreement that we’re not suited to be together. There’s nothing between us to fix.”
“That’s absurd,” Creighton barked. “I’ve given this a lot of thought since we spoke last. This is nothing but premarital jitters. Happens to every man when he sees a wedding date approaching.”
“You seem to be forgetting that we never set a wedding date,” Josh said. “I’d never even proposed. We only started dating to begin with because it was what you wanted.”
“But the inevitability of it was staring you in the face,” Creighton said. “Same thing.”
“Sir, you don’t really need me in court, do you?”
His boss sighed heavily. “No.”
“All right, then. I’ll be in touch.”
“Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Creighton asked, his disappointment evident.
“Absolutely sure, sir. If that’s a condition of me coming back, then I’m afraid it’s a deal-breaker.”
“No, no, I already told you it wasn’t,” Creighton said impatiently.
“Goodbye, sir.” He hung up the phone, glanced at the clock, then called Ashley.
“Where are you? I thought you’d be back by now.”
“I had to deal with a crisis. It’ll be a few more minutes. Would you rather meet at the café?”
“No, I’ll wait. Just hurry. My stomach is rumbling.”
When he finally drove up to Rose Cottage, she was already waiting out front.
“You weren’t kidding about being starved, were you?” he teased.
“No. Melanie and Maggie ruined my appetite this morning, so I missed breakfast.” She regarded him curiously as she slid into the passenger’s seat. “Want to tell me about whatever crisis held you up?”
“Later,” he said. “It wasn’t that important.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as an unimportant crisis.”
He laughed. “It depends on which side of the crisis you’re on.”
“Ah, I’ll try to remember that.” She glanced out the window. “There’s a parking space right there,” she pointed out eagerly.
Josh glanced in that direction. “And it’s right behind your sister’s car, if I’m not mistaken.” Ashley groaned.
“Okay, it’s your call. Lunch this second with your sister or drive to someplace else?”
Even before she spoke, Josh figured the audible growling of her stomach pretty much clinched it.
“We’ll stay here,” she said with undisguised reluctance.
“Don’t worry,” he soothed. “I’ll protect you.”
In fact, this could work to his advantage. With Maggie and perhaps even Melanie pestering her, Ashley might forget all about that crisis in his life. He needed to know if he really was going to go back to Richmond and the fast track before he told her that he was a lawyer. He had no idea how she was going to take that news given her own ambivalence about the legal profession these days.
“Oh, look, they’re at a table for two,” Ashley said happily when she spotted both Maggie and Melanie in side the café. “No room for us.”
Of course, no sooner had the words left her mouth than two extra chairs materialized. Apparently Maggie and Melanie had seen them coming and put in a request for the extra seating.
Ashley sighed and dutifully crossed the restaurant.
Maggie studied her with undisguised speculation. “You look amazingly bright-eyed compared to this morning. Was fishing the only thing you all did?”
Josh waited to see how Ashley would field that one. She frowned at her sister. “That, little sister, is none of your business,” Ashley said.
“The same way it was none of your business what we did with Mike and Rick?” Melanie inquired sweetly.
Ashley didn’t miss a beat. “No. I’m the big sister. I had an obligation to keep an eye on you guys.”
“Well, we might be younger, but we’re old married ladies now, so it’s our obligation to look out for our unmarried big sister.”
“In some cultures, you two wouldn’t even be married until Ashley here walked down the aisle,” Josh reminded them. “You’d be wanting her to hurry up.”
Melanie gave him a thoughtful look. “Are you suggesting marriage is already on the table?”
“Good grief, no,” Ashley said fervently.
Josh wasn’t sure he appreciated the idea being dismissed so readily. “Don’t be too hasty,” he said, just to rattle her. “It could be on the table.”
Eyes flashing, she stared him down. “It is not on the table,” she repeated emphatically.
He grinned. “We’ll discuss it later.”
“Whose side are you on?” she demanded irritably. “You’re just going to get them all stirred up. They won’t give us a minute’s peace. Mike and Rick will haul you out for some sort of guy talk, which will be only marginally less intimidating than having my father come down here.”
Josh shrugged. “They don’t scare me.”
“Do the words ‘What are your intentions?’ scare you?”
Not half as much as he’d expected them to. Not even a tenth as much as they had when Creighton Williams had first uttered them. Obviously, though, they terrified her.
“Settle down, darlin’,” he soothed. “Nothing has to be decided till after lunch. You’ll be able to think more rationally on a full stomach.”
Ashley glowered at him, even as Maggie and Melanie chuckled.
“Go to hell,” she muttered, then turned to beckon for the waitress. “I’d like a cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate milk shake.”
Her sisters stared at her in shock.
“Oh, my gosh, she really has gone round the bend,” Melanie murmured.
Maggie nodded. “Seems that way to me, too.”
“I repeat, go to hell,” Ashley said, then added, “all of you.”
Josh chuckled. “Sounds like her old self to me.” And what a pistol she was. He’d never met anyone like Ashley D’Angelo, and no matter what it took, he was pretty sure it would be a very bad idea to let her get away.
8
If she hadn’t been so hungry, Ashley would have gotten up and walked all the way back to Rose Cottage just to get away from Josh and her sisters. They were having entirely too much fun at her expense. As for Josh and those crazy allusions to marriage, he’d apparently stayed underwater too long and killed off a few important brain cells. She wasn’t taking him seriously, but her sisters very well might. They were eager to see her follow what they now assumed to be a family tradition and fall wildly in love while staying at Rose Cottage.
Ashley and Josh were on the way home before she called him on his ill-conceived teasing. “What on earth were you thinking?” she asked testily.
“About?”
“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about,” she retorted. “I’m referring to all that nonsense about marriage.”
He gave her a look filled with feigned innocence. “Maybe it wasn’t nonsense.”
“If it wasn’t, then you’re the one who needs his head examined. I know absolutely nothing about the state of your life beyond the fact that you just broke up with some other woman, but I think we can agree that the turmoil in mine is sufficient to preclude any serious talk of the future.”
“There’s no harm in getting the idea out there, though, is there?”
She gave him an impatient look. “My professional life is in chaos. Don’t you think I have enough to worry about without pondering marriage to a man I barely know?”
“I don’t know. Thinking about getting married could be more fun than thinking about torts and trials and things over which you have no control, such as public opinion.” He glanced over at her. “Don’t you agree?”
The man was totally exasperating. “Marriage is not some gam
e, dammit! You start tossing that word around with my family, and you’ll be in front of a minister before you can catch your breath. Haven’t you noticed that my sisters both married after whirlwind courtships? They think it’s a family tradition, and they think it’s all tied up with staying in Rose Cottage, as if the place had some sort of magical powers in the love department.”
He grinned. “It’s a unique tradition, all right. As for the cottage being enchanted, didn’t you ever see that old movie?”
She sighed heavily. “Yes, I saw it. It doesn’t apply. Don’t you take anything seriously?”
“Sure. Actually I take marriage very seriously. That’s why I broke things off with that other woman. I realized I wasn’t serious enough about her for marriage. We were wasting time together in a relationship that was going nowhere. She deserved better than that.”
“Then why are you joking around about the whole marriage thing with me?”
Now he sighed. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted eventually. “The words just seemed to pop out. Since no panic alarms have gone off, I’ve seen no reason to take them back. Besides, it’s given your sisters something to chew on besides your career status. It’s pretty much gotten your attention off that, too.”
She regarded him doubtfully. “So this has been some sort of magnanimous gesture on your part to get my sisters off my case?”
“Something like that,” he said, then winked. “For now, anyway.”
She studied him helplessly. “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Ditto, darlin’, but aren’t we going to have fun figuring things out?”
That was precisely the problem, Ashley thought a little desperately. She was having fun, perhaps too much fun given the fact that she had an army of reporters on her trail, a career in turmoil and a guilty conscience over her part in freeing a confessed murderer.
Determined to get things back on a far safer track, she regarded Josh seriously. “What are your plans this afternoon?”
“Kicking back. Nothing much.”
“Good. Then you can help me make a list.”
He regarded her warily. “What kind of list?”
“Career decisions,” she said with grim determination. “I could use an outside perspective.”
“Bad idea,” he said.
“It has to be done,” she insisted. “Maybe you have all the time in the world to relax, but I can’t sit around wallowing in indecisiveness indefinitely.”
He chuckled. “How many days have you been wallowing in anything here?”
“Three, four, something like that.” To her amazement, she couldn’t remember precisely. Maybe she was getting too good at the whole relaxation thing. That should be a warning to her. She needed to get focused—fast. A life without focus was a life that could spin out of control. Of course, hers had managed to slip off the track even with all her safeguards in place….
“And you’re going to be here three weeks,” Josh said. “Isn’t that what you told me the night we met?”
She nodded. “What’s your point?”
“You’re pushing for too much, too fast. The real answers won’t come to you for at least another week or so.”
“Why on earth would you say a thing like that?”
“It’s a proven fact that you have to spend serious time unwinding before you can get in touch with your real heart’s desire.”
“A proven fact?” she echoed skeptically.
He nodded. “Absolutely. Trying to force things will just set you back. You’ll wind up with a decision that’s based on logic, not emotion.”
“You are so full of it, Madison.”
“But I’m charming,” he said with the engaging smile that never failed to make her heart take a tumble in her chest. “And you have to admit that the whole relaxation thing is working out exactly as I predicted.”
“True,” she admitted reluctantly. “But what’s wrong with logic? The world would be a better place if everyone made their decisions based on logic.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s critical to factor emotion into the equation. Without it, we’d all be dutiful little drones. Trust me on this. You can’t be making lists this soon, or you’ll just have a bunch of cut-and-dried choices.”
She sighed heavily. “Then what on earth will I do with the rest of the afternoon?”
“I have a plan,” he said cheerfully.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Actually, it was your sister’s idea.”
She regarded him suspiciously. “Which one?” She was pretty sure any ideas tossed out by Melanie would involve getting all those tulip and daffodil bulbs in the ground.
“Maggie. Why? What difference does it make?”
“Never mind. What sort of brainstorm did she share with you?”
“Trust me, it’ll be fun.”
She was about to protest that she wasn’t going anywhere with him without details, but then she fell silent. The truth was, she did trust him, even though she knew precious little about him beyond his name and his ability to bait a hook. Given the way she was feeling about the whole trust thing these days, that was nothing short of a miracle.
She glanced at him and saw that he was grinning as he awaited her decision. “Okay, you win,” she said.
“See, now, putting yourself into my hands wasn’t so hard, was it?” he teased.
She uttered a self-mocking laugh. “Actually, you have no idea how hard it was.”
But something told her it was a huge step in the right direction.
When Josh turned into the driveway at Maggie’s, he saw Ashley stiffen beside him.
“We’re going to my sister’s? Why? So she can cross-examine us some more? That sounds like fun.”
“The trust business doesn’t run very deep with you, Ashley, does it?” he asked, amused.
“Frankly, no.”
“Well, cool your jets, lady lawyer. We’re not here to visit. In fact, as far as I know, Maggie’s not even home.”
“Then why are we here?”
“It’s an orchard,” he reminded her with exaggerated patience. “We’re going to pick apples.”
She stared at him blankly. “Why?”
“Because it’s something you’ve never done before. Neither have I. We can share the experience. People bond over new experiences.”
“And I suppose we’ll bond even more as we share a hospital room when we both wind up with broken arms,” she said cheerfully.
“You’re not approaching this with the right attitude,” he scolded. “We’re young. We’re limber. How hard can it be?”
“Unless you think you’re going to shake the tree and have apples fall into our baskets, it’s going to be work, Madison.” Her expression brightened. “Watching you get the hang of it could be amusing, though.”
Josh parked the car at the edge of the orchard. “You can forget that idea. This is a joint venture. And Maggie has promised to bake us an apple pie when we’re done.”
“An apple pie, huh? That can’t take more than a couple of apples, right? Okay, I can do that.”
Josh gave her a chiding look. “It’ll take more than a couple for the pie, then we’ll want some apples for our picnic tomorrow and some for snacks later on. Plus we haven’t even decided which kind we want. I like Granny Smith. How about you?”
“I should have known you’d prefer something tart. I like the sweet ones. I’m not sure we have a choice, though. I think all these trees are Golden Delicious.”
“Not according to Maggie.”
“When did you two have this heart-to-heart about apples?”
“When I was here the other night.”
“So you’ve been planning this outing since then?”
“No, I’ve been planning this since lunchtime, when I recalled the conversation she and I had after dinner. In relaxation mode, it’s not acceptable to plan too far ahead.”
“Which is why the whole marriage thing is so absurd,” she said
. “If that’s not planning way ahead, I don’t know what is.”
“A valid point,” he admitted. “We’ll table that for this afternoon, though I find it interesting that you haven’t forgotten it for a second.” He glanced up at the trees that were laden with fruit, all out of reach. “I think getting to those apples is going to require all of our concentration.”
He met her gaze. “Ever climb a tree before?”
“Do I look as if tree-climbing were a hobby of mine?”
“You could have been a tomboy. How am I supposed to know?” At least one of the D’Angelo sisters had been. He could recall their grandmother lamenting it to his mother. Neither Melanie or Maggie seemed the tree-climbing type, so maybe it had been Jo, the one he hadn’t met yet.
“Trust me, not a tomboy,” she said.
He gave her a very thorough once-over. “Just as well. I would hate to think of that smooth skin all scraped and scarred.” Then again, he could have had himself a grand time kissing any imperfections. He decided not to share that intriguing thought.
“If that’s the case, why would you insist on sending me up into a tree to pick apples now?” she inquired.
“Because we’re old enough and wise enough now not to take unnecessary chances.”
“Ha! I’ve seen glimpses of your daredevil side.”
He climbed out of the car. “Come on, Ashley, stop whining. This is going to be fun.” He looked around. “There should be a ladder out here somewhere, and some baskets.”
“Let me know when you find them,” she called out, still tucked into place in the car.
“You are not getting into the spirit of this,” he accused.
“What was your first clue?”
He walked over to the car and rested his elbows on the passenger windowsill, then looked deep into her eyes. “Do you really, really hate this whole idea? We can do something else.”
Suddenly a grin spread across her face. “Nope. Just seeing how far I could push you before you let me have my way. Bring on the ladder, Madison. If you want to pick your own apples for a pie, then I’m right there with you. Never let it be said that I’m not up for a challenge.”
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