Weddings Do Come True

“Don’t you just love flush toilets?” the little girl asked, looking right up at her.

She had the most beautiful blue eyes, Lacey thought, and exquisite bone structure, very like her uncle’s. Short dark hair scattered around a cherubic face. Out of the corner of her eye, Lacey saw Gumpy struggling to suppress his laughter. His thin shoulders were shaking.

“I do,” Lacey said, though she had to admit she had never given the topic a single thought in her entire life. “I like flush toilets very much.”

The other little imp materialized, and looked up at her with eyes amazingly like his uncle’s. “I’m Danny.”

“Hi,” Lacey said.

“And I’m Doreen,” the other one said.

Ethan was not being sidetracked by introductions. “You can take my truck,” he said grimly to Gumpy. “You’ll be back in plenty of time for us to use it to feed cattle.”

Lacey looked at Gumpy with concern. Surely he would not be expected to drive back and forth all night and then feed cattle in the morning?

“Never mind,” Ethan said, evidently reaching the same conclusion. For a moment in his eyes a barrier came down, and she could see his affectionate concern for the old man outweigh his substantial irritation. “I’ll take her.”

He strode out of the room, and it was as if something went with him. Energy. Light. Lacey realized his physical nearness had made her edgy, aware of something beating, pulsing, deep within her.

Danny and Doreen raced around the room and then disappeared down the hallway.

Lacey studied the living room. It was only slightly homier than the kitchen she had come through earlier. The couch looked worn but comfortable. A bright scatter rug was underneath it, no doubt to keep feet warm on icy winter nights. The coffee table, a beautiful old scarred wooden trunk, held a cup of coffee, half-full, and a well-thumbed book that looked like a medical manual on cattle. There were no pictures on the walls.

Keith, she knew, would hate this room. His taste ran to authentic Persian rugs and antique oriental vases. But she found herself drawn to it, to the lack of clutter, to the simplicity.

She glanced, covertly, at the four movies lined up under the televison, wondering what they would tell her of the man who lived here. Toy Story, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dances with Wolves and Chris Irwin, Horse Whispering Demystified. Gumpy shuffled over and sat on the couch, looking peaceful and unperturbed, but she felt driven to apologize anyway.

“I’m sorry, Gumpy,” she said softly, “I never should have let it go this far.”

He just smiled, that wise and knowing smile she had come to like very much.

They heard a drawer slam in the kitchen.

“Where the hell are my keys?”

From a different part of the house, Lacey heard breathless giggles.

Ethan must have heard them, too. Because the silence was suddenly very silent. She could hear the fridge motor.

“Doreen?” he called. “Danny?”

Silence.

“Where are my keys?”

Hushed giggles.

Lacey turned to Gumpy and widened her eyes. She mouthed, “The toilet?”

He nodded and she waited for an explosion, but none came.

Ethan came back into the living room. He sank down on the couch and closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked tired and discouraged, much, she thought, how she must have looked when Gumpy found her at the airport.

“You probably can’t even cook,” he muttered in her direction.

“You haven’t eaten until you’ve had my vegetarian chili,” she told him proudly.

“Vegetarian?” he said with flat dislike.

Even loyal Gumpy was looking at her with distress. “Vegetarian?”

They heard a toilet flush and then flush again, followed by childish laughter.

“My life,” Ethan said, slowly and deliberately, “could not possibly get any worse than it is at this moment.”

She felt it was wise to say nothing. Apparently so did Gumpy.

“Miss?” Ethan said, opening one gray eye and looking at her.

“Ms.,” she corrected him.

His sigh of long suffering said his life had just gotten worse. “You’re on a cattle ranch,” he told her, reclosing his eyes. “As in beef. We promote the edibility of red meat.”

“Oh.”

The phone rang, and for a long time it seemed as if both men planned to ignore it.

“You know who that is, don’t you?” Ethan asked Gumpy.

“Not a clue.”

“It’s a hopping-mad fifty-seven-year-old woman who has successfully raised four children on a diet of meat and potatoes.” Except for the hopping-mad part, he sounded distinctly wistful.

He unfolded himself from the couch and went and got the phone.

Chapter Two

The phone was wall mounted in the hallway. Ethan picked it up and looked back at the pink suit settling herself on his sofa. She crossed one long, slender leg over the other one. That suit really said it all.

This was no nanny.

This was trouble. Capital-T trouble.

He deliberately turned his back on her, but was annoyed that the picture of her did not leave his mind. He tried to concentrate on what Derrick Bishop was telling him.

His mother, Mrs. Bishop, was in the hospital in Ottawa. Something about a bad spill on some ice on the sidewalk outside the airport that had left her with a broken hip.

Knowing he was being a selfish SOB, all Ethan could think was that the cavalry was not coming after alL

Unless you counted her. He hung up the phone and turned back, using the darkness of the hall to study her.

The cavalry she was not.

Cavalries did not come in that particular shade of pink. Her skin was faintly golden, and the suit was lightweight. He figured she did not come from a Northern climate. The suit really was an engineering marvel. It looked businesslike, but it also clung and hinted.

Ethan Black had pictured Betty-Anne Bishop to be the approximate size and shape of a refrigerator. Nothing had prepared him for this.

He deeply resented the flash of heat he felt deep in his belly when his lovely intruder flung a heavy tress of wayward hair over a softly rounded shoulder, even though it confirmed the absolute wisdom of getting rid of her. Fast.

The truth was he’d had lots of experience with beautiful women. Win a few buckles, ride a few bulls, and you were suddenly irresistible. Barbie doll beauty hadn’t impressed him all those years ago, and it didn’t impress him now, or at least not the part of him he listened to.

Now, brains, he thought, that impressed him in a woman.

And he could tell this girl—make that Ms. Woman—was short in the smarts department. Who else would get in a truck with a toothless old man they knew nothing about?

He hoped to God she wasn’t a hooker.

He considered that, watching her with narrowed eyes. The suit was very expensive looking and very proper. If it weren’t for the color—and for the fact he knew she’d taken a ride with a stranger to an unknown destination—he might think high-powered executive type. She smiled at something Gumpy said. The smile was warm and open.

But that didn’t alter the fact she was an impostor. She had lied to Gumpy.

Expensively dressed. Beautiful. Desperate. A woman in trouble.

He did not need any more troubles. Not of his own or anybody else’s, either. Double trouble had arrived here two weeks ago, and Danny and Doreen were his absolute limit. She had to go. He was still the boss around here, not Gumpy.

Of course, there was the little matter of the keys. If he took the toilet apart tonight, a prospect that blackened his already-black mood, Gumpy could take her back to Calgary first thing in the morning. He could feed the cattle on his own. He cursed the early skiff of snow that added four hours of feeding cattle to his daily workload. Six, if Gumpy weren’t here.

What was he going to do with the kids? The thought of taking them with him to feed the cattle was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. He thought of sending them with Gumpy, but there wouldn’t be enough seat belts in Gumpy’s truck, not that Gumpy would go for it if there were. Pulling rank only went so far with his old hand. Of course, Gumpy was more than a hand, and he knew it.

More even than a friend. A link to ways long forgotten.

He went back into the living room. Danny and Doreen streaked by, his hat down around Doreen’s chin, Danny riding hard on a broomstick.

“What’s your name?” Ethan asked the woman.

He knew before she answered, he was going to hate her name. He knew she would have a name like Tiffany, or Jade, or Charity.

“Lacey,” she said evenly, “Lacey McCade.”

Bingo. Not a sensible name like Mary or Betty.

“Mrs. Bishop broke her hip,” he said to Gumpy. “She’s not coming.”

Gumpy beamed as if he’d just won the lottery. The kids screeched through, squeezing between the coffee table and the couch.

But she reached out an arm and stopped Doreen and then caught up Danny. “You can help me bake cookies tomorrow if you go quietly and put on your pajamas.”

Tomorrow?

“What kind?” Danny demanded.

“What kind do you like?”

Ethan glared at her. Tomorrow?

“Chocolate chip,” they said together.

“We don’t have chocolate chips,” he said. Not that she was going to be here long enough to bake cookies.

“I can do it before I go,” she told him levelly, as if she could read his mind. “It only takes half an hour or so.” And then as if that settled it, she smiled at the kids, a smile so radiant it almost melted the caution he felt. Almost. “Do you like oatmeal cookies?” she asked them.

They hooted their approval, just as if they fully intended to earn their cookies by quietly going and putting on their pajamas.

“Oatmeal?” she asked him.

He nodded curtly, folded his arms over his chest, tried to suppress his surprise—and annoyance—when Doreen and Danny regarded her solemnly for a moment, and then marched off silently to put on their PJ’s.

Gumpy looked smug.

“She’s not staying,” Ethan bit out.

“Well, she’s gotta stay tonight. Unless you got a spare set of keys made after we ran those ones through the baler.”

He hadn’t, and Gumpy knew it.

“I’m taking the toilet apart right now. The keys are probably caught in the trap.”

“Well, I ain’t waiting up for you to do it.”

Ethan saw he was being unreasonable. He’d already decided they would have to take her back tomorrow. It would be too late to do it after he’d rescued the keys. And he still had to get those kids to bed.

But the kids marched out in their pajamas, asked a couple of anxious questions about cookie baking and then asked her if she’d tuck them in.

Not him, the one who’d cooked for them and watched Toy Story with them twenty-seven times and washed their mountain of dishes, and let them play with his damned hat.

Nope. Her. The impostor.

“Well, now she’s gotta stay and make cookies,” Gumpy pronounced with satisfaction when she’d left the room, one hand firmly in the grasp of each child. “Promises are important.”

Actually, though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, that would work out fine. He could get up early with Gumpy and feed the cattle, she could watch the kids and make cookies and then leave right after lunch. Not perfect, but workable.

Whatever had driven her here, he was pretty sure she was not the type who would be rummaging through the house looking for stuff to steal.

Not that he had anything worth taking. Unless you counted Chris Irwin’s video. The VCR was Gumpy’s.

“Been a long time since I had cookies that didn’t come out of a bag,” Gumpy said, getting up and stretching. “I’m goin’. Do you think she’ll cook us breakfast? I’m fair tired of instant porridge.”

Ethan was tired of instant porridge, too, especially the way Gumpy made it, with hot water straight out of the tap. But if he complained, he’d end up with breakfast duty. So he just said, “Get real. Does she look like the type who cooks breakfast?”

“She does to me,” Gumpy said stubbornly, and moved by him. “She’s going to make cookies, ain’t she?”

Ethan followed him and watched as the older man went down the stairs to the landing and bent over his boots, continuing to mutter the whole time.

“I bet the cookies won’t be any good, anyway,” Ethan said.

Gumpy mumbled something.

“I didn’t catch that,” he finally said, knowing he was taking the bait.

Gumpy straightened. “I think we should make a bet. If she cooks breakfast, she stays.”

“Gumpy, I don’t even know where you found her.”

“At the airport, just like you said.”

“We don’t know anything about her.”

“Just look in her eyes.”

“She lied to you. She’s no nanny.”

“Neither are you. I don’t hold it against you.”

“But I never said I was,” he said with elaborate patience.

“I bet she can do the job.”

“And I bet I’m going to be asked to be the guest conductor for the Calgary Philharmonic.”

“She’s supposed to be here.” He opened the door and cold air blasted in.

Gumpy considered himself to be something of a mystic. He was right about things often enough that Ethan had stopped laughing. He eyed the old man warily.

“If she cooks breakfast tomorrow, you should ask her to stay,” Gumpy said stubbornly.

“Only if it’s good,” Ethan said dryly. Not much danger on either count, but Gumpy looked pleased, like a fisherman who had a strong nibble. “Maybe you should stay in the house tonight.”

Gumpy shook his head obstinately and went out.

Ethan turned back into the house, which was unbelievably silent. If he strained, he could just hear the soft murmur of her voice. He turned on the radio to drown it out. Fighting weariness, he turned off the water main and began to scoop the water out of the toilet.

“The kids are asleep. I’m going to go to bed.”

By now he had out a wrench and was unbolting the bowl from the floor. He looked out at her from where he was twisted beneath the tank. She was standing in the door watching him as though he was performing heart surgery. “Yeah. Sure. First door on the right.”

“I figured it out. The lace doily on the dresser was a dead giveaway.”

He glanced at her sharply. Was she smarter than she looked? He’d put that little scrap of lace out to make it look welcoming for Mrs. Bishop. It was the only doodad in his house.

“Sleep in tomorrow,” he suggested. After all, he had a bet to win. Not that he had much in the way of breakfast makings around, anyway. He hadn’t really had time to properly stock groceries. He had eggs, cereal and instant porridge. Good luck turning that into anything special.

Gumpy wouldn’t consider boiling the water for the instant porridge cooking, would he? Contemplating that, he went back to work.

An hour later, the keys rescued and the toilet bowl reanchored to the floor, he showered, checked on his niece and nephew and walked by Lacey McCade’s firmly shut door.

It occurred to him she hadn’t had a single piece of luggage with her.

Which made him wonder again where she had come from and why. It also made him wonder what she was sleeping in.

Lacey lay awake in the inky darkness. The bed was narrow and lumpy. She wondered what he was sleeping in. Boxers?

She could feel herself coloring to the roots of her hair. Which was a mess.

She was in a strange man’s house, under false pretenses, thinking decadent thoughts. What had happened to her? She was not the same woman who had gotten up this morning, calmly eaten her toast and jam, and headed for work.

Just this morning she had been the fast-rising woman lawyer, preparing for the wedding of the century, and the life of acquiring the stuff—the beach house, the car.

The kids, she realized, had never come up.

A foolish thing not to have discussed with the man you were going to many—presumably the catch of the season.

Lacey replayed the conversation she’d had with Keith, from the airport at Calgary, rather than think any more thoughts about the cowboy in his boxer shorts. Or lack thereof.

“Keith,” she had said, watching a 747 lumber along the runway, looking as if it would never have the power to take off, “Cancel the wedding.”

At the precise moment she had said those words, the plane was suddenly in the air, its huge body soaring upward at an impossibly steep angle.

She surprised herself. Her voice sounded firm and sure and uncompromising.

Silence. Then, “Lacey?”

“Cancel the wedding,” she repeated, more strongly than before.

She pictured him behind his desk, his tie undone, his blond head bowed over some paperwork, though she thought she probably had his undivided attention now.

“I can’t cancel the wedding,” he sputtered. “It’s three weeks away. It’s going to be the wedding.” Long fingers would be scraping back his hair, his handsome features would be marred by a frown, the wrinkles deep in his forehead.

Lacey turned from the bank of windows. The plane was now a speck in the distance. She took a deep breath. On the other side of the pay phone she was using stood a beautiful statue, cast in bronze, protected by a glass case. It was of a cowboy standing quietly beside a horse that dipped its head to water. Something about it had made her ache with an emotion she did not understand.

But that had something to do with the word the. Why did it have to be the wedding?

She would have settled for a wedding. For ordinary things.

She snorted at herself. Since when?

Since precisely three hours ago, when the off-ramp to the airport had beckoned to her so bewitchingly she could not say no.

“Where are you?” Keith demanded.

“I don’t think that’s important.”

“Area code 403,” he read off his call display.

Her eyes rested on the bronze again. When she was a child, she had begged her father to consider the Stampede as a vacation possibility. There had never been money for exotic holidays, though. Not that her father would have considered a rodeo exotic.

Lacey wondered about taking it in while she was here. Then some long-forgotten part of her recalled the Stampede was in the summer. July? And summer was long past here.

Listening, she could hear Keith on the other end of the line, thumbing through papers. The telephone book, she guessed bleakly.

“Canada,” he crowed. “Alberta. Lacey, what are you doing in Alberta?”

“I don’t know,” she’d answered truthfully.

And she didn’t. She only knew that when she had seen the airport sign, she had been compelled to obey something within her that told her to go. To go now. Before it was too late.

For what, she was not sure.

Keith was handsome, gloriously so. And wildly successful in his own right, quite separate from the old family wealth he came from. “A young man going to the very top,” her father had pronounced with grave approval after meeting him for the first time.

And, of course, Lacey had her own career, and though it was not quite as illustrious as Keith’s, between the two of them they were well on their way.

Again, her eyes had been drawn to the bronze cowboy. So still.

Of course he was still, she chided herself with annoyance. He was bronze.

“Lacey, what’s the matter?”

Keith was trying so hard for a tender note, but she could picture him glancing at his watch. And she could certainly hear the edge of impatience in his voice. The wedding was about to go up in smoke because of a whim. Her whim. Keith did not like whims.

He liked things organized. Predictable. Perfect.

“I can’t go through with it,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

“There’s no such word as can’t.” This was an expression Keith had picked up at one of the motivational seminars the company had sponsored.

“I’m having some doubts.” The details on the bronze made it very lifelike. The bronze cowboy had his back to her, and when she was done on the phone she would go look at the front of him. Still, even from the back, how he was standing said so much. Weariness in the slope of his shoulders but pride, too.

“What kind of doubts? Why now? The time for doubts was six months ago. A year.”

She knew she had failed to have her doubts on schedule. Before the two hundred guests had been invited and the caterers confirmed. She knew her timing was terrible. She had known it even as she drove toward the airport, but knowing had not stopped her.

“Keith, I just feel confused.”

“Oh,” he said with relief, “confused. Lacey, all brides have the prewedding jitters.”

She didn’t care if he was L.A.’s most persuasive lawyer. He wasn’t going to convince her that a bride-to-be getting on an airplane and flying across a continent was nothing more than prewedding jitters.

“You’ve been doing too much,” he said, his voice soothing, a man who had all the answers. For everybody. “My mother could have looked after wedding details. Or yours.”

She felt petty for noticing his own services were not volunteered. He was probably right. The frantic pace, the dress fittings, the endless arrangements and appointments, the expectations coming at her from all sides that it was going to be the perfect fairy-tale wedding.

“Plus,” he added, “you’ve been working in Divorce too long.”

That was true. She’d seen more than her fair share of how those perfect fairy-tale weddings could end.

“Come on,” he said. “Hop the next plane out of there. I can tell you’re still at the airport. I can hear the luggage wheels rumbling by you. Come home. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She took a deep breath. Of course he was right She was just suffering a terrible case of prenuptial jitters. Taken to the extreme by her close proximity to a Visa Gold card.

But then she suddenly caught sight of her own reflection in the glass around the cowboy. She looked very professional in her suit. Her blond hair was piled up on top of her head in a very corporate topknot. Well, her hair, being her hair, was falling out a bit on one side.

Still, she looked cool and calm and utterly professional, not at all like a woman who would ever lose her head or be irresponsible. Not like a woman capable of letting down her future groom, her parents, and two hundred confirmed guests.

She had the unnerving idea, studying her reflection, that it was like studying a stranger. That composed woman wasn’t her at all.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Calgary!” he said. “You’re at the airport in Calgary. The number you’re calling from has Calgary prefixes. If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you. Grab a seat at the bar. I’ll be there in—how long will it take me to get there?”

“Don’t come.”

“I’m coming,” he announced.

She hung up the phone and began calling hotels. Only to find out even her Visa Gold wasn’t going to buy her a hiding place in this town. Not tonight.

She sank into a chair and contemplated her options. She could fly somewhere else.

She realized she was being crazy, but a rebellious voice inside her head told her to go ahead and be crazy. Told her there was something wrong with being thirty years old and never having done one crazy or impulsive thing.

She had set goals and worked steadily toward them all her adult life. At eighteen she had started university. She had earned scholarships, maintained an A average throughout, passed the bar in the top percentile and nailed a job with one of L.A.’s top ten law firms. Not bad for a girl from a staunchly blue-collar neighborhood, a cop’s daughter.

And now this. Her wedding, the final coup, the match made in heaven.

No one could have been more surprised than her when, driving back to work this afternoon, she’d been almost overwhelmed by a sense of—She forced herself to analyze it, sitting there in the airport. A sense of what?

Emptiness.

Emptiness, she chided herself. In a life so full she’d been unable to find time to have lunch for the past two and a half months? Emptiness?