Dirty Rotten Tendrils (3 page)

“So you agree that we should postpone our announcement?”

“Mmm.”

Translation:
My brain has shut down. Check back in thirty minutes.

I came to a stop. Not that I wanted to spoil the mood, but it was important that we were on the same page before he picked up that engagement ring. “Was that a yes?”

“To what?”

“To
what
?”

He rolled his eyes as I perched on the last barstool and prepared to explain. “Here’s the situation. Your mom has a lot on her plate right now. Not only is she having to deal with Rafe’s hasty decision, but she’s been uprooted from her home in Ohio and is living at your sister’s house to help care for your nephew as Gina prepares for the birth of her second child. The last thing your mom needs is for us to toss our engagement onto the pile.”

“Sunshine, the thing my mom wants most in the world is for me to get married. I don’t think she’d mind us tossing that onto the pile. I think she’d carry it to the top.” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-five minutes.”

Rats. He still wasn’t seeing the light.

“So you believe it would be wrong for us to keep our news a secret because of how much joy it would bring your mom?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“I suppose you’re right. Imagine the pleasure she—and my mom, too—will derive from planning the wedding, making up their guest lists, and selecting the reception hall, menu, and caterer, not to mention throwing the rehearsal dinner and all those bridal showers. Because you realize there is no way on earth they will turn over those duties to us. Once the two of them learn we’re officially engaged and they put their heads together, we’ll be lucky to choose the date.”

“Bridal
showers
?”

“Sure. There will be a personal shower for close friends and the bridal party, another shower for extended family and close neighbors, and a gigantic shower for everyone from the first two showers plus all those to whom our mothers owe social obligations. You’ll have to be there, of course. But don’t worry. Food will be plentiful—lots of little finger sandwiches, petit fours, and strawberry punch. And just imagine the mountains of gifts we’ll be unwrapping and admiring—and sending thank-you notes for. We’ll probably need to set aside a whole day for that. And then—”

“Hold it.” Marco sat down on the next stool and rubbed his jaw, pondering the situation. “So,” he said, “if we make our announcement now, we’ll take the focus away from Rafe’s wedding, and he’ll feel cheated.”

“Naturally.”

“Plus, if Rafe sees us going ahead with our plans, he’ll get more excited about his own plans, and then there’d be no way for my mom to talk him out of it.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“And we’ll be at the mercy of our mothers.”

“Absolutely.”

“So you’re saying we should wait a while before making our announcement?”

“It would be for the best, Marco. Don’t you think so?”

“I’m beginning to see your side of it. If we opted for a private, intimate ceremony—”

“And they found out? They wouldn’t hear of it. We’d be better off figuring out when, where, and how we’re going to do this and then sending out the invitations. If it’s a done deal, what are they going to do? Shoot us?”

Marco slapped his knee. “You’re right. We need to keep this under wraps at all costs. No one can know, not even your assistants.”

“I’ll have to tell Nikki. I can’t live with her and keep all those secrets. But she won’t say a word until I give her the green light.”

“I’m cool with that.”

Good thing, since I’d already told her. Nikki was my roommate and best friend since third grade. We shared everything, even colds. There was no way I could’ve kept news of our engagement from her. “I’m so glad we can have these discussions.”

“Me, too, so let’s have another.”

“About what?”

“The real reason you want Rafe to be talked out of marrying Cinnamon. I know it’s too soon for them to make that commitment, but a romantic would say it was love at first sight, and you’re a romantic. So let’s have it.”

I checked Marco’s watch. “Wow. Only twenty minutes left. Let’s talk about this over dinner tonight, okay?” I hopped down from the stool.

“Abby.”

“Now? Really?”

Marco folded his arms over his chest and gave me his no-nonsense Army Ranger gaze. “Now. Really.”

“It might spoil the mood.”

“You’ve already taken care of that.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine. Here it is. I don’t think Rafe had any intentions of getting married until I sort of . . . fostered his engagement.”

“How?”

I climbed back onto the stool. It wasn’t going to be a quick explanation. “After Rafe got the job at Hooters, we were commiserating on how hard it is to be held to the standards of more successful siblings and—”

“You’re speaking about your brothers now?”

“My brothers the successful surgeons. In Rafe’s case, he feels compared to you, so he asked for my advice on how to cope with negative self-esteem issues. I suggested one way to handle it was to do something different so there wouldn’t be any way to be compared.”

“Rafe used the word
surprise
.”

“What?”

“You told him to surprise us.”

“Okay, I may have used that word, but he took it out of—wait. What? You already knew what I told him?”

Marco lifted an eyebrow. He did half of his communicating with his eyebrows, like a semaphore system. In this case he meant
Of course I knew.

“Does your mom know?” I asked.

“No.”

Whew! Close one. “When I told Rafe to do something different and, okay,
surprise
the family, I was referring to how I became a florist instead of a doctor or lawyer. How was I to know Rafe would take my advice to the extreme? Anyway, I swear to you that I’ve learned my lesson. I will never again give advice to immature males—after I advise Rafe to drop Cinnamon.”

Marco threaded his fingers through mine. “Look, Sunshine, if you’re serious about wanting to talk Rafe out of this marriage, get my mom to help you. The two of you working together would be an unstoppable machine.”

“While that sounds like a good idea in theory,” I said tactfully, “the problem is that she’d want to know why I was getting so involved, and I’d rather she not find out about my role in Rafe’s engagement.”

“Because you think she’ll hold it against you?”

I nodded.

Marco studied me, his clear gaze seeing deep down inside me to the scars I kept hidden from the world. He leaned across the space between our stools and kissed me tenderly, his lips lingering on mine, before saying softly, “My mom likes you, Abby. She wouldn’t hold it against you.” He kissed me again, then leaned back. “But I respect your feelings. If you feel better not enlisting her help, it’s okay with me.”

That was why I loved Marco. Sure, he was a gorgeous hunk of male; sure, he was smart and capable and sexy; but what made him stand out was that he listened. He didn’t always understand, but he paid attention and didn’t blow off my feelings.

I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him hard, then leaned back to gaze into his eyes. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

Marco tapped his watch. “
And
we still have fifteen minutes.”

He hopped off his stool and held out a hand to help me down. “What do you think I should do about my engagement ring?” I asked, taking his hand. “Have the jeweler hold it?”

“Wear it on a chain around your neck.”

“And keep it tucked under my clothing! Perfect. That way it’ll be close to my heart.”

At that, Marco swept me into his arms and gave me a kiss that started off sweet and gentle but quickly turned habanero-pepper hot. Quite understandable since we’d seen little of each other over the past week. Because of a difficult case he’d taken for his private investigation business, which he ran in addition to the bar, his long hours of undercover surveillance had kept us apart for too long.

When he turned to carry me to his office, there stood Gert, the scrawny, wrinkled, leather-faced waitress who’d worked at Down the Hatch for forty years. She was standing with her hands on her hips, shaking her head as though she thought we were silly.

“Don’t tell me you never kissed anyone in this bar,” Marco said to her.

“Honey,” she replied in her scratchy voice, “I could tell you stories that’d make a sailor blush,” then went straight into a coughing fit, caused by a lifetime of smoking.

“You’re early, Gert,” Marco said grumpily, putting me down.

“You told me to come in early, boss,” she answered. “Eight thirty on the nose.”

“Holy cow, it’s eight thirty?” I exclaimed. “Lottie and Grace will be wondering what happened to me. I’m surprised they haven’t phoned. Lottie always makes breakfast first thing on Monday mornings.”

“Do you want me to take care of that errand we discussed earlier?” Marco asked, discreetly pointing to his ring finger.

“Thanks, but I’ll handle it. Bye, Gert.” I blew a kiss at Marco, then grabbed my purse and coat and headed for the door.

 

 

Bloomers is located two doors south of Down the Hatch Bar and Grill. The flower shop occupies the first floor of a three-story redbrick building built in the 1890s, and stretches from Franklin Street in front to the alley in back, with full use of the deep, dark basement below. The yellow frame door—yellow is my favorite color—with its beveled-glass center separates two big bay windows, one on the showroom side and the other on the coffee-and-tea-parlor side. At the back of the showroom is a curtained doorway leading to my private paradise: the workroom, where my creativity blossoms, so to speak.

My fears about missing breakfast appeared to be unfounded, thankfully. Lottie Dombowski, my chief assistant, was standing in front of Bloomers watching the activity across the street, which now included an impromptu brass band playing an extremely poor rendition of the theme song from
America’s Next Hit Single
.

“Hurry or you’ll miss him!” Lottie called, waving to me over the tops of people’s heads as I made my way up the crowded sidewalk. She pointed to the white limousine, which had been driven across the courthouse lawn to the rarely used side entrance. It was something I’d seen only once before in my lifetime, when a vice president had stopped by while in town to deliver a commencement speech at the New Chapel University School of Law.

While the white limousine idled there, and the brass band, now reassembled near the side entrance, played “Hooray for Hollywood,” the black limos parked so as to form a protective vee behind it. Three big, stern-faced men in dark suits and sunglasses emerged, talking into their sleeves as they took positions around the vehicle’s perimeter.

Maybe it
was
the vice president.

“Karl!” Lottie bellowed to one of her sons across the street. “Move up closer or you’ll never get that photo of Lila and Cody. Stand on your brother’s shoulders, for pity’s sake!”

“Which brother?” Karl hollered back.

“Pick one.” With a heavy sigh, Lottie said to me, “The last kid to come out has a tough row to hoe.”

Lottie, a purebred Kentuckian, was a brassy-haired, vocal, generously built woman who brooked no nonsense from her sons. At the moment, seventeen-year-old quadruplets Jimmy, Joey, Johnny, and Karl were standing at the back of the crowd, whistling, hooting, pounding each other on the back, and generally showing off for the teenage girls who’d also come down to the square. That they were missing school for this nonevent surprised me. Lottie was a strict disciplinarian.

“Did the school declare a holiday?” I asked her.

“They should have,” Lottie replied. “All the kids are down here. I’m sending the boys back as soon as they’ve seen Cody and Lila.”

Lottie, a superb florist herself, had owned Bloomers before I did. In fact, I’d delivered flowers for her during summers home from college. Then Lottie was forced to sell Bloomers to pay her husband’s hospital bills after he’d had major heart surgery, and I reentered the picture. A failure at love and law, with a yen to work with flowers, I used what was left of my grandpa’s trust money to get a mortgage on Bloomers and hire Lottie to teach me everything she knew.

Now, as a bright orange helicopter buzzed the courthouse, I raised my voice to say, “Lottie, I’m heading inside.”

“Okay, sweetie. Breakfast’s waiting in the kitch—Lordy, would you look at that!”

I turned to see the copter landing in the street behind the courthouse, which had been blocked to traffic. In big fat black letters on the side of the copter it said AIR LIP.

“Air lip?” Lottie called in bafflement.

“Attorney Lipinski’s ride,” I replied, trying to make myself heard over the chopping of the blades. “Who else would be flamboyant and insulting at the same time?”

A moment later Lipinski emerged from the copter and ducked to run beneath the swinging blades, which wasn’t too hard for a man of his short stature. He was instantly surrounded by reporters, cameramen, and photographers, who snapped away as the Lip made a show of removing his yellow jumpsuit to display a sharply tailored three-piece, dove gray suit with a white shirt and an orange-and-yellow-striped tie underneath. His dark hair was parted on one side and slicked back, making his large ears protrude, and when he smiled, he was all teeth.

Grinning like a monkey, he turned his back to the crowd, then tossed the jumpsuit over his shoulder as though he were a bride tossing her garter. The crowd went wild.

With the dark-suited security men encircling him, Lipinski hurried toward the white limo. The driver lowered his window to speak with him, then as one of the security detail opened a rear door, Lipinski walked around the limo and extended a hand to someone inside. There was a drum-roll from the brass ensemble as a small hand was placed in his. Then a woman’s leopard-print high-heeled shoe and long, tanned leg emerged, followed by the other shoe and leg, then the immediately recognizable face of starlet Lila Redmond. She was clad in a copper-colored belted leather coat.