On Any Given Sundae (21 page)

He reached passed the plates and papers and
gave her a long hug and then a soft kiss on her cheek. “You know,
my marriage proposal—it still stands. We could be very, very happy
together. Good friends, comfortable. Not this constant and
unpleasant churning of emotion.” He smiled at her. “Why don’t you
marry me, Elizabeth?”

She glanced at him sharply before being
distracted by a noise. “Did you hear something?” she said.

He shook his head then grinned a little
wickedly. “Just my beating heart.”

“Nice try.” She thought about his words. What
he’d described as a “constant and unpleasant churning of emotion.”
He wasn’t just talking about her feelings for Rob. Something was
definitely up with him. Then it suddenly hit her. “Jacques, are you
in love with someone?”

He gave her a stricken look. “It doesn’t
matter. I don’t like this. I don’t want this.”

“You
are
in love with someone.” And
she knew, with certainty, that this someone wasn’t her. For a
moment she felt a sting of hurt, but she and Jacques had always
worked best together as friends. She knew that even before Rob
Gabinarri returned to put a big crimp in her life.

Jacques still wasn’t talking.

“Why won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “You
know you can trust me.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just—I’m just—” He paused
and she saw actual tears in his eyes. Tears she knew he wouldn’t
let fall. “She’s a good friend, too, but there was always
something…more to it. A spark of something beyond friendship, which
made everything more frightening.”

Elizabeth covered her mouth as the
connections in her brain began to zig and zag and reach an
amazing—but not really so unbelievable—conclusion. “Gretchen?” she
whispered.

Jacques nodded. “For maybe two years now,” he
admitted. “She’s like the smell of bread dough rising. Like thick
chocolate icing on a fresh pastry. Like powdered sugar on Mexican
wedding cakes.” He gave her a small smile. “Like all the things I
love best.”

“Does she know how you feel?”

A single tear escaped his eye, but he brushed
it away before it rolled down his cheek. “I was going to try to
tell her yesterday. Then I saw her with Rob. And I realized that,
even if there’s nothing between them, she has higher standards than
just me.” He looked utterly, inconsolably miserable.

“Jacques, don’t say things like. It’s so, so
not true. You’re a wonderful man who’s incredibly caring. Gretchen,
or any woman, would be delighted to know you were interested in
her. Even when I knew you were just playing around with the
marriage proposals, I was still flattered that you’d thought enough
of me to pretend.” She took his hands in her. “Please, d-don’t sell
yourself short.”

“Guys like Rob are tall. They have a head
full of hair, muscles and no flab. They don’t have a silly accent
and they know how to play all sports. There’s no comparison between
him and me.”

“But Jacques, you and Gretchen can literally
see eye-to-eye. She laughs when she’s with you and has told me a
trillion times that she loves your French accent and wishes it were
even thicker.”

This made him grin. “Really?”

“Oh, yes. And you know darned well that
appearances aren’t everything. Hair and flab don’t matter where
there’s true affection.”

He tilted his head to one side and regarded
her strangely. “You believe this?”

She paused for a moment of personal honesty.
“Well—” she began.

“You’re saying
you
believe, although
your hair was so frizzy and you were a little chubby in high
school, that these things didn’t matter? That a boy who cared about
you wouldn’t have cared about those features? What you always
considered to be your flaws?” He shook his head.
“Mais non, il
n’est-ce pas vrai.
It’s not true that you believe this.”

“But that was
high school
, Jacques,
not
now
. That same kind of shallowness doesn’t hold up
anymore. We’re all smarter and wiser. At least most of us are.” She
grinned at him and tried to make herself project total belief in
this position despite all of her evidence opposing it.

If only Rob would have ever said that he
thought she was beautiful to
him
. He must’ve said a thousand
times he thought she was brilliant. But, to her, that was
decades-old praise. And, perhaps her grand wish was just an
expression of human nature. Everybody craved the one compliment
they never got.

Jacques still looked sad as he stood up and
tossed the rest of his blueberry muffin in the trash. “Ah,
mon
amie
, thank you for the advice. I will consider every thought.
Although—” He grinned. “I’ll wait for the next batch of muffins you
bake, if you don’t mind. Those were dreadful, you know.”

“I know,” she said, pitching the remaining
ones into the trash bin one at a time as Jacques left. Without Rob,
most everything was dreadful.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rob found himself on US-41 driving a good
twenty miles per hour above the speed limit. He didn’t care. He was
headed southbound to Chicago and, by God, he couldn’t get there
soon enough.

There were times in a man’s life when
standing and fighting were the best options. There were also times
to head for the hills. Or, in his case, a high-rise condo
overlooking the Windy City’s Lake Shore Drive. Go Bears.

Even now, an hour later, he still couldn’t
believe what he’d overheard. Monsieur Jacques saying so breezily to
his secret love interest, “Rob—he’s a short-term thing, yes?”

And Elizabeth—damn her!—saying, “I suppose
so.”

And then the two of them mumbled some stuff
he couldn’t hear because he was too busy picking his heart up off
the floor. Oh, except for the last, extra-special bit: “Why don’t
you marry me, Elizabeth?”

Why? He could sure give good ole Jacques a
few hundred reasons why
not
…in English or in
français
, for that matter. He’d taken two whole years of
French in high school. He could put a few fairly graphic sentences
together if he ever found his battered old dictionary.

He stepped a little harder on the gas
pedal.

Huh. So that’s how it was, then.
Elizabeth…and
Jacques
. He knew there’d been something
simmering between them, even if she hadn’t fully opened her eyes to
it. Why had he ever overlooked, overruled, overridden his first
impression? The casual friendship those two shared. All that time
spent baking and talking about recipes together. They had mutual
interests. And what could he add to the conversation? “I used to
play football a lot. Cool, eh?”

Rob saw the police siren before he heard it
but, no doubt about it, the black-and-white car was headed toward
him.

“Oh, hell.”

He pulled over and the officer got out and
sidled up to his Porsche.

“Nice car,” she said.

And he thought, Nice body, nice lips, nice
skin… But he said, “Thanks.”

She asked for his driver’s license. “You
realize you were going close to thirty miles above the speed limit,
Mr. Gabinarri, don’t you?”

He nodded then managed to shoot a warm smile
at her.

She grinned back. Attractive lady, no doubt.
But, dammit, not his
particular
type of attractive these
days.

“No way are you getting out of this speeding
ticket,” she told him. “And it’s going to be an expensive one.”

He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut while
she did all of her police officer stuff back in the squad car. A
few minutes later she came back, notepad in hand.

“Here you go,” she said, scribbling down the
rest of his ticket information. One that probably would have his
insurance company tossing him in driving school.

“Um, thanks,” he said, when she handed the
paper to him. He noticed an address scrawled on the top and glanced
up at her in question.

She winked. “If you’re free after five, I’ll
be a little place called the Silver Stallion, a bar about a mile
and a half east of here.” She pointed to the street address she’d
written on the page. “It’s easy to find. Any chance you might be
able to swing by?”

He struggled with his answer. Not because he
didn’t want to tell the truth, but because he desperately wanted
his lie to
be
the truth. “I don’t think so, ma’am. There’s a
woman at home who’s waiting for me.”

She shrugged and gave a good-natured laugh.
“Oh, well. Lucky lady.” She waved him off but, before she walked
back to her squad car, she added, “Drive back to her safely.”

Rob thought about that comment (as he headed
south and still further away from Elizabeth) for another ten miles
before pulling off into a gas station along the side of the
highway.

“Hi, Miguel,” he said into his cell phone.
“How’s it going down there?”
I’m only about seventy minutes
away. Tell me you need me back right now. I need a good excuse to
leave Wilmington Bay for twenty-four hours and you’re my only
chance, buddy.

“Awesome, Boss Man.”

So much for that idea.

“Hey, have you got any more of that winning
Fourth-of-July topping?” Miguel asked. “That Hawaiian Mix? The
Playbook’s dinner crowd is going crazy for it.”

“Sure, I could get some to you, though it’s
pretty easy to make,” Rob said.

He explained to Miguel that the winner of the
Topping Taste Test had brought a combo of macadamia nuts, dark
chocolate chips and coconut shavings. The runner-up was the person
with the candied pineapple bits. Put them all together and you get
what they’d been calling the Hawaiian Mix for the past two weeks.
It’d been Tutti-Frutti’s biggest hit since the contest, and he’d
shipped some down for Miguel to experiment with at the
restaurant.

“Why don’t I bring you down a tub of it?” Rob
suggested hopefully.

“Nah, no need. I’ll get the dessert guys on
the case now that I’m sure of the ingredients. You just deal with
whatever you need to deal with up there. All’s well here.” His
friend paused. “Unless you want to come back, Rob. I mean, I’m not
trying to keep you away. It’s your place, after all.”

He thought about it, going purely on gut
instinct. Did he want to go back to Chicago, or was he just trying
to escape Wilmington Bay? Two different things, weren’t they? And,
oh, the answer was obvious.

“Guess I’ll stay here a little longer then,”
he told Miguel. “I promised Uncle Pauly, after all. But call me if
anything comes up.”

“Likewise. And we’ll see you for sure in a
few weeks.”

“Right,” Rob said. But, for the first time,
there was no thrill, no satisfaction associated with this thought.
For the first time in a long time he was rearranging his definition
of the word “home.”

He got back on the Interstate, taking the
northbound ramp, and began driving back to his hometown…at a very
responsible speed.

***

Elizabeth called Gretchen.

“Hey, Gretch, any chance we could talk?”

“Sure, what’s up? Everyone’s been acting so
moody lately. Must be something they slipped into that Lake
Michigan water.” She laughed at her own joke then sobered up. “Is
there something serious happening, Elizabeth? Something I don’t
know about?”

Gretchen’s voice was so concerned, so very
caring, that Elizabeth almost burst out with an apology for
entertaining, even for a second, the idiotic notion that her best
friend might try to sneak around with her boyfriend behind her
back. If Rob even was her boyfriend anymore.

One thing was certain, though. She owed Rob
an apology for what she’d said to him.

“No,” Elizabeth told her. “I—I just wanted to
thank you for being such a true and loyal friend. And—and if you
ever need someone to listen to you about relationship things, then
I hope you’ll come to me.”

Elizabeth thought she heard Gretchen sniff on
the other end of the line.

“Thanks,” Gretchen said. “But I think it’ll
be a good long time before anyone’s interested in me. I’m glad
Rob’s smart enough to see in you all the wonderful qualities that
we’ve always known about. He’s a great guy. Gorgeous, too.” She
paused. “But I don’t know if anyone is out there who’ll look at me
that way. The men I’m attracted to…well, they have a tendency to
think of me as their buddy. I’m too tall, too strong, too
big-boned. Not one of those cute feminine women like you.”

“
What?
Gretch, you’re totally
beautiful! And not all men want a woman whom they can easily
overpower. Trust me on this. You should hear Camden talk about
Annabelle, Karate Queen Extraordinaire. He loves how strong she
is.”

“Camden isn’t the man I’m attracted to,
though. I’m telling you, this guy thinks of me as a friend and
that’s all. I mean it. Every time I start to wonder if there might
be something more there, he backs away. He’s trying to protect me
from myself, I just know it. He doesn’t want to break my
heart.”

Elizabeth’s eyes pricked with tears—tears of
joy for two of her best friends who were about to realized they
were meant for each other.

“Uh, Gretch? Is there any chance that I know
this guy-friend of yours?”

There was a long pause.

“Gretchen?”

Then came a very small voice from the other
side of the line.
“Mais oui.”

Elizabeth grinned and let the tears stream
down her face.

***

Inspired by the new love blooming between
Jacques and Gretchen, and by their heartfelt declarations (albeit
not yet to each other), Elizabeth decided she should try to make
amends with Rob. So she called his mother.

Alessandra Gabinarri greeted her suggestion
with a whoop of delight and told her to come over immediately.

She also called Tutti-Frutti and spoke with
Nick, who’d switched with Jacques and was working an earlier shift
today.