Suddenly a Bride / A Bride After All: Suddenly a Bride

“You’re welcome. Oh, and one other thing.”

Elizabeth gripped the glass tightly. Here it comes. He’s going to kiss me. What do I do if he kisses me? Close my mouth? Open my mouth? Fall on the floor in a dead faint?

Will walked past her to lift the lid on the cookie jar. “I thought I’d take one for the road,” he said, holding up a cookie like some sort of prize. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yes … see you tomorrow,” she echoed, lifting her hand to give him a small finger-wave.

This time, after the door closed, she counted to ten, waiting to hear his car move off down the drive.

Then she sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and laughed until Mikey padded into the room to remind her he was still thirsty.

Once back on the main road, Will used his hands-free cell phone to call his cousin. She answered after five rings, her voice sounding as if he’d woken her up. Good.

“Chessie, this isn’t going to work.”

“Wha … who—Will? What time is it?”

He shot a look at the dashboard clock. “Not quite midnight. And I mean it, Chessie. This isn’t going to work. I’m going to call it off.”

“You’re going to call what off? For God’s sake, Will, it’s midnight. Just because you can operate on less than eight hours’ sleep doesn’t mean the rest of us can. Call me back in the morn—Oh, wait. Um … does this have anything to do with Elizabeth? I thought you told me you were just taking the three of them to a ball game. Ah, man, Will, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” he told her, looking to his left before pulling out onto the highway. “I did nothing, I should do nothing, I am doing nothing. It was a stupid idea, Chessie. She’s not my type.”

“If you mean she isn’t cold and ambitious and only out for herself, then no, she isn’t.”

“Leave Kay out of this,” Will told her, concentrating more on his driving than he was on what Chessie was saying. Always a mistake.

“Aha! So you knew just who I meant, didn’t you?”

“Never mind that. I’m just telling you—”

“Never mind that? You wake me up in the middle of the night, and then don’t even give me a moment to gloat when I score a major hit? Hi, Will, this is Chessie—remember me? I gloat. I live to gloat.”

“Yeah, yeah, score one for Chessie. Can we get back to the reason I called, please? Because your plan is full of holes, Chess. There’s no such thing as just waking someone up. You have to figure out what to do with them once they’re awake.”

“You could be nice and hang up and call them again in the morning,” his cousin said. She then added quickly, “Okay, okay, I know you’re not talking about me. You’re talking about Elizabeth. What did you do, Will? Turn on all your boyish charm in one go?”

“This has nothing to do with me. I’m only saying that Elizabeth … that she’s …” How about that? Him, the silver-tongued lawyer, at a loss for words. “She could get hurt.”

He could hear Chessie getting out of bed. Well, either she’d thrown back the covers and gotten out of bed, or she had just levitated a good three feet above the mattress. “William Hollingswood … what … did … you … do?”

“Nothing. I didn’t do a single thing. All right, almost. I was going to kiss her good-night. Hell, it’s the natural end to an evening. But I didn’t. Chessie, I don’t think the woman’s been out on a date since her husband died. How do I say this and not have you crawl through the phone and murder me? Okay, I can’t. She’s ripe, Chess. Ripe for the plucking.”

“But you won’t … pluck. Right?”

Will closed his eyes for a moment. “No, I won’t. But she knew I wanted to. She’s a nice woman, Chess. A lady, a mom, for crying out loud.”

“Not your type.”

“God, no.”

“Did you want to kiss her? Or was this one of those, ‘oh, hell, we’re here, why not’ deals?”

“I don’t know,” Will said honestly. “What I do know is that Elizabeth is the forever type, and I’m not. On my own I never would have asked her out. So, since you’re the one who got me into this, how do I shut this thing down without hurting her?”

His cousin was silent for a few moments, and then surprised him. “There’s a thing? Really? You know, Will, it could just be that Elizabeth doesn’t find you all that captivating. Did you think about that one? Okay, so you took her out. One time. Do you really think you’ve now ruined her for all other men or something? God, that’s arrogant.”

“You’re right.” Will pulled into his own driveway and cut the engine. “It was one date. And not even a date, since we had the twins with us. It was just a friendly evening. I’m overreacting,” he said, sitting back in the bucket seat. “Of course I am. I’m being an ass, and I’m sorry. And I’ve already asked her out for tomorrow night. Why did I do that, Chessie?”

“Yes, you were, and I have no idea. Unless, of course, Elizabeth packs more of a punch than she thinks she does. Does she, Will? Is this phone call about you being worried about her or you being worried about yourself?”

“Go back to bed, Chess,” Will said, cutting the connection. And then he sat in his car for another five minutes, trying to answer his cousin’s question. “One more day. I’ll give it one more day,” he said at the end of those five minutes, and then he went inside, feeling he’d at least begun to back away … even if Elizabeth didn’t know that yet.

Chapter Five

Sam The Dog had somehow managed to wrap his leash around Elizabeth’s bare legs in the time it took to grab a folding lawn chair from the back of the SUV, and the boys were already halfway down the hill to the field by the time she could follow them.

She felt a small pang as she watched them so blithely desert her—and not only because they’d left their bats and mitts behind in the backseat. They were growing up. Sometimes it was as if they grew an inch or more overnight, and they didn’t seem to need her the way they once had … the way she’d always clung to them, probably too tightly, once Jamie was gone.

They’d just finished first grade, had been away from her for nearly seven hours a day. Now they were playing baseball. Tomorrow they’d be leaving for college.

“And now let’s all have a pity party for the overprotective mommy in the crowd,” Elizabeth grumbled as she struggled to hold on to chair, bats, gloves and Sam The Dog while navigating the slope down to the ball field. “Sam The Dog! Stop pulling on the leash!”

Her mother would have told her that she was attempting a “Lazy Man’s Load,” trying to carry too much at one time in order to save herself a trip back up the slope to her car, and that the exercise was doomed to end in failure. And her mother would, as usual, have been right.

The lawn chair slipped out from beneath her arm, cracking her hard on her ankle bone before it hit the grass. Her reaction was to reach down to grab her ankle, a move that dislodged the two bats tucked into the crook of her other arm. She made a quick, twisting grab for them, and that’s when it happened.

Sensing the slack on his leash, Sam The Dog made a break for it, heading straight onto the field and into the midst of the players standing huddled around the coaches.

It was like watching a bowling ball strike the pins, sending them scattering everywhere.

Sam The Dog, being a border collie, immediately began trying to herd all the children back to where they were, even while the coaches seemed to be attempting to shoo him off the field.

Elizabeth left everything where it had fallen and took off down the slope. “Sam The Dog! Sam The Dog, you come here this instant! Danny, grab his leash!”

Danny made a valiant stab at it but only ended up laid-out on his belly as Sam The Dog eluded him as he circled the children, urging them closer and closer to the pitcher’s mound.

She saw Will standing near the players’ bench, a clipboard against his chest, watching the excitement with an amused smile on his face. She hastened to where he stood, nearly breathless from running and shouting. Well, at least now she didn’t have to worry anymore about what she was going to say to him the next time she saw him.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she told him as Mikey finally managed to grab Sam The Dog’s leash. “He means well. He really does.”

“Mikey or the mutt?” Will asked her, his eyes still on the ball field. “He was herding them, wasn’t he? And with much more success than we’ve been having. Amazing. If we can find him a shirt that fits, we could make him the first-base coach. What’s his name? I heard you calling something, but I couldn’t catch it.”

“He’s Sam The Dog,” Elizabeth said, relieved that she and the dog weren’t going to be immediately ejected from the field.

Will turned his attention to her. “You’re kidding, right? And you call him that? Not Sam? Sam The Dog?”

“He’s Richard’s dog. Officially, he’s Samuel Thibold Devonshire, I think it is, but Richard thought that was too long, so now he’s Sam The Dog. I don’t know. It fits somehow.”