A Bride by Summer

“What do you think Dad would say if he were here?” Reed asked as he closed the mailing carton.

“After the shock wore off, he probably wouldn’t say much,” Marsh answered quietly. “Mom would be the one we’d have to worry about.”

Reed and Marsh shared a smile that took them back to when they were teenagers. Reed said, “She’d expect us to do the right thing. They both would.”

“We are doing the right thing, or at least as close to the right thing as we can under the circumstances,” Marsh said. “Have you decided what you’re going to do if Joey is yours?”

Reed eyed the baby now sleeping in his arms. If Joey was his son, it meant Joey’s mother was the curvy blonde waitress named Cookie who’d accidentally spilled chili in his lap during a layover in Dallas last year. She’d blushed and apologized and somehow, when her shift was over, they’d wound up back at her place.

“If it turns out Joey’s mine, and Sam locates Cookie and she has a legitimate reason for leaving him, I’d like to get to know her better.” He wished he’d asked more questions that night. She’d mentioned an ex-husband, somewhere, and a local play she’d been auditioning for. He didn’t recall ever hearing her last name. Now he wished he had asked. After all, if she was the mother of his son, she deserved better. She deserved the chance to explain. “What about you? What will you do if the test proves Joey is yours?”

Marsh took his time considering his reply. “The week I spent with Julia on the Outer Banks last year was pretty damn idyllic. I thought I knew her as well as a man could know a woman. I thought we had something. If Joey is our son, she would have had to have a very good reason for all of this. The Julia I knew wouldn’t have left Joey unless she had no other choice. I have a hundred questions, but it does no good to imagine what might have happened to her or what might be happening to her now. I only know that if Julia is Joey’s mother and I am his father, she will return for him, and when that happens I’d like to try to work things out, as a family.”

It wasn’t surprising that they wanted the same thing, for Reed and Marsh were both family men at heart. They grew silent, each lost in his own thoughts. The only sound in the room was Joey’s hum as he slept in Reed’s arms and the tick of the clock on the old stove.

“Why don’t you put Joey in his crib for his morning nap,” Marsh suggested. “The agency is sending another woman out for an interview later. You should have plenty of time to overnight the paternity kit and be back before then. Unless you want me to mail it.”

“You had the late shift with Joey,” Reed said. “I’ll take the kit to the post office.”

After laying Joey in his crib in the home office they’d converted into a nursery last week, he returned to the kitchen, where Marsh was still somberly sipping coffee. Keys in one hand and the sealed test kit in the other, Reed headed for the door.

“Hey, Reed?” Marsh stood across the room, his jeans riding low, his stance wide, his brown eyes hooded. “May the best man win.”

Again, that grin took Reed back to when they were kids and everything was a competition. He shook his head, but he couldn’t help grinning a little, too.

Getting in his car with its loosened side mirror, he wondered if Marsh was picturing Julia right now. Reed could only wonder what might have prompted Joey’s mother—whoever she was—to leave him with only a vague note and a loose promise to return for him.

He was at the end of the driveway when it occurred to him that he couldn’t seem to bring Cookie into sharp focus in his memory. Her bleached-blond hair kept switching to red.

* * *

“How was your drive?” Ruby’s closest friend, Amanda Moore, asked the minute Ruby got back. “Tell me you got completely lost.”

Ruby shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint you, but no.”

“Not even slightly turned around?” Because Amanda had been lost when she’d met her fiancé, Todd, she was convinced that the key to finding happiness was that sensation she’d experienced when she’d made a wrong turn but somehow wound up in the right place.

But as Ruby had told her a hundred times, she didn’t get lost. Ever. Her innate sense of direction was intricately linked to her keen memory for all things visual. Both had gotten her out of countless scrapes over the years.

“The reunion is in just over two weeks.” Amanda was tapping away on her notebook at the end of the bar in Ruby’s new tavern. “That doesn’t leave us very much time to find you a date.”

“You’re my best friend, and I would give you a kidney or the shirt off my back,” Ruby declared from behind the bar. “But I told you. I’m not taking a date. From now on I’m flying solo. I mean it, Amanda.” Her laptop was open, too. Next to it was the box she’d started filling with cameras from the former owner’s collection. “I don’t even want to attend the class reunion.”

“You have to, Ruby.”

“Peter’s going to be there.”

“I know,” Amanda said gently. “That’s why I think you should bring a date. As former class officers, we’re not only the planning committee, but we’re the welcoming committee, too. Don’t even think about trying to get out of it. You promised, and you never break your promises.”

With a sigh, Ruby returned to compiling the menu of drinks that would be indigenous to her saloon. So far her list included alcoholic beverages with names such as Howl at the Moon and Fountain of Youth and Dynamite. Since she thought best when she was moving, she wandered to the pool tables in the back of the room.

Amanda tucked her chin-length brown hair behind one ear and followed. “Number one,” she said, fine-tuning a line on the small screen. “This goes without saying because it’s always number one with you. Nonetheless, number one.” She cleared her throat for emphasis. “He must be tall. T-a-l-l. Tall, with a capital T. Number two. It would be nice if he spoke in complete sentences.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. While she was looking up at the ceiling, a loud scrape sounded from above. Evidently her mother was still rearranging her furniture, even though Ruby had told her that the layout was fine the way it was.

Nobody listened to her, she thought as she shook out the plush sleeping bag she’d found near the pool tables and refolded it. It was a strange place to leave a sleeping bag, but at the closing yesterday, the previous owner, Lacey Bell Sullivan, had asked Ruby to keep the bedroll here for safekeeping for a few days while Lacey’s brand-new husband whisked her away on their honeymoon. Lacey had vaguely mentioned that someone might come by to pick it up. Ruby believed there was something Lacey wasn’t telling her, but Amanda was right. To Ruby, a promise was a promise.

Amanda was rattling off number five, apparently unconcerned that Ruby had missed numbers three and four entirely. “No bodybuilding Mr. America wannabes. And your date should be sensitive but not too sensitive. You don’t want to be apologizing all the time.”

Ruby smiled in spite of herself.

While Amanda recited the remaining must-have qualities from her list, Ruby took another look around. It was hard to believe this building was hers. The main room of the saloon was large and L-shaped, stretching from Division Street all the way to the alley out back. The tables and chairs were mismatched and the lighting questionable. There was a jukebox on one wall and two pool tables in need of a little restoration in the back. The ornately carved bar, where drinks would be served and stories swapped, was the crowning jewel of the entire room.

The ceilings were low and two of the walls were exposed brick. The hardwood floors were worn and the restrooms needed a little updating, but the building was structurally sound and included an apartment with a separate entrance.

Lacey Bell Sullivan had moved to Orchard Hill with her father when she was twelve. She’d inherited the building when he died. Business had fallen off, but she believed with all her heart that what the tavern really needed was a breath of fresh air. A new life.

Ruby thrilled at the thought.

“Rainbow of Optimism,” she said under her breath as she hurried back to her laptop and added another drink title to her menu.

Amanda hopped back onto her barstool, the pert bounce of her hairstyle matching her personality. “What are you working on?”

“I’m giving Bell’s a new identity so it will appeal to a lively, energetic, fun-loving crowd. Right now I’m compiling a menu featuring one-of-a-kind drinks.”

Amanda turned the screen around in order to read the menu. “These are fun, Ruby. Fountain of Youth and Dynamite are self-explanatory. What’s this two-X-Z-zero-three?”

“Oh, that doesn’t belong on the list. It’s just the license plate number of a Corvette I saw run a sweet Mustang off the road earlier. I stopped to make sure the driver of the Mustang was okay. What do you think of Happy Hops?”

“Was this driver a guy?”

“We’re talking about the title of a drink,” Ruby insisted. “Is Happy Hops too trite?”

“Was this handsome stranger under, say, thirty-five?” Amanda asked.

“I didn’t say he was handsome.”

“I knew it,” Amanda quipped.

Another scrape sounded overhead. Holding up one hand, Ruby said, “You and my parents are making me sincerely wish I had hired a moving company.”

Just then Ruby’s father came bounding into the room waving a sheet of yellow lined paper. A brute of a man with a shock of red hair and a booming voice, he said, “The smoke alarm doesn’t work. The bathroom faucet drips. Only one burner works on the stove, and that refrigerator is as old as I am. Did you count the steps leading to the apartment? Do you really want to have to climb twenty steps at the end of a long day?”

“Walter, would you stop?” The only person who called Red O’Toole Walter was his wife. Ruby’s mother now joined them downstairs. The freckles scattered across Scarlet O’Toole’s nose gave her a perpetually young appearance, which was at odds with the streaks of gray in her short red hair.

“It isn’t too late for her to get out of this,” Red said to his wife.

Scarlet wasn’t paying attention. She was listening to Amanda, who was telling her about the near accident Ruby had witnessed and the driver she’d stopped to help earlier.