Читать книгу Marrying Maddy - Кейси Майклс, Kasey Michaels - Страница 10

T he fitting finely completed, Maddy gratefully allowed Mrs. Ballantine to help her out of the heavy gown and then went wandering off to take her second shower of the day. The underslips itched, and she’d actually broken out in a few hives along her waistline.

Mrs. Ballantine promised to cover the waistbands with some soft cotton, but Maddy still itched, so a cool shower sounded pretty good to her.

Hives. She never broke out in hives. It was pretty pitiful, being allergic to your own wedding gown. Not prophetic, she was sure. Just pitiful.

Her hair still in the ponytail, and only slightly damp around the edges from the shower, Maddy dressed in a short denim skirt and a pink-and-red flowered denim vest with metal snap closings she’d picked up on sale the previous week.

She loved sales, couldn’t get enough of them, especially considering that she hadn’t looked at a price tag until eighteen months ago. Now paying retail was an anathema to her, buying on credit felt like something akin to mortal sin and, as she’d discovered the delights of the local malls, she’d also developed a healthy appetite for fast food and huge pretzels slathered with mustard.

She knew her family thought she had probably gone a little overboard in her zealousness for economy, her pursuit of cooking and other household skills, even her recently discovered passion for gardening.

Matt was going to get himself one very accomplished wife, the lucky dog. Not that millionaires probably cared all that much about cents-off coupons and buying in bulk.

But, small as her accomplishments must look when compared to those of her older, quite successful siblings, Maddy was happy with her life.

Well, with most of her life.

She sure wished she didn’t have hives. They weren’t a good sign, definitely. The first and last time she’d had hives was on the airplane, flying home from Nevada. They’d started on her face, and hadn’t quit until she was all but covered in the itchy things.

Nerves, the Chandler family doctor had declared when he’d met her in the local emergency room an hour after her flight touched down. He then treated her with antihistamines and the recommendation that she look inside herself and discover what could be troubling her, as her body was merely reacting to her stress in its own particular way. That was Dr. Neally, full of holistic ideas and the patient having the power to cure herself. The man even had a lava lamp in his waiting room.

Maddy had taken the antihistamines, and switched doctors. Her new physician, Dr. Linda Garvey, Matt’s sister, told her pretty much the same thing, but then said she should sit down, examine her life and decide what she wanted from it. For some reason, what Maddy decided she wanted was to learn how to cook. And she ran with it, straight to classes at the local community college.

She hadn’t had a hive since, thanks to her soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Until today, damn it. And she’d rather stick one of Mrs. Ballantine’s straight pins in her eye than call the way-too-insightful Linda for help. Not when she was supposed to be the happy bride, only a week shy of her wedding to her doctor’s brother.

Maddy found some antihistamine capsules in her kitchen and downed two, even knowing that they’d make her sleepy in the middle of the day. She slipped her bare feet into a pair of cherry-red sneakers gotten for twenty percent off at JCPenney’s, and headed down the front stairs to see what the rest of the family was doing.

Ten minutes later she was sitting on the carpet in the second drawing room, surrounded by boxes, ribbons and tissue paper, once more playing Happy Bride. And trying to ignore the itch that seemed to be crawling up her back.

Jessica Chandler, Maddy’s older sister, sat cross-legged on the Oriental carpet with her, the two of them in the center of the room surrounded by white linen covered tables displaying many of the wedding gifts as they opened today’s deliveries.

At least one of the gifts was always good for a laugh.

“Ah, just what you need most, Maddy,” Jessica said, holding up the unwrapped gift. “Another silver tray. What does that make now—ten of them? You’d think somebody would have some imagination, wouldn’t you?”

“Great-Aunt Harriet has some,” Maddy replied, warily eyeing the object in her hands. “What is this?”

Jessie laughed out loud. “And we have today’s winner. What is it, Maddy? I don’t know, wait—it’s Great-Uncle Albert!” she suggested, still giggling. “I wouldn’t lift the lid if I were you. Especially if you feel a sneeze coming on.”

“Funny, Jessie, very funny.” Maddy looked at the vase, or ornamental urn, or whatever the devil she held in her hands, then carefully placed it on the carpet, still unable to believe what she was seeing. Her chin began to itch, but she ignored that, too.

The “Thing” Great-Aunt Harriet had sent by messenger—Maddy already had decided to think of it as the “Thing”—stood at least two feet high, and was fashioned out of some sort of porcelain. And it had to be old as dirt, something Great-Aunt Harriet had pulled from her collection and forwarded to her great-niece instead of just sending her another silver tray, like any normal person.

The Thing had a lid, and the lid had a handle—two close-to-naked cherubs cavorting. The Thing also had side handles, both of them similarly un-clothed cherubs bent forward at the waist, and looking as if they were about to do swan dives onto the floor.

She and Joe would have laughed and laughed—no! She would not think of Joe O’Malley again.

She scratched at an annoying itch behind her knee, and went back to inspecting her latest gift.

The Thing was so ugly, so overdone with intricate scrollwork and rosy-cheeked cherubs, and even bits of faux greenery, that Maddy was sure it had to be worth a small fortune. Ugly things almost always were. Worst of all, it seemed familiar; like something she’d at least seen a variation of during her college studies.

Carefully removing the dome lid and placing it back in the box, Maddy lifted the remaining piece and inspected the bottom of the base. “Nove, with an asterisk under it. Good Lord, Jessie, it’s a Le Nove. I should have known. I remember one from my classes—covered in shells and painted with mythological figures. Look, there are shells on this one, too, along the base. Well, at least now I know what to say in my thank-you note to Great-Aunt Harriet.”

“You sure do, Maddy. ‘Dear Aunt Harriet, thank you so much for the exquisite Nove. It will look so lovely in the basement storage area.’”

Maddy rolled her eyes, even as she scratched at her chin. “Jessie, this is a Nove. Straight from the late 1700s. A true, if revolting, work of art. I wouldn’t put it in the basement. Great-Aunt Harriet meant well, and always does.” She replaced the lid, tucked the vase back into its box. Then she smiled evilly. “I’ll give it to Allie.”

“Only if you want to be cut out of my will, young lady,” Almira Chandler said as she walked into the room, looked down into the tissue-filled box. “Did I hear someone say Great-Aunt Harriet? For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she sent back the silver compote your grandfather and I had given her one Christmas. That’s Harriet, the idiot. Some people give gifts that keep on giving, or whatever. Harriet just keeps recycling the same old stuff. I imagine it makes some sort of sense—to her.”

“But you love her, Allie,” Maddy said. “You love her because she’s three years younger than you and looks ten years older. Like you’ve said, you just can’t turn your back on a woman who makes you look so good at family parties.”

“Twenty years older than me, Maddy, not ten.” Almira laughed as she peered down into the box. “Now, what did the idiot send over now? The woman’s been cleaning house and stuffing up all her relatives’ houses for the last decade, saying she’s going to die any day and wants her treasures in loving hands first. Which,” she ended, straightening, “explains that hideous Chelsea tea caddy Mrs. Ballantine keeps insisting on putting on the breakfast table. Just what I want to wake up to, certainly. A grinning idiot figure of a man with a round, bare belly and a lotus leaf for a hat. He even has teeth, for crying out loud. And Harriet will linger on another twenty years, until she’s buried us all under her junk.”

“Very valuable junk, Allie, according to Maddy, our very own Art History major, although we probably should remember she graduated with only a C average,” Jessie interjected, opening yet another box, pulling out yet another silver tray. “My, Maddy, this is your lucky day, isn’t it?”

Maddy looked at her sister, slimmer than her, taller by four inches, older by three years. Jessie had dark honey-brown hair as opposed to Maddy’s own deepest black, pale blue eyes to her vibrant green. She was a bright, talented, successful young woman with a lifelong air of dignity and composure about her that Maddy had always envied, even as she had tagged after her, worshiping her.

Jessica was so confident, so sure of herself, and always had been. So successful, working side by side with their brother, Ryan, in the family business.

Maddy wished she could be more like her sister, rather than being the “baby” of the family, the one without a job, without a career, without, it seemed, much ambition or direction at all. And not expected to have any of those attributes, either, come to think of it.

If they’d had a Chandler family pet, they’d expect it to learn more tricks than they had ever expected from Maddy. No one in the family had batted a single eye or made a single comment when she’d withdrawn from her graduate courses, come home and learned how to cook pot roast. She sometimes wondered if she’d accepted Matt’s proposal because she loved him, or because he, at least, seemed to think she had some sort of potential.

Not that Joe O’Malley hadn’t thought she’d had potential. As a lover, that is. The asking her to be his wife part had only been an afterthought, she was sure. Something he thought he should do. Especially when he was about to lower the boom of his grand get-rich scheme. Having her safely married to him before she found out probably had seemed like a good idea at the time. The rat.

And now the rat was rich. Filthy rich. He didn’t need a little wife cutting coupons and sewing on buttons. Not that she had taken those courses just to make herself better equipped to be Joe’s wife, if the man were to come to his senses and figure out he simply could not live without her. Not at all.

Maddy stuck out her tongue, swiped it over her top lip, which had begun to tingle ominously.

And not that she needed grad school or cooking classes to strike out on her own. She could be on her own if she wanted to. Sure, she could. She could be working in some small museum, or in an art gallery somewhere. She could be independent. But, no. She had to leave the classroom, go running off to elope with a man whose kiss was enough to make her forget everything but the man, the kiss.

Which had gotten her—where? Almost to the altar, that’s where. With another man.

Maddy shook her head, banishing these pointless thoughts, knowing she had to stop using Joe as an excuse for her own failings. She hadn’t wanted a career, and she knew it now just as she had known it then. Only she hadn’t known what she wanted back then, and as Chandlers all went to college, she had gone to college. And gotten straight C’s, as Jessie had just pointed out.

She’d gotten straight A’s in all her classes at the community college. She loved her classes. That had to mean something. Had to mean more than that she had started taking the classes because Joe might come back and need a wife who knew how to cook. She enjoyed being domestic. Why, she’d even begun taking parenting classes last semester. Wasn’t that how she and Matt had gotten together? Because of their shared interest in having a family?

What Maddy wanted, had always wanted, she could now acknowledge, was a husband to love, a man who loved her above and beyond anything else in his world. And babies—lots of them. A home of her own. Let Jessie and Ryan run the business, heap more millions into her trust fund. She’d always be grateful to them for it. But she would be more than content to stay home and bake brownies, which she did now, from scratch, after taking a bakery class at the community college.

Cooking classes, classes on handling a family budget, gardening classes, even one on flower arranging—she’d taken them all, excelled at them all. Enjoyed them all.

Her degree in Art History meant less than nothing to her, but she truly treasured the First Place blue ribbon she had won last fall at the Great Allentown Fair for her chocolate cheesecake.

Eighteen months after admitting to Joe that she couldn’t boil water, Maddy had transformed herself into an accomplished cook, an enthusiastic gardener and a woman who actually knew how to hang wallpaper.

All so she could marry Matthew Garvey and have a house nearly as huge as this one, a staff to handle any emergency and enough free time to take every class the community college offered.

If there was something wrong with this, and Maddy was sure there was, she refused to recognize that she now had what it took to be a stay-at-home wife to a struggling young businessman, but she no longer had that struggling young businessman.

She unconsciously began to scratch at a spot behind her left ear.

“Maddy? Maddy. Allie’s talking to you,” Jessie said, giving her sister a playful shove in the ribs.

Maddy looked up at her grandmother, blinked a few times to clear her head and said rather dreamily, “Hmm?”

“Articulate as ever, darling,” Almira said, shaking her head. “I said, there’s a moving van next door. Mrs. Ballantine was nice enough to find your grandfather’s binoculars for me, and I wondered if you two wanted to go into the morning room, which has such lovely spying windows?”

Maddy shook her head. “Allie! Don’t tell me you actually want to spy on the new neighbors, see their furniture, probably make insulting cracks about every second piece that comes out of the truck.”

“And there’s something wrong with this?” Allie’s smile faded even as her green eyes twinkled. “Don’t let this miracle of plastic surgery fool you. I’m old now, Maddy, and just have to get my kicks wherever I can find them. So humor me, okay?”

Jessie was already on her feet. “Come on, Maddy, it’ll be fun.”

“For you, maybe,” Maddy said, also getting to her feet. “But Matt and I wanted to buy that house, remember? If I’m going to scope out the new neighbors, I’d much rather do it with Grandad’s old hunting rifle. Buying the place right out from under us like that, topping our bid with a one-time offer the Realtor couldn’t refuse.”

“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” Jessie said, her voice rather muffled, as if she were speaking with marshmallows in her cheeks. “So, are you saying we’ve got nefarious characters moving into the old Harris house?”

“No, Jessie. What I’m saying is that I have next to no interest in our new neighbors. You and Allie go spy on them if you want. I’ll be out back, checking on my roses.” And taking a peek in the first mirror she saw on her way out, because her upper lip suddenly felt rather fat.

“Speaking of roses, I heard that the new owner is going to cut down all of Miriam Harris’s rose gardens and replace them with a second tennis court, or something like that,” Allie said as she walked away.

“What! How—how could they do that? Miriam’s roses have been there for fifty years, at least.” Maddy followed after Almira, nearly jogging to keep up with her grandmother’s brisk steps, all thoughts of mirrors and her possibly fat lip banished. “I mean, are these people absolute idiots? Who needs two tennis courts?”

Mrs. Ballantine stood at attention in the hallway, conveniently armed with a huge pair of vintage World War II field glasses, which she wordlessly passed to Almira before stepping back to let the three women pass. To an observant person, the two women performed like a well-trained tag-team wrestling duo. But Almira’s grandchildren weren’t being all that observant right now. At least one of them wasn’t, anyway.

“Who needs two tennis courts? I don’t know, dear, why don’t you look and see?” Almira answered, already in the mostly glass-sided morning room, the door closed behind them. Besides being the best vantage point to the driveway next door, the large, wicker-filled atrium was a family favorite for resting, and curling up with a good book.

Almira’s husband had added the room as an anniversary present years ago, and the only solid wall in the room was taken up with floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed three deep with romance novels. Sarah had them all cross-indexed and alphabetized, and a small card catalog stood in the far corner. Almira Chandler was very serious about her cherished books. Very serious.

Almira shoved the binoculars into Maddy’s hands—it was either take the things or have them jammed into her gut. “Why don’t you take a peek, and then maybe you can tell me what an idiot looks like. Or didn’t I mention that the owner is already on the property, overseeing the unloading of what looks to be a small mountain of boxes?”

Jessie, who had been watching all of this with a rather confused smile on her face—as she knew their grandmother never did anything without a reason—helpfully drew back the sheer curtains to give her sister a better view.

Maddy lifted the binoculars to her eyes, knowing that somehow she had been roped into doing what her grandmother wanted, again. She blinked as she saw nothing but fuzzy greenery through the lenses, then adjusted both the knob on the binoculars and her direction, slowly moving her sight along the sweep of lawn, past the white-painted split-rail fence covered in trailing red roses that divided the two properties.

Now more grass, trees and the start of the sweep of brick driveway that made a huge semicircle in front of the Harris house. She’d planned to plant white petunias and blue alyssum along both sides of that long driveway, as a complement to the blue-gray stone and creamy white wood trim of the house. With a couple of red geraniums mixed in, to pick up the dull red in the bricked driveway.

So many plans. So many things she was going to do with that house. Holding on to the heavy binoculars with only one hand, she used the other to run her fingernails over the wedge of bared flesh above her vest.

Feet. She saw feet. Male feet. Bare feet, standing on the brick driveway. Giving the powerful binoculars another small adjustment, she moved them slightly upward. Past remarkably straight legs, to a pair of khaki cutoffs and a white shirt with some sort of logo on it.

Too tiny to make out, even with the field glasses.

Maddy took a breath, moved the binoculars another fraction. Forgot about the itch on her chin.

“Joe.”

She said his name calmly, as if she had been expecting to see what she now saw. Why, she didn’t know. It had to be something about the knees, or something like that. Joe had great knees, not knobby at all. Her mind must have recognized them even before she saw his face. And now that mind had gone on Stun.

She didn’t itch anymore. She could safely say that. Because she was suddenly numb, all over.

“Who, Maddy?”

“I think that’s whom, Jessie, dear,” Almira said, moving closer to Maddy. “Did you say Joe? I thought you said Joe. But you couldn’t have said Joe, could you? I mean, what would that mean?”

Maddy was still staring through the binoculars, watching as Joe moved, pointed to a stack of boxes, said something to one of the workers. Smiled. Showed that single dimple in his left cheek. Made her heart flip over, land again with a sickening thud.

“I’m going to kill him,” she announced quietly, matter-of-factly.

By now, Jessie understood what was happening. Not all of it, of course. But enough to know that trouble was coming—with a capital T. She grabbed the binoculars from her sister. “Joe? Joe O’Malley? Your Joe O’Malley? Ohmigod, Maddy! Where? Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter, Jessie. He’ll be dead before you can meet him.”

Jessie squinted as she ran the binoculars over the figure of Joe O’Malley, at last getting a glimpse of the guy who had broken her sister’s heart. “Wow, cute. No wonder you—well, never mind.” Sorry she’d said what she said, she quickly passed the binoculars to Allie as she took hold of her sister’s arm. “Now, Maddy…”

“I’m having a nightmare, aren’t I?” Maddy said, shaking off Jessie’s hand. “First Great-Aunt Harriet, and now Joe O’Malley. It has to be a nightmare. But, if I shoot him, I’ll wake up. Why, the bang alone would wake me, right? That should work.”

Almira hadn’t used the binoculars, just placed them on a small table and walked toward the closed door leading to the hallway. She stood there, silently, her expression blank, and laid a hand on the doorknob.

“This way, darling,” she said, opening the door as Maddy stomped around the room in circles, her fists clenched, her mind going in sixteen directions at once. “May I suggest the front door? It’s the fastest way.”

“Allie, for God’s sake, don’t help her,” Jessie said in mingled exasperation and…could it be relief? No, that couldn’t be it. She felt sorry for her baby sister. Truly she did.

“Why not, Jessie?” Maddy said as, at last, everything fell into place. Every little bit of what was happening to her at this moment. “She brought him here, didn’t she?”

Almira Chandler put one fluttering, newly manicured hand to her chest. “I brought him here? Why, Madeline Chandler, shame on you. What are you saying?”

Maddy growled low in her throat, like an animal about to pounce, then straightened her shoulders and headed past her grandmother. “No, I don’t have time for this. You I can kill any time. Joe first!”

Mrs. Ballantine slipped into the room, her head turned to watch as Maddy stomped down the hallway on the way to the front door. She waited until she could hear the door slam, wincing only slightly as the chandelier in the foyer tinkled a bit in the passing breeze.

“Shame on you, Mrs. Chandler,” she said, shaking her head. “Bringing an old heartache into Miss Maddy’s life just a week before her wedding to that nice Mr. Garvey. How could you have done such a thing to that poor little girl?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Ballantine, I really don’t,” Almira replied, sighing. “It must be this old age of mine. I just seem to do the most outlandish things.”

Jessie looked from one woman to the other. Neither smiled. Neither allowed a single emotion to show on her face.

“Why, you two sneaks! You’ve been planning this together, haven’t you?”

“Darling,” Almira said reasonably, “Mrs. Ballantine and I can’t even plan menus together, not without nearly coming to blows.”

Jessie thought about this for a moment, then pointed her finger at her grandmother, then at Mrs. Ballantine. She opened her mouth, wagged her finger a time or two as she searched her brain for something to say, anything to say. And then she let her arm drop to her side and said simply, “Thank you.”

“Whatever for?” Mrs. Ballantine said, looking as innocent as a drill sergeant could, which wasn’t very much.

Jessie rubbed at her forehead, trying to tell herself that nothing had changed, nothing would change. Then her blue eyes widened as another thought struck her. “Allie? Mrs. Ballantine? You aren’t going to say anything to Matt, are you? I mean, Maddy needs your help. Lord knows she’s been a mess, especially since Joe O’Malley’s company went public and his picture was on the cover of Newsweek— but you aren’t going to meddle in my life, right? Right?”

Almira put a hand on Jessie’s arm. “I don’t meddle, Jessica. I never meddle. Why, I’m as surprised as you are that Joseph O’Malley bought the Harris house.”

“Yeah. Right. Sure.” Jessie kissed her grandmother’s cheek. “You just keep on believing that Maddy and I believe that. And then keep your meddling out of my life.”