Four Weddings and a Fiasco: The Wedding Caper (6 page)

No such luck.

When he pushed opened the door, K.D. was on one side of the counter and Mrs. Cavendish was on the other. Between them sat a small pile of clothes and a larger pile of clothes.

"This is what we're taking," K.D. said, her hand on the small pile.

Mrs. Cavendish spotted him and smiled with more relief than if he were the cavalry, and she’d been down to her last bullet.

"Truly, Mr. Larkin, these pieces are entirely necessary for what you indicated." She patted the larger pile.

He picked up K.D.’s pile and placed it atop Mrs. Cavendish’s "We'll take them all."

"Eric." He wouldn’t have ignored K.D.’s tone in a cop-citizen situation, but that wasn’t what this was, no matter what she thought.

"All," he repeated.

"Excellent, Mr. Larkin. In the end, she dresses beautifully and I believe you will be pleased."

K.D. glared at the woman. The kind of glare that should have criminals quaking in their bad-guy boots, and irk high-class clerks who already appeared frazzled beneath a calm veneer. He figured it was a good thing the clerk didn’t notice the look K.D. aimed at her. She was too busy smiling at him, or possibly at the credit card he held out.

"I'm sure I will be pleased," he said, smiling back and not breaking eye contact, so the store manager wouldn’t look toward K.D. Mrs. Cavendish palmed the credit card without a hitch and turned to the register.

With her back safely to them, he wrapped a hand around K.D.’s elbow and steered her toward a far display.

“What about this, dear? Have you looked at things for fall?”

He gave her credit. Though her jaw was working and her arm under his hand was tense enough to
boing
, she didn’t say a word until they were out of earshot. And even then kept her voice low enough that Mrs. Cavendish wouldn’t hear even the staccato rhythm of anger.

“
She dresses beautifully
? What kind of crack is that? And
in the end
? What does that mean? Sounds like
She cleans up well once you scrape the grime off her
. Like I’m some show horse she dug out of the mud pit and has been grooming all afternoon. Or like I’m one of these mannequins — these
dummies
— whose only use is to hold up the clothes she chose to put on me. Because
she dresses beautifully
sure wasn’t her reaction to my real clothes. You should have seen her face when she saw my —”

She clamped her mouth shut. A renewed glare descended on her face. She started to aim it at him, apparently saw something in his face that made her look bounce away. She spun free of his hold on her arm and took three jerky steps toward another display.

What was that about?

Mrs. Cavendish had seen her . . . what?

At that moment, she stopped abruptly and tried to turn around. But he was right behind her, and she slammed into him. It wasn’t that hard of a collision, yet it knocked the breath out of him.

That surprised him . . . for about half a second, until several things clicked in his head.

For starters, a likely interpretation of what she’d just said. Plus the way her glare had bounced away from him. And the red rushing from her throat and up toward her cheeks.

Add in that the display she’d turned away from like it was a burning building was of an undergarment that caught his attention and dried his throat by where it
wasn’t
. It plunged from a nonexistent neck to well below the waist and slashed up high on each hip.

It was suggestive on a mannequin. On a body like K.D.’s, it would go from suggestion to command.

Oh, yeah, and a recognition that his breathlessness didn’t come from the force of their collision, but from that momentary sensation of her softness against his chest and groin.

Put it all together and it was a safe bet that K.D. had cut herself short from telling him that Mrs. Cavendish had looked down her narrow nose at K.D.’s underwear. Most likely utilitarian, sturdy, inexpensive underwear.

His mouth started to stretch into a grin.

She’d stopped herself because she was uncomfortable talking about her underwear in front of him. That probably should have concerned him. Because a man and a woman who hoped to convince an audience that they were married shouldn’t be that shy with each other.

But she wouldn’t react that way to almost mentioning her underwear or coming face-to-unnaturally-pointed-breast with the mannequin barely wearing that — what did they call those things? Teddies? Yeah, that was it — if she didn’t have some awareness of him as a man.

“What?” she abruptly demanded. Having backed up a step, she propped her hands on her hips. But that made her elbow brush the teddy-wearing mannequin’s thigh, and she quickly switched to crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s that look for.”

He’d heard testosterone blamed for a lot of things. At the moment it was responsible for his failure to fight down the grin stretching his lips. From K.D.’s expression she considered it self-satisfied at best and more likely a leer.

“Just wondering if you need anything else?” He gestured toward the mannequin beyond her shoulder. “That, maybe?”

“You have got to be—” She bit that off and darted her eyes toward the register where Mrs. Cavendish appeared to be wrapping up her labors. Her next words were heavy with the kind of restraint that couldn’t be good for the teeth she clearly was gnashing. “Thank you,
dear
. But no thank you.”

“Ah, Mr. Larkin. If you’re ready. . .?” Mrs. Cavendish cooed from the register.

“We’re ready,” K.D. said, sidestepping him neatly.

“Pity,” he murmured as he followed her toward the register with a final glace at what little covered the mannequin. “A real pity.”

S
till muttering about his buying all those “unnecessary” clothes, K.D. refused his help taking the purchases upstairs to her room. She said she was going to hang them up right away, then be down for their next study session.

Eric went in search of Myrna. She was in his kitchen, apparently having tossed something in the garbage.

“What are you doing?” he asked mildly.

“Throwing out bananas.”

He came around the island, heading for the can under the sink. “Hey, I just bought those. Why would you throw them out?”

“This,” she said — not the least bit mildly, “is precisely the sort of thing that could trip you up and blow the whole thing.”

“Bananas?”

“K.D. hates them. Hates everything about them. Can’t stand to have them around.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I know it, because she told the crew at the Rose Chalet, and they told me.”

Why didn’t she tell me
? Stupid. He knew it was stupid.

“Can’t even stand to look at them, much less have someone eat one in front of her. Here she comes. Good thing you have me around.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.’’

K.D.
wasn’t sure she’d ever worked harder. Not this kind of work, anyway. Thinking of all the likes and dislikes that were such an automatic part of her that she forgot them, writing them down, sharing them with Eric, then memorizing his list.

And that was the easy part.

Because the other area they tackled was issues in their “marriage.”

After eating the takeout dinner Eric had gotten, they sat at the island listing ways they could disagree about topics Myrna labeled as: Having Kids, Trust, Communication, and Extended Family.

Myrna left. They kept working.

Around ten, Eric stood, stretching his long frame. “Let’s take a break. Want some ice cream?”

“That sounds good.”

He got a carton of butter pecan from the freezer. Without turning around from taking down two dishes, he asked, “Want a banana on top? I like mine like that.”

“No, thanks.” She switched sheets of paper, looking for the date he graduated from college. Why could she not remember that?

He thunked the filled bowls and a pair of spoons on the counter.

She glanced at them, then at him. “No banana?”

“No. There are no bananas left in my house.”

She frowned slightly. “I don’t— Oh. Because of me? I’m sorry —”

“Don’t apologize for that. I don’t give a damn about having bananas in the house or not. But why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“You thought to tell everybody at the Rose Chalet about it. And this is exactly the sort of thing that could trip us up.”

“I did not tell everybody at the Rose Chalet. I happened to mention it in the course of a conversation.”

“You could blow this whole thing if you keep holding back parts of yourself.”

Her building irritation ebbed.

You could blow this whole thing if you keep holding back parts of yourself.

That’s what his ex-wife had done. Holding back parts — many parts — of herself. He’d never said it that directly, but it hadn’t been hard to pull that conclusion together from the fragments he’d let fall and the bigger chunks Myrna had contributed.

“We can’t possibly tell each other everything. We can only try to hit the highlights.” She touched his arm below his rolled-back sleeve. The skin was warm, the muscle under it strong. “Is this our first fight?”

He seemed to catch himself. At her touch? Or in response to her point? “You’re right. We can’t tell each other everything. But we need to share the sort of things that could trip us up.”

“We can cover things like that on the fly if there’s a slip up. Because there are bound to me. There always are in any undercover situation. I’d eat a banana if I had to.” His expression eased into a smile. She felt hers do the same. Then it faded. “If that was our first fight, we aren’t going to convince anyone we need marriage counseling. We’re going to have to work on that aspect, too.”

“You’re chewing your lip again,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“I’m not your mother. No need to apologize to me.”

A clutch hit her chest for an instant, before she remembered this was all a role they were playing.

Laced with the truth, but, still, a role.

Keep it close to the truth, Captain Hadley had said, and she had when she’d talked about her mother. Maybe too close.

Now, Eric rested his warm hand on her forearm. A brief touch, really, but she felt the difference between the role he’d been playing with his words, and the reality of his touch.

“What are you worried about, K.D.?”

Why did I tell you so much about myself
?
Bananas are one thing, but I shouldn’t have let my mother slip into this
. “These seem like generic problems. Will they buy us as a couple in trouble, if we only come in with these basic issues?”

He chuckled dryly. “Believe me, if it weren’t for these issues, marriage counselors would go out of business.”

Only when she was in bed, going over the growing pile of material again, did another thought surface:

Eric had recognized she’d been worried.

K.D.
woke with a question so urgent that she pulled on a robe and went downstairs in search of the answer.

“Eric?” she called.

“He’s out running,” came Myrna’s voice from the office.

K.D. knew from his questionnaire that Eric ran for fitness, not for love. That was reserved for tennis.

“Need something, K.D.?” Myrna added.

She went into the office. “You’re here early.”

“Got behind on my work with prepping you two. Will get even farther behind with the wedding tomorrow.”

Her heart stuttered before she could tell it to stop being silly.

“That’s related to what I wanted to ask Eric about — what kind of law he practices.”

Myrna nodded. “Good catch. He started prosecuting criminal law. Did real well, too. Would have made a good career of it.”

“But?” K.D. prompted.

“But Hilary got a hold of him. Government pay was never going to be enough for that one. Not unless it was as king of one of those countries where the king gets everything. She wheedled and whined until he got a job with a corporate law firm. I followed him over there. Nice benefits,” she acknowledged. “Boring as hell. And, of course, Hilary still wasn’t satisfied.”

K.D. sat on one of the visitor’s chairs.

Eric had made no secret of the wounds he carried from his divorce, but he had said little about its cause. Because of the timeline they’d developed for their fictional courtship and marriage, he’d declared that for the purposes of this charade, his marriage to Hilary would not exist.

That had been a fine reason for him to not talk about it.

She wondered if it had not been an accident that she and Myrna had not been alone until now.

“Oh?” She didn’t need to ask any more.

“She was after him all the time. More, more, more. That’s what she wanted. All the time. He thought she’d settle down, want to have a family like he did.” The older woman snorted. “Not that one. She wanted one hundred percent of the spotlight, one hundred percent of the time.

“When she let up on him, stopped that constant whining and wheedling, he thought she’d grown up. I didn’t. One of the few times in my life I wish I wasn’t right all the time.” She looked away from K.D. “Hit him hard. Makes me angry to think about it. If he weren’t such a good man, it wouldn’t have caught him the way it did. It’s not like he doesn’t know the world — he’d have to be an idiot not to after a couple years prosecuting in Cook County. But he has a real good family, and he thought that was one place where trust and honor and faith could be relied on.”

K.D. blinked away the sting in her eyes.

“That’s why this place breaking up marriages —”

The front door opened. K.D. twisted in her chair to see Eric, his skin sheened with sweat and his chest rising and falling rapidly, stop in the entry way, hands on hips, head dropped down.

“You sprinted up the stairs again, didn’t you,” Myrna accused.

“It’s good for the —”

He stopped when his gaze came to her.

She knew her pretend-silk robe covered her from throat to calves, and it wasn’t the least bit see-through. So, why did she feel half-naked?