FAMILY FALLACIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series #3) (15 page)

“Congratulations,
Skip.”

Skip stood up to shake
his hand. “Thanks, Rob.”

Rob slapped him on the
shoulder. “Ouch! I gotta remember not to do that,” he said, shaking his
stinging hand in the air. Skip grinned at him.

“I think this makes us
friends-in-law,” Rob said. They both laughed. Then Skip slapped Rob on the
back. He mock staggered across the room.

“Now wait just a damned
minute!” Kate’s raised voice cut through everyone’s frivolity.

The baby wailed from
the nursery. Maria muttered something and jumped up to go to her.

Kate looked at Rose.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Rose said. Actually there had been a couple
expletives as well but she didn’t bother to translate those.

Kate decided Edie was
in good hands and she had other issues to address. She turned to Skip, hands on
her hips. “I do
not
recall,
Mr. Canfield
, that you
ever
specifically
asked
me to marry you.”

“I was going to, once
we’d had a few more real dates. When the timing felt right.”

Kate heard the anxiety
in his voice and most of her anger melted away. Of course he hadn’t intentionally
sprung this on her in front of their friends.

“We were going to have
one tonight, remember? We can still go, Kate. It’s not that late. Everybody’s
going to help out. Maria’s going to take care of Edie, and Mac and Rose are
going to stay to guard them.”

“I’ll stay too, Kate,
if it’ll make you feel better,” Rob offered.

Maria came out of the
nursery and eased the door closed. “You go, Kate,” she said quietly.

“You all are ganging up
on me,” Kate protested. “Wait!” Her eyes narrowed as she looked around the room
at them, hands back on her hips. “You had this planned, didn’t you? So what’s
with the fake expressions of shock?”

“Just the date!” Rose
said. “We didn’t know he was going to
propose
tonight.”

“
I
didn’t know I
was going to propose tonight,” Skip muttered.

“Go on, sweet pea,” Mac
said. “Go out with the man so he can propose, proper-like.”

Kate turned back to
Skip. She wanted to give in to the pleading look in his eyes but she couldn’t.
“Oh, Skip, I’m sorry to disappoint you but no matter how many people stay here
tonight, I just wouldn’t be able to stop worrying about Edie.”

Skip sighed. “Why is
it, darlin’, that nothing ever quite happens like it’s supposed to when I’m
around you?” He captured one of her hands in his and dropped down on one knee.
Looking up at her, he said, “Kate, will you marry me?”

For a long agonizing
moment, Kate didn’t answer him as she debated with herself. She had promised to
tell him if he was going too fast. But she knew damned well that they would
have ended up here in time, in a few months, or maybe even a few weeks. It
wasn’t his fault that today’s events had brought them to this point
prematurely.

She looked down into
his anxious eyes, then gently brushed tousled hair back off his forehead. “Yes,
Skip, I will marry you.”

W
hen Kate woke up in
the guest bedroom on Thursday morning, once again alone, her mind was confused
but not because of her location. She could faintly hear the deep rumble of a
male voice and the echo of a childish giggle from the living room below her.

Glancing at the clock
on the nightstand, Kate realized that Edie would not have been up for long. But
Skip had once again grabbed the monitor and turned it off before it could wake
her.

Swinging her legs out
of bed, Kate headed into the bathroom where she indulged in a long shower. The
hot water pelting against her skin cleared the cobwebs of sleep from her brain,
but did nothing else to help with her mental overload.

As she vigorously
rubbed shampoo into her curly mop, she realized that her heart was quite clear
on the subject of her sudden engagement, but her head was still reeling.

She had been way too
tired and overwhelmed to sort it all out last night. But apparently not too
tired for other things. Her skin tingled now at the memory. She wasn’t quite
sure how this man managed to turn every cell in her body into warm,
quivering...
Stop that
, she thought, as she dried off.

Then she dressed in the
sweater and tailored slacks she had brought upstairs the night before.

When Kate descended the
stairs, she stopped on the bottom step, watching Skip and Edie at the kitchen
table. He was putting one small chunk of banana at a time on the highchair
tray. The little girl ate the first two, then squished the third one in her chubby
fist and smeared it across her cheek.

Kate was smiling as she
walked into the kitchen and sat down at her place at the breakfast table. There
was something winking at her from the middle of her plate.

“Rather presumptuous of
you, Mr. Canfield, to buy a ring before actually proposing,” she said,
annoyance under her teasing tone. “Or did you run out and get it while I was in
the shower?”

Now that she had said
the magic word,
yes
, Skip had regained his confidence. The previous
evening, Rose and Mac had stayed at the house while he had made a trip back to
his apartment for clean clothes, his razor, and a small jewelry box. Now
freshly shaved and wearing a crisply ironed white shirt, jeans, and a
nonchalant smile, he reached over to take her hand. He picked up the ring and
slipped it on her finger. It was just a little loose.

“I didn’t buy it. It’s
my mother’s.”

That took her by
surprise. Why would his widowed mother
not
be wearing the engagement
ring her husband of thirty-nine years had given her?

“She wanted me to give
it to you, darlin’,” Skip said, guessing at her train of thought. “On
Thanksgiving, she was giving me the ‘when are you gonna settle down and give me
more grandchildren’ routine, so I told her about you, and Edie. She took off
her ring and handed it to me, and said, ‘It’s about time, boy!’”

Kate stared at the ring
on her finger, trying to sort out her jumbled feelings.

“That ring’s got quite
a history,” Skip said. “It was my grandmother’s. She died when my dad was in
his teens. A few years later, when he told his father that he’d asked my mother
to marry him, but he couldn’t afford a ring, his father gave him
that
ring
to give to my mother.”

This was the
grandfather after whom Skip’s father and Skip himself had been named. Kate
thought about the diamond ring she had taken off, along with its matching
wedding band, in the upstairs bathroom two nights ago–the diamond she intended
to someday pass on to her daughter.

Her heart warmed toward
her future mother-in-law. She was a far cry from the stiff and jealous Edith
Huntington.

Maria began serving up
the sumptuous breakfast she had prepared in celebration of their engagement.
She piled scrambled eggs, refried beans, and sauteed plantains onto their
plates and placed a platter of warm corn tortillas on the table. Then she
picked the baby up from the highchair and started out of the room.

In the doorway, she
turned and actually winked at them. Laughing, they dug into the feast.

After a few minutes,
the silence was broken by a contented sigh from Skip. She glanced up. He was
watching her from across the table. “Kate, despite all the chaos and crap
that’s going on in our lives, I’m the happiest man alive right now.”

She noted his choice of
words. The threatening notes, the malpractice suit, the problems in her
family–these were no longer things happening in
her
life that he helped
her deal with. She felt more weight lift from her shoulders.

As Kate reached for
another tortilla, the diamond on her finger sparkled in the sunlight streaming
through the kitchen windows. She pulled her hand back empty and put it in her
lap.

“Skip, before I say
what I need to say, I want to reassure you that I am
not
changing my
answer to your proposal. My heart knows that I want to marry you. But my head
is
screaming,
‘Slow down, What the hell is going on?’ I just can’t wrap
my brain around how fast things have moved in the last twenty-four hours.”

He smiled at her. “Does
kinda feel like we’re on a runaway stagecoach, don’t it?” he drawled.

“Yeah, and whoever the
hell the driver is, he’s falling down on the job!”

“Oh, I think he got
throwed off quite a few miles back, darlin’.”

Kate couldn’t stay
serious, with the image he had just planted in her mind. “Oh, Mr. Skip, save
me!” she said in a high-pitched exaggerated Southern accent, picking up her
napkin and rapidly fanning herself. “Yuh have ta save me, sur.”

He laughed out loud and
leaned across the table to capture her hand in his. “Don’t worry. The horses’ll
run out of steam eventually,” he assured her.

Then he brought her
hand to his lips and kissed the knuckle of her ring finger, just below the
sparkling diamond. “I do love the way that ring looks on your finger, darlin’.”

His warm lips, even on
that small a patch of skin, had sent a jolt through her system. “I do too,”
Kate said softly.

Skip let her hand go so
she could finish her breakfast.

After a few minutes, he
said, “Actually I was thinking about that this morning. About how fast
everything happened yesterday.” He snorted. “And right after we’d had that talk
about not rushing things. But if we’d been truly dating for the last five
months... If the relationship had been able to evolve a bit more naturally, I
think we’d be about here by now. We’re really just catching up with ourselves,
in a way.”

“You would have asked
me to marry you after dating just five months? You, the guy who’d never even
seriously
considered
marriage before.”

“Yes, I would have
asked you to marry me, after five months of knowing I was madly in love with
you.”

“You fell in love with
me five months ago?” Her mouth was hanging partway open.

“Yup! Head over heels,
that day I kissed you last summer, and by the end of that week, I knew I wanted
to marry you,” he informed her, then softly added, “The feeling’s only gotten
stronger since then.”

Kate stared across the
table at him. She had known he wanted her, had been fairly sure that he loved
her, and he’d said he wanted a serious relationship. But she’d assumed that
meant he was
hoping
the relationship would grow in that direction.

His words shed a whole
different light on his actions last night. They weren’t those of an impulsive,
out-of-control man. How much more control could one ask for than five months of
that kind of patience?

Once again he read her
mind. “I’m sorry I lost it with the cops. I hate it when I lose control like
that.”

“It was a bit of a
shock.”

“Don’t worry, I only
blow like that about once or twice a decade. Last time was right after my dad
died, when I told my captain to ‘take this job and shove it.’ I’d just gotten
the call from my sister. I went to Johnson to arrange for the time off to fly
to Texas. He was a bit of a...” Skip was about to say
prick
but caught
himself. “...a jerk. Wanted me to come back right after the funeral. Wouldn’t
give me a few extra days to stay with my mom and make sure she was okay. Help
her get the practical stuff sorted out. And my sister was pregnant at the time,
with two little rug rats already. I wasn’t gonna just dump everything on her
and race back here.

“He had the gall to suggest
that I needed to get my priorities straight, at which point I told him, in a
very
loud voice, that I
did
have them straight. My family comes first.”
Skip reached across the table and took her hand again. “And it always will.”

She smiled at him. “That’s
good to hear.”

“Darlin’, you better
stop lookin’ at me like that,” he drawled, “or I’m gonna be throwin’ you over
my shoulder and haulin’ you back upstairs.”

“And that wouldn’t be
fair to Maria, to leave the dirty dishes after she cooked us such a feast,”
Kate said. They got up and started clearing the table.

While Skip was loading
the dishwasher, Kate rummaged in the junk drawer where she kept rubber bands,
carry-out food menus and various other minutia. When she found what she was
looking for, she slipped it into the pocket of her slacks.

Taking Skip by the
hand, she led him into the living room. Maria was coming out of the nursery,
the baby in her arms. They thanked her for the delicious breakfast, and Kate
said, “I have a little while before I have to leave for work. I’ll watch Edie
for a few minutes.”

“You got good time,
Kate,” Maria said. “I just change diaper. Phew!” She held her nose.

Kate smiled at her.
“Yes, I do have good tim
-ing
then.”

Taking the baby, Kate
sat down on the living room rug. Edie crawled off her lap to dig through her
pile of toys.

Skip flopped down on
the sofa with a groan. “I ate too much. I keep hanging around here, I’m gonna
need to work out a lot more often.”

“Speaking of hanging
around here,” Kate said, reaching into her pocket. “At the risk of whipping up
the stagecoach horses, I figure if we’re engaged, you might as well have this.”
She handed him a house key. It was one part practical gesture and one part a
token of permanency. Not quite as flashy as a diamond ring, but...

Skip grinned, his eyes
acknowledging the implied message. He took out his key ring to add the key. The
baby zeroed in on the shiny, jangly treasure and crawled rapidly in his
direction.

“Watch out. She loves
keys,” Kate said.

Skip inspected the key
ring to make sure there was nothing on it she could get loose and choke on,
then he handed it to the child. She sat up and started shaking it vigorously.

Over the clamor, Kate
said, “Actually Skip, I think we need to shoot those damned horses. Now that
we’ve caught up with ourselves, as you put it, we need to take some time to...
sort out some things. There’s a lot of stuff we need to talk about.”

“Kate, talking to you
is the
only
thing I’ve been allowed to do for the last five months. Is
there
anything
we haven’t talked about?”

“Believe it or not,
yes,” she said with a chuckle, but she was now choosing her words with care.
“There are still things we need to figure out.”

Kate thought,
like
where we’re going to live.
She wasn’t ready to give up the old Victorian
that she and Eddie had so lovingly renovated.

Or how we’re going
to manage my million-dollar brokerage account
,
and that I might not be
able to provide your mother with more grandchildren.
It had taken six years
of trying before Edie was conceived.

“What things, darlin’?”
Skip was asking.

“I don’t even want to
list them, because then we’ll start talking about them. It’s nothing all that
earth-shattering,” she fibbed. They
were
potentially earth-shattering,
which was why she didn’t want to go there right now. “Just some things that we
would have normally discussed along the way, before we got to the getting
married stage.”

“I guess I shoved the
cart in front of the horse, didn’t I?” he said. “I’m sorry I rushed things.”

“I’m not. Now that I’m
getting used to the idea. Dancing around the subject of commitment was already
getting a little tricky, and I was kind of expecting we would move fast once we
repealed the four-foot rule.” Kate let out a little snort of laughter. “I told
Liz that I was afraid we’d go from zero to sixty, but it ended up being more
like zero to a hundred.”

The baby had lost
interest in Skip’s keys. She dropped them and crawled back toward her toys.
Skip scooped them up as he slid off the sofa to sit beside Kate on the floor.
“My engine’s still idlin’, darlin’,” he whispered in her ear, “whenever you’re
ready to take another ride.”

She punched him in the
shoulder, and then leaned against that shoulder as they watched Edie gumming
one of her toys. Kate was reminded of the first time she had leaned against
that solid shoulder, on a hot summer day five months ago.

“I think last summer I
was already in love with you, but I was afraid to admit it even to myself.”

“Because it was
too
soon
. How I’ve come to hate those two words.”

“Well they’re gone from
our vocabulary now,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “I love you, Skip.”

His face broke into a
grin. “I like those words much better.”

~~~~~~~~

B
y Friday morning, Kate
was somewhat less sleep deprived, but she was still trying to wrap her mind
around the sudden turn that her life had taken in the last few days.