“That went pretty well,” he said.
She laughed. “Your family has a twisted sense of humor.”
“That they do, and they’re going to give us both shit whenever they can. But nobody spilled the beans.”
As they crossed the porch, Emma shifted her leftovers so she could touch his arm. He turned and looked down at her in the fading sun. “Thank you, Sean. For doing this even though your aunt’s not very happy about it and your family’s never going to let you live it down.”
“Don’t worry about it. And that was the biggest hurdle, so it’ll only get easier from here.”
Somehow, she doubted that.
A knock on the door jerked Emma awake and she blinked at the clock across the room, next to the bed where Sean was now sitting up straight. Six twenty-five.
“Are you both decent? I can’t wait to show you what I found!”
Oh crap. Gram wanted in. She scrambled off the couch. “Just a second!”
After draping the blanket in a half-ass way over the back of the couch, she grabbed her pillow and crossed to the bed in a tip-toe jog, dodging the squeaky spot in the floor. Sean pushed his pillow back to one side and lifted the covers for her and, even though she tried not to look, she caught a glimpse of gray boxer-brief-clad bulge as she slid between the sheets. She wouldn’t mind waking up to that every morning.
Instead, she was waking up to an impromptu visit from her grandmother. She gave Sean an apologetic glance and he flopped backward onto his pillow, throwing his forearm over his eyes. “Come on in.”
Gram opened the door and stepped in, carrying an old shoebox decorated with bits of lace and pink hearts cut out of construction paper. She smiled at them and held it up. “Your wedding box!”
Emma’s stomach dropped. She’d forgotten about the wedding box. For years she’d been obsessed with weddings—maybe because the only pictures she had of her parents together in the same shot were wedding photos. She’d cut pictures out of magazines and drawn primitive sketches of whatever she couldn’t find in the colorful pages. She’d written notes about her future wedding in a crayon scrawl and then penciled block letters. She’d even done a few in cursive with a hot-pink pen before she finally outgrew the box. She hadn’t thought about it in years, and she certainly hadn’t expected to see it at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning.
“It was in the back of my armoire, way down at the bottom,” Gram said. “I was going to start breakfast but I remembered it Saturday night while we were talking about what kind of wedding you want. I finally found it this morning and I just couldn’t wait to show you and I knew you’d be getting up for work.”
Emma rubbed her face, wishing the friction could jumpstart her brain. “You don’t have to make breakfast.”
“For the last time, I’m not a fan of instant oatmeal and I don’t mind doing it.” She walked over to set the wedding box on Emma’s lap and headed for the door. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes.”
She was almost to the door when Emma’s alarm went off. The alarm from her cell phone, which was across the room and plugged in next to the couch where she had been sleeping only a few minutes before. Emma watched Gram stop and look at it, frowning.
“I keep it over there because it’s too easy to hit Snooze when it’s next to the bed. If I get up to shut it off, I stay up.”
“Makes sense.” Gram smiled and left, closing the door behind her.
Emma groaned and climbed out of her bed—her wonderful, comfortable bed that she missed very much—and crossed the room to shut off the alarm and unplug her phone. When she turned around, Sean was sitting up, rummaging through the box.
He held up a small piece of paper she recognized with a pang as being from the pink stationery set her grandfather had bought her for her tenth birthday.
“I want to marry a man who will wear pink shirts because it’s my favorite color,” he read aloud and then he looked up at her. “Really? That’s your criteria?”
“It seemed important when I was
ten.
”
“Bouquet—pink gladioli tied with white ribbon,” he read from a torn piece of school notebook paper. “What the hell is gladioli? Sounds like pasta.”
“Glads are my favorite flower.” She grabbed her clothes and went into the bathroom, closing the door none too softly behind her.
When she emerged, he was still in bed and still rummaging through her childish dreams for her future. She watched him frown at a hand-drawn picture of a wedding cake decorated with pink flowers before he set it aside and pulled out another piece of pink stationery.
“If the man who wants to marry me doesn’t get down on one knee to propose,” he read in a high-pitched mock-feminine voice, “I’ll tell him no.”
“My younger self had very high standards,” she snapped. “Obviously
that’s
changed.”
He just laughed at her. “Were you going to put all this into spreadsheet form? Maybe give the poor schmuck a checklist?”
“Are you going to get up and go to work today or are you going to stay in bed and mock a little girl’s dreams?”
“I can probably do both.”
When he put the lid back on her wedding box and set it aside, she bolted before he could throw back the covers to get up. One glimpse of his boxer-brief-clad body was all she could take in a day.
Gram was making blueberry pancakes, which improved Emma’s mood drastically. She fixed two coffees and set Sean’s army mug in his spot before sipping her own.
“Thanks for finding my box, Gram.”
“You used to work on that box for hours. You were so little when you started, your grandfather had to help you cut the pictures out of the magazines because you cried if you cut into the pretty dresses.”
She’d had such big dreams. Prince Charming was going to charge into her life with his white horse and his pink shirt and sweep her off her feet. There would be romance and roses and champagne every day, and he’d write poems about his love for her.
Things had definitely changed since then. If and when she finally reached a point where settling down and starting a family was an option, she’d settle for love, reliability and respect over romance and roses.
She was on her second pancake by the time Sean finally appeared, his hair damp from his shower, and he dug in with relish after making a fuss over Gram.
“I’m going to cry when you go back to Florida, and I’m back to instant oatmeal and fast food drive-through windows,” he said.
“Kiss ass,” Emma muttered against the rim of her coffee mug, but he just grinned at her.
Gram plopped another pancake on Sean’s plate. “Mary invited us all to their big Fourth of July bash on Saturday. They have a party and then go watch the fireworks over the lake. I told her we’d be there, of course. She said your family sometimes comes, too, Sean.”
And there went Emma’s appetite. “You didn’t tell me that.”
He shrugged. “Mitch said he’d be there. I haven’t heard from the others yet.”
Banging her head against the table wasn’t an option, so Emma shoved another bite of blueberry pancake into her mouth and chewed slowly to buy herself time to stop screaming on the inside.
Not only were more people getting dragged into the mess she’d made, but his brothers and sister would be even worse because she’d have to pretend they weren’t total strangers. Just thinking about it gave her a headache.
She shoved back from the table and rinsed her plate. “I’ve got a few phone calls to make before we leave. And we’ll be working in the sun all day, Sean, so you might want to take it easy on the breakfast.”
“Are you okay, honey?” Gram asked, her eyes full of concern. “You looked fine before, but now you’re a little pale.”
She forced herself to smile. “Just trying to sort my schedule in my head, Gram. I’m not sure about Saturday. I might need to work.”
“Don’t be silly. Nobody’s backyard is more important than your family. If Sean’s family can make the time, so can you.”
“Okay, Gram. I’ll make it work.” She kissed her grandmother’s cheek and escaped to her office for a few minutes of peace.
Sean hadn’t mentioned the upcoming family bash or the fact his aunt would expect them to be there. Or the fact some of his siblings might show up.
Emma rested her forehead on the cool surface of her desk and sighed. Just what she needed. More Kowalskis.
Sean still didn’t have much of a plan for what he’d do when the month was over, but he was pretty sure of one thing he
wouldn’t
be doing—landscape design for finicky people with too much damn money.
They were spending the day on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee again, at one of those little summer cottages that were really mansions, adding to landscaping Emma had previously done.
“Is she going to make you take these all out after?” he asked, making sure the mulch he was spreading was level enough to satisfy his boss’s insane control freakishness when it came to her work.
“She might. But she’ll pay for it, so I’ll do it. But these are mostly annuals, anyway, so she can leave them for the rest of the summer without ruining the overall landscaping plan.”
Mrs. Somebody-or-other was hosting a baby shower for her spoiled princess at the cottage the following week and the much-heralded first grandchild was reportedly a girl. Emma’s job—and therefore Sean’s, as well—was to turn the beachfront property into an explosion of pink.
There were tall, skinny pink flowers and short, bushy pink flowers and all different kinds of pink flowers he knew nothing about. There were even some of those gladiolus things she’d been talking about that morning. But he wasn’t likely to learn anything about them since she didn’t trust him to do more than carry over whichever pot she pointed to and then spread mulch when and where she told him to.
Being surrounded by so much pink made it impossible to put the morning out of his mind because every flower made him think of a ten-year-old Emma wanting to marry a guy wearing a pink shirt.
That thought invariably led to thoughts of a very grown-up Emma sliding between the sheets, her long leg brushing against his thigh and making him think all kinds of naughty things. Luckily, the steamy thoughts of pulling her body, still warm from sleeping, up against his had fled when her grandmother walked into the room. Residual desire had remained though, even while they went on about that stupid box, so it was a damn good thing Emma had jumped out of bed to shut off her alarm.
The whole thing seemed wrong to him somehow, though, the more he thought about it. Cat didn’t seem like the kind of woman to work herself into such a tizzy over finding a box she had to burst in on them before they were out of bed. Excitement at the breakfast table, sure, but she’d been too respectful of their fake need for privacy for it to make any sense.
“I think Cat’s on to us.”
Emma sat back on her heels and brushed dirt off her gloves. “What makes you think that?”
“Just a feeling.” He couldn’t really explain it. “The way she watches us sometimes. And coming into our room at twenty after six? That didn’t seem suspicious to you?”
“She was excited.” But that excuse was weak and she knew it. “Gram would say something if she thought I was lying to her.”
“Maybe not. Maybe she wants to figure out what we’re up to.”
She seemed to consider it for a moment, then she shook her head. “I don’t think she could keep quiet about it. But, just in case she’s suspicious, we’ll have to step it up.”
Step it up? If they stepped it up any more, his balls were going to explode. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…more touching or something?”
“No.” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but he meant it. He couldn’t take any more touching. “I mean, I don’t think that’s the problem.”
Actually, touching was exactly the problem, but not in the way she was thinking. He was horny, plain and simple, and the constant touching and looking and pretending was killing him. Slowly and seemingly without end.
The nights were the worst. Emma was a restless sleeper and he was a light sleeper and the combination made for a constant state of low-grade sleep deprivation. The sight of her dark curls spread across her pillow and her long legs kicked free of the blanket made for a constant state of high-grade lust.
“What do you think
is
the problem, then?”
He shook his head. “Forget it. Probably just my imagination.”
When she pushed herself to her feet and stretched, he tried not to watch, but he couldn’t look away. He knew being bent over the garden was hell on the muscles, but the way she put her hands to the back of her waist and arched her back—which pushed out her breasts—was hell on his self-control.
“How come you didn’t tell me about your aunt and uncle’s big holiday bash?”
“Because you’re just going to worry about it and stress and it’s only Monday. I thought I’d wait until Friday to bring it up.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Have you talked to Cat about the house yet?”
She shook her head. “I keep hoping she’ll bring it up, but she hasn’t. And it never seems like the right time.”
“If you let her go back to Florida without selling you the house, this was all for nothing, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” she snapped. “I know it doesn’t seem that way, but I don’t
like
lying to my grandmother this way and now that the time has come, I’m finding it hard to bring up the house.”
His phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket to look at the caller ID window. “Shit.”
“Who is it?”
“My sister. Sorry, I have to take it or she’ll keep calling back.” He flipped open the phone as he put a little space between him and Emma. “Hi, Liz.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Tell me Mitch is full of shit.”
“He usually is.”
Her sigh practically vibrated his phone. “Are you living with some woman you just met and pretending to be her fiancé?”
“Yup.”
“Does that seem normal to you?”
“I never claimed it was normal. It’s pretty crazy, actually, but we’re making it work.” More or less. Other than an unexpected case of blue balls, it was going better than he would have guessed it would.
“And Aunt Mary’s going along with this?”
“Reluctantly, but yes.”
“I can’t make it, but Mitch is going to be there for the Fourth. If he tells me he thinks this woman’s up to no good, I’m going to sic Rosie on you.”
“Nobody’s up to no good, Liz, and we’re not hurting anybody. I promise.”
“We’ll see what Mitch has to say.” He heard a voice in the background and what sounded like a door slamming. “I have to run. I’ll call you next week, after I talk to Mitch.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said, but she’d already hung up.
He shoved his phone back in his pocket and smiled at Emma. “She sends her regards.”