Geek Groom (Forever Geek Trilogy #2) (2 page)

After I let the supple fabric run through my fingers a few times, and the shock of the moment abated, I took another look around the room. That’s when a few things sank in. First of all, there was a total lack of personal items. Nothing in the bathroom to indicate a woman had lived there for the past three nights. Then I noticed the roses. Dozens of them in vases throughout the rooms. And one single pink rose on the pillow with a note.

It read:
Call the front desk. I’ll see you at 6.

Another look at the writing and things started to make sense. Evan’s the only person I know with that scrawl.

A quick call and my bags were brought to the suite. By five to six I was showered and dressed and as curious as hell. Promptly at six, two things happened. First, room service showed up and began setting an elaborate table. And, not at all unexpectedly, Evan strolled though the door looking like he’d stepped out of a magazine. A black suit hugged his towering frame, drawing tight in all the places where his physical labour had created well-sculpted muscles. He was clean shaven, a rare treat indeed, and his light brown hair was tamer than usual. Simply put, he was the stuff fantasies are made of. Three nights apart might seem like a short time, but I flew into his arms as if it were a month.

“What is this? What are you doing here?”

“I don’t want to ruin your evening,” he said, “so let’s start this off right.”

You’d think a woman who tirelessly fantasizes about getting engaged would have clued in by now, but honestly, when he knelt before me, I thought he was tying his shoe or something. Until I saw the ring in the box he held before me, a regal pearl and diamond concoction set to resemble a flower. A ring I’d seen many times in my life. My great-great grandmother’s ring that had been in our family since the late eighteen hundreds, a ring I’d coveted since I was a little girl and was always told it was too rare for anyone to actually wear. I’d long suspected my mother lied to me on a regular basis. Now I had proof.

But that’s neither here nor there. At that moment, my mother and great-great grandmother Shea are the last thing on my mind. All I could do was hold my breath while Evan spoke.

“Jillian, the first thing I knew about you for certain was that you were beautiful. The next thing I learned was that you were brilliant. And over these past two years, I’ve come to know the many, many wonderful things that make you who you are. Your passion, your commitment, your willingness to try new things and your ability to make me laugh, even when I want to bang my head off the wall, are all things I love about you. Some mornings I wake up and I watch you sleeping and I can’t believe that I’m the man you’ve chosen to love.”

He took a deep breath and his fingers trembled as he took my hand in his.

“I don’t ever want to wake up without you, or go to sleep without you. I want you in my life for as long as you’ll have me. Which is forever, I hope. If I’m a lucky man. So I’m asking you, Jillian Katherine Carew, will you be my partner in life?”

Evan maintains that I didn’t answer right away but I don’t believe him for a second, because I’m sure I started saying yes somewhere around the first Jillian.

After the dinner in our room, after we made love and nearly ripped that damned expensive dress, after I put it on again and we went to a jazz club and danced, and after we came back to our room and this time carefully removed our clothing before almost breaking the bed, after all of that I finally thought to ask him why now? Why this proposal?

“Did you expect something different?” he asked while twirling my ring around my finger.

“Honestly? I expected it to involve dice or a game or some sort of role playing.”

“But that’s not you. I know you like playing games with me, but you deserved something that spoke to all the things you are without me. Elegant, sophisticated, a little retro.”

I later learned that he’d first concocted this plan when I told him about the conference four months ago. Every little detail, even the coffee and muffin coupon to remind me of the day we met. Which as you’ll recall, worked.

So here I am today, definitely not wearing that gown, feeling up hairy legs. If my mother could only see me now.

I
thought I was going to love this bridal shower a whole lot more than the one in Juniper Cove. I was wrong. Between the covert looks from distant cousins who are wondering how I scored the family ring instead of them, and the insistence of my mother that I spend no more than two minutes talking to each guest so that I can talk to all sixty of them in the two-hour span of the event, well, I’m nearly ready to run for the hills.

At this moment I’m smiling and nodding while my mother introduces me to a third cousin whom apparently I played with once when I was four.

“Aren’t you just so lucky,” the cousin says. I know I should remember her name but I must have blacked out for a second. I’m pretty sure it starts with an E. Eleanor? Ethel? Evelyn? “Not only did you inherit that amazing ring, but Auntie Margery even allowed you to use her parasol for your shower.”

Oh God. Are we going to have to talk about this umbrella again?

It was a source of stress for Mom for weeks wondering if my marriage to a labourer would be sanctioned by Auntie Margery. Apparently, she was withholding the frothy pink lace antique from many of the cousins these days. I suppose Evan passed muster after all. I was hoping he wouldn’t. But there it is, propped up on display on the gift table with perfectly wrapped presents beneath it. No willy-nilly smattering of dollar store gift bags here.

Over the years I’ve managed to avoid almost every family bridal shower for the Carews and Sheas. Between travel and grad school, then post-doc work and a well-practiced gift to come up with perfectly respectable reasons to miss the events, the last shower I attended was about seven years ago. And at that time I really wasn’t paying attention to the formalities at all. If memory serves, I spent most of it drinking champagne and—well, that’s about all my memory is serving me about now. And now here I am with the entire dining room of a swanky downtown hotel draped in soft pink and pale yellow decor, food and wine flowing, and hating it more and more with each second that passes.

Enid is going on. “Did you know she refused to let me use the parasol when I was engaged to David White? In hindsight, I’m glad she did. It gave me time to rethink my decision to marry him.”

You know those moments when propriety goes out the window and you just say what’s on the tip of your tongue? Here I go.

“You called off your wedding because of an umbrella?”

The look Evangeline is giving me is priceless in its incredulity. “No. It just made me think about his suitability a bit more. What did Auntie Margery see that I hadn’t?”

“And what did you discover?”

I really want to know the answer here, because I can’t imagine such a simple thing causing a re-evaluation of an engagement.

“He wasn’t going to fulfill his promise to me.”

Damn it all. I wish I could remember her name. This seems like the kind of conversation you should be having that involves statements like “What did he promise you, Ester?”

But I needn’t worry. She’s going to tell me anyway. Her voice lowers, as if she’s telling me a deep, dark secret, although I suspect by the way Mom isn’t hanging on her every word that this is old news to everyone but me.

“He wasn’t going to buy me a house in King William Estates. I mean, I’m sure he thought he would. Someday. But there was no way he was going to afford it on his salary, and that was before the market started to jump the way it has.”

“So you called off your wedding because of a house?”

The swanky houses in that area of St. John’s might be nice, but there are better places to call home.

Here we go. Mom is tugging on my arm. “It was so nice to see you again, Irene. Thank you so much for coming.”

But I’m not giving up that easy. And Irene? How the hell did I think that started with an E?

Turns out Irene has a bit of fight in her too, because she’s ignoring Mom as well as I am.

“Not just because of a house, Jillian. Because of a lack of potential for a decent future for me and any others that might come along. It’s easy for you. You might be marrying a construction worker, but he has options. He could go back to being a lawyer any time he felt like it.”

“Excuse me?”

What was this nonsense?

“Oh look,” Mom is saying, tugging harder on my arm. “Ingrid is waving to you.”

Ingrid. My best friend and maid-of-honour whom Mom warned me earlier not to spend the entire shower “ensconced” in conversation with because it would be rude to the guests. Now she’s doing her best to get me to the other side of the room.

There’s something rotten happening here, and my mother is the root cause, I’m sure.

“Mother, care to tell me what that was about?”

“Excuse me, darling. I have to go check on the caterers to make sure everyone is topped up before you start opening your gifts. Go talk to Ingrid for a few minutes and then we’ll get started.”

God damn it all. What has my mother been saying about Evan? I have a sneaking suspicion that by the end of this afternoon we are not going to be on speaking terms. Crap. I hate drama. I particularly hate drama with my mother. And now a month from the wedding it looks like drama is exactly what’s on the menu.

“You look like you need a drink,” Ingrid says, reaching me before I get to her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all, unless you consider premeditated matricide a problem.”

“What’s Laura done now?” Ingrid links her arm in mine and leads me towards the nearest tray of wine.

“I think she’s lying about Evan and telling people he’s a lawyer.”

As usual, Ingrid doesn’t have my degree of indignation. Instead she laughs. “Sounds like your mother to me.”

“It’s not funny. I thought she liked Evan.”

“I’d say she adores him. But that doesn’t mean she’s not going to be her normal self. Appearances matter to her. You know this by now.”

“I don’t care what I know. All I know is that I’m not going to have her make Evan out to be someone he’s not. Which by extension makes me someone I’m not.”

I take a deep drink of the cool Riesling and ponder how I’m going to handle this. Fifteen-year-old Jillian would have left the room and cried in private. Twenty-five-year-old Jillian would have caused a scene. But now I just feel tired. Angry, but tired. I don’t want to fight with Mom. Honestly, I’m a little out of practice. We haven’t had cross words since I met Evan. I thought we’d reached a point where we were going to accept each other. Seems I was wrong.

A round of applause breaks my train of thought. As if to mess with my mind even more, there’s Mom rushing up to greet Evan, who’s standing in the doorway of the dining room, a huge bouquet of roses in every colour imaginable in hand.

“She planned this,” Ingrid says. “So she can’t dislike him if she told him to be here at precisely 3:35 with flowers for you. If she was trying to hide him away, she wouldn’t have brought him into the lion’s den.”

Whatever moment of insight Ingrid might be trying to convey, I’m not listening. I’m just glad to see him. The anger that threatened to spill out of me is tamed by the sight of him. I never knew I needed a calming presence in my life, until I had one.

“Ladies, allow me to introduce my soon-to-be son, Evan.” Mom is fawning over him like he’s the best thing since sliced bread and it’s making me mad. This room of people that believe he’s something he’s not. And he’s not helping matters one iota by looking as good as he does. Come on, what kind of guy can get away with looking that great in a pair of cords and a cable knit sweater that’ve lived in his closet for at least ten years? 

The legion of old biddies and prissy cousins are practically cracking their necks to get a good look at him. Despite my crankiness at Mom and the whole event in general, there’s no denying the tingle I get as he meets my gaze. A cocky smile comes across his face and he strides towards me.

“Sorry to crash your soirée,” he says.

“You’re not sorry at all,” I counter just before he drops the roses in Ingrid’s arms and delivers a kiss that might have the older ladies in need of a defibrillator.

“You’re not mad I came?”

“Are you kidding? I’m wondering how I can get out of opening presents and run away with you, never t to endure another hoity-toity society event again.”

“Going that well, is it?”

Now I’ve got a problem. There’s no way I’m hurting his feelings by telling him my mother has chosen to embellish his credentials. But I also don’t lie to him. At least I haven’t yet. But there’s a time and place for everything, and right now, avoidance is the best course of action.

“As well as any event planned by Mom can go when it involves this crowd.”

“It’ll all be over soon,” he whispers in my ear. “You won’t have to endure this anymore.” He chuckles. “Well, maybe at least once more when there’s a baby shower.”

“Don’t kid. If we ever have kids we’re moving to Rome as soon as we find out.”

He laughs but I’m serious. I can’t handle my parents in parental mode. God only knows what sort of crazy they’ll morph into should they become grandparents.

Y
ou know that adage, let sleeping dogs lie? That’s my normal modus operandi when it comes to Mom. But I couldn’t sleep at all last night. It didn’t matter that Mom was perfectly nice to Evan for the remainder of the shower, or that she gave him a big hug and kiss before we left the hotel, his truck loaded down with gifts. I couldn’t watch anything she did without wondering if it was an act. So here I am, walking through Bannerman Park with a coffee in hand, my feet crunching the fine layer of frost from a not-so-freak early June chill (which is why I’m getting married in July, not June!), going to ask my mother why she’s ashamed of Evan. This is not going to be a good morning.

Maybe it’s because she’s a surgeon that my mother is so damn meticulous about her schedule. But I know that at 8:45 on a Monday morning I can find her sitting in the sunroom (she calls it a conservatory), a full French press of coffee on the table beside her, and a stack of medical journals dog-eared and full of sticky tabs. That’s what really gets me about Mom. For all of her class-centred views and desire to be part of the townie elite, she’s the smartest person I know. And I know plenty of smart people. I’m a university prof with a PhD. But Dr. Laura Carew leaves them all in the dirt.