Once Upon a Proposal (10 page)

The rest of the grounds—classrooms, dining hall and the partially-covered outdoor training areas—were silent with only the safety lights flicking on then off when they walked past. They passed through the front gate, which Bobbie locked behind them. Gabe's truck gleamed wetly where it was parked in the roomy parking lot beneath one of the light poles. She headed toward it, trying not to think anything of his light touch at the small of her back as they crossed the lot.

He'd touched her the same way when they'd danced at Fiona's birthday party, too. Probably just a habit of his. A gentleman and all that.

They reached the truck, and he unlocked the passenger door and helped her up onto the high seat. She gathered her coat around her but he didn't move away and close the door. She looked at him. His eyes were shadowed and mysterious in the light as he looked back.

Her heart suddenly beat a little faster. Her breath suddenly
felt a little shorter and then he leaned closer…and reached across her. She heard the safety belt snap into place and realized all he'd done was fasten her in. Like a child.

She swallowed that unpalatable thought as he finally closed the door and walked around the truck to his side and got in.

They drove back to the hospital and her waiting car with only the low sound of music from the radio and the occasional swipe of his windshield wiper blades against the lingering drizzle to break the silence. Finally, by the time the hospital was in sight, that silence felt like corkscrews tightening around her nerves. “I hope your ex-wife won't be upset about the costumes we came up with for Todd and Lisette for school tomorrow.”

His thumb slowly tapped the steering wheel. “I don't care if she is or not. At least the kids are happy with what they'll be wearing. They definitely weren't thrilled with the store-bought getups that Steph got them.” She felt the glance he slid her way. “Don't worry about it.”

“I just don't want to be the cause of any problems.”

“I'll worry about Steph. I'm happy the kids have been content to be with
me
. Something else I have to thank you for.”

“That's not true.”

He gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah, it is. Believe me. So…you didn't say what you'll be dressing up as tomorrow, but I heard Lisette laughing about it when you and she were in your room while Todd and I cleaned up the kitchen.”

“Oh, right.” She looked out the side window. Did he think it was immature to dress up? “Pippi Longstocking.” He was so silent that she finally looked over at him. “Silly, I know, but I've got a few things that'll work for the clothes without much effort, and the only thing I'll have to worry about are getting the braids to stick out from the sides of my head.”

“Considering your curly hair, I almost expected a Little Orphan Annie.”

“I've already done that one once.”

“You dress up every year?”

“Pretty much. Either there's a party to go to, or where I'm working requires it.” She gave him a quick look. “Like this year.”

“Do you mind? Get tired of it?”

She thought about denying it. But what would be the point. “Not usually. When's the last time you dressed up for Halloween?”

He slowed to turn into the hospital parking lot. “A long time ago.”

She plucked at the folds of her coat. “Not since you were a kid, I suppose.”

He exhaled. “Steph dragged me to a party when we were dating. I dressed up then. Does that count?”

Suddenly wishing that she hadn't brought up the matter at all, she pulled her purse onto her lap to root through it for her car keys. “Sure. It counts. Um…what—”

“Zorro. And yes, I felt like a damn idiot wearing the mask.”

She managed a smile for him. “I'm sure you were very dashing.” And his date had probably looked like some svelte bombshell in whatever costume she'd worn. Bobbie knew well enough not to voice
that
question. And fortunately, he'd pulled up behind her parked car, anyway.

Her keys jingled when she pulled them out of her purse before pushing open the door. She waved him back. “Don't get out. I'm fine.”

He subsided in his seat. “Thanks again for everything.”

“You don't have to thank me.” She looked up at the tall hospital building. “It's probably too late to go in and see her again.”

His hand slid up her spine, not stopping until he reached the nape of her neck. He squeezed gently. “Probably. Come and see her tomorrow. She'd get a kick out of Pippi.”

She didn't know why she suddenly felt tears burning deep behind her eyes, but she did.

Which meant that she needed to get out of his vehicle and into hers before she completely lost her composure. “I'll probably do that. Maybe after my shift at the Bean.” She cleared her throat. “Don't forget to take Fiona the signature card from the bank so she can get another signer on her checking account.”

“I won't.” He could have sounded amused that she'd reminded him of something that he, himself, had suggested in the first place, but he didn't. He just pressed his fingers gently against the back of her neck again, and then his hand moved away. “Do you want me to follow you home?”

“No!” She swallowed and slipped out of the vehicle. “No,” she said more normally. “I am a big girl, you know. I can make the drive on my own.” And if he followed her back to her place, what were the odds that she'd be able to keep herself from inviting him in?

Not good. Not good at all.

And then he would probably be uncomfortable, and try to let her down without hurting her too-young feelings.

“Drive carefully, then.”

She nodded and closed the truck door and went to her own car. She'd just fit the key in the ignition when she realized he'd gotten out of his truck anyway, and was looking down at her through her window.

She rolled it down. “Did I forget something?”

He hunkered beside the car, folding his arms on top of the opened window. “Just for the record,
no.
I'm not still in love with my ex-wife.”

Her jaw went loose and her insides suddenly went soft. “I didn't—”

“—ask. I know you didn't.” His gaze roved over her face. “Strangely enough, I still wanted you to be clear on that point.”

She felt breathless. “Okay.”

He nodded once. “Okay.” Then he nodded again, straightened enough to lean inside the car, and pressed an achingly slow kiss to her lips. A kiss that said all too clearly that he knew she was definitely not a child. And when he finally pulled away, she could only sit here, dazed and silent. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

He thumped his hand on the roof of her car and was moving back to his truck before she could shake herself out of her trance.

Then his truck slowly moved further away in the parking lot and when she saw his brake lights go on and stay on, she realized that he wasn't going anywhere until he was certain that she was safely on her way home.

Fresh warmth spread through her. The kind of warmth that came not just from passion, but from something else entirely.

Something even more dangerous.

Her hand shook as she started up the car and backed out of the parking space. His truck was still sitting there, so she inched past him. Only when she was driving in front of him did he begin driving again, too.

He stayed behind her until their routes home took them in opposite directions. When she heard the staccato toot of his horn as he turned off, she rolled her window down enough to stick her hand out in a little wave.

And then he was gone, his taillights disappearing into the night.

But that warmth stayed inside her all the way home.

I
t took hours for Bobbie to get to sleep that night. And then when she did sleep, it was only to wake up tangled in her sheets and sweating from dreams about Gabe. Intimate dreams.

The kind of dreams that had you jerking out of your sleep from sheer pleasure, only to realize that it was
just
a dream.

She was due into work at seven-thirty in the morning. And even though she'd set her alarm for the usual ninety minutes earlier, she dragged herself out of bed with an extra hour to spare on top of it.

Staying in bed, trying to sleep, thinking about the man she was engaged-in-name-only to, was just too torturous.

So she took the dogs out for a chilly, dark walk around the block, fixed herself a yogurt and fruit smoothie, and set about transforming herself into some recognizable form of Pippi Longstocking. Once she was finished, she decided she hadn't done too badly.

The yellow dress that she'd sewn red patches all over was really a long T-shirt, but as long as she was careful not to bend over, the hem of it managed to cover the tops of the red and green thigh-high knit stockings that she'd found from a few Christmases ago. And once she'd wrapped enough wiry pipe cleaners around a red headband, she was able to work her two braids onto the wires so they were sticking out oddly from the sides of her head. A dozen freckles painted onto her cheeks with an eyeliner pencil and she was good to go, even if she did earn a few whines from the dogs when she gave them a last pat before leaving the house.

She started to head to the coffee shop, but since she was running early for once, she decided halfway there to face the music with her mother. So she drove to the house that Cornelia had moved them to not long after Bobbie's father had died.

Bobbie had only hazy memories of that first house. It had been much larger and grander. But the place where Cornelia now lived was the place Bobbie had called home and she let herself in without even knocking.

Despite the early hour, her mother was exactly where Bobbie had expected her to be: sitting at the breakfast table with a pot of tea and the morning paper.

She glanced up when Bobbie entered. “Bobbie, dear! What a surprise.” She got up to take the jacket that Bobbie was shrugging out of. “Look at you. You've outdone yourself this year. Is everything all right?”

Bobbie let out a breath. “One day I'm going to pop in on you and you're not going to automatically think something is wrong.”

Cornelia frowned as she draped the jacket over the back of a chair. “I don't always think that.”

“Don't you?” Bobbie bit her lip. “I'm sorry. It's just been a bit of a day.” Or two or three.

“It's not even seven o'clock in the morning,” Cornelia
chided gently. “And not that I'm averse to seeing you at any time, but this
is
a bit of a surprise.” She tugged gently on the end of one of Bobbie's gravity-defying braids. “So…what's wrong?”

Bobbie let out a breath and sat down. “Fiona had a heart attack yesterday.”

“Good heavens.” Cornelia touched the gold pendant hanging around her neck and sat back down in her chair. She reached across the table to cover Bobbie's fidgeting fingers with her own. “I'm so sorry to hear that. Is she all right?”

“She will be. But that's only part of what I need to tell you.” Maybe it was the scare with Fiona or having already gone through a version of this conversation with Tommi, but Bobbie managed to condense matters more than usual when she was faced with telling her always collected mother about her marriage-bound pretense with Gabe.

When she was finished, Cornelia rose again from the break fast table and moved across the kitchen to look out the window above the sink.

Even at this early hour, her pale-blond hair was pulled back in its usual chignon and she was dressed impeccably in a soft salmon-colored sweater set that perfectly matched her narrow slacks. “Tell me the truth, Bobbie.
Were
you already engaged to this man when Harry told me you were before?”

“No!” Bobbie pushed off her chair and went to stand next to her mother. She could see faint reflections of themselves in the window pane. Cornelia, tall and slender and fair and more beautiful than most women half her age. And Bobbie. Short and rounder in places than she liked, with her dark hair currently confined in ridiculous, wired braids. “If I'd intended to lie to you about any of this, I wouldn't be here now.”

Her mother sighed a little and slid her arm around the shoulders of Bobbie's red-and-yellow patchwork dress. “Are you in love with this man?”

“No!”

Cornelia lifted a brow. “Are you certain?”

Bobbie swallowed. “Yes. No. I don't know. I only met him a few weeks ago.”

“And look where you are,” her mother countered quietly. “You jumped into an engagement with Lawrence after only a month,” she reminded. “I don't want to see you hurt again.”

“I'll be fine. And
someone
has to help him, Mom. You'd be appalled at his ex-wife's attitude.”

“Stephanie Walker. I've met her and her husband, actually, at a HuntCom function last year.”

“I told Gabe this was a small city,” she muttered.

Cornelia patted her shoulder. “She was perfectly lovely, actually, though maybe a tad uptight about her husband's career. I find it hard to believe that she wouldn't see reason when it comes to the custody of her children.”

“She called me
the help
the first time we met.”

“Mmm. Unfortunate, of course. And I'm well aware how communications between former spouses can deteriorate beyond all measure. I'm sure you were just too close to the blast range.”

Bobbie wasn't sure of any such thing, but she wasn't going to argue the point with her mother. For one thing, she hadn't been shocked right out of her gourd and insisted Bobbie get herself immediately uninvolved—which had been her first reaction when Bobbie had told her she'd planned to marry Lawrence.

“Colin—that's Gabe's father—said he knew you, too.”

“Colin Gannon. Of course.” Cornelia nodded. She smiled faintly. “Handsome devil. His wife is an interesting woman, as I remember. She didn't strike me as particularly maternal.”

“That's one way of putting it. So you're not, um, going to disown me or anything?”

Cornelia tsked. “Where do you get these silly ideas?” She
pressed a kiss to Bobbie's forehead. “I love you, darling. I just want to see you happy.”

If it weren't for knowing that her involvement with Gabe was one of necessity rather than emotion, she would have been able to say that she was perfectly happy.

So she just smiled and hoped her mother would take that as answer enough.

Knowing that the morning traffic would be thickening, Bobbie left soon after, and the rest of the day flew by quickly. The shop was busy, and when she wasn't making coffees, she was fielding calls from Cheryl at the agency.

By the time Bobbie got off shift at four, she was feeling exhausted. But the sky was clear for once, so she walked the few doors down to a local floral shop and bought a pot of yellow daisies. They were cheerful-looking enough to give her a fresh shot of energy that carried her back to her car and across town to see Fiona.

Gabe had left a message on her cell phone while she'd been working that he had to run out to Ballard to finish the consultation he hadn't made it to at all the previous day. He'd also visited the bank for his grandmother and the paperwork was still with Fiona. He'd ended the no-nonsense call with “See you later, Pippi.”

There was nothing romantic about the message.

No undercurrents in his voice that told her anything other than what his words conveyed.

She'd still listened to it five times in the office at Between the Bean during her lunch break. Doreen, dressed all in pink organza as Glinda the Good Witch, had finally stuck her head around the office door. She'd jabbed her wand—a silver-painted dowel with a foil-wrapped star stuck on the end of it—toward Bobbie. “Just call the man back already if you want to hear his voice so darn bad.”

Bobbie had flushed and turned off the phone before fin
ishing her peanut butter sandwich. She hadn't called Gabe, knowing he would be busy enough without having to answer a call from her. What would have been the point of her interrupting him, other than to tell him she couldn't get him out of her head?

But she hadn't erased the message.

And as she drove to the hospital, she couldn't help but wonder if she'd run into him there. She also couldn't help but worry how she would keep up the pretense of their relationship in front of Fiona. The last thing Bobbie wanted to do was cause the woman any sort of stress. If she actually believed that romance had bloomed so quickly between Bobbie and her grandson, telling her that it was all for show was bound to be troubling.

As it happened, though, Bobbie needn't have worried about that.

Gabe wasn't in Fiona's room.

His ex-wife and his children, however, were, and while both Todd and Lisette—dressed in the costumes that they'd come up with at Bobbie's the evening before—seemed genuinely pleased to see Bobbie, their mother most definitely wasn't.

She gave Bobbie a glacial look, but moved aside so that Bobbie could place the large, cheery plant on the windowsill, which was a little crowded, thanks to a big crystal vase overflowing with an amazing orchid bouquet. Bobbie then went to Fiona's side to kiss her cheek. Her dear friend was sitting up right in the bed. “You're getting quite a garden in here,” she told her.

Fiona smiled and patted her cheek. “The daisies are lovely, dear. So bright and cheerful. Thank you.”

“We brought the orchids,” Lisette piped in. She'd completed her swan costume with a white tutu from home and looked quite the young ballerina as she struck poses around the confining room, despite her mother's quiet words to be still.

Bobbie glanced at the impressive floral display sitting next to her very ordinary daisy plant. She glanced at Gabe's ex-wife and tried to remember that her own mother had claimed the woman was perfectly nice. “They're beautiful.”

Stephanie smiled back, but the effort could have frozen water. She brushed a languid hand down her perfectly cut, deep-red sheath dress. “The children insisted on visiting their grandmother before getting out of their costumes.”

“And I appreciate you bringing them,” Fiona put in, giving Todd a wink.

Stephanie looked marginally warmer. “Yes. Well, now they need to be getting home. Ethan will be home this evening and I'm planning a special dinner.”

Todd grimaced. “I'd rather be trick-or-treating.”

“You're too old for those things,” Stephanie told him. “And it's hardly a safe activity, anyway.”

Bobbie sank her teeth into her tongue to keep from protesting that. Todd was only ten. Lisette, twelve. And if they had adult supervision while visiting a few of the neighborhood houses, what was the harm?

Todd's shoulders drooped a little.

Even though Bobbie had worried that she would upset the former Mrs. Gannon by helping the children find costumes more to their liking than the plastic ghost-sheet and cowboy vest that their mother had purchased, she was glad now that she had.

At least the kids had been able to enjoy their costumes at school.

She returned their hugs when they offered them, and tried to ignore the frost that returned ten-fold to their mother's expression as she did so. Bobbie was almost giddy with relief when the other woman departed without adding any words to the animosity in her eyes.

When they were alone, Bobbie pulled a bag out of her
oversized purse and handed it to Fiona before scooting one of the side chairs closer to the bed.

“What is this?”

“A few toiletries.”

Fiona peered inside, pulling out the comb and the new tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. “Bless you.” She took the comb and dragged it through her short hair.

Bobbie smiled, glad that she'd thought to pick up the few simple items. “There's lotion in there, too, and a few magazines. So, how are you feeling today?”

Fiona grimaced at the wires still coming out from beneath her hospital gown, leading to the machines beside the bed. “Like I'm ready to get out of here.” She pointed with the comb toward a manila folder sitting on the rolling tray that hovered over the foot of the bed. “Hand me that, will you? It's all of the banking information that Gabriel brought me this morning.”

Bobbie handed her the folder, then sat back in the chair again. “Cheryl's called me a half-dozen times today. Everything's going fine at the agency. The graduation for Saturday morning is on course. There's a new crop of pups being turned over from their puppy raisers to the trainers the following Saturday.” That particular event was always held in conjunction with a festive picnic. It was one way of honoring and thanking the raisers for being an important part of the process. “I told her to confirm the times and dates with the caterer for the picnic, and to stop worrying so much.”

Fiona smiled faintly. She set aside her comb, flipped open the folder and pulled out a sheet of paper that she handed to Bobbie. “Sign by the red X there at the bottom.”

Bobbie automatically took the sheet. “For what?”

“To be a signer on the agency's bank accounts.”

Bobbie went still. Alarm inflated inside her belly. “Fiona—”

Fiona held up her hand. “Don't bother arguing with me.”

“But your son should—”

“—nothing. Colin would sooner close the agency's doors than get involved there.”

“Or Gabe—”

“He has enough on his plate.” Fiona waved her hand toward the paper. “You're the one I want. So sign.”

“But Fiona, I don't even
work
for you. Not that way.”