Sealed with a promise (28 page)

  “Whose birthday?”

  “Tyler’s. That was Pickett on the phone. I’m supposed to ask you, instead of going out to dinner, would you be willing to go to Aunt Lilly Hale’s family reunion? It’s like a Christmas party she throws every year.”

  “Tonight?” All the plans he had made for an intimate dinner to set the mood, a little wine, and then back to Emmie’s cottage, disappeared. He couldn’t think of much he wanted less than to make conversation with people he didn’t know in the huge formal rooms of Lilly Hale’s house. He wanted Emmie. Needing to have her was getting close to an obsession.

  “Yes. She wants me to meet her there.” She looked at his face, which he knew wasn’t radiating joy. “Forget it. I’m sure a family party of people you don’t know doesn’t sound like a fun time. You don’t have to go.” She started to scoot of his lap. “I hope you’ll excuse me from dinner with you.”

  “Wait a minute,” he anchored her hips in place. “Yeah, I’d rather have an evening alone with you-a chance for us to talk-yeah, talk, not the other four-letter word. But if this is what you want to do…”

  “Usually, it wouldn’t be. But I’ve seen so little of Pickett lately. We’ve talked on the phone, but it isn’t the same.”

  “This isn’t for Pickett, it’s for you? You want to see her?” Emmie nodded. He gently helped her off his lap. “Stand up for a second. I need to get my cell phone. I left it in my jacket pocket.” He punched in numbers and in a distant part of the house, Emmie’s phone warbled. A look of confusion appeared between her brows. “Your phone is ringing,” he told her. “You left it in the bathroom.”

  Emmie padded in her stockinged feet through the kitchen and the bedroom. She had to turn on the light in the bathroom. The phone was on the lip of the tub.

  What kind of game was Caleb playing now? She was asking for a sudden change in plans, and she’d been a little disappointed when Caleb wouldn’t go along, but not surprised. Blount had never wanted to do anything that was her idea-blowing her off for the faculty dinner wasn’t out of character-she should have expected it. And he’d sneered more than once at what he called her “country cousins.”

  She and Pickett had sworn they would keep their friendship strong, and if that meant going off and leaving Caleb, she would.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Is this Emmie?” Caleb enquired, for all the world as if he hadn’t expected she would answer her own phone.

  Emmie swallowed a surprised laugh and played along. “Yes, it is.” Phone to her ear, she started back to the living room.

  “This is, your friend, Caleb.”

  “Yes, Caleb.” Emmie suppressed another giggle and added with dry understatement, “I had guessed it was you.”

  “There’s a party at Miss Lilly Hale’s house tonight. I’d like to go, but I don’t have a date. I was wondering if you’d go with me?”

  The sheer sweetness stopped her in the doorway to the living room. If he’d said, “Okay, I’ll go with you,” never in a million years would she have trusted that he was doing anything but placating her. His back was to her. He was touching items on her desk in one of the few aimless gestures she’d seen him make. “Yes,” she whispered past the yearning that threatened to close off her throat. “I’d love to.”

  He must have known she was there, but he kept his back to her. “Do you want me to pick you up?”

  Emmie thought they were done. Why was he carrying it further? “Pick me up? You’re standing in my living room.” She closed her phone. “Caleb, what is this about?”

  He turned around, clipping the phone to his belt. “It’s called multitasking. We’ll go to the party. We’ll go because you want to see Pickett. But I want it to be perfectly clear- you’re going with
me
because I just asked you for a date, and you accepted. Even if you spend the whole evening talking to Pickett-this counts as our second date.”

  “Sit tight.” Caleb pushed the gear lever into park and shut off the engine. “I’ll come around and get you.” It wasn’t a suggestion. She had asked for this. Put that man anywhere near a four-wheel drive vehicle, and every alpha trait he had came to the fore. He pressed the latch of her seat belt before she could reach it. In the glow of the delayed turn-off headlights, she thought she caught a trace of a smirk.

  He opened her door.

  At least a token protest was called for. “I’m perfectly capable of climbing down myself.”

  “I know you are. Lean forward.” He grasped her waist. Emmie was used to the casual strength with which he picked her up, but he didn’t set her on her feet. Instead he pulled her flush with his body.

  Her breasts brushed his chest as he slowly let her down.

  “You’re using this as an excuse to cop a feel!”

  “Right.”

  “You’re taking advantage of me.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I thought you were doing the ‘man has to be in charge’ thing.”

  He tugged one of her curls. “Think multitasking.” The corners of his Brad Pitt lips dug deeper into his cheeks. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  Golden oblongs of light streamed the promise of welcome and warmth from every window of Aunt Lilly Hale’s house into December’s early dark. Emmie pulled her coat closer. Damp wind chased leaves across the sandy driveway. Because they were late, Caleb had to park almost at the highway.

  He bent and put his lips to her ear. “Look.” He pointed to the edge of the field where a drainage ditch divided the field from the road. “Deer. Five of them.”

  “Aunt Lilly Hale says that during hunting season they actually come onto her lawn, right up to the house, in daylight. They know no one will shoot that close to the house.”

  One of the larger deer raised its head. In less than one second they vanished so completely it was difficult to believe they had been there.

  Emmie slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were a little cool, the bones tiny. His eyes prickled. He had been the sexual aggressor, and yeah, aggressor was the right word. He’d gone after her without a lot of concern for the impact he would have on her life. She had always responded, but except for the beginning when she’d grabbed his arm and dragged him into the small office, she had never touched him first. An odd pride filled his chest that somewhere in this day she had given him this much trust.

  Emmie led him around the house to a back door. “Nobody uses the front door.”

  “What do you mean? Everybody used it at the breakfast.”

  “That wasn’t a family gathering. That was social. Different rules.” Emmie led him up a short flight of brick steps and onto a screened porch. Without knocking, she opened a glass door decorated with a spray of pine boughs gathered with a large red bow.

  They entered to cries of, “Hey, look who’s here,” and an olfactory blast of roasting turkey and sage, tangy cranberry, cinnamon, yeasty rolls, and an oddly refreshing resiny smell coming from pine boughs stuck everywhere. There was also the smell of a lot of people. American people.

  Every place had a smell, and the people in a country also had a discreet, recognizable odor. He’d left Afghanistan months ago but he was still was surprised sometimes to smell a bunch of Americans in one place.

  “Don’t get hung up on expectations,” he’d told trainees. “Once you’re inserted, it’s never the way you thought it would be, and even if you’ve been there before, it’s never the way it was.”

  He knew better, but he’d fallen for his expectations.

  He’d anticipated a low-key, decorous gathering. Not this. The kitchen was a surging mass of people, colors, sounds, and smells, and calls for consultation shouted above the noise of a mixer.

  Underneath it all was the smell of the house. He remembered it from before. There was a certain smell all old houses had in common. Old wood, old wool, old dust-no matter how clean. This one had that smell. But he also thought it smelled like stability, lives lived to completion, and kindness, sweet and dark and rich and complex.

  At the stove in conversation with other cooks, Miss Lilly Hale, a large poinsettia-printed apron over her sweater and slacks, heard the commotion and turned around. “Do-Lord, I’m so glad you’re here!” She held out her arms in clear expectation of a hug.

  Do- Lord had one of those “where the hell am I?” moments. Everybody had them. They could be scary seconds of disorientation when waking up in a strange place. Or Zen moments in which the juxtaposition of the familiar into the unfamiliar produces an awakening when you suddenly find it remarkable that
you
are
here.
It could totally derail one’s focus, which usually wasn’t good. It could also make perception hyperclear. A person suddenly knew how remarkable, special, and singular this particular instant is.

  Of all the things he’d ever done, hugging an old lady wasn’t one. He wasn’t sure what he should get hold of her by. He stepped closer, and her arms came around his middle and squeezed while he tried to reason where he could safely put his hands. Lilly Hale Sessoms was a substantial woman, so he was surprised at how little she felt, and how fragile. And peculiarly soft. Not flabby. But like some crucial binder that keeps flesh together was breaking down. He didn’t dare squeeze her. He settled for placing his hands lightly on her shoulder blades until she let go of him.

  As she pulled away her gray curls brushed the underside of his chin, and his throat tightened around a strange lump. And the world settled back into ordinary reality.

  After a few exchanges of ritual greeting phrases, Lilly Hale twinkled, so obviously sizing him up it was impossible to take offense, and said, “I expect you’re a very useful young man.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that I am.”

  “I need someone to set up the children’s table in the family room. I have to leave it until the last minute. Come with me.”

  She led him through the crowd spilling into the wide hall. Pickett’s sisters Grace and Sarah Bea and their husbands were there, along with others he had met at the wedding. Occasionally, she stopped to introduce him.

  “Charles,” she said, to a twitchy, hunted-looking young man of about sixteen. “Chief Dulaude is going to set up the tables for me. Will you help him?”

  In a few minutes he understood why Miss Lilly Hale had assigned him to the table detail and designated Charles as his helper. In short order, three teenage boys who had been hanging out with teen-angst casualness in the hall, unwilling to align themselves with the children in the family room or the older adults in the parlors, appeared. Two he recognized were Grace’s sons, and one, he wasn’t sure. That they wanted to hang out with a SEAL was clear. That they didn’t want to align themselves with Charles, equally clear.

  If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was get a bunch of young guys working together. “Hey, men.” Do-Lord waved them over. “Give us a hand.”

  “Emmie! You’re here!” Pickett carried a stack of linen napkins. She dropped them on a table and held out her arms.

  “Pickett!”

  Pickett held her at arm’s length. “Wait a minute-I’ve got to look at you! Turn around. Oh, my, you look terrific!”

  Emmie was glad she’d changed into her new charcoal blue slacks and lavender-blue woven silk sweater. She looked good. She was dressed just right, and there was nothing so satisfying, she suddenly discovered, as sincere compliments from a good woman friend.

  Pickett’s eyes were wide with wonder. “Emmie, what
happened?
’

  Emmie laughed. “I finally noticed there was something missing from my life. Me.”

  Once the tables were set up and covered with white linen cloths, and chairs were fetched from various places around the house, they were summoned to the large double parlor where a grand piano had been opened.

  Lilly Hale called for attention. “James,” she announced indicating a scholarly-looking man in his fifties, “is going to read us the Christmas story from Luke. Then I’ve persuaded Hannah and Emmie to sing.”

  Children were shushed, and James opened the Bible and began to read. “And it came to pass in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.”

  “And they came and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.”

  Charles took his seat at the piano. Emmie and Hannah, a dark-haired girl about fourteen, stood in the curve of the piano. Emmie squeezed Hannah’s hand and nodded to Charles to begin. For all his youth, from the first notes, Charles played with unmistakable mastery. “Away in a manger…” Over the glistening notes of the piano, voices poured like silk, finding silver curves in the fabric of space-tracing them with their song. The simple joy of allowing music to manifest through them shone in three faces. They knew they had been given a glimpse of the mystery from which all life springs.

  “Emmie,” Aunt Lilly Hale directed, “I want you and Do-Lord to sit at an adult table. Pickett, you too. There are enough adults to supervise the children. Tyler will be fine with them.”

  In the double parlors, furniture had been pushed back and two dinner tables spread with snowy linen. To accommodate all the diners, chairs from every corner of the house had been pressed into service to augment the regular dining chairs-another job assigned to Do-Lord and his crew.

  Caleb set his plate beside Emmie’s, held her chair, and then Pickett’s. He was ready to take his own seat when the doorbell rang.

  “My goodness! That’s the front door. Do-Lord, you’re up.” Lilly Hale said from her seat at the head of the table. “Would you answer it please?”

  On the threshold stood Charlotte Calhoun and Vicky. As soon as she saw him, Vicky threw her arms around his waist. “You
are
here! I told Mother you would be.” She pulled back, smiling tremulously. “I told. It wasn’t fair for you to get in trouble when it was me.”