He was here—the take-charge man with the arresting silvery gray eyes who had already commandeered her lunch hour, and had her thinking about him off and on most of the day. Caroline pushed away from her laptop computer and sat back in her chair. “You’re kidding.”
Sela propped a hand on the voluptuous curve of her hip. “You only wish I was kidding.”
Why did the wealthy always have to be so eccentric? Caroline wondered. Because they could….
“Would you like me to tell them you’re too busy to see them?” Sela asked.
“No.” Caroline sighed, thinking. If they were this determined, they’d find some way to see her. At least this confrontation, if that was what it was, would be private. There would be talk enough when word got out she had turned down the job, and speculation why—which, as a courtesy, she would not answer. Caroline went back to her laptop and finished updating her To Do list for the day, checking off all the items she had completed thus far. “Just give me a moment, and have them all come in. And, Sela, while they are here, hold my calls.”
“Will do.”
A minute later, all four of her guests trooped in. Well, Caroline amended silently, taking a moment to study her uninvited guests. Jack strode in, looking every bit as reluctant to be there as she was to have him. His mother, Patrice, was every bit as blonde and petite and elegant as the photos that always appeared in the paper. And she smelled incredible, as if she were wearing one of the signature scents she had been famous for before she sold her business. She was on the arm of a dapper white-haired gentleman, who also looked to be in his early sixties. A little girl who was all tomboy followed. The color of her dark brown bob matched Jack’s. She wore a backward baseball cap, T-shirt and overall shorts, snow-white cotton athletic socks and dirty sneakers. She had a fluffy, and quite large, golden retriever loping at her side. Not on a leash, Caroline noted, but then, at least for the moment, the dog did not appear to need one. It looked intent on staying close to its mistress.
“We’ll cut straight to the chase,” Patrice said regally, after quickly and expertly making introductions. “I understand you’ve refused to plan my wedding to Dutch—and I want to know why!”
Jack regarded Caroline with a poker face—except for his silver-gray eyes. They were pleading for her not to give him away.
It would serve you right, she thought, if I did.
“Please help us,” Dutch Ambrose said.
Maddie stopped petting her dog, long enough to look up. “Can Bounder be in the wedding, too?” Her big blue-gray eyes danced with delight at the idea.
Caroline imagined the little tomboy walking down the aisle with a basket of flowers in her hands, the big beribboned dog beside her, and felt a seismic shift inside her—the increasingly loud ticking of her biological clock. The familiar longing for a little girl of her own, and the deeper, more elemental need to have someone, something, in her life—beside the business she had spent the past two years building—to love.
Aware this little girl was everything she had ever imagined in a daughter of her own, and more, Caroline told herself to be reasonable—not romantic. And the reality was she was still running a business and needed to concentrate on that, rather than her deep-seated, private longings.
Feeling calmer, she lifted a hand and pasted on the brisk businesslike smile that had soothed many a frantic bridal party.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves here.” Boy, are we getting ahead of ourselves. Imagining what it would be like to have a child just as adorable as Maddie, as my own….
Jack cleared his throat and broke in. “I tried explaining to Mom that it just wasn’t going to work out. You and I—” he looked at Caroline with a meaning only she could read “—we’re just not on the same page.”
“So avoid her!” Patrice fumed, disapproving. She turned to her son and said impatiently, “I never said I wanted you involved in the planning of my wedding, anyway. You’re the one who insisted on paying for it!”
“And it would be my pleasure,” Jack reiterated with what seemed to be sincerity, Caroline noted. It was his turn to look distressed. “I just don’t understand why the nuptials have to be this month.”
This month? Caroline thought, a little shocked. April was already half over!
“When you get to be our age, you’ll understand time is not something to be wasted,” Dutch cut in with a wink and a grin.
Patrice smiled back at Dutch. She grasped his hand, looking up at him. “Especially with the two of us,” Patrice said quietly, with a meaningful expression. She squeezed Dutch’s hand once again.
Abruptly, silence fell.
Caroline, who was usually pretty attuned to these things, felt something did seem to be odd about this match. And that was as off-putting for her as it apparently was for Jack.
And for them to be trying to tie the knot in less than two weeks … Something was definitely strange about his. No wonder Jack was trying to stop it. He must feel something was just a little off, too.
Telling herself that it was her job to arrange weddings, not lives, Caroline cleared her throat, as well. If Patrice and Dutch wanted to marry for reasons of compatibility and companionship, as she was one day wont to do, if at all, then that was their business and no one else’s.
Especially since Caroline knew better than anyone that True Love simply was not fated to happen for everyone.
Some people, like her, had one shot at big romance, if they were lucky, and if that failed … well, odds were it wouldn’t happen again.
That didn’t mean a person couldn’t be happy and pursue other dreams, like owning their own business, or one day adopting a child who wouldn’t otherwise have a home, as her mother had, and she planned to do when the time was right.
“A wedding in April is tough to arrange, even a year in advance.”
“For anyone else, probably,” Patrice concurred, one successful businesswoman to another. “For you? Honey, we’ve heard you work miracles.”
CAROLINE WASN’T SURE how it happened. One minute she was standing there explaining why she couldn’t take on the Gaines–Ambrose wedding, the next she was agreeing to have dinner with the family at Jack’s place the following evening. They would pay her for the consult, of course, to discuss other options for the family.
To her relief, once that was set, they all left as unexpectedly as they had arrived.
As soon as the coast was clear, Sela came back in to ask with her customary frankness, “Why did you agree to that?”
There were pluses and minuses to having an assistant who was the same age her own mother would have been, who often viewed herself as the replacement to the mom Caroline had lost to illness when she was eighteen. The plus was that she had someone to act as a parent to her when she still needed one. The minus was that she sometimes found herself explaining things she would rather not have, to the veteran mother of five grown children, grandmother to eight, and full-time arbiter of love.
Caroline sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
Sela studied her over the rim of the folder in her arms. “It had something to do with Jack Gaines, didn’t it?”
“Of course not!” Caroline successfully fought back a flush of embarrassment.
To no avail—she still didn’t fool the woman who had seen her through the tumultuous aftermath of her failed engagement and the beginning of her business. “The little girl, then,” Sela persisted gently.
That assertion, Caroline noted, was a little closer to the mark. “Maddie was everything I would ever want in a daughter.” And it wasn’t just her short cap of dark brown hair and expressive little face, or her big blue-gray