Trading Secrets

by Christine Flynn

  It never entered her mind that the woman standing up with her before a justice of the peace would be the justice’s wife, that the man standing up for the groom would be a total stranger or that she would be saying her vows in a slate-blue business suit to a man she’d never even kissed.

  “Now that the fee is out of the way, do you have the license?” The justice of the peace, a tall, thin gentleman with a rather prominent Adam’s apple peered at Greg over the top of his rimless half-glasses.

  “Right here.”

  Greg removed an envelope from inside his suit jacket. He had picked up the license at the courthouse yesterday when he’d stopped at the hospital to check on Mrs. McNeff and Edna Farber. Three days ago Edna’s stubborn old mule had kicked her in the head after the cantankerous and equally stubborn old woman lost her footing trying to push him out of her garden. Her neighbor had been with her at the time and rushed her to Greg, but he hadn’t been able to bring her around. Fearing hemorrhage and not wanting to wait for the ambulance, he and Joe had raced her to the hospital themselves.

  Paper rustled as Greg handed the document to the lanky, sixty-something Cletus Jasper. The clerk at the courthouse had suggested they call him when Greg had said he was looking for a quick and simple ceremony.

  “Thank you for doing this on such short notice.”

  Mr. Jasper motioned that it was nothing. “Me and the missus do weddings all the time. Done hundreds of ’em over the years. Best part of the job.”

  “If you’ll step over here?” The man’s wife, a pleasant looking woman who reminded Jenny of Mrs. Claus, motioned to a spot in the corner of the antique-filled office off the side of their home. “This won’t take any time at all. Cletus has this down to less than three minutes.”

  The knot in Jenny’s stomach tightened.

  She didn’t know why she felt so nervous. It wasn’t as if she and Greg were really marrying. At least, not in the emotional sense. And it wasn’t until death did them part. Theirs was strictly a marriage of convenience. An arrangement. She and Greg were friends. Nothing more.

  Still, she felt as nervous as a real bride as she glanced from the well-meaning woman to the handsome man at her side. She’d never seen Greg in a suit before, but he wore formality as easily as he did jeans or a lab coat. The charcoal pin-striped fabric turned his eyes more silver than gray, and he wore suspenders rather than a belt. The touch was both trendy and old-fashioned conservative, and though she knew she shouldn’t be thinking such things, made him look incredibly…sexy.

  Her nerves jumped as he threaded his fingers through hers and leaned down to her ear.

  “Smile,” he whispered, his breath warm on her skin. “I’m just marrying you. Not amputating a body part. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

  He lifted his head. In the lean angles of his face she saw nothing but the disarming confidence that always seemed to surround him. That and a certain impatience to get this over with. He had a consultation with Edna Farber’s neurologist in twenty minutes.

  The justice of the peace cleared his throat. His wife stopped smiling at them long enough to motion in the balding older gentleman who apparently attended such nuptials whenever the groom hadn’t brought his own witness.

  Jenny had thought that Greg might ask Joe to stand up with him. She’d realized after she’d thought about it, though, that Greg wouldn’t ask his friend to stand with him for the same reason she hadn’t asked her sister. They were only performing a legality. Friends and family weren’t necessary for moral support and sharing.

  A faux Roman pedestal supporting a bushy fern served as the ceremony site. Standing beside it, Cletus Jasper held a small book and asked Greg to take Jenny’s hands.

  With her fingers trembling slightly in Greg’s firmer grip, the man cleared his throat again.

  “You have come before me and these witnesses today to enter into the union of matrimony. Is there any reason this union should not take place?”

  Short and to the point. They were getting what they’d asked for.

  Greg said, “No.”

  Jenny, staring at the subtle pattern in Greg’s tie, shook her head.

  Apparently satisfied, the sober-looking man then asked Greg if he took her, Jennifer Dawn Baker to be his lawfully wedded wife.

  She heard him say, “I do.”

  “And do you, Jennifer Dawn Baker take Gregory Matthias Reid to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  She glanced up, made it as far as the cleft above his upper lip and murmured, “I do,” too.

  “Do you have the rings?”

  Her eyes met Greg’s. Buying rings hadn’t occurred to either one of them.

  “We aren’t exchanging them,” he said, making it sound as if the subject had been discussed and dismissed.

  “Oh, well, then…” He flipped a page, cleared his throat again. “Do you have anything you want to say to each other?”

  One of Greg’s dark eyebrows arched at her. “Do you?”

  She shook her head, hanging on to his hands more tightly. “Do you?”

  He mirrored her motion, gave her hand a squeeze that almost felt sympathetic and looked back to the man watching them both.

  “We don’t.”

  He flipped another page, glanced at his wife. Mrs. Jasper checked her watch. The surreptitious thumb’s-up she gave him seemed to indicate he was about to set a new record.

  “In that case,” he said, “by the power vested in me by the State of Vermont, County of Caledonia, I now pronounce you man and wife.” He looked to Greg as he closed his book and his wife glanced at her watch again. A smile threatened above the slash of his glasses. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Jenny hadn’t thought about this part. She didn’t know if Greg had, either. But with the three people clearly waiting for them to get on with it, she didn’t have a chance to consider how awkward the moment might have been. Greg let go of her hands to touch her cheek. His expression seemed to say it would only be a moment before this little formality was over as he dipped his head toward hers.

  Her eyes had barely closed when she felt the brush of his lips. They were warm, tender and far softer than they looked. She also felt a jolt of heat that shot from her breasts to her womb and caused her breath to stall in her lungs.

  Greg felt her go still. He went still himself. It was just a kiss, the mere touch of skin to skin, but his heart jerked against his breastbone. When he dragged in the oxygen he suddenly craved, her intoxicating scent came with it.

  Heat smoldered through him, catching him off guard with its intensity, making him lift his head.

  His eyes held the unmistakable confusion in hers as he skimmed his hand to her neck. With his thumb resting at the hollow of her throat, he could feel the erratic beat of her heart. She’d felt that heat, too. He could swear it.

  “Congratulations,” he heard the man beside him say as Mr. Jasper stuck out his hand.

  “Congratulations to you, too, dear,” his wife echoed. “Now, if you’ll just come over here and sign your certificate, the two of you can be on your way.”

  It only took a couple of minutes to dispense with the last of the necessary procedures. With Mr. and Mrs. Jasper wishing them well, and feeling like a hypocrite because the older couple honestly thought they’d just sent another happy bride and groom on their way, Jenny moved ahead of Greg out the door.

  “I think we made their day. Quickest ceremony on record,” he said, watching Jenny as he tucked the folded certificate into his inside jacket pocket. The afternoon sun shimmered in her hair as she glanced toward him.

  Determined to be as unaffected as he apparently had been by what he’d done, Jenny gave him a quick smile.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she replied, reluctant to let him think otherwise. “Are you?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “Sure. Look,” he continued, wondering if he should explain why he’d done what he had, or just let it go. A glance at his watch solved the dilem
ma for him. “I need to see Edna’s neurologist in about five minutes. I want to check on Mrs. McNeff, too. The hospital is less than a mile away. Just drop me off at the front entrance, then meet me there after you go to the office supply place. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  He watched her reach for the handle of the truck’s door. Beating her to it, he opened the door for her and forced his glance from her long legs and strappy high heels as she hiked her slim skirt to climb in.

  When he’d kissed her, it had seemed a whole lot easier to just do what was expected than make a big deal out of something that was as much a custom as the ceremony had been. Easier, anyway, until he’d heard the way her breath had stalled, seen the awareness in her eyes.

  “I’d like to see Mrs. McNeff, too,” she said, glancing at him while she modestly tugged her skirt to her knees. “It won’t take me long to pick up what we need for the office. Why don’t I meet you in her room after you do what you need to do?”

  The regional hospital in the rural little town of St. Johnsbury was small by big-city standards. But it served the scattered communities and villages of the Northeast Kingdom and beyond with much of the latest technology, and provided the sort of advanced care a country doctor needed for his sicker patients. Provided he could get them there in time to utilize their expertise.

  Jenny hadn’t honestly appreciated how critical the availability of such care could be until she’d started working at the clinic. The need for such services wasn’t often, given the relatively small population the clinic served. Yet, as she sat with Mrs. McNeff while waiting for the man she’d just married, she found herself thinking of times when that care had simply been too far away.

  “I’m just so glad it isn’t winter.” Sally McNeff’s seventy-five-year-old mother spoke quietly, her eyes tired, but clearly inquisitive. With her round glasses and her silver hair pulled into its neat bun, she reminded Jenny of a librarian, which she practically was. The woman had owned the town’s only bookstore for over forty years and had probably read every title to ever grace its shelves.

  “It’s such a long way to come here,” she continued, “and I worry about Sally having to drive me if I have to come back every three months like they say. We can certainly wait for a day or two if the roads are especially bad, but I can’t help think of the things that happen where people can’t wait. Like when Harlan Waters had his heart attack last year. They say he might have made it if the ambulance hadn’t taken so long to get to him. And Amos’s daughter when she had her first baby a few years back. She was too early and Dr. Wilson couldn’t stop her labor, you know. Everything turned out fine, but it had to be a nightmare for them getting in that accident. Her husband still has a limp.

  “Forgive me,” she murmured, waving a weathered hand. “When my eyes get too tired to read, that leaves me with nothing to do but think.” A wry smile lit her pale eyes. “When an old person thinks, it tends to be about all the things that can go wrong out there. That’s why so many of us spend so much time on our knees. Those of us who can get down on them, anyway.”

  Jenny offered a sympathetic smile. “No apologies necessary,” she said, thinking of her own experience with the need to hurry.

  She would never forget the frantic rush with the boys at the quarry.

  And only days ago Greg had dropped everything to get Edna the help he couldn’t give her without access to sophisticated equipment and specialists.

  As if thinking of him conjured his presence, Greg appeared in the doorway.

  “Mrs. McNeff,” he said, walking into the room with its wheeled tray at the foot of the bed and IV monitor clicking away. “I’ll see you back in Maple Mountain. Your oncologist said that if you’re feeling strong enough, you can go home tomorrow. She’ll be here in a while to tell you that herself.” Totally dwarfing the diminutive woman, he reached for her thin arm and gave it a squeeze. “It’ll be good to have you back home.”

  There was no doubt from the lady’s smile that it would be good to be back home, too. “Thank you,” she murmured. “And thank you, Jenny,” she said as Jenny rose from the chair by the bed. “It was so nice of you to sit with me. Tell me, will you always accompany Dr. Reid on his rounds?”

  Jenny opened her mouth and promptly hesitated.

  “She’s with me because we just got married,” Greg offered easily. He glanced at his watch. “About an hour ago.”

  The pale arcs of Mrs. McNeff’s eyebrows rose above the rims of her glasses. “You did? Well, how wonderful,” she said, placing her blue-veined hand delicately at the neck of her pink bed jacket. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t recall hearing that you were seeing each other. Not feeling well has kept me somewhat isolated from everyone’s news.”

  “No one would expect you to keep up with everything.” Gentle as always with his more frail patients, Greg patted her arm again. “We’ve kept it quiet, anyway. And thanks very much,” he said, sounding far more at ease than Jenny felt as they both stepped from the bed.

  Thinking the woman looked slightly perplexed, or maybe it was just curious, Jenny edged toward the door. “You take care.”

  Mrs. McNeff assured her that she would, but her faintly distracted air seemed to warn Jenny. It was entirely possible that once they were gone, she would be on the phone at her beside, if for no other reason that to fill herself in on whatever else she might have missed. Depending on who she called, their news could be all over town by the time they returned home.

  She mentioned that to Greg as they started down the brightly lit hall.

  “I know,” he muttered.

  A few steps later, he glanced at her with his brow lowered. Two steps after that he stopped.

  Looking somewhere between apologetic and preoccupied, he said, “We have a little problem.”

  Her heart seemed to stop. He already regretted what they’d done. She could feel it.

  “A problem?” she asked, priding herself on how calm she sounded as a pair of visitors and a nurse walked by.

  “We have to take Edna back with us. She has a goose egg on the side of her head, but her CAT scan looks great and her other tests are all fine. Dr. Dickson said there’s no reason to keep her here, and she’s driving the nursing staff crazy. Her nearest relatives are over in West Pond and they can’t come until Sunday. So, she either asks someone from Maple Mountain to get her, which makes no sense with us here, or she comes with us now.”

  Jenny’s breath leaked out like air from a slowly deflating beach ball. She didn’t know if it was the sense of insecurity she’d acquired over the past couple of months or the hormonal swings that came with being pregnant, but there was an intensity to her reactions that hadn’t been there before. Or, maybe, she thought, they’d been there all along and she was only now acknowledging them. “Why is that a problem?”

  The look he slanted her clearly said he couldn’t believe she’d had to ask. “Because the woman never shuts up.”

  Jenny found a certain advantage to having the spry and wiry Edna sandwiched between her and Greg in the cab of the truck. For one thing, thinking about what she’d just done was impossible. Edna was the same age as Mrs. McNeff, but she was far more outspoken and far less introspective. It also took more than getting kicked by her mule to slow her down.

  Clutching her purse as if one of them might snatch it, Edna jabbered pretty much nonstop all the way to Maple Mountain.

  It wasn’t until they had pulled into the driveway of her tiny house, two miles from Jenny’s, that she finally slowed down long enough to tell them she thought it awfully nice of them to give her a ride and mentioned that they were both dressed as if they’d been to a wedding or a funeral.

  “So which was it?” she asked, looking fully prepared to ask who had wed or died in her absence.

  “Wedding,” Jenny replied.

  “Ours,” Greg added, since the question was coming. “Come on, Edna. Let’s get you inside.”

  They left a half hour later, after going out with Edna
and her flashlight to make sure her mule and her chickens had been watered and fed by her neighbor, and heating her a cup of tea and a bowl of soup. They had also confirmed to Edna that, no, they hadn’t known each other but a little over month and that, yes, their marriage was pretty sudden. Since it was after eight o’clock when they pulled up in front of Greg’s house, he ushered her inside before they encountered anyone who might stop them with similar questions.

  Because it was getting late, and because they hadn’t been able to leave the clinic as early as they’d intended, they had decided on the way from Edna’s to fix something quick for dinner so he could get to the dictation from his patients that day and she could get settled in. The plan had sounded fine to Jenny until she stepped into his foyer and he closed the door behind her.

  The nervousness she’d felt with him earlier threatened to return. Which, she told herself, was ridiculous because she’d been alone with him countless times before. Wanting to ignore the fact that she hadn’t been alone with him since the mere touch of his lips to hers had turned her insides to mush, she glanced from the stairs straight ahead to the entry mirror and table by the door. She had just noticed what looked to be a cozy study off to her left when the scents of lemon polish and pine cleaner registered.

  “Lorna has been here.” Greg offered the observation as he tossed his keys into a brass dish on the table and motioned her to the double doorway on her right. “She cleans for me on Friday mornings.”

  Not sure if she should leave her purse by his keys, not totally sure what any of the protocol was now that she was here, she wrapped her fingers around its thin shoulder strap and crossed the hardwood entry floor.

  “I can do that now,” she offered. The tap of her heels silenced as she stepped onto the thick toast-colored carpet. Greg moved ahead of her. “Clean, I mean.”

  It was the very least she could do. Especially since he wasn’t letting her pay rent. He’d told her to use the money to pay off her lawyer. She started to mention that, too, only to have Greg cut her off.