Two-Penny Wedding

by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  HILLARY SPOTTED HIM in the hotel coffee shop, sitting alone at a table for two. Gathering her courage and every last ounce of her confidence, she approached him. “Sonny, hi. I was hoping I’d find you here.”

  He looked up from staring into a nearly full cup of coffee. “If you’re here to tell me I’m an idiot for picking a fight with Daniels and breaking his nose, there’s nothing you can say that will make me feel any worse.”

  Her eyebrows arched upward in surprise. “You broke his nose?”

  “Yeah. This afternoon when I found him with Gentry in her bedroom.”

  “Really, hmmm.” Hillary pulled out the chair across from him and waved away the approaching waiter. “What was he doing in her bedroom?”

  “Returning a button, they said, but who the hell knows. They’re both so…I don’t know, frivolous, I guess. She makes up one story and he tells another. Gentry turns everything into a drama. She and her pop. Two of a kind.”

  Hillary considered that. “It’s a very dramatic household,” she said. “I don’t understand why you look like you’ve lost your best friend, though. You broke Jake’s nose. That ought to make you feel better.”

  “What?” He frowned. “I thought you were the primary reason I got sloshed with punch at the Hamiltons’.”

  “I detest public scenes,” she said. “If you must fight, do it in private. That’s my motto.”

  “I usually am a model guest. Daniels just rubs me the wrong way.”

  “I think we’re all aware of that now.”

  “Gentry’s right. I was clearly in the wrong. Physical violence is never a solution. I shouldn’t have hit him.”

  She shrugged. “Get over it, Sonny. Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “I never used to.”

  “Sure you did. What are you drinking?”

  “I don’t know. Coffee, I guess.”

  With a laugh, she reached across the table and patted his hand. He wasn’t so bad, she thought. Just a little too unsure of what people expected of him. With a little encouragement, he might develop into someone very nice to know.

  He pulled his hand back. “I’m engaged to Gentry,” he said, as offended as if she’d made a pass at him.

  “I have a rule about my friends’ significant others. You want to know what it is?”

  “Okay.”

  “The rule is, no pass, no play, no promises. So you can relax, Sonny. I’m only here because I thought you might like to play a round of golf with me. Or we could just sit here and drink coffee and talk. Since you’re going to marry one of my closest friends, you and I should probably get better acquainted.”

  He held up his cast. “Golf is out for a while. But if you don’t mind drinking overbrewed coffee…”

  “As a matter of fact, I do mind. I’m rather particular about what I drink. Do you like cappuccino?”

  “If it’s made correctly, sure.”

  “I happen to know where we can get the best in the world.”

  “The best?” He questioned her judgment with a skeptical smile. “It always makes me skeptical when someone says they know the best anything.”

  “You don’t have to take my word for it. We can go there and you can decide for yourself.”

  “Now?”

  “Do you have something else to do?”

  He pushed his cup away and stood, tossing a couple of dollars on the table. “As a matter of fact, I’m free until Saturday. So where is this best cup of cappuccino in the world?”

  “I’ll have to show you. I could never explain how to get there from here. It’s a long way from here, but I promise it’s worth the trip.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “I like people who know their own minds.” She fell into step beside him. “Oh, I was wondering, Sonny…do you happen to have your passport with you…?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Gentry found the ransom note in her room that evening. The single sheet of notebook paper was stuck with tape to the center of the mirror in the dressing room and she pulled it off with a sigh. But when she unfolded the note, she had to laugh.

  Cutout letters spelled odd-shaped. words in between pictures cut out of magazine ads. Sydney’s magazine would never be the same, and although Gentry couldn’t say it had been sacrificed for a good cause, at least the note was clever and she could imagine the fun they’d had putting it together.

  She scanned the note, pausing once or twice over a picture to puzzle out the meaning. HOLDING. A cutout yellow sun beside a picture of a man’s hairy legs. RANSOM. A cellular phone was circled in red with a line drawn through the center and an arrow pointing to an ad for Florida orange juice. COME TO. A picture of a house with a pool. AFTER. Another smiling yellow sun, with an ad for a down comforter below it. OR ELSE. SIGNED. At the bottom, above a penciled-in signature line, was a picture of a wedding dress with a pasted-on cutout of Tinkerbell tossing magic dust. Glitter was glued all around the page and fell in a shimmering trail to the signature line. At the bottom of the page, big block letters spelled out P.S. BRING BEER!

  Gentry read it again, aloud this time, laughing and shaking her head at the energy they’d put into this.

  “Holding…”

  “Sunburn, suntan, legs, suntanned legs…knees? Sun knees? Sonny!”

  “Holding Sonny ransom. Don’t phone…”

  “Florida? Orange? Sergeant Orange!”

  “Sergeant Orange. Come to the pool after sundown. Or else. Signed, The Magic Wedding Dress.”

  She could imagine Sydney dictating the words, while Heather clipped the pictures and Hillary glued them neatly onto the paper. What they expected her to do was a little harder to imagine, but she suspected that if she went out to the pool, she’d find them there, pretending they had no earthly idea where the note had come from.

  They would read it, ask questions, make up new interpretations for the pictures and deny ever having seen Sonny’s legs.

  “Are they missing?” Heather would ask with concern.

  “You should check the emergency room,” Hillary would suggest.

  Sydney would, naturally, go straight for the bottom line. “Did you bring the beer?”

  She was suddenly glad they were here for the week. Being with them was the best thing she could do for herself right now. After the incident between Sonny and Jake, she had wanted nothing more than to be alone, so she’d left the house, headed for her favorite stores and wandered aimlessly through the aisles. She’d driven fast, put a compact disc in the player and turned up the volume. Anything to keep from think ing about Jake, wondering if he was all right, hoping his nose wasn’t broken, thinking he had provoked Sonny’s punch, knowing he didn’t deserve a broken nose, deciding she wouldn’t think about him ever again, and then running through the list again.

  As she drove homc, she had toyed with the idea of walking to the guest house. Just to check on him. Make sure…what? That she still loved him? Bad idea.

  But now, here was an invitation from her friends, teasing her to come out and play. What would she ever do without them? She changed into her swimsuit and tucked the note into the folds of her towel, knowing they’d be eager to admire their handiwork. Then she headed for the kitchen to get the ransom for “sun knees.”

  JAKE DIVED INTO THE POOL, slicing his way through the cool, chlorinated blue until he reached the bottom, then turning to push off with his feet and shoot like an arrow to the surface. He had a picture of Pop’s Stetson-shaped swimming pool hanging on a wall at the Two-Penny Lodge. It was something of a joke around the lodge that he had been Charlie North’s son-in-law, and Jake wondered at times why he left the reminder in place.

  But he knew the answer. The picture kept him centered. It had probably been the single, most compelling reason he hadn’t put up a fight when Gentry left. For him, the pool represented everything she had been when he met her…cool, sophisticated, funny, intriguing, inviting, heated, sparkling, luxurious, exhausting, pampered…the list could run for pages. Jake
had grown up half a country away and never once imagined that such a pool…or woman, existed.

  Gentry had blazed into his life like a fireball and he had been determined to have her, no matter the cost. He’d pursued her, romanced her, stolen her away, and then eagerly taken her home to a world he couldn’t wait to share. But she didn’t know how, or wouldn’t make the effort, to fit into his world, and he soon discovered there was no more a place for her at the TwoPenny Lodge than there was for a swimming pool shaped like a Stetson hat. She didn’t belong there, she didn’t want to belong there, and he had been wholly responsible for her unhappiness.

  Now he was just wholly responsible for his own.

  He shouldn’t have come here. No matter what Ben had told him. Gentry was going to marry Harris this time. It would be admitting too many mistakes to cut her losses at this point. One lapse in judgment could be explained away, wiped out, annulled, but to call off the wedding at the last minute a second time…

  She wouldn’t do that. He knew that as surely as he knew she wanted to. He’d known the moment he kissed her he couldn’t stop her and shouldn’t try. He’d waited too long, missed whatever window of opportunity he might once have had. Some mistakes couldn’t be undone.

  Feeling the curved side of the pool, he remembered the feel of her body stretched luxuriantly beside him in their bed at the lodge. Following close on the heels of that came the memory of this afternoon and Gentry in her dressing room, looking beautifully disheveled in the wedding dress, and trying to make contact with his reflection in the mirror.

  He would treasure that image for the rest of his life.

  Gripping the pool’s tiled rim, he crooked one arm over the edge while he wiped the water from his face, being careful not to bump his nose in the process. He didn’t want to get another nosebleed. It seemed to have taken forever to get that one stopped. He supposed he ought to be grateful Harris’s cast-iron punch hadn’t been delivered full face or full force, otherwise his nose would be flatter and fatter, and hurt like the dickens. As it was, he’d just gotten clipped, enough to make his eyes water like lawn sprinklers and give him one mother of a nosebleed, but narrowly missing serious injury.

  He thought he might feel a little sorry for Harris…except that he couldn’t find much sympathy for any man who could look forward to a future with Gentry in it. Even at her temperamental worst, she was pure, fascinating energy and he would have given ten years of his life to steal her away from this wedding, too. But then, as always, came the question he’d failed to ask before…once he had her, what would he do with her?

  Shaking back his hair, he grasped the pool rim with both hands and pushed up and out of the water.

  “Want a beer?”

  His heart stopped beating and then rushed to catch up as he turned to see her sitting an oversize hat brim away. The moon was making a slow appearance in the darkening sky and the automatic lights around the pool flickered somewhere between off and on. She was sitting beside the round table where he’d sat with her father earlier in the day, her bare feet hooked on the edge of the chair, her legs drawn into a slender triangle, her arms carelessly draped across them. If he hadn’t already been in love with her, he would have fallen head over heels right then.

  “I’d love one. Thanks.” He’d forgotten where he left his towel, so he wiped his face with his hands and finger-combed his slick hair, getting rid of as much moisture as he could before he walked around the pool to join her at the poolside table. His body, newly relaxed by the exercise, knotted with a tense and tight desire.

  “Are you all right?” She peered closely at him in the semidark. “Don’t you have to wear a bandage or anything?”

  “No. I was lucky. I’ll live to get punched another day.”

  “But I thought he broke your nose. The way you put your hands over it and with all the blood, I just assumed…”

  “Just a nosebleed.” Jake felt like a fourteen-yearold assuring his girl he was too much of a man to be felled by a bump on the nose. “It looked a lot worse than it was.”

  “I’m glad it isn’t broken. I was always rather partial to your nose just the way it is.”

  “My nose and I are flattered. It’s nice to know there’s at least one thing about me you find appealing.”

  “You deserved that punch, you know,” she said as if she’d thought about it a lot. “Except that no one actually deserves to be hurt. But you did do your best to goad Sonny into hitting you.”

  Jake wasn’t sure there was a good way to defend himself on that, so he didn’t try. “Did you mention a beer?”

  She offered him the bottle and he took it, brushing her fingers in a touch that wasn’t accidental and wasn’t meant to be. She didn’t jerk away from him, but she didn’t respond, either…at least not that he could tell. He twisted off the lid and took a long, cold swallow from the bottle. Dropping into a chair across from her, he tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound completely inane. “Did Harris hurt his hand?” Oh, great opener, Daniels, he thought.

  Gentry lifted her brows, obviously sharing his opinion. “Not nearly as badly as I hurt his feelings after you left to take care of your nose.”

  “Did you beat up the bully for me, Liz?”

  “Not for you. I couldn’t believe the two of you were brawling in my bedroom. I made sure Sonny understood that it is not to happen ever again.”

  “It was hardly a brawl. He wouldn’t have hit me at all if you hadn’t distracted me by cheering him on.”

  “I wasn’t cheering. I was glad he missed you…the first time.”

  “So was I. But then, I was glad when Cleo smooched him.” Jake put his head back and laughed long and deeply.

  “I did want to, uh, talk to you about that.” Embarrassment was burned into every word, as if her voice were blushing. He loved it.

  “You want to discuss smooching?” he asked in his best I’m-here-for-you-if-you-need-to-talk tone. “We could call Cleo in as a consultant, if you’d feel more comfortable.”

  She pressed her lips together, and he could all but hear her silently counting to ten. “Could we forget that part for a minute? I wanted to tell you…ask you, really, if…The thing is, something rather strange happened in my bedroom today and I…”

  “Did you notice it immediately upon putting on the wedding gown or did it occur later?”

  She frowned. “Later. It was an odd sensation and I…Maybe I imagined…Oh, never mind.”

  He cleared his throat and asked very seriously, “Are you referring to the moment our reflected images made contact in the mirror?”

  Her eyes flashed to his in annoyance. “No. Honestly, Jake, can’t you stop teasing me about that?”

  “Stop?” He gave her a sympathetic smile. “This is the first time I’ve mentioned it, but if it bothers you…”

  “It does. You’re acting like there was really some sort of magic going on because of that silly dress. And it wasn’t like that at all. I was distracted because of the button and—”

  “Which button?” he interrupted her, as if it were a matter of grave concern. “The missing button? Or the missing button that wasn’t missing? Or the missing button that wasn’t missing that turned up missing after all?”

  Her temper was rising. Jake even thought he could see her hair beginning to curl. “The button that caught in the lace when I reached behind my back to unbutton the dress.”

  She kept her consonants nice and tight. He’d always admired her articulation-under-fire skills. “Oh, the snagged button.” He nodded. “Go on. You were distracted because of the snagged button…?”

  “It isn’t important.”

  “No, I really do want to hear about this strange occurrence that happened in your bedroom today.”

  Her discomfort was a thing of beauty and he watched her struggle with pure enjoyment.

  “Okay. Well, when I was going into the bedroom, I felt…I mean, did you notice…? Was it my imagination or…?” She stopped and sucked in a bre
ath of hard-won composure. “All right, I’m just going to say this straight out. Did I get stuck in the doorway between my dressing room and bedroom?”

  He made her wait only a moment or two before he set her at ease with a nod of concurrence. “You were stuck, Gentry. You were stuck in the no-budge position until I stepped around you and pulled you through that doorway. I’m no therapist, you understand, but I think that what happened to you today is most likely a psychological phenomenon in which a person struggles with two conflicting desires…to go forward and to not go forward because the person fears what lies ahead.” He paused just long enough to see her head dip in a nod of possible agreement. “It’s called Smooch-a-phobia.”

  He laughed so hard, he nearly didn’t duck in time. The empty beer bottle soared over his head, with a mile to spare, and landed, neck down, on the lawn. “Liz? You missed me.”

  Her temperature hit the boiling point. “Jacob Daniels! You are the most annoying, exasperating, irritating—”

  “Irksome,” he suggested.

  “Irksome, aggravating, irrepressible—”

  “Irresistible.”

  “Irresistible, infuriating, maddening—”

  “Magnificent.”

  “Magnifi—! Stop that. You know I hate it when you do that to me.”

  “I never could get you to work magnificent in. Tripped me up every time.”

  One foot began to swing back and forth as a mark of her irritation. “Sometimes I wonder how you ever persuaded me to run away with you.”

  “No, Gentry, it was the other way around. You persuaded me that I had to take you away with me.”

  “I did not. You begged me. You said you would feed me fresh raspberries and real cream.”

  “You misunderstood. I said you’d dine on baked trout and low-fat milk.”

  “You said you’d bring me breakfast in bed every day.”

  “I said, there would be guests to be fed every day.”

  “You said you couldn’t live without me and that you would love me until the day you died.”