C’mon, Zeke. See the good side of people. Be curious about them. Solve the problem of who they are, and they’ll be putty in your hands.
Just the way she was any time he touched her.
No. No more morose wallowing.
She concentrated on the screen—making herself focus on the bigger picture, watch the interplay, and not solely on Zeke’s face.
You can do this, Zeke. You can do this.
What was the guy on the other side of the microphone grinning about?
Oh, yeah. Spam killer software. Zeke blinked, trying to remember how he’d come up with the idea. Thank God, Quince stepped in.
Who cared how he’d come up with it? He’d moved on to other problems.
After Quince, Vanessa and Brenda’s ultimatum in his office, he’d gone home, eaten the balanced meals Brenda had had delivered and slept. The next morning, he’d read all the resignation letters, talked to each of those employees, then to the assembled staff.
Before Brenda sent him back home for more sleep, he’d managed to e-mail to his home account copies of what he’d been working on since he’d returned from Drago. The projects he’d been driving his staff nuts about.
And nuts was the operative word. As in—was he nuts?
Pure junk, he saw after a second night’s sleep. No wonder they’d rebelled.
This morning, though, he’d awakened with a new idea. Two, actually.
One was to check on Larry’s project to make the market work better for farmers around Drago. Interesting that Larry was the one employee who’d been perfectly happy these past weeks. Darcie would love that.
His smile and pleasure faded. Darcie wasn’t here to share it with him. She’d made that decision.
Of course, decisions could be unmade.
Like his decision this morning to carefully study his second new idea, to think it through, to run it by Vanessa, Quince, Brenda and others.
Yeah, that decision definitely could be unmade. Because, dammit, when a move was right, it was right.
“…wraps up our presentation,” Quince was saying. “We hope you—”
“Not quite yet, Quince,” Zeke said, stepping to the microphones. “I want to tell you we’ll be making another major announcement. In three days in my hometown of Drago, Illinois.”
Zeke was back in town.
Even before Mrs. Richards flagged her down in front of the library at ten in the morning and breathlessly informed Darcie that Zeke had been seen, she had sensed him. Like a vibration traveling through the air and pounding against her nerves.
The vibration was so strong it threatened to knock her knees together as she stood at the front of the Community Center, keeping an eye on things outside as most of the citizens of Drago streamed inside.
Zeke was back. But he hadn’t come to see her. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t even let her catch sight of him.
That had to be deliberate. Didn’t it? There were only so many places to be in Drago and he hadn’t been in any of the obvious ones. Because she’d looked.
Strictly within her regular duties.
Of course, she’d known he’d be back. Ever since he’d made that mysterious announcement at the end of his news conference—when he’d called Drago his hometown—the town had been buzzing with it.
Zeke-Tech had rented the Community Center to hold a news conference and the media had poured in. Soon, according to the schedule Chief Harnett had given the department this morning, Zeke would arrive at the back entrance and be escorted inside by the chief and other dignitaries. Darcie would remain at her assigned station out front and never see him.
So, before she’d come to the Community Center, Darcie had made a detour. The only sop to her pride was she hadn’t slowed blatantly as she drove past Mrs. Z’s house and saw an unfamiliar dark sedan with dark-tinted windows parked there. The kind of car driven by a man who didn’t want anyone to see inside.
She had dared to look inside him anyway. That had driven him away.
So why was he back?”
“Darcie.” Chief Harnett called on the radio. “Change of plans. They want me on stage, so I want you at the back of the room.”
“But—”
“Benny’s going to take your position.”
“Yes, sir.” She didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
The news conference started like most as far as Darcie could tell from her limited experience with news conferences.
The PR guy—Zeke’s friend, Quince—said there would be two announcements, then he introduced Zeke. With a grin that twisted her insides, Zeke said, “I discovered some intriguing challenges when I was in Drago recently, and Zeke-Tech is going to take on those challenges. For one, we’ve working on helping farmers pinpoint their best markets.”
Zeke scanned the audience. Darcie managed to both do her job of keeping an eye on the crowd and to not be picked up by that Zeekowsky radar by shifting discreetly behind cameras and other equipment set up by the media. Sometimes, as now, by standing behind a big person.
Someone from the audience said, “You don’t usually reveal what you have in development for fear of a rival getting ahead of you. Why tell us this?”
“It’s not fear of them getting ahead of us,” Zeke said. “It’s not wanting to be slowed down by them grabbing onto our coattails.”
That drew a laugh, and Darcie felt her heart expand. That’s the way to win them, Zeke.
“Besides, this time I’d like to challenge Zeke-Tech’s competitors to also help farmers. We’ve got a lot of projects to tell you about—”
“Zeke,” Quince warned from beside him.
“—Later,” Zeke concluded, earning more chuckles. “In the meantime, there’s something else I got interested in while I was here in Drago.”
Darcie’s breathing hitched for an irrational second, then smoothed as he continued.
“Zeke-Tech is going to bring out a new product we’ve licensed from a talented young man whom I’d like you all to meet, Warren Wellton.”
With a flourish, he brought Warren on stage to applause from the Dragoites and surprise from the out-of-towners. Oh, yes, and one Drago native who also looked more than surprised. Ashley Stenner gaped at Warren as if he’d just been revealed as the prince who’d been masquerading as a pauper.
“It’s a kid!” said the cameraman Darcie was standing behind.
Darcie moved from behind that cameraman to another. As she reached him, he sat down and she had to sidestep, then scrunch up to get behind a short skinny reporter from a Chicago radio station.
The media bombarded Warren and Zeke with questions. Darcie admired the way Quince took the pressure off them both, but especially Warren, with a comment or joke or rephrasing of the question, allowing them to come up with an answer. As the questioning went on, it almost seemed that Warren grew taller before her eyes. Amazing what self-esteem could do for posture.
Abruptly aware that she was as bent over as a troll, Darcie straightened.
At that moment the radio reporter asked a question. She was all for the First Amendment, but his timing stunk.
“The economy in this area is struggling. And while this licensing agreement will certainly help the boy’s family, what about the rest of the area? Will this mean more jobs for Drago? Or is this—”
“Excuse me. Sorry to interrupt,” Quince said pleasantly. “But that brings us to the second half of this news conference. So if you’ll allow us to fill in some background, we’ll answer your question in a moment.”
At that instant, Zeke’s roving gaze slammed into her.
Heat and cold hit Darcie simultaneously, like ice cubes amid a sauna. She wanted to sink behind the reporter. She wanted to run. She wanted to cry. She stood straight and looked back at Zeke.
“By way of background—” Quince started.
Without taking his eyes off her, Zeke stepped in front of his VP. “Screw background.” Then, louder, he said, with no embellishments. “We’re bringing a division
of Zeke-Tech here to Drago. It’ll mean more money coming in, more jobs for Drago—for my hometown. It’s a start.”
The last words were washed over by a gasp from the crowd.
Darcie still hadn’t looked anywhere but at Zeke, but she didn’t have to see to know that her fellow Dragoites’ mouths had dropped open, and they were vainly trying to suck in oxygen to replace what had whooshed out of them at the shock of joy. She knew, because that’s what she was doing.
Only her shock was wider, her joy deeper.
Anton Zeekowsky had truly claimed Drago as his hometown.
The corners of his mouth twitched, and she knew she must look like an idiot, but she didn’t care, because the intensity in his eyes held her.
The crowd started to cheer, but Zeke talked over them—talked right to her. “I’m moving back to Drago, Darcie. I’m coming home.”
“Oh, Zeke.”
She wasn’t sure if her mouth formed the words or if any sound came out, but she knew he received the message.
He tore the microphone off his lapel and strode past the town dignitaries and the Zeke-Tech representatives onstage, jogged down the steps and strode to the center aisle, heading straight for her.
Darcie saw hands reaching out to pat him on the back, touch his sleeve. She knew people had to be speaking to him, asking him questions, trying to get his attention, but the intense beam of intelligence and heart that was Zeke was trained solely on her.
She might burn up like tissue paper in a laser beam—but what a way to go.
He picked her up.
Right there in front of all of Drago and a good part of the business media, he picked her up. Scooped one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and picked her up like she was a skinny thing.
She put her arms around his neck and hung on.
“What the hell! That’s a cop! Are you getting this?”
“Get the camera on this! Turn the camera! You’re going to miss it!”
“Wait a minute! Zeke! Zeke! Turn this way! Over here!”
“What does this mean? Who is she? What’s her name?”
At the main door, Zeke shifted her in order to grab the handle, giving the maneuver enough of his attention to avoid them getting whacked with the heavy door. Outside, he looked at her again and smiled.
“Welcome home, Zeke,” she said, just before his mouth came down on hers.
Epilogue
The wedding had been beautiful.
Her mother and Mrs. Z had planned it with an attention to detail that would have done an invading army proud. Yet they had respected Darcie and Zeke’s wishes to keep it modest. Best of all, they had stuck to the deadline, so they were married the first weekend of October.
The most difficult decision had been where to hold it. In the end, they had been married in the backyard of their home on a sparkling fall day.
Sure, the house was still being renovated, but that didn’t bother them.
Where better to have the wedding than in the present Zeke gave her not long after he’d carried her out of the Community Center.
She’d been so out of it, clamped to his side as he drove the sedan with the dark-tinted windows—which were quite cozy with two people on this side of them—through the deserted streets of Drago that she hadn’t even noticed where they were going until he pulled up in front of her childhood home.
“Oh, Zeke, I don’t live here anymore. I have an apartment over on—”
“I know. We’re here because I bought it.”
He got out of the car and tugged her to follow him. She clambered out with her head spinning.
“You bought it!”
“For you.” He kept her moving, around the car and onto the front walk. “When I found out it was for sale, I figured you and your mother must have hit a rough spot, so I had a lawyer contact Jennifer and offer top price. She didn’t know who the buyer was. That way—”
“You bought it! You bought it?”
“You keep saying that, Darcie. Is something wrong?”
“Did you notice we’ve already moved out?”
His face cleared. “Oh, yeah. After I bought it, it took me a while to know what I wanted to do. Brenda—my assistant, Brenda—has it all arranged.”
“All what arranged?”
“The people to come in to paint and clean and do anything else you want done before they move you and your mother back in. They should be here in an hour or so.”
“I don’t think so.”
He checked his watch. “Yes, an hour.”
“I meant about moving back in. Mom’s moved in with Dutch and it’s about time I have my own place, don’t you think?”
“But…” His gaze never left her face. He wasn’t looking off to the horizon, he was looking into her. So deep and so concentrated, she might just stop breathing. ‘No.”
“No?” Not a complicated word, but darned if she could make sense of it or of the man standing in front of her—who most definitely was complicated.
“No, it’s not time for you to find your own place. It’s time for you to live with me. No— I mean here. I’m really moving back to Drago. It seems someone taught me that I can go home again. Especially since it turns out everything I need is here. And the only person I want.”
How could she not kiss the man after that? But when they emerged from the kiss, which hadn’t become more only because they were standing on the front sidewalk in broad daylight, she had to give him another chance.
“Zeke, Zeke, are you sure?”
“I better be, or my staff is going to shoot me for all the arrangements we’ve made in three days. Headquarters will stay in Virginia, but I asked who might be interested in moving to Drago and so many said yes, I’ll have to turn some down. At least until we get up and running. Can you believe it? All those people want to bring their families to a small town surrounded by cornfields. Said they’re looking for a simpler life.”
“You’re going to hire local people, too, aren’t you? You’re—”
He stopped her with another kiss. “Yes, we’ll do local hiring. Quince is probably explaining that right now. Local hiring will increase once the training program we’re starting takes hold. Internships, stuff like that. It’s all set.” He stared past her. “All set except one thing. A place to live—a home for us.”
He looked at her, then returned his stare to the same spot.
She turned, and there sat her childhood home, solid and settled.
“Your apartment would make a great office, and I do already own the place,” Zeke was saying. “We could do whatever you wanted to it. You made over Drago for me, I could make over your old house for you.”
“Yeah? Don’t think I didn’t notice what you put first, Zeke—an office.”
“That’s because I know it best. Although, I admit,” he added in that accuracy-is-vital voice, “you’d do most of the deciding about where to put things and paint and stuff like that. But I could help.”
Her effort to be stern melted. “You’ve already helped Zeke. You came home to me.”
In the end, he’d helped with the house, too. Primarily by telling her, whenever costs gave her a case of the nerves, to do it the way she really wanted to do it. He’d also insisted on planting several bushes of a lilac called Tinkerbelle, though she never could get a straight answer from him on why. In the meantime, her old apartment served as their home.
For the wedding, they’d halted work for two weeks, blocking off the unfinished kitchen but otherwise leaving it open to the wedding guests—more open than it used to be with several walls already knocked down. Mrs. Z and Martha Barrett draped fabric over unfinished surfaces, rented bistro tables and chairs for throughout the house and had candles everywhere.
Darcie’s smooth dress had suited her perfectly. She hadn’t even been tempted to try to find a dress that would make her matron of honor, Jennifer, look dumpy. Quince was Zeke’s best man. The chief gave Darcie away. In a break with tradition, the mothers sat together
, happily crying.
Darcie let out a contented sigh.
“What was that for?” asked Zeke. Since he sat behind her on their hotel room’s window seat, his chest as her backrest and his arms crossed at her ribs, he had absorbed the motion of her sigh as if it had been his own.
“Bliss. About everything. The wedding, all our friends, getting to know your friends, our mothers and being here with you. Because, I admit it, you were right—Paris is a better place for a honeymoon than Drago.”
Zeke laughed. It rumbled through her with a pleasure as intense in its own way as what they had brought each other an hour ago in the big bed behind them. “And here I was thinking we might as well have stayed in Drago, because who wants to leave the room?”
She turned in his arms and kissed him.
“Good point.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1821-5
WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR?
Copyright © 2006 by Patricia McLaughlin
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* Wedding Series
† A Place Called Home
What Are Friends For? Page 22