Our monkeys. Carmen felt a rush of warm, tingly happiness and looked at Caden and Aiden, who’d finished dancing and joined his brother and their friends.
“My feet are killing me,” Kylie Gregson said as she teetered in their direction wearing a five-inch pair of stilettos. “I haven’t danced this much since the Boise State Spirit Squad Reunion.”
Carmen had to admit the former cheerleader had a great sense of style and had outlasted all the other moms on the dance floor.
“Drew’s waiting in the car,” Luke told his sister-in-law.
“We could have driven ourselves,” Carmen said, used to being independent and talking care of herself.
“No way.” Luke smiled at her, then looked up to see the twins walking up. “The boys wanted this to be a full-service event.”
“We tried to order a limo,” Caden said. “But Dad said he had more expensive things to buy.”
She turned to Luke, but not before the corner of her eye caught Aiden shooting an elbow to his brother’s ribs.
“Hey, look,” Luke said, reaching behind him for a chocolate pudding cup that Carmen could have sworn hadn’t been on that table just a minute ago. “Remember the last time we shared one of these?”
Carmen raised her eyebrow. What was up with Luke’s little trip down memory lane? “Yep. I thought Scooter and Jonesy had finished off the last of them.”
“Apparently not all of them.” Luke held the plastic container under her nose. “Here. You should have the last one.”
“Oh, no thanks.” Carmen wrinkled her nose. “I already had a ton of cookies from Maxine’s bakery, and the only drink they offered tonight was that neon-red punch. I’m all sugared out.”
“Just open the pudding cup, Carmen.” She noticed the perspiration on Luke’s brow and wondered if he was getting impatient because the boys were giggling and jumping around like a couple of caged hyenas.
“Come on, boys,” Kylie said, waving her wrist with the matching pinecone corsage in the air. “Let’s go wait out in the car with Uncle Drew.”
“No way. We want to stay for this. Me and Caden worked way too hard on this project for the past few months. We’re not gonna miss out on the bestest part of the night.”
Carmen looked at the matching set of nine-year-old grins and could only imagine what kind of project they’d organized this time. But when she turned back to their dad, her breath caught in her chest and she had to blink several times to clear her eyes.
Luke was down on one knee, the foil wrapper of his pudding cup peeled back to reveal a diamond solitaire halfway buried in chocolate. “I love you, Maria Carmen Delgado.”
“We love you,” Caden corrected his father.
Luke nodded. “We love you, Maria Carmen Delgado. Will you marry me?”
“Marry us, Dad.” Aiden got down next to his father. “You were supposed to ask if she’d marry us.”
Caden joined the other two Gregsons on their knees and Carmen, who always knew how to handle men, suddenly didn’t know how she would handle being this happy.
“Of course, I will marry all of you!”
The boys jumped up, shouting and high-fiving, leaving their father still kneeling and holding the ring, which was now sinking down lower into the pudding. Carmen knelt beside him, and he dug the diamond out, then licked it off before putting it on her finger.
She laughed and kissed him, his mouth tasting like chocolate.
“I love you, too,” she said, but Luke’s attention was already on his celebrating sons, a look of suspicion on his face.
“Wait a minute. You guys said you’d worked too hard on this project for the past few months. But we only went to the jewelry store in Boise last weekend.”
Kylie, who’d just snapped a picture of the pudding proposal, tossed her cell phone into her beaded designer clutch.
“I better go check on Drew,” she said, leaving in an obvious hurry. His sister-in-law’s abrupt departure must’ve put Luke on even higher alert, because he hadn’t looked away from the smiling twins long enough to say goodbye.
“You boys have something you want to explain?” he asked when his sons both took a sudden interest in the design of the ceiling.
Aiden nudged Caden, who shot a frown at his brother before finally speaking. “We heard you tell the other dads at poker night that you wanted Officer Carmen to like you. And since we knew she liked us, we decided to get her to like you, too.”
“But that was months ago.” Luke, still looking perplexed, remained on his knees. “How did you come up with...?”
Carmen saw the realization hit his face seconds after it hit hers. “Did you guys plan this all on your own?”
“Mostly. But we had to get a whole bunch of help from everyone to make it work.”
Like a movie reel playing in her mind, Carmen flashed back to the tipped canoe, the last-minute trip for party supplies, the hotel room next to theirs suddenly becoming available. All along, she’d been outsmarted and outplayed by a couple of nine-year-old twins. Then she started laughing, realizing that it probably wouldn’t be the last time.
“You two little matchmakers are lucky this harebrained scheme of yours worked out and that Carmen and I ended up falling in love.” Luke pulled both of his sons in for a tight hug.
The boys giggled again and Caden said, “Uncle Kane told us there was no such thing as luck.”
“Oh, really,” Luke said, standing and pulling Carmen into his arms. “You tell Uncle Kane that he just needs the right good luck charm.”
* * * * *
Look for Kane Chatterson’s story, the next installment in Christy Jeffries’s new miniseries SUGAR FALLS, IDAHO, coming soon to Harlequin Special Edition! And don’t miss the previous books in this miniseries:
A MARINE FOR HIS MOM
WAKING UP WED
and
FROM DARE TO DUE DATE.
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Officer Wyn Bailey has found herself wanting more from her boss—and older brother’s best friend—for a while now. Will sexy police chief Cade Emmett let his guard down long enough to embrace the love he secretly craves?
Read on for a sneak peek at the newest book in New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne’s HAVEN POINT series, RIVERBEND ROAD, available soon from HQN Books.
Riverbend Road
by RaeAnne Thayne
CHAPTER ONE
“THIS WAS YOUR dire emergency? Seriously?”
Officer Wynona Bailey leaned against her Haven Point Police Department squad car, not sure whether to laugh or pull out her hair. “That frantic phone call made it sound like you were at death’s door!” she exclaimed to her great-aunt Jenny. “You mean to tell me I drove here with full lights and sirens, afraid I would stumble over you bleeding on the ground, only to find you in a standoff with a baby moose?”
The gangly-looking creature had planted himself in the middle of the driveway while he browsed from the shrubbery that bordered it. He paused in his chewing to watch the two of them out of long-lashed dark eyes.
He was actually really cute, with big ears and a curious face. She thought about pulling out her phone to take a picture that her sister could hang on the local wildlife bulletin board in her classroom but decided Jenny probably wouldn’t appreciat
e it.
“It’s not the calf I’m worried about,” her great-aunt said. “It’s his mama over there.”
She followed her aunt’s gaze and saw a female moose on the other side of the willow shrubs, watching them with much more caution than her baby was showing.
While the creature might look docile on the outside, Wyn knew from experience a thousand-pound cow could move at thirty-five miles an hour and wouldn’t hesitate to take on anything she perceived as a threat to her offspring.
“I need to get into my garage, that’s all,” Jenny practically wailed. “If Baby Bullwinkle there would just move two feet onto the lawn, I could squeeze around him, but he won’t budge for anything.”
She had to ask the logical question. “Did you try honking your horn?”
Aunt Jenny glared at her, looking as fierce and stern as she used to when Wynona was late turning in an assignment in her aunt’s high school history class.
“Of course I tried honking my horn! And hollering at the stupid thing and even driving right up to him, as close as I could get, which only made the mama come over to investigate. I had to back up again.”
Wyn’s blood ran cold, imagining the scene. That big cow could easily charge the sporty little convertible her diminutive great-aunt had bought herself on her seventy-fifth birthday.
What would make them move along? Wynona sighed, not quite sure what trick might disperse a couple of stubborn moose. Sure, she was trained in Krav Maga martial arts, but somehow none of those lessons seemed to apply in this situation.
The pair hadn’t budged when she pulled up with her lights and sirens blaring in answer to her aunt’s desperate phone call. Even if she could get them to move, scaring them out of Aunt Jenny’s driveway would probably only migrate the problem to the neighbor’s yard.
She was going to have to call in backup from the state wildlife division.
“Oh, no!” her aunt suddenly wailed. “He’s starting on the honeysuckle! He’s going to ruin it. Stop! Move it. Go on now.” Jenny started to climb out of her car again, raising and lowering her arms like a football referee calling a touchdown.
“Aunt Jenny, get back inside your vehicle!” Wyn exclaimed.
“But the honeysuckle! Your dad planted that for me the summer before he...well, you know.”
Wyn’s heart gave a sharp little spasm. Yes. She did know. She pictured the sturdy, robust man who had once watched over his aunt, along with everybody else in town. He wouldn’t have hesitated for a second here, would have known exactly how to handle the situation.
Wynnie, anytime you’re up against something bigger than you, just stare ’em down. More often than not, that will do the trick.
Some days, she almost felt like he was riding shotgun next to her.
“Stay in your car, Jenny,” she said again. “Just wait there while I call Idaho Fish and Game to handle things. They probably need to move them to higher ground.”
“I don’t have time to wait for some yahoo to load up his tranq gun and hitch up his horse trailer, then drive over from Shelter Springs! Besides that honeysuckle, which is priceless to me, I have seventy-eight dollars’ worth of groceries in the trunk of my car that will be ruined if I can’t get into the house. That includes four pints of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia that’s going to be melted red goo if I don’t get it in the freezer fast—and that stuff is not exactly cheap, you know.”
Her great-aunt looked at her with every expectation that she would fix the problem and Wyn sighed again. Small-town police work was mostly about problem solving—and when she happened to have been born and raised in that small town, too many people treated her like their own private security force.
“I get it. But I’m calling Fish and Game.”
“You’ve got a piece. Can’t you just fire it into the air or something?”
Yeah, unfortunately, her great-aunt—like everybody else in town—watched far too many cop dramas on TV and thought that was how things were done.
“Give me two minutes to call Fish and Game, then I’ll see if I can get him to move aside enough that you can pull into your driveway. Wait in your car,” she ordered for the fourth time as she kept an eye on Mama Moose. “Do not, I repeat, do not get out again. Promise?”
Aunt Jenny slumped back into her seat, clearly disappointed that she wasn’t going to have front row seats to some kind of moose-cop shoot-out. “I suppose.”
To Wyn’s relief, local game warden Moose Porter—who, as far as she knew, was no relation to the current troublemakers—picked up on the first ring. She explained the situation to him and gave him the address.
“You’re in luck. We just got back from relocating a female brown bear and her cub away from that campground on Dry Creek Road. I’ve still got the trailer hitched up.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“How about that dinner we’ve been talking about?” he asked.
She had not been talking about dinner. Moose had been pretty relentless in asking her out for months and she always managed to deflect. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the guy. He was nice and funny and good-looking in a burly, outdoorsy, flannel-shirt-and-gun-rack sort of way, but she didn’t feel so much as an ember around him. Not like, well, someone else she preferred not to think about.
Maybe she would stop thinking about that someone else if she ever bothered to go on a date. “Sure,” she said on impulse. “I’m pretty busy until after Lake Haven Days, but let’s plan something in a couple of weeks. Meantime, how soon can you be here?”
“Great! I’ll definitely call you. And I’ve got an ETA of about seven minutes now.”
The obvious delight left her squirming and wishing she had deflected his invitation again.
Fish or cut line, her father would have said.
“Make it five, if you can. My great-aunt’s favorite honeysuckle bush is in peril here.”
“On it.”
She ended the phone call just as Jenny groaned, “Oh. Not the butterfly bush, too! Shoo. Go on, move!”
While she was on the phone, the cow had moved around the shrubs nearer her calf and was nibbling on the large showy blossoms on the other side of the driveway.
Wyn thought about waiting for the game warden to handle the situation, but Jenny was counting on her. She couldn’t let a couple of moose get the better of her. Wondering idly if a Kevlar vest would protect her in the event she was charged, she climbed out of her patrol vehicle and edged around to the front bumper. “Come on. Move along. That’s it.”
She opted to move toward the calf, figuring the cow would follow her baby. Mindful to keep the vehicle between her and the bigger animal, she waved her arms like she was directing traffic in a big-city intersection. “Go. Get out of here.”
Something in her firm tone or maybe her rapid-fire movements finally must have convinced the calf she wasn’t messing around this time. He paused for just a second, then lurched through a break in the shrubs to the other side, leaving just enough room for Great-Aunt Jenny to squeeze past and head for her garage to unload her groceries.
“Thank you, Wynnie. You’re the best,” her aunt called. “Come by one of these Sundays for dinner. I’ll make my fried chicken and biscuits and my Better-Than-Sex cake.”
Her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled, reminding her quite forcefully that she hadn’t eaten anything since her shift started that morning.
Her great-aunt’s Sunday dinners were pure decadence. Wyn could almost feel her arteries clog in anticipation.
“I’ll check my schedule.”
“Thanks again.”
Jenny drove her flashy little convertible into the garage and quickly closed the door behind her.
Of all things, the sudden action of the door seemed to startle the big cow moose where all other efforts—including a honking horn and Wyn’
s yelling and arm-peddling—had failed. The moose shied away from the activity, heading in Wyn’s direction.
Crap.
Heart pounding, she managed to jump into her vehicle and yank the door closed behind her seconds before the moose charged past her toward the calf.
The two big animals picked their way across the lawn and settled in to nibble Jenny’s pretty red-twig dogwoods.
Crisis managed—or at least her part in it—she turned around and drove back to the street just as a pickup pulling a trailer with the Idaho Fish and Game logo came into view over the hill.
She pushed the button to roll down her window and Moose did the same. Beside him sat a game warden she didn’t know. Moose beamed at her and she squirmed, wishing she had shut him down again instead of giving him unrealistic expectations.
“It’s a cow and her calf,” she said, forcing her tone into a brisk, businesslike one and addressing both men in the vehicle. “They’re now on the south side of the house.”
“Thanks for running recon for us,” Moose said.
“Yeah. Pretty sure we managed to save the Ben & Jerry’s, so I guess my work here is done.”
The warden grinned at her and she waved and pulled onto the road, leaving her window down for the sweet-smelling June breezes to float in.
She couldn’t really blame a couple of moose for wandering into town for a bit of lunch. This was a beautiful time around Lake Haven, when the wildflowers were starting to bloom and the grasses were long and lush.
She loved Haven Point with all her heart, but she found it pretty sad that the near-moose encounter was the most exciting thing that had happened to her on the job in days.
Her cell phone rang just as she turned from Clover Hill Road to Lakeside Drive. She knew by the ringtone just who was on the other end and her breathing hitched a little, like always. Those stone-cold embers she had been wondering about when it came to Moose Porter suddenly flared to thick, crackling life.
Yeah. She knew at least one reason why she didn’t go out much.
The Matchmaking Twins Page 18