Third Time's the Bride!

by Merline Lovelace

  “You’re never late! The National Institute of Standards could set the time by you!”

  “I know!”

  “Have you told Callie?”

  “Not yet. She’s been so preoccupied lately and I wanted to make sure. I’m going to swing by a drugstore on my way home from work tonight and pick up another pregnancy test.”

  “Don’t you dare pee on it until I get there.”

  “It isn’t a spectator sport,” Kate protested, laughing.

  “The hell it’s not. I’ll get dressed and be there by the time... Oh.”

  Brought up short, she remembered that she and Brian were supposed to break their own news to his son this afternoon.

  “Damn! Brian’s on his way to pick Tommy up at school. It might be a little awkward if I tell the kid I’m going to be his new mom, pat him on the head and rush out the door.”

  “Just a little,” Kate agreed drily.

  “Promise me you won’t take the test until tomorrow. I want to be there.”

  “Dawn...”

  “C’mon, Katy. You know the drill. One for all, and...”

  “...all for one. I know, I know. All right, I’ll hold off until after work tomorrow. The three of us can have a pee party.”

  “This is so awesome! Just imagine, this time next year we might both be moms! Who wudda thunk it?”

  “Not me. Damn, I’m being buzzed again. I have to go. Listen, I want you to promise me something, too.”

  “Whatever it is, you’ve got it.”

  “Just think hard about you and Brian, okay? It all seems to have happened so fast.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Promise me, Dawn. Think hard.”

  “I have. I will. See you tomorrow.”

  She cut the connection, prey to a whirl of emotions. She was utterly thrilled for Kate, and just a little piqued her friend hadn’t expressed the same uncensored enthusiasm about her and Brian.

  Not that Dawn had really expected her to. Kate and Callie had questioned her first choice of a mate, but had swallowed their doubts and participated enthusiastically in a frenzy of wedding plans. They’d assisted with arrangements for the second ceremony as well, and helped pick up the pieces from that train wreck afterward.

  Of course, they’d have doubts about this one. Dawn harbored a few herself. Okay, more than a few. But still... Like Brian said, she thought defiantly as she stooped to retrieve the towel and headed for the bathroom. Life didn’t come with any guarantees. Neither did love.

  That brought her to a full stop. Chewing on her lower lip, she realized that neither she nor Brian had uttered the L-word.

  So what? Defiant again, she marched into the bathroom and tossed the towel in the hamper. The indefinable and much-misunderstood emotion people called love underscored everything else they’d talked about. Sharing a home, a future, a son.

  Didn’t it?

  Chapter Eight

  When Dawn and Brian broke the news to Tommy, she knew she’d treasure the boy’s reaction for the rest of her life.

  She might turn out to be a terrible mother. Too flighty or forgetful or wrapped up in her work. And the kid might grow into a snarky, rebellious adolescent. Right now, though, the grin that split his face from ear to ear made whatever bumps they might encounter down the road well worth the risk.

  “This is awesome!”

  Abandoning his big-boy, first-grade dignity, he threw himself into Dawn’s open arms and actually allowed her to cuddle him for five or six seconds before squirming free.

  “Wait’ll I tell Cindy! Her mom said you wouldn’t wanna stay with me.”

  “She did? Why?”

  “’Cause you’re too...too...” He scrunched his nose. “I can’t remember exactly. But Cindy said they meant you’re too pretty to drive me to school ’n soccer games ’n stuff.”

  Dawn mentally translated “pretty” to something a little less flattering.

  “I’ve never meet Cindy or her mom. I can’t imagine why they’d think I’m, uh, pretty.”

  “Probably because Addy told them so,” Brian put in.

  “Oh, right.”

  “You made quite an impression on the kid,” Brian continued, his eyes dancing. “He probably told his mom the same thing he told me.”

  Dawn didn’t quite trust that devilish glint, but had to ask, “Which was?”

  “You’re OTC, babe.”

  “That’s it!” Tommy exclaimed. “That’s what Cindy said Addy told her ’n her mom. You’re off the charts.”

  Dawn laughed but decided she’d better put meeting Cindy and her mother near the top of her should-do list.

  Right after planning a wedding ceremony! A necessity Brian moved front and center when he came back from the kitchen with a dew-streaked bottle and three tall crystal flutes.

  “This is what you do when a girl agrees to marry you,” he explained to his son as he popped the cork. “You celebrate the occasion with champagne—or in our case, sparkling cider—and take her out to the finest restaurant in town.”

  “We’re goin’ to a restaurant?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Which one?”

  “I called Mon Ami on my way to pick you up at school and made reservations for 6:00 p.m. Or...” His smiling gaze shifted to Dawn. “There’s always Paleo’s, Tommy’s favorite.”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s my fav now, too,” Dawn admitted with a grin. “We should probably warn them, though, that they’re going to lose money on me with their never-ending paella.”

  “Paleo’s it is.” Passing around the flutes, Brian proposed a toast. “Here’s to us.”

  * * *

  Not until they were in the SUV and headed for the popular eatery did Tommy bring up the requirements for married life as dictated by his best friend.

  “’Member what else Cindy told me?” he asked the two adults in the front seat, his voice worried. “If you get married, you have to sleep in the same bed ’n take showers together ’n stuff.”

  Dawn slewed around and managed to keep a straight face. “I remember.”

  “Are you ’n Dad gonna do all that?”

  “Probably.”

  Shrugging, Tommy consigned the problem to the indeterminate future. Or so Dawn thought. Five seconds later, he demanded specifics.

  “When are you getting married?”

  “We haven’t discussed a date yet.”

  “You won’t do it while I’m in school? Get married, I mean.”

  “Of course not.”

  “No way,” Brian echoed, meeting his son’s worried gaze in the rearview mirror. “You have to be there. I want you to be my best man.”

  “You do?” Tommy brightened until he got hit with a horrible thought. “Will I hafta wear a tux like yours, with suspenders ’n a bowtie ’n everything?”

  “Maybe.” Brian’s glance shifted. “Why don’t we leave the details to Dawn? Weddings are really a girl thing. We guys just show up and do as we’re told.”

  * * *

  “He actually said that?” Kate demanded incredulously the next evening. “Weddings are a ‘girl thing’?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She and Dawn sat knee to knee on the sofa in Kate’s spacious living room, their legs curled under them. Callie had gone down to the corner deli for some goodies to celebrate with after the peeing ceremony. While waiting for her return, Dawn filled her friend in on last night’s announcement.

  “Was he being facetious?” Kate asked.

  “I didn’t think so at the time. Chauvinistic, maybe. Stereotypical, certainly. But when I replayed the conversation to him later, he swore he wasn’t thinking about my near misses.”

  Dawn certainly was, though
. Even now she grimaced when she thought back to the frenzy of planning her first wedding. The bridal magazines she’d poured through. The gowns and reception ideas she’d pinned to her boards. The venues she’d visited and menus she’d sampled. Kate and Callie had been right there with her, sharing ideas via Facebook and Pinterest and email. They’d been there, too, when Dawn realized she’d totally misread the depth of her feelings and called off the wedding.

  She’d learned from that mistake. Or thought she had. Deliberately, she’d scaled back plans for her next wedding—until Fiancé Number Two pressured her to do it up right. Dawn shuddered at the memory.

  “I’m actually glad Brian’s leaving the arrangements to me. God knows I don’t want to go through another disaster like the last one.”

  Kate might harbor private doubts about her friend’s third trip to the altar, but she fired up instantly in her defense. “You should’ve let me tell Travis what that butthole did to get back at you when you called it off! If you hadn’t sworn me to secrecy about the whole sorry mess, Travis would’ve taken the jerk apart with his bare hands.”

  “Which is why I swore you to secrecy. I didn’t want...”

  She broke off at the sound of the condo’s front door opening and looked up with a welcome smile for Callie. But when her friend stumbled into the living room, both Dawn and Kate shoved off the sofa.

  “Omigod!”

  Callie’s normally smooth, Madonna-like complexion was a blotchy red. What looked like the start of a vicious bruise blossomed on her right cheek, both palms were scraped and her gray slacks sported tears at the knees.

  Dawn rushed across the room. “Did you fall?”

  Kate was right beside her. “Are you hurt?”

  “Yes to the first question,” the brunette answered with a wobbly attempt at a smile. “No to the second. I’m okay.”

  “The heck you are! Here, sit down.” Kate took their obviously still-shaken friend gently by the elbow and steered her to a chair. “Are you sure you didn’t break anything in the fall? An ankle? Your wrists?”

  “Only my pride.”

  “You’ll ache like the devil tomorrow,” Dawn predicted, scrunching down to check the scrapes. “Kate, do you have any Tylenol in your medicine cabinet?”

  “I do.”

  “Bring two tablets,” she instructed as she rolled up the hem of Callie’s slacks. “Also alcohol and cotton swabs to clean these scrapes, two large Band-Aids and antiseptic cream if you have it.”

  Kate hurried out and was back short moments later with her arms full.

  “So what happened?” Dawn asked as she carefully swabbed the abrasions on Callie’s palms. “Did you trip over a curb?”

  “A crack in the sidewalk.”

  “Ouch! That happens when you’re window-shopping.”

  “Or stargazing,” Kate added, “which you, girlfriend, are prone to.”

  To the astonishment of both her friends, tears sheened Callie’s normally serene lavender eyes.

  “I wish...I wish I’d been window-shopping or stargazing.”

  The quaver in her usually placid voice alarmed them even more than the tears. They exchanged startled glances, then Kate took charge.

  “Listen up. Here’s what’s going to happen. Dawn will finish cleaning those scrapes while I pour you a stiff brandy. Then you’re going to tell us what the heck’s going on. No!” She flung up a hand. “Don’t even try to convince me everything’s normal. You’ve been too quiet and Joe Russo’s called too many times—”

  “He has?” Dawn interjected, surprised.

  “—and you’ve been too damned evasive when I’ve asked you about those calls,” Kate finished relentlessly.

  With another stern order for Callie to sit tight, she marched over to the armoire that doubled as her bar and entertainment center. She returned with stiff drinks for Callie and Dawn, and a fizzy Sprite for herself.

  “All right,” she said after they’d all taken a fortifying gulp, “spill it, Cal. You haven’t been yourself since you quit your job. What haven’t you told us?”

  Callie let out a slow breath. “I didn’t want to say anything before...”

  “Why not?” Kate asked indignantly.

  “We were all looking forward to the trip to Italy. I wasn’t about to spoil that. And you had enough to worry about with your pending divorce.” Her glance shifted to Dawn. “Then you shocked both of us by deciding to take on nanny duties. Now you’re engaged again, and Kate may be pregnant and...” She made another attempt at a smile. “With everything else going on, I didn’t want to make a big deal of my petty problems.”

  “Bull,” Dawn huffed. “Whatever caused you to walk away from a job you used to love wasn’t petty! C’mon, girl. Spill.”

  “All right.” She gathered her courage with another fortifying sip. “I received some threatening emails.”

  “What?”

  “Who from?”

  “I don’t know who sent them. That’s why I’ve been talking to Joe Russo. He’s trying to nail the guy. Or gal.”

  Shocked, Dawn and Kate could only listen in dismay as Callie shared the sobering details.

  “The first email showed up in my inbox three months ago. I knew immediately it was from a parent or guardian of a child I’d represented as an advocate. Whoever sent it had obviously lost all parental rights.”

  Callie had never talked much about her job. She couldn’t. Sworn to protect the privacy of the kids she stood up for in court, she would never violate their trust. Yet Kate and Dawn had gleaned enough over the years to sense how deep some of her cases cut.

  “I got a few more in the weeks that followed,” she continued. “Not much worse than others I’ve received over the years. How can you bureaucrats in the Children’s Advocate Office sit in your crowded little cubbyholes and know what happens in the real world? How could I, a woman with no husband or kids of her own, spend a few hours talking to a confused eight-or nine-year-old and rip an entire family apart?”

  “Right,” Dawn spit out fiercely. “Like some assholes with eight-or nine-year-olds don’t rip their families apart themselves?”

  Bombarded by memories, Dawn couldn’t help remembering how Callie had been her sounding board in the years leading up to her parents’ divorce. Callie and Kate both. They’d offered laughter and hope and the rock-solid stability of their friendship while the rest of her world collapsed. Dawn often wondered if the empathy and support Callie had provided during that awful time had contributed to her eventual choice of a profession.

  She’d also suspected that same deep emotional investment had eventually worn Callie down, leading her to quit her job. Now it appeared there was more at play than either she or Kate had realized.

  “What did you do with the emails?” She wanted to know.

  “I showed them to my supervisor, made copies for the file and forgot about them.”

  “Until?”

  Callie bit her lip.

  “Until?” Kate echoed insistently.

  “Until they got nasty. I received one right after you and Travis renewed your vows at the Trevi Fountain. Joe Russo saw how much it upset me, got me aside and pried the details out of me.”

  She paused, looking slightly bewildered. “I still don’t know how it happened. One minute we were all tossing back champagne. The next, Joe had herded me into a private alcove and I was telling him about the emails.”

  Dawn shot Kate a surprised glance. They’d all gotten to know the high-powered security expert a little in Italy. But only a little. Dawn doubted she’d spoken a dozen words to the man until he’d joined them for dinner here at Kate’s last week—which made the fact that their intensely private friend had shared her troubles with him even more surprising.

  Callie caught the exchange and shook her head. “I know! I
can’t imagine why I opened up to him like that.”

  “I suspect because he aced Interviewing Techniques 101,” Dawn drawled.

  Along with advanced courses in prisoner intimidation and interrogation. Russo struck her as a man who knew how to wring every last drop of information from the guilty and innocent alike.

  “What’s he doing about the emails?” She wanted to know.

  “He’s working with the Boston Cyber Crimes Division to trace the source, but no luck so far. Something about firewalls and gateways. I hope they’ll have better luck with the one I just received.”

  “You got another one?”

  “A few minutes ago. It... It’s what made me trip over my own feet. I smashed my phone when I fell or I would show it to you.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I won’t bother to repeat the names the sender called me. They’re too ugly. The bottom line is that I’m going to pay for the pain I’ve caused.”

  “Sunnabitch!” Fury boiled in Dawn’s blood. “I hope I’m somewhere in the vicinity when they nail this bastard. He’ll be looking for his testicles two counties over.”

  “Three,” Kate countered fiercely. “Although I think we can count on Joe and Travis to take care of his balls.”

  “And Brian,” Dawn added. “I can tell him about this, can’t I?”

  “Let me ask Joe.” Callie managed an apologetic smile. “I hate to delay our pee and wedding planning extravaganza, but he made me promise to contact him immediately if I received another one of these emails.”

  “Go!” Kate ordered. “Use my office and call him now!”

  When Callie disappeared into the small den, her two friends stared at each other in dismay.

  “No wonder she’s been so quiet these past weeks.” Kate’s mouth twisted with self-disgust. “And I was so immersed in my own little problems I chalked her decision to quit her job up to stress and burnout.”

  A belated realization hit her.

  “Oh, Lord! That’s why it was so easy for me to talk her into extending her stay here in DC. She doesn’t want to go back to Boston, where this creep probably lives.”

  “Crap! You’re right.” Dawn thought fast. “Well, I’ve got to fly home to inform my boss I’m relocating to DC and make arrangements to sublease my condo. I can scoot over to Callie’s and pack up whatever she needs. And when Travis gets back from Florida, she can move into the gatehouse with me. We don’t want those banging headboards to keep her awake,” she added with a knowing twitch of her brows.